Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me

by Adrienne Brodeur

Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it.

I’d known the Southers since I was eight, when my mother married Charles. I knew them in the way that a child knows her parents’ friends, which is to say not well and with indifference. I was fourteen.

If the idea of a woman in the kitchen calls to mind the image of a sweet homemaker in a ruffled apron or a world-weary mother dutifully fulfilling her obligation to feed her young family, you’re picturing the wrong woman in the wrong kitchen.

My mother had narrowed her vision and chosen happiness, and I had willingly signed on, both of us ignoring the dangers of the new terrain.

Overnight, my brother and I acquired four adult stepsiblings—none of whom lived with us—and vaulted up several rungs on the socioeconomic ladder.

The prevailing wisdom concerning divorce at the time was that children were resilient creatures who would fare better with happy parents.

On top of my mother’s desk, frozen in a 1970s acrylic-cube frame, are six photos of Peter and me taken during this period. In every shot, our eyes look vacant and our expressions radiate worry and loss.

As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.

our older brother had died before Peter and I were born, and we would always live in his shadow.

I wonder if that part of it is over for her now, if five and a half decades is long enough to metabolize such a loss or if there are still moments when time collapses and her agony overtakes everything.

Whatever the cause, I wanted to make her happier. I always wanted to make my mother happier.

Such pressure for a young girl to carry on her shoulders.

I knew only what pleased my mother; I didn’t have a moral compass. It would be years before I understood the forces that shaped who she was and who I became and recognized the hurt that we both caused.

So my mother and stepfather did what WASPs have done for generations: they lived off the vapors of family wealth, maintained appearances, and drank copiously.

As a child, I’d heard her friend Brenda refer to them as “bedroom eyes.” At the time, I took this to mean she looked sleepy.

his parenting style was one of benign neglect.

At age seventeen, three years into my life as Malabar’s confidante and accomplice, I became overwhelmed by the desire to get away.

Stashed in the drawer of my bedside table was a container of her sleeping pills. My mother would swallow a couple—part of her chemical lullaby—to ensure that she’d sleep like the dead for the next ten hours, her face surrounded by pillows.

At four in the morning, an idea appeared, fully formed.

Initially, each dollop of praise chemically rewarded my adolescent brain like a hit of dopamine, but I came down from the high quickly. This lie pressed on my conscience

I had always felt complicit in my mother and Ben’s transgression, but now I was an accessory to a more serious crime.

ironically, the biggest fallout from Hazel’s extortion attempt turned out to be a yawning rift between us.

“Loneliness is not about how many people you have around. It’s about whether or not you feel connected. Whether or not you’re able to be yourself.”

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

It was as if she knew that I had not been one of those kids who sneaked flashlights under the covers to read at night.

I was!

At least now Jack would finally see me for who I really was: a girl so lost she couldn’t tell right from wrong or separate her own feelings from her mother’s.

Why is it that an insult stays with you forever, whereas love and praise passes through you like water through a sieve?

Good question.

Aristotle famously suggested that through the mirror of friendship, people are able to see themselves in ways that are otherwise inaccessible.

From my parents, I’d learned that when your vessel started to take on water, you found a lifeboat and abandoned ship.

we’d grown up like vines willing to strangle each other for sunshine.

It’s said that if we do not learn from the past, we are condemned to repeat it.

Do you think we learn more from our parents’ mistakes or from what they do right?