Sometimes, broken is just broken. There was no repair for my parents’ marriage. My mom tried everything. I was 13 the first time I begged my mother to leave my stepdad. My baby brother had just been born, my sisters were 10 and 3, and we were all terrorized. “Please, Mom. Please. Just leave him. We’ll go find a little place for us. I’ll get a job after school. I’ll drop out of school and work. Please let’s just go.”
She wouldn’t leave him. Too much was unknown, and the unknown is even more terrifying a painful, yet somehow comfortable, reality. It took my mom 30 years of trying to make it work before she would finally accept the ugly truth: sometimes broken is just broken.
It’s hard, right? How do we know? How do we know there is no repair for the things we so badly want to fix? What are the telltale signs? And are there even telltale signs?
It’s Not that Bad. Is It?
As we sit on the precipice of the end of life as we know it, so many Americans are still scrambling for some sense of normalcy. Covid 19 has disrupted all of our lives, some in much larger, more obvious ways than others. But we’re all affected. And since the beginning of this global pandemic, I’ve been hearing calls for us to “just get through this and return to normal.”
“Just two weeks,” people yell at each other, on social media, over zoom chats. “We just have to ride this out for two weeks, and then everything will go back to normal. We can fix everything.”
It’s been a lie from the very beginning, and the smartest among us knew it all along. They told us Covid 19 would be endemic. They showed us evidence from China, which is only now lifting its lockdowns months after it began. They knew it was going to get so much worse before it got any better.
Return to Normal
But we continue to call for return to normalcy. Let’s go back to the way it was, we say. Why? Because the unknown is terrifying.
I experienced this as a child, a child of trauma, witness to and victim of my parents’ abusive marriage. My stepdad would be fine for a few weeks. We would all stop walking on eggshells. We would breathe easy again. Laugh again.
Then it would hit us all over, so much more painful because we had let our guard down. So much more traumatic because we allowed ourselves to be suckered into believing he would change. Even more devastating because we learned my mother would never leave. This trauma was our “comfortable known.”
And this is the terror we’ve been living in the United States from its very founding.
Every time we think perhaps we’re ready to breathe easy, a new trauma lashes the people of this nation, the western patriarchal capitalist monstrosity we call the United States of America.
Our beloved abuser. Our known abuser.
Yes. It’s that Bad. And No Repair Can Fix It.
We talk often in history and government classes, in philosophy and politics, of how The United States is the very first country founded on democratic ideals. “The first democracy.” “The city on a hill.”
While that may be true, to such an extent that granting limited voting rights to landed white males can be considered true democracy, it is also true that The United States was the first nation to be founded on capitalist ideals. To decide from the very beginning that we would be a great nation of wealth, and that wealth would be our driving motivation, at the expense of all else.
It was always about concentrated wealth.
The north and the south disagreed over slavery based on who would make more money. Not based on morals.
Jackson expanded the right to vote to all white males, and expanded the power of the federal government, returning to the gold standard, not for the good of all, but for his own power, his own wealth and that of his cronies, other “self made” common men like him.
It was never about freedom.
The Gilded Age gave birth to the Horatio Alger myth, bringing us hero tales of Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, while brushing stories of vulture capitalism, and the fact that millions went without boots, much less bootstraps, under the rug.
The Great Depression stories forget entirely the fact that the wealthy capitalized on underpaid labor of the working class and gambled the wellbeing of millions of people for their stockmarket thrills and overspending on credit they could never hope to pay back. They gambled it all, and lost.
And the beat goes on…
This country, like my parents’ marriage, was broken from the very beginning because it was built on unstable ground by broken people bent on abusing others for their own benefit.
You cannot grow something beautiful from a broken foundation. The only answer is to tear it all down and start again, perhaps pulling shards of beauty from the rubble.
No Repair: It Is What It Is and It Sucks
The fact that it cannot be fixed doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck.
“Mom?” I asked, all those years ago. “How are you going to sit with him, 20 years from now, when we’re all grown up and moved out, and look over with love at the man who terrorized us for so many years? How are you going to just sit in a rocking chair next to him and say ‘thanks for the memories?’ How can you forget all he put us through and just move on?” I needed to know.
I couldn’t imagine that you could continue to do the same horrible things over and over and eventually things would work out.
The reason I couldn’t imagine it, the reason it is in fact unimaginable is that you can’t. You cannot repeat the same broken cycles over and over and find them somehow magically healthy. You actually have to break the broken cycles.
Which is what my parents finally did, thirty years after their shaky start.
Which is what America is experiencing now, almost 250 years after our shaky start.
Broken is broken. There is no repair. We are now going through an ugly divorce.
And it sucks.
It sucks to watch it all fall apart, even if it was an unstable house of cards to begin with.
Breaking the cycle in our family meant traumatized children who grew up to form our own unhealthy cycles, who had unhealthy coping mechanisms, and how no idea how to function in healthy relationships without lots and lots of practice and forgiveness and help.
Breaking the cycle in our country will mean potentially, in the long run, potentially hundreds or thousands dead, millions without work, and hundreds of millions in one kind of pain or another.
But what is the alternative?
The only alternative to breaking the cycle is continuing the cycle of brokenness. Sustained trauma, ignorance, abuse, and a future filled with pain and no opportunity for healing.
Our refuges in a cycle of brokenness include numbing out, remaining blind to our own suffering, and allowing ourselves to be gaslit. To pretend like it’s all okay. It’s not that bad.
I suppose it is still possible, there is still a slight chance, at this point in the divorce, to bury our heads in the sand, keep on keeping on, and to go on as we have been, comfortably numb.
But, between you and me, between the two choices, remaining in a cycle of brokenness, clinging to “comfort” and guaranteeing lifetimes upon lifetimes of misery, and breaking the cycle and dealing with the short term ugly consequences and long term hope for lifetimes of true love and freedom, I choose the latter.
I’ll take the risks, I’ll carry with me into battle the faith that the benefits to marching forward will far outweigh the potential for temporary, though sharp, pain. I’ll make the choice over and over again, throughout whatever battles we must fight, that freedom and love in the big picture are far more valuable than imagined and tenuous comfort in the short term.
Broken is broken, and I’m ready to break the cycle.
How about you?