In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

What is history anyway? A story: The last man standing holds the pen. A sense of place: I am on this path that is hardly comprehensible. A birthright: I may be from, but I am not of that world.

I grew up idolizing the flawed people of my history. The cheaters, the drunks, the mean men and their women. They were my first heroes, and they lived their hard lives surrounded by the unspeakable beauty of the land that I call home. But the older I got, the less clear it was where my home could be.

Home—can anyone define that? For some, it’s simple: Where the heart is. Cross-stitch that and hang it on a wall. For the rest of us, it’s a negation: Where I’ve never been. Perhaps it is, after all, that one place to which we can never return. I left my home and grew up, carrying my child self everywhere I went, full of longing and fear and memory.

There is no creek to keep me company, us running wild together behind the house and wandering through the holler. No hills to hike up so I can check on the spring and get a good drink. No trees to hide me. All the things I loved, I had to leave.

I thought I could control their understanding of me, keep my inner torment a secret—it seemed like another sin to be so angry—but I did not realize how much my sense of self was controlled by all that hiding.

Before long, that same look would cross my own face more than once, as tragedies piled onto one another and I slowly came to realize I could not change that grim reality. I grew familiar with a feeling of dread that was nearly eclipsed by weariness. A heartache that could no longer cry out.

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.

At some point, I stopped trusting myself to know the difference between what made sense and what did not. I learned that when things looked wrong, felt wrong, there had to be something I didn’t understand.

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.

He was the only real hero I ever heard of as a child, and his legacy still haunts us. I wonder whether any of our men were ever good, whether any of them ever loved their children or touched their wives with tenderness. I wonder whether the women were gentle, or whether their hollow expressions accurately reflect their despair, their loneliness, their sense of futility. I wonder what they passed down to me—my blurred vision, my thin frame, my long fingers, my penchant for superstition, my longing for green hills and cliff faces? I want their stories, so I can write my backstory. I want their names, their loves, their longings, their addictions, and their brutalities. I want them to whisper to me their heroic moments, their indiscretions, their final regrets, and the recognitions that filled their eyes in the moments before death. But the storyteller was always my father, the original unreliable narrator. Drunk, drugged, lost.

I grew up loving my family but knowing they didn’t know me. We are all strangers.