Awake: A Memoir

by Jen Hatmaker

At the onset of adolescent sexuality, I hear: Girls’ bodies are a problem and need to be heavily policed. Girls’ bodies are an offering for boys. Girls’ bodies are easily ruined. Girls are responsible for a pure bedroom. So our sexual deviance was our fault, and the boys’ sexual deviance was our fault. Got it.

Most of us don’t hide the truth because we are unrepentant liars. We simply know the truth will disrupt it all—the life we’ve built, the marriage we have, the image we’ve nurtured, the career we enjoy, the approval we’ve secured. Admitting the truth, hearing the truth, confronting the truth is all highly consequential. We want the story of our lives, not necessarily our actual lives.

No one else shared the moments. We are the keepers of the family stories. We know all the shorthand. We were a team. I’ve lost my institutional memory partner, and that loss cannot be quantified. No one else will ever remember the fake pothole. They weren’t there.

Inside the family, I bent everyone carefully around his wild mood swings, explosive anger, unseen grenades. When one of us stepped on one anyway, I tried to control (his) behavior and (their) responses. It wasn’t fine, but I tried to make it fine. Our marriage wasn’t fine, but I pretended it was. The kids weren’t fine, but I told them they were. He wasn’t fine, but I treated him like he was.

I managed people’s difficult experience of him, including the kids. If he was mean to someone, I’d do a cheerful tap dance to lighten the atmosphere, then make excuses, explanations, and amends behind closed doors. I tried to rearrange the molecules so people wouldn’t experience what they were actually experiencing. I gave it the old razzle-dazzle.

You don’t realize you aren’t walking on eggshells anymore until you can’t hear them crunching under your feet.

have “avoidant” tendencies because I am conflict averse and aggression immobilizes me. In my marriage, that manifested as silence, withdrawing, and ignoring anything hurting or bothering me, plus ignoring my own behaviors too (bonus!). I shut those off and felt like I was being “easy.” Of course, nothing could be further from the truth because withdrawal doesn’t feel easy to your partner, it just feels disengaged.