Neylan McBaine

When The Hurt Is Too Great To Stay

In June 2008, I sat on a bench outside the Harvard Business School's Baker Library with my father, enjoying a pleasant New England afternoon. The topic turned to my pregnancy, my third girl. My dad, himself the father of two girls, offered, as he often did, his unsolicited opinion: "I just worry about your having three daughters. Girls are so expensive to raise and then they don't contribute anything to society. Maybe the Chinese have got something right..."

Beside the obvious craziness of this remark from a dying old man, was it emotional abuse? After all, I am one of my father's two daughters and therefore one of the expensively educated and non-productive subjects of his observation. (My older half sister is Yale- Oxford- and Columbia-educated, but my dad didn't live to see her successful reentry into law practice over the past year. Perhaps she would have redeemed us both in his eyes....) I was already familiar with my dad's views on daughters since he had offered to finance embryo gender selection after my first daughter. We declined.

But emotional abuse? I endured years of similarly cruel remarks, so perhaps. But from ample tender moments and a warm physical affection that was contrary to his upbringing, I knew my dad loved me deeply. As my mom says, he just had a funny way of showing it. I never claimed I was emotionally abused simply because I didn't want to trivialize the sufferings of people who are indeed irreparably harmed by those close to them. Throughout my life with my father, I cried, ranted, fought back, clammed up, and kicked him out of my house at times, but I never cut off ties. I didn't feel I was being hurt deeply enough to merit hurting him even more.

An article from the New York Times today offers one of the first perspectives I've read on the effects of parents' emotional abuse on adult children. I appreciate the severity of the question posed in the article: When is parental emotional abuse enough to motivate the child to sever the relationship? It is not always wise or advisable to make the decision I did. Indeed, my sister chose a different route with my father, and, in my mind, justifiably so. He was even harder on her than he was on me. And when the strain spilled over to our husbands and our children, we were no longer the only victims.

Learning to love my dad was the most obvious challenge the Lord has thus far placed in my life. And its obviousness made it a task that I approached with a detached discipline: "Here," the Lord seemed to say. "He's talented, devoted, smart and elegant. But he's also obnoxious, clueless and often cruel. Figure it out." I couldn't walk away from such a piqued challenged from a God who had given me to this lusciously multifarious man in the first place.

The Trouble with Change

I lived in the same apartment until I left for college. I went to the same school from first grade through twelfth grade. I am not an expert in change.

However, in the past three years we have lived in three different cities: Boston, New York and now Salt Lake City. Esme, my oldest daughter, has made all of those moves with us, including the move to Boston from San Francisco when she was two years old. She is an expert in change.

Except when she's not. Esme's been having a rough time recently. She loves being close to her grandparents, aunts and uncles. She loves her new school. But she misses her old friends. She misses my walking her to her classroom, like I did at her old school. And of course, she misses walking. Anywhere. We are living out of boxes and her dad has mostly been gone. It's a lot to take, even for a seasoned mover such as herself.

I have not, recently, been very good about mitigating the stress she is feeling. I lose my perspective: when she's yelling around the house, stomping angrily and declaring that no one loves her, I see her whole life flash before my eyes. And I panic. In that moment, I see her anger stretching out over eons of time, putting her in therapy so she can come to terms with parents who dragged her around the country. I descend with her into frenzied instability. It's not pretty.

This morning, I made the mistake of refilling Esme's cereal bowl by putting the Cherrios in the milk, instead of on the side of the bowl on the place mat, where she wanted them. In the aftermath, my only goal was to get the other two children out of the house alive. We ducked the books hurled across the living room, withstood the stomping around the house and the chanting of "Nobody loves me! Everyone's so mean to me!" For some reason, I was able to stay detached this morning, playing defense to make sure no one got hurt rather than offensively trying to stop the passionate display.

She was still carrying on as we walked outside to our carport. I hustled the girls along, laden with a baby and a schoolbag and trying to reach my keys to unlock the car. "Stay close, ladies. Remember there are cars coming along here." The beauty of a suburban apartment complex is that at 7:30 in the morning, people are hanging out on their balconies. "Nobody loves me!" Esme yelled, although she didn't realize she had an audience.

"Nobody loves you?" boomed a voice from an upstairs balcony. A heavyset man looked down from his smoke on the second floor. "It sure looks like your mom loves you!"

I looked up, smiled and made a gesture of throwing up my hands as best I could while holding a baby. I knew at that moment that we'll get through this, Esme and I. When we're shut up in our apartment, tired from a day at school or out of sorts from all the new people and places, it seems like every little thing is the end of the world. But ask anyone on the street (or on a balcony) and they'll say we're doing just fine: my love for my girls is obvious, even if I'm just walking them to the car. I've just got to trust that love to see us through till we've absorbed all the change.

Fame

When did I know I was not going to be a professional musician? Strangely, considering all the time and effort I put into perfecting my craft as a solo pianist over the course of my youth, I don't remember a time when I thought I actually would become a professional musician. And yet the pursuit shaped my whole childhood. Why?

Watching Fame in the movie theater tonight, my life as a semi-professional child in New York City played as a subconscious reel simultaneous with the feature film. For years, my fun get-to-know-you fact at school and then work functions was that I had performed on every stage at Lincoln Center by the time I was twelve years old: dancing with the School of American Ballet and singing with the Metropolitan Opera Children's Chorus put me on the three main stages, and later, I checked off the halls of the Juilliard School while enrolled in the conservatory's pre-college program. Yet I never had the drive to make music the only thing in my life like the kids in the movie have, or like some of the children I performed with had. 

How could I tell? There were lots of telling moments along the way: feeling sick to my stomach outside the soundproof practice module before a competition, waiting in line to warm up as my scheduled performance time approached; crying in the car after my arch rival won first place and I had forgotten the entire left hand in my own performance; observing the 16-year-old Korean boy in my weekly master class who had left his parents and moved to New York alone to pursue his craft. There were also moments of feeling on top of the world, like I had conquered something so amazing everything else would be easy: performing the Beethoven 1st piano concerto with a full orchestra behind me; accompanying varied and passionate singers throughout college; playing the Weber trio in Bridgeport, CT; nailing my final solo concert the day of college graduation. Each of these was a highlight in my life, worth every moment of sweat and tears.

So even though I always knew a professional solo piano career wasn't for me, I didn't do it for the destination. I did it for the journey. I had the opportunity recently to visit with my most influential piano teacher from my childhood. I had always thought she hoped one of her students was going to make her revered and famous, and I felt a twinge of guilt that it hadn't been me. "I don't care what my students do when they grow up," she told me recently. "Nothing in your childhood could have given you the discipline, the confidence and the sense of hard work that you got from studying the piano. I helped make you a better person."

The world of young performing artists is electrifying, oozing talent and lathered with hope. It is also a laboratory in which determination is tested and ambition is the catalyst for any reaction. It was statistically not possible for all of those I grew up with to "make it", but it was sure worth trying.

Thank Heavens for Cheese

Here's a story for you: High school big-man-on-campus gets the lead in the school play. His co-lead is the daughter of the local preacher, a Bible-loving girl with a long dress and long hair. They fall in love cause she sings him a new-agey pop song on stage. His cool friends abandon him. They look at stars together. Then she tells him she has leukemia and will soon die. He is heartbroken. He sits with her in the hospital, where he learns his estranged father has paid the girl's medical bills. He asks her to marry him, which she does, and then she dies.

Cheesy, right? You may recognize this as the plot of "A Walk to Remember", the 2002 movie staring Mandy Moore. Well, I watched it tonight on the "Family" channel. And the truth is, I sobbed through the whole thing. 

Since I've been living in my suburban apartment, temporarily husbandless, and without my TiVo hooked up, I've become very familiar with evening cable TV programing. I love the act of watching TV. I love everything about it: lazing on the couch, short bits of mindless entertainment perfectly suited to my end-of-day mommy brain. But in case any of you were unsure, television these days pretty much stinks. Sharing the TV horror stories we have in common is a favorite pastime for me and Elliot on our long-distance phone calls. It helps to bond over the tedium of late-night cooking shows, the cruelty of fashion shows, the explicit sex in prime time dramas. TV, I love you! How come you you let me down?

Or perhaps I've become overly sensitive as I think about the world my girls are growing up in and what kind of entertainment I want in my house. I am starting to worry that nothing except the most carefully selected movies, dutifully researched and ordered ahead of time on Netflix, would fit the bill of a satisfying night in front of the tube. What a pain! That's no fun.

So although tonight's find was not particularly sophisticated or artistic and the story was Velveeta, it was such a delight to stumble on something that was intentionally sweet and completely innocuous. My heart isn't completely calloused against TV yet, and all my sardonic fashion and cooking shows haven't turned me cold to a sappy love story. Thank heavens.

***

PS. I have just laughed for 30 straight minutes watching Drew Barrymore on SLN. My banner TV night continues!

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

In my ninth grade English class, we started out the year of studying ancient texts by reading the Bible "as literature". In a class that September while we were still engaged in the book of Genesis, we were greeted with a pop quiz: "Are you your sister's keeper? Discuss."

I don't remember what I discussed, but I know how I answered the question: "Yes." The concept of stewardship -- the idea that we are given sacred responsibility for others because of our choices, our roles or our gifts -- is a central tenet of my belief system. Our interconnectivity is, I believe, the hardest thing about living on this earth and the defining condition of our experience here. Through our relationships, we learn how to love, how to be selfless, how to take responsibility for our choices, and how to forgive.

Those are not things that come naturally to us poor humans. In my own life, I know that I have had to make conscious choices about who I want to be and what qualities I want to act on; natural goodness is inherent in so very few of us. But in making the choice to be my sister's keeper -- to be a steward, responsible for the health, safety, spiritual growth of a husband, parent, child or friend -- my commitment to that choice dictates my behavior. I choose who I want to be, and then I behave in a way that brings that person into being.

Not the other way around. What if we all went around behaving whatever way our baser inclinations dictate and then relied solely on those actions to craft our identities? It sounds silly when put in such terms: the challenge for the individual human spirit becomes not rising above those actions that hurt and tear down, but actually seeing to what degree we can revel in them. In the name of individuality, Jon Gosselin tells an interviewer, "I just looked in the mirror one morning and decided I no longer wanted to be that person." Really, Jon? With nine other people's lives intertwined with your own, depending on your stewardship?

It is so out of fashion to subdue selfish personal desires in the name of a greater good. But I love the reasoning of Elder D. Todd Christofferson in my church's General Conference on Sunday: "Mere wanting is hardly a proper guide for moral conduct." There have been many things I have done in my life because I believed they would lead me to the kind of person I want to be, not because I was already that person. Even though I answered an emphatic "Yes" to my ninth grade teacher's (and God's) question, I chose three small children so that I could learn what stewardship means in practice. They demand a lot of who I am now, but they are essential to who I want to be.