In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

But we lived the poverty boom-and-bust lifestyle. In a landscape littered with disappointment, immediate gratification seems to make sense.

There were plenty of other kids with their own personal hell burning inside them as we tried to memorize capital cities and the names of all our presidents and multiplication tables.

I cleaned constantly, always thinking that with a little more effort, everything would be perfect, and Dad would have nothing to be angry about.

I would have to see the hurt or anger in my children’s eyes to slowly understand that no one was going to punish me anymore. To understand that if I didn’t fix myself, I would pass my brokenness on to them—the burden of my anxiety and fear and heartache would somehow become theirs, no matter how hard I wished and prayed otherwise.

I would close the door to my room and open a book, forcing myself to read the words, pulling my mind away from the sounds in the next room over and over, willing myself to go into someone else’s world, where fathers weren’t nightmares.

he always told me that the Lortabs he snorted were the poor man’s cocaine.

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. Enacting our oldest child or baby of the family roles, our good girl and troubled child titles. Proving over and over that we are either the pieces of shit our parents resented and could not raise or the angels they adored who could do no wrong.

I could only think, This isn’t right. I briefly considered saying no, that I didn’t want to, that I had just turned seventeen and didn’t know the first damn thing about being somebody’s wife, and if I were the betting kind, I would bet I was going to have a hard time figuring it out.

So many people who endure poverty as children end up making unhealthy choices or accepting their lots. Those around us don’t realize that some of us never feel like we have a choice, never know we have a voice or a right to speak. Some children are taught they deserve and have such power, but for those of us who weren’t given the privilege of that knowledge, we go on doing the things we saw adults around us do, we subconsciously choose the lives that were modeled for us.

You have every right to your anger. Nobody will ever take that away from you. But it is hurting only you.

I didn’t know how to forgive someone while still honoring myself.

I didn’t understand that letting someone else decide for me was still a choice, that I could have said no.

Sometimes, when I was around my family, they would turn to each other when I used a word they didn’t understand—a five-dollar word, too rich for our blood—and I would look away, knowing my new way of speaking marked me as an outsider.

And I couldn’t tell them, I am still one of you, because in so many ways, I wasn’t able to be.

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,

And then 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.

One day, as my mind ground away, asking Why are things like this, I had a new thought: every terrible relationship I ever had, had one thing in common—me. Well shit, I thought.