In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

the best stories are true—the truth is complicated, compelling, and moving.

What is it that convinces so many women—and men as well—to endure destructive relationships for the sake of the children? My mother must have performed some painful mental calculations to measure the devil she knew against the one she did not.

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.

If you can survive the weight of bills you can’t pay and the emotional demand of children who you know deserve to be loved better than you know how to love, and if you can endure the loneliness and the panic that takes your breath away when you imagine what would happen to your children if you died or someone took them from you, then you just might make it, eventually. So I hear.

I’ve come to believe that one of the defining moments of adulthood is the moment at which we recognize our parents as the overgrown children we all are, running around and reacting to each other as we learned to from our parents.

You’ve made your bed, now lie in it. I imagine I know how Grandma Wright felt when she said that. Angry at a daughter who didn’t listen, who snuck off with the bad boy. Not ready to rescue a grown woman, not sure whether that woman is ready to rescue herself. Not knowing what has happened to her daughter’s children, what is happening, what comes next. CHAPTER 10 Fish out of Water One

we go on doing the things we saw adults around us do, we subconsciously choose the lives that were modeled for us.

I didn’t understand, then, how cigarettes were soothing her, giving her a comfort that no one and no other thing could as she tried to survive our father and young motherhood in our little corner of the world.

But when you try to go where you don’t belong, there is always hell to pay.

But the hero of the story is always the storyteller. The storyteller is the one with power.

That word—love—how does one begin to define it? For the longest time, I relied on the power of definition through negation. I am not in love. I could never love a child as a mother should. Now I tell my son of my love for him, how it will outlast us both. He asks me about my family—don’t I love our family as much I love him? I tell him no, I love him above all else.

I was lost inside myself, certain of nothing good about me other than the fierce and selfless love I felt for my baby. To my friend’s dismay, I went back.

My childhood fear returned, that of being trapped and not allowed to leave, isolated from the rest of the world in a beautiful prison.

there’s the other women, so good at deciding when a woman’s sexuality is her empowerment or her sluttiness. So wrapped up in keeping women in their place—whatever that place may look like—they forget that the rules they embrace are also their own bondage.

I wanted to die. I didn’t want to hurt my children, which is probably why I never followed through.

The people around us told me what a good mother I was, and I knew that I loved him, and I finally understood what people meant when they talked about dying for someone—I was probably already close to that on the birthing bed.

That’s why someone who used to be poor will, if they have it, lend money to a poor person to pay a bill—they know the stakes.

I knew then that I couldn’t trust myself to love a man, that something inside me drew me to the kind of men who wouldn’t really love me but whose love I would desperately try to earn.

I cussed at my two-year-old daughter today. I hate myself for it. I’m just exhausted by how much she needs, how much she demands. At the end of the day, I feel like a cigarette is the only comfort I have.

I realize that, for the most part, the adults around me then felt like I feel now—childhood slips away without warning, and we find ourselves pretending to be grown, pretending we want to be part of this world with jobs and bills, but numbing ourselves with television or another glass of wine.

We have our own children and see ourselves in them—we relive our teen years (the best years of your life), or we play out our unresolved conflicts while our own parents become grandparents and suddenly aren’t so awful anymore.

it is always someone at a higher pay grade who convinces workers to blame immigrants, people of color, and other poor people when the owner won’t pay fair wages.