An Inland Sea

emotional and financial abuse

I’m in my regular spot this morning, the navy blue chair-and-a-half, staring out at the big body of water people call Lake Michigan. If you have never seen it, you would call it a sea. It is an inland sea, a vastness that hides the other side. Like so much in life, you cannot see the truth of it until you are willing to look beneath the surface.

I had stayed up late last night to see the NFL draft. I was waiting for the Lions to pick at seventeen, but when the Raiders came on the clock earlier in the night, the atmosphere in my living room shifted.

When the camera panned to the family of the new first-round draft pick, it wasn't the player who held my gaze. It was his mother. She was tucked into their couch, her posture shrunken. I watched her husband sitting beside her, the announcers called the husband 'protective,' but my nervous system saw something else, a pattern I knew by heart, even if it wasn't actually there.

I didn't know their story, but it looked familiar. I was seeing ghosts of my own past rather than necessarily the reality of theirs.

Immediately, my right arm began to throb, that familiar, burning ache of "tennis elbow," even though I have never picked up a racket. My body was tallying a score my mind was still trying to ignore. I’ve spent years reading researchers such as Lindsay C. Gibson, Gabor Maté, and Bessel van der Kolk, learning that the nervous system is an honest historian; it stores every silenced scream in its tissues. My body wasn't just watching a broadcast; it was reacting.

I remembered the Sunday afternoon my own "unseen" history finally became physical. I was standing at the dishwasher, and my mother-in-law stood at the granite island, leaning over the counter so her shadow cut across the soapy water in the sink. She had positioned herself perfectly between me and the kitchen exit. “The mother,” she called herself.

“Is that new?” she asked, her eyes scanning my shirt. It was her signature opening every time she saw me, a relentless audit of my life.

I didn't answer. I couldn't. I looked at my husband, who stood by the sink with his eyes dull and fixed on the floor, trapped in the narrow space between us. He had been trained since he was a boy to believe her judgment was a form of love. As she spoke, my hand quit. I was holding a heavy dinner plate, and my fingers turned to lead. I watched, almost in slow-motion, as the plate slipped and shattered in a deafening crash against the floor.

Another strike happened again a few weeks later. At 3:00 AM, I swung my legs out of bed and stood up. I went down instantly. My chin hit the floorboards, and my body sprawled across the carpet. I didn't feel pain; I felt nothing. It was as if my waist was the edge of a cliff and everything below it had ceased to exist. I stayed there, cheek pressed against the rug, the smell of dog hair and dust filling my nose.

"What happened?" my husband’s voice came from the bed, thick with sleep.

"I can't feel my legs," I whispered.

I waited for him to jump up, to carry me, to show the terror I was feeling.

I lay there in the dark, staring at the legs that looked like mine but refused to work. In that stillness, I realized I was a house on fire, and the man beside me was refusing to admit there was any smoke.

I look away from the TV now, back toward the water. A patch of gray mist moves over the lake, blurring the horizon until the water and sky are one and the same, an indistinguishable bruise. I am no longer on that floor, but the mist reminds me of how long I lived in that fog.

The "generational curse" that put me there began with a grandfather twenty-three years older than his bride, a blueprint of dominance that my mother-in-law perfected and passed to her husband and sons. We didn't begin to break it until COVID, when I heard her start the same venom with my nephew's girlfriend, “her dad’s a doctor, but she’s overweight, I don’t know what he sees in her.” I told my husband then, "I will not let her do it to the next generation.”

For the past six years, my husband and I have sat in a few small offices with plain walls. My memory of that healing is anchored in the rough, nubby wool of the second therapist’s light-blue sofa. I have picked at that fabric with my fingernails during the hours it took my husband to finally find the words to say this isn’t right, instead of retreating into the sink. He is still learning with a new therapist every Tuesday. I no longer get the blank stare when I point out his family’s cruelty.

I looked back at the television. The broadcast continued to celebrate the first round picks’ family, praising their "strength" in the face of the mother’s MS diagnosis. A wave of nausea hit me. The "God bless,” and the smiles were similar to the ones I remembered, scriptures used as weapons to hush anyone who dared to name the harm.

I reached for my phone. For years, I would have kept my suspicions to myself to protect the "peace." But silence is what paralyzed me, and my husband's brother's wife has been diagnosed with MS. I pulled up the thread with Elaine, the friend who had handed me Tara Westover’s Educated, like a life raft.

“I’m watching the draft,” I typed, my heart hammering. “But I want to puke. All the 'God bless' and the reporting on her illness. It hits too close to home.”

I hit send.

That single text was more than a message; it was a boundary years in the making. It was the sound of the silence finally breaking.

My friend texted back almost instantly: “No shit! Can’t wait to catch up next Wednesday.”

I looked back out at the lake. The "generational curse" is often just a current, a cold pull that drags you out to sea because you were never taught how to swim against it. But as I sit here now, finally able to feel my bare feet on the floor, I realize that the only way to stop the drowning is to be the one who finally stands up and speaks.

The waves hit the shore, but the house didn't shake. The cycle had found its end in a navy blue chair, a cell phone, and a voice that refused to be silenced ever again.