In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

It made sense to me then that he needed someone to tell him that, because in fact even I didn’t understand that it wasn’t okay to hurt me, whether it was my heart or my mind or my body at stake. I would spend much of my childhood quietly enduring whatever there was to endure, keeping my face still so my rage and fear did not betray me, so whoever it was would not punish me further.

Like so many women before me and since, I learned that you go back, you stick it out, you love the man until he is saved by your sacrifice. It’s the kind of thing you can always see going so badly in someone else’s life, but not in your own.

One of the questions asked, “If you could be any other person, who would you be?” My immediate thought was that I didn’t want to be anyone else, because if I was someone else, someone else would have to be me, and nobody else could do it.

Looking back now, I can see that anxiety fueled my feeble attempts to fix the broken world around me, and that anxiety didn’t go any damn where as I grew older and grew up.

I knew then that I would never get him back, that maybe he was never there to lose in the first place. I had been dreaming of the man I knew he could be, that I just knew he wanted to be and surely would choose to be someday. For the first time, I was struck with the understanding that as hard as I had tried to make sense of the whole mess, it was time to give that up.

I thought something must have changed my father, that he had to have been different at some earlier point. I wondered whether he was kind in his younger days, or charming, just trying to decipher exactly what would have led my mother to marry him. No, she says, he was not. He would storm away from her house if she could not come with him, threatening to find other girls. He would drive another girl by her house for her to see. He had been cruel and hateful always.

I run to the phone and finally decide to ask someone to help us, so I call 911 or the operator, but the lady’s voice on the phone says only, The number you are trying to reach is not in service, and then I hear the warning-siren busy signal that says, Hang up the phone, you’ve done something wrong, and I realize at last that there is no way out, no one coming to rescue us or to save us or to sit my father down and tell him once and for all that what he’s doing is not right.

That was my father’s brother, and it didn’t surprise me. I wondered, but never asked, whether the tank was full of water and what happened to the fish and how a woman gets her head out of a broken fish tank and how a daughter pretends everything is okay.

But the comfort I had held on to for so long was gone, and I didn’t know how to tell the youth-group teacher that if he couldn’t give me that back, I wouldn’t have anything else to assure me that somewhere things made sense, that there was a reason for my dad and his world, and that even though I felt so terribly lost, I would someday be safe and loved, and everything would be okay.

My old church sits right off the road—the church where I learned about Jesus and was molested, saved, baptized, and finally told to leave.

For most of us, there is no flash of understanding when we turn eighteen, no sudden self-awareness that transforms our child selves into responsible, world-savvy adults. We fight the demons that embedded themselves into the fabric of our consciousness, not knowing why we always feel like we’re in a fight. We walk through the world as if we are part of it, but our anguish constantly reminds us that the world neither loves nor wants things that are broken.

I didn’t know how often I would later tell God that I would give all the money I had just to go to her house and lie in her arms, beg her to hold me, please hold me and let me be her little girl.

But you have to wonder how much was being done to guard against abuse when the only things at stake were these hicks and hillbillies, these rednecks and backwoods inbreeders. Balance that against the stock prices, the yachts and cruises, the Cuban cigars—and our history shows that time and time again, poor people just can’t compete.

I took the rolled-up dollar bill from my father and snorted the burning powder, telling myself I could not reject what I thought was the only way he could show me love. It would be a long time before I felt like I deserved a love that didn’t hurt.

It was then that I understood the difference between theory and life. It was then that I realized I could never go home to the women like my mother—like me—and tell them feminists were working for them by writing essays or books or songs. I finally understood that the same people who sign petitions for laborers across the world don’t always love the laborers next to them. And that health care for all sometimes means not the ones who smoke. I realized that the feminists around me would still ask, Why didn’t you kick him in the balls? because a woman should be able to fight off two men twice her size. A feminist can still say, She was sprawled out for the men, and an entire community will shut out a young woman who is trying to figure out how to survive and be a mother if her decisions don’t meet their standards, if she doesn’t control the story told about her.

In my small world, I found myself more alone than ever and wondered whether any of these other worlds would ever truly want me, whether I could belong anywhere. I couldn’t return to the holler where I grew up—my father lives there still, shut in my granny’s house, all the old magic gone from a place now filled with the sorrow and torment of a man shooting up heroin that is somehow affordable to the hillbillies that once had to rely on Lortabs for such a high. The new home and family I thought I had—the family I chose, the ones who care about social justice and the environment—have abandoned me each time a man told them to, and I never know who is gone until I meet them in the grocery store or at a restaurant and they look at me, full of knowing, then turn away.

He always says he wants to see me, he loves me. And he’ll call me when he can—sometimes a collect call from jail and sometimes from a new cell phone number when he’s out—and wonder aloud why I won’t come see him, then tell me about the latest person to steal from him, or who he stole from last, or how he got a little money and wants to send me some, wants to send birthday money and Christmas money, but the cards never come, that money never arrives, and he doesn’t call back.

I wondered how my father had come down this road, how everything had gotten so much worse once he left the holler. Maybe it had been worse for a long time, and I had just not seen it. Maybe it was the shifting variety of drugs available to him as the pharmaceutical companies changed up formulas. Maybe it was just the way things were always going to go.

How can I create a different world for my children, one that does not lead to broke-down cars and crippling addiction and felonies? How can I even be a mother? How do I translate the language of my childhood into a language of adoration, of devotion, of caretaking? I constantly tried out new words and, like magic, drew phrases like I love you and You’re so good from nowhere. Like a miracle.

He asks me what a family is, and I say, Family is all of us who love you. He seems to think that’s good enough.

I tried so hard to avoid dating or becoming my father. I didn’t date anyone who did hard drugs (at least after my first marriage ended). I congratulated myself that no man ever hit me (the bruises on my neck were more than ten years ago now, and that was only once), though I never stopped being afraid of it, never stopped wondering whether it would happen if I dared say too much, if I let my face betray my true feelings. In the end, though, there was never a good set of rules to follow to protect myself.