How I Learned I was Wrong about Everything
Fact-checking the stories that define who we are
There’s a story my mom used to tell me.
It was about an old joke in her family, something to do with a raccoon at a Christmas party when she was small.
I don’t remember the specifics, though I wish I did. There’s nobody left to ask anymore.
What I do recall is that it happened before her younger sister, Bonnie, was born. The joke wasn’t about the events of that night, but rather the way the story became so well worn over time that Bonnie would tell it herself, as if she had been there.
She actually believed she was there that night until well into adulthood, when someone explained that this memory wasn’t, in fact, hers. It belonged to the rest of the family.
But is that right?
I wonder about that sometimes, especially with so much of my own family gone. When it comes to shared memories, who gets to own them? Who gets to tell them?
Who gets to say what’s true or what it all means?
If our stories are what defines us, does the truth even matter?
Like Bonnie, I grew up repeating a narrative that happened before my time. It was the foundation for everything else, the place I would go whenever someone asked, “Tell me about yourself.” This story provided the entire context for my arrival on this earth and everything that happened after.
It went like this:
My father was one of the first K-9 cops in King County, Washington. A tall, serious, Canadian immigrant, he was like an older brother to everyone in his life, not just his five siblings.
In 1976, he married my mother, a schoolteacher and a survivor of an abusive childhood. In my telling, they were happy for a time: Late-era hippies with a yellow van and two dogs, just thrilled to have found one another.
They had my sister, Jennifer, in 1979, and built a house in the woods in a quiet part of town.
And then in 1981, everything changed.
Dad was on duty with his police dog Jake, pursuing a man who had robbed a bank and was on the run. They followed him along a tree-lined perimeter, and the perpetrator shot them both multiple times. Eventually, he was out of bullets. Reinforcements arrived soon after.
Jake wasn’t supposed to survive, but he did. They said he saved Dad’s life.
There are these photos of the two of them in various states of recovery, camera crews around them to capture the remarkable story. Sometimes my sister appears too, a toddler, hugging the dog a little too tight.
On the news, they said it was a miracle they both had lived.
But it was a tragedy, too. Dad developed PTSD. He tried to go back to work, but he could never get over the traumatic memories. He had to leave that job, losing his formal role as a protector. And with it, he lost his pride and joy and his entire identity, or so I believed.
I always thought that becoming a cop was my dad’s dream, and then it was yanked away. He was a tragic hero, and this the story of his tragic undoing.
Dad drank. He spiraled. And my mother went in after him. She was unwilling to let go of him, of them, of the promise of the life they had built together.
In 1982, I showed up. It was in the aftermath of all this, and I was the final addition to a family unit already subsumed in grief.
For 14 more years they stayed together, but the road was bumpy. I knew they loved me, but they were largely unavailable. I fashioned a role for myself that was primarily to stay out of the way and try not to be a bother.
In my telling, what I saw in this part of the story was my mother following my dad into his decline. She disappeared with him, lost to the grief.
Eventually they divorced, and he battled his addiction while we struggled with money. Mom juggled single motherhood with running a business, and she made a lot of mistakes. When my sister left for college, fearing that her transition would be difficult, my mother relocated to Tucson with her.
I was only 16, and she left me at home primarily on my own for those next two years. I tried like hell to do my part and not complain, unsure how to ask to be parented by someone who had no more to give and was already doing the best she could.
I fled the west coast and moved far away for college. Our relationship was strong throughout all of these years, but as I got older a lopsided blame began to emerge. I got angry about the past.
The child in me wanted so badly to see my father as a victim of addiction that rendered him incapable of choosing us that I had to find other places to place the blame. I worked so hard to forgive Dad for his failures that I blamed my mom— and myself — instead.
I carried the shame for a very long time that losing our family was never reason enough to push my father to rock bottom. I had a full-fledged chip on my shoulder. God, was it heavy.
I channeled that resentment into my career, bringing an unhealthy knack for surviving and desire to travel into everything I did. I sought out high-stakes gigs, thrived on external validation, fell in love with an equally ambitious partner, had two kids, and created a new family.
In parallel with all of this, I lost my parents in painful, drawn-out declines. Eventually, the sheer weight of life and death and running so hard caught up with me and I ran straight into a wall. That’s another story, for another time.
But you see it, right? The through-line: My father was shot, he was a tragic hero, our family fell apart, and I blamed my mother instead of him. I became successful, fueled by a lot of rage and internal turmoil along the way.
That was my story, that was my narrative. I upheld it steadfastly, both inside my mind and shared with others, for most of my life.
Until I decided to take a closer look and discovered that maybe it wasn’t exactly true.
Their deaths were what unlocked me. My dad passed away in January 2016, and my mother followed 6 years later.
By the end, I felt as if I had been losing them for my entire life. First, to trauma and grief, and then to alcoholism and multiple sclerosis, respectively. These diseases were ostensibly different, but the experiences were eerily alike.
In both cases, their minds disappeared in uneven, unpredictable cycles that broke my heart over and over, for years. I wished for their deaths so we could all be released. Eventually, we were.
After my mom died, in April 2022, I found that I was finally able to really process everything from a new perspective. I found a new therapist and set to work, trying to break through years of compartmentalization to reconcile the combination of rage and love and loss that plagued my heart.
I found in the process that the anger I carried had been useful for a long time, but it had begun to feel too heavy. My parents could no longer disappoint me or let me down, I was safe from the hurt now, and I wanted to let all that anger go.
To do this, I felt the need to better understand what had really happened.
What had truly broken our family? Was the story I’d been telling even the right one? What forces had shaped my parents, and why did they do the things they did?
I hoped that spending the time to reexamine the story of my childhood would help lift the burden I was so sick of carrying. I was on a fact-finding mission designed to heal my emotional pain.
I started with my sister, of course. My steadfast champion, Jenn is the one person in the world who can always validate the strange realities of growing up in our family. I asked her to help me make sense of the story, to understand what really had broken our parents.
We pieced together what we could, and then talked about who else might have different perspectives.
In all, I spoke to 17 people in this process. What I learned was so profound that I recorded everything and turned it into a podcast, a 6-chapter audio documentary that tells the story of my parents, their parents, and the way our family fell apart.
But what changed me the most, was this: When I spoke with my cousin Teri, the eldest in our generation, she said the single thing that reframed my entire defining narrative.
By the time we spoke, I had already updated a few key elements of my narrative. I learned that Dad became a cop not out of pursuit of some lifelong passion or desire to protect, but as a means of escaping the Vietnam draft due to a terrifyingly low draft number
I learned that he studied business in school, but everyone around him actually expected him to become a vet or work with animals in some way. It resonated because my dad had always collected pets, and of course, became a K-9 cop of all things.
The image of Dad joining the police force to avoid war, and then getting shot in the line of duty all the same, was heartbreaking in a new way for me. It also poked some holes in the well-worn hero’s narrative I had been telling, reframing aspects of the tragic loss of his police career.
I said as much to Teri, while laying out my theory for her of how his shooting led to his addiction and broke our family.
Teri reminded me what I already knew and had conveniently forgotten: Dad was an alcoholic long before the shooting. She saw the sequence and impact of events a little differently.
Here’s what she said:
“I just see them as very different problems. You know, the post-traumatic stress from the shooting absolutely contributed to the alcoholism. [But] would he have been able to be a good parent if he didn’t have the shooting? Probably not.”
She pointed out that Dad didn’t develop the addiction because of this event, he used the addiction to cope with it.
“Because as long as he drinks, as long as any alcoholic drinks, they’re going to fuck up their life. Even without the shooting, he was probably going to end up letting you down.”
It’s a nuanced point, but it changed everything for me.
In all the tellings of our story, I had never even considered the version where the shooting wasn’t the initiating event. Maybe Dad would have abandoned us regardless.
I suddenly saw how long I had spent using the shooting to explain all the ways Dad had let me down, because it allowed me to believe he was a tragic hero and not just another absentee father. I was making excuses for him so I could still hold him on a pedestal in my heart.
And he never even asked me to do that.
After talking to Teri, I rediscovered a recording of an AA testimonial speech he had once given wherein he recounts repeatedly how his drinking was problematic far before the shooting, and how he never felt worthy of my mother, my sister, or me. He blamed himself for the dissolution of our family even more than I ever did.
I realized that holding so fiercely onto this version of the narrative had also clouded my appreciation for my other parent: my mother. The one who stayed.
Flawed, broken, and bereft as she was, my mom showed up in all the ways that mattered most. She inspired me, she supported me, showed unconditional love, and fanned the flames of my dreams for as long as she was able.
The tragic hero in my life was not my dad. It was her. I was just too consumed with misplaced blame to realize it.
I began to rewire my narrative to allow for this revision. It’s important because this is the story that defines me.
It gives the context for my arrival on this earth and explains everything that happened after.
She deserves for me to make sure that the story I tell is true.
I’m reminded of another story that my mom used to tell me.
She must have been about 37. She’d already had my sister, but she desperately wanted one more child. The doctors had said it might not happen.
So, she went to the beach. Straight over to the Pacific Ocean.
She waded out into the water to have a talk with God. She held her arms out and she said, “You. Will. Give. This. To. Me.”
And eventually, I did come along.
I like to imagine my mom like this, in this posture. At the end of the earth and with her arms wide open, willing the universe to comply.
So full of vitality and strength, the traits that eventually faded, slowly, until she disappeared first in mind and then in body.
Mom believed that we have the ability to speak things into existence. It was this fierce willfulness that pulled her out of a tragic childhood and propelled her through the trials and tribulations she faced with my dad.
It was this strength of spirit that she gave to my sister and me, even throughout all the years that we were unable to fully appreciate all the ways she showed up for us.
For a long time, I overlooked how much she gave me because I was blinded by my view of my father as a hero.
But now I can see it. I don’t blame her anymore; I just love her fully. And now, as I rewrite the narrative that defines me, I want to bring this part into the story.
In this version, I am there with her. We stand together, side by side, our bare feet in the cold Pacific Ocean, arms open wide.
We are daring to survive, daring to dream, and willing the universe to comply.
