Thicker than Water: A Memoir

by Kerry Washington

I remember going to my mother one day in my bathing suit and pointing out the protruding shape of my belly as a flaw I wanted to fix. She said, “Just hold in your tummy. That’s what everyone does.” So, on land, in my bathing suit, I learned to restrict my body, to hold my breath, and to pretend. But in the water, I could be free.

Whenever she slammed the trunk of a car closed, she’d say, “Cover your ears—there’s going to be a loud noise!” It took me years to realize that she wasn’t really protecting our ears—she was cleverly making sure no little fingers got caught.

When I was a child, things were different for me at night. At night, I tossed and turned, knowing that something was not quite as it seemed and that things were happening that were dangerously wrong. With the day’s performance over, the curtains drawn, the theater empty, I stayed up to see what ghosts haunted the stage. And there, in those late-night hours, I sometimes met my mom and dad without their masks, angry beasts with no audience to pretend for anymore.

I was no stranger to my mother’s protective veils. She had one for me, too. But this was different. Unlike the veil that she deployed to keep me from being able to read her innermost thoughts, the veil induced by my dad was designed to keep my mother’s rage trapped deep inside her. The veil that greeted me was sheer and fluid—it obscured her from me, created a distance between us that was necessary for her to maintain her secrets, but it never entirely hid my mother from my view.

She seemed to decide that this man was not deserving of her truth, and that the easiest way to get through this moment, this evening, this marriage, and perhaps this lifetime was to keep him out and communicate from behind the mask.

He said, “My therapist told me the cruelest thing you can ever do to another human being is to label their suspicions as false when you know them to be true.” His therapist explained that when you teach a person to believe that their internal truth is a lie, you take from them the very thing that is most important to each of us—our ability to know and trust ourselves.

Food and exercise were my drugs of choice because everyone eats and many people work out, so I could mask my abuse behind socially acceptable behavior and remain high-functioning in the midst of the maelstrom. But behind closed doors, the behavior was extreme. And the obsession was debilitating. I hated myself, which made me want to escape further into the emotional numbness that this abuse of my body provided.