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Life was busier than ever as a parent of four small children living in Manhattan. But that was good, wasn’t it? Even the governor of Texas when I was growing up, Ann Richards, who had a quick tongue and a beehive hairdo, said so: “If we rest, we rust,” she’d famously quipped. It was advice I’d taken to heart.
For the better part of a decade, I was nursing a baby, carrying one toddler, and trying to ready another for admission to a preschool that would, as it had been explained to me by other moms on the playground, determine their fate. I dragged strollers out of the backs of taxis, sat in ballet classes, and juggled nap-time schedules. I sourced Halloween costumes, elaborate Easter baskets, and thoughtful Christmas gifts. Anytime there was an opportunity to demonstrate my commitment to being an exceptional mom, I wanted to be the best at it: There was no end to committees and benefits and end-of-school picnics, birthday parties requiring elaborate cupcakes, and athletic events in need of juice boxes. I was fortunate that we could afford childcare, but with no family in New York to help me, I felt that the health and happiness of my family rested solely on my shoulders. I wanted people to see me as a good mother by the way my children behaved and appeared; after all, they were a reflection of me. It did feel, at times, that I was doing more things for my children than with my children—things that had no bearing on my relationship to them, that they would never know I’d done—but such were the rarefied problems of a New York City mom. And for the most part, from the outside, it looked glamorous: I loved bringing my family from Texas to New York so I could share this fast, exciting life I’d built with them. It felt like another achievement, to run them through my New York City paces, and I wanted to be seen for it.
Yet as life marched on, I felt my anxieties begin to calcify. I had always been tightly wound, but I found that, increasingly, my nerves could be triggered unexpectedly. My husband, John, was patient and understanding, and yet the source of my panic often seemed to bewilder both of us. I had long been claustrophobic; ahead of a long flight, I would seize with dread anticipating the lack of control I’d feel flying through the air in a confined space. John would hold my hand, gauging my stress level by how sweaty my palm was. I reasoned that it was probably because my mother’s brother had died in a plane crash when he was 21, but the fear was paralyzing.
At a routine dentist appointment, I tried to tell the dentist that I was in pain while he was filling a tooth, but he wouldn’t stop. Instead, he pressed the palm of his hand down on my left shoulder. “You need to be still,” he said. “I’m almost finished.” I obeyed, tightening my hands into fists and willing myself to stay still as tears ran down my cheeks. The second he set down the drill, I ripped off the paper bib and bolted from the room and past the front desk, sobbing. The receptionist stared at me, jaw agape, unable to understand why I was so distraught. Out on the street, I couldn’t catch my breath. I hunched over, gasping, with my hands on my knees.
Once, John found me stretching on a yoga mat at home. “I like what I see here,” he said playfully.
“You in those tight pants.”
“Oh, you’re funny,” I said.
“What if I took this,” he said, picking up a yoga strap, “and kept you here in this room with me?” He reached for my hands and fastened the strap around them. He was being playful, but I felt my body tense. As he began to pull the strap tighter, I felt the sudden, urgent need to escape. I pulled my wrists from the strap. “Stop,” I said. “I don’t like it.” I could feel that I was in fight-or-flight, but I didn’t want to embarrass him. I left him standing in the room alone, still holding the strap, looking confused.
He came to find me a few minutes later. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m not sure what that was.”
“I want to make sure I didn’t do something wrong,” he said. “I would never want to make you uncomfortable.”
“No, you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “I just had to get out. But I’m not sure why.” We dropped the subject.
It was like my body knew something that I didn’t. Over the years, I had thrown out my back many times; whenever it happened, I couldn’t identify the source of the pain, only that it seemed to occur in times of particular stress. When my daughter Grace was an infant, my back went out while I was walking down the hallway. I collapsed, landing on my stomach, somehow managing to catch her in my arms as I fell to the floor. I would need surgery, but the thought of being put under anesthesia terrified me—a particularly unlucky phobia, given the toll that all the running I’d done in my life had taken on my body. Eventually, I had to have a piece of disc removed from my lower back, a place where I’d had chronic pain on the left-hand side. Years later, I had my right labrum reattached to my hip; seven weeks later, the same thing on the left. All in all, I was on crutches for over three months.
Sinus infections came and went for over a decade, but every time I went to the doctor, he assured me that every mom of young children was sick as frequently as I was. “Once they’re all in kindergarten, you’ll be home free,” he said. It felt like he wasn’t listening to me, but who was I to argue? He wrote me a prescription for yet another antibiotic and sent me on my way.
As the years ticked forward, my body kept telling me to slow down, but I just couldn’t. I had two gears: fast and faster. I threw myself into physical activity, which had always been my escape, and spent months training for a triathlon. Swim, bike, run, repeat. In low moments I slapped felt bee stickers, like the ones my grandmother had always given me, on my helmet and shoes and bike; her memory kept me going. I would be at the YMCA pool at five thirty in the morning, then home in time to take the kids to school, leaving enough time to bike or run for an hour or two before officially starting the day. “What if you don’t complete the race?” a friend asked. But the thought had never crossed my mind. Giving up was not an option.
With the triathlon, I had hoped to recapture the glory of my youth—all the volleyball matches I’d won, the tennis victories that had made my father so proud. But when I crossed the finish line into the arms of my children, surrounded by family and friends, I felt nothing. I waited for a wave of euphoria that never came. I woke up the next morning sunburned and dehydrated, aware only of an emptiness within me.
I needed a new mountain to climb. I had been away from the workforce for nearly a decade, and now that my kids were all in school, I felt ready to go back to work. Over the years, I had been John’s partner as he’d built his investment firm, watching from the sidelines but taking notes and honing my own instincts; now I wanted my own foothold. I started small, making personal investments in founders of early-stage businesses, most of them female. Soon my days were filled with conference calls and board meetings; within a few years, I started my own firm. I made sure my team knew that they could reach me anytime, day or night. I had always been sensitive about gender inequality: I remembered my conviction that I’d be a better class president than my grade school classmate Bradley but also my certainty that he’d win only because he was a boy. Supporting female founders was a tangible way to empower women as they built businesses. Yet more than that, the time spent focusing on others allowed me to avoid looking at myself. With my kids growing up, it was nice to feel needed anew.
Yet at home, I was occasionally thrown by my own reactions to my children’s behavior. I had never tested my parents’ boundaries the way my kids seemed determined to test mine. One night, my teenage son Jack brought home a girlfriend to our apartment, disappearing into his bedroom and closing the door. This would have been a cardinal sin in my childhood home. I stormed down the hall and flung his door open.
“Mom,” Jack asked incredulously, looking up from the floor, where he and his girlfriend were crouched over his computer, watching a movie, “what are you doing?” He had grown into a charismatic, confident young man, rational like his father. I must have seemed unhinged to him in that moment, but I couldn’t explain why I felt like his being behind a closed door had seemed like an emergency.
Later that week, when I was having dinner with a therapist friend, I admitted that I had done this to my son. “You have to stop doing that,” she said. “Where do you want him to be intimate with girls—the park? You’re modeling shame.” I thought back to how my father had talked to me about sex: “Your mother was a virgin when I married her, and I expect you to be the same.” There had been no further discussion.
That’s just the way it was in West Texas. Even though I had become much more progressive since moving to New York City, some vestige of those conservative Southern values ran deep. One night, when I saw my daughter Gracie bolting stealthily for the front door, I called her back so I could once-over her outfit. She was wearing ripped jeans, which back home would have been considered disrespectful or provocative. “Grace—” I started.
“I know you weren’t allowed to wear them growing up, but it’s not the ’80s anymore!” she protested. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Can you please just wear something else?” I asked. Gracie’s friends, gathered at the front door, looking at the ground, pretended not to listen. But I knew they must have whispered about my ridiculous rules as soon as they got in the elevator.
One night, Gracie came to my bedroom. “Mom, have you talked to Gigi tonight?” she asked. “She seems a little sad.”
“About what?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It has something to do with you.”
At 10, Gigi was already verbally dexterous and loved to question authority; I suspected she’d grow up to be a lawyer. I went into her room and asked if everything was okay. Her demeanor was solemn as she collected herself, sitting on the edge of the bed with her older sister next to her. I suddenly felt as if I were on trial.
“Mom,” Gigi said, “I don’t know how to say this, but I feel like I don’t know you.”
“Know me?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Gigi said. “I feel so disconnected from you.”
“Really?” I said. “After all that I do for you? My life revolves around trying to keep you safe and taking care of you.”
“Mom, she’s trying to tell you something,” Gracie interjected. She was 13 and reminded me of myself at that age: serious, driven, and focused. “We know you do everything for us.”
“But we don’t feel like we know who you are,” Gigi said. “You’re nice, but you’re not real. Do you have any idea how hard it is to have you as a mother? You do everything perfectly. You make everything look so easy. How are we supposed to relate to you?”
“Perfect is not my goal,” I said. “I don’t know what perfect even means.” Yet I knew this wasn’t true. Perfect had always been my expectation for myself. But hearing my daughter say it aloud bothered me, the way it always had when strangers told me I had the perfect life. I had indeed been raised to be perfect, but also not to draw attention to the quest for perfection. Perfection must look effortless. Had I passed that on to my daughters? The thought disturbed me.
“I’m just trying to be there for you,” I said.
“You’re here, but you’re not here,” Gigi cried. “Where are you, Mom?”
What could I say? My daughters were asking me to participate in life, and in our relationship, in a way that I could not. There was a distance between us, and I was angry that I did not know how to bridge it.
I left the room, slamming the door behind me. In our bedroom, John was reading the newspaper in his sweats and a T-shirt. “What just happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Gigi accused me of not being present. But everything I do I do for them. How can she not see that? I don’t know what to do differently.”
John took a long pause. “I know this is hard, but you’re the adult. She’s the child. I think you’re the one who’s going to have to do the work.”
I threw my hands up and stomped into the bathroom. I didn’t know what that meant. People often talked about this—“the work”—in a vague, wellness-minded way, usually without being specific about what it entailed. Therapy? I’d tried therapy. I wasn’t sure what else to do. Now my own children were trying to hold a mirror up to me, but I could not bring myself to look.
So I kept running. I ran and I worked and I raised my children and ensured that I was too busy to feel much of anything. But sometimes, when I dove back into the swimming pool early in the morning to wear myself out in the chlorinated depths, I would scream at the top of my lungs, down at the very bottom of the pool, where I knew nobody could hear me.
Adapted from The Tell by Amy Griffin, published in March by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
