(It is a chapter from Barbara’s yet-to-be-published memoir, “First You Grieve.”)

By: Barbara Chiarello

“Writing is like drawing poison out of your body, saving your own life — or the life of someone else.” — Donna Freitas

Not Alone

When I was about 3, my father would take me into the ocean at Coney Island, holding me in his arms so I could go farther out.

Once, my foot accidentally caught the top of his bathing suit and pushed it down a bit. He was embarrassed and told me to stop.

I was surprised. Suddenly, there were boundaries?

It may have been because we were not alone.

Even now, when I go to the beach that incident lingers.

No Underpants 

One night in the ’80s, I remembered that my father slept without underpants.

Earlier that evening my husband and I watched our favorite British detective show, and a suspect came to the door in a shirt and boxer shorts, bare legged.

I looked over at my husband after we had gone to bed. Clad in a sleeveless undershirt and Jockey shorts, his bare legs . . . .

The double image became the triple image. I saw my father in his long undershirt only, his penis showing. I remember not looking if our trips to the apartment’s one bathroom coincided. 

Childhood experiences can only be repressed, never erased.

No matter how deeply buried, emotionally charged memories fight to be, often overpowering our defenses when we are already overwhelmed.

Better a controlled excavation.

Walls Closing In

“Traumatic memories lack verbal narrative and context; rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images” (Herman 38).

I have vague memories of lying in bed and watching the walls getting closer and closer. Was this a fever delirium? Was my father on top of me, blocking my view of the room?

Another memory: My mother holding me in the bathroom, washing my face with cold water as I cried and cried. Giving me a necklace of clear faceted beads.

My father banging on the door.

My mother refusing to let him in.

Had my mother rescued me? She and I never talked about it.

Only much later did I learn that children do not tell because they “are too young to know that the abuse isn’t appropriate — especially if it’s done by someone they know and trust” (Committee for Children, 2024.)

For the longest time, I couldn’t even tell myself.

The Bear That Ate Children

On some weekend mornings, I would crawl in bed next to my father and he would tell me a story.

Once upon a time there was a woman with lots of children. Her husband had died, so she had to provide for them.

One day a bear came to her village and ate all of her children. Then he came to her kitchen and demanded food.

She took one look at the bear’s swollen belly and knew what he had done. Cunningly, she fed him some of the delicious chicken soup she had been cooking for dinner.

After he ate, the mother asked if he wanted to rest. “Bearila, bearila, my bed is very comfortable for a nap.”

The bear was tired, so he ambled off to the bedroom where he fell into a deep sleep.

Meanwhile, the mother got out her butcher knife. As soon as the bear started snoring, she walked to the side of the bed. Without hesitation, she slit open the bear’s stomach and all of her children tumbled out unharmed.

A smart woman can outwit a hungry bear. A vulnerable child cannot.

Pushing Against My Father

Every Sunday my parents and I took the three-train, one-and-a-half hour ride up to the Bronx to visit my father’s mother.

My mother got off first, walked to my grandmother’s apartment building and chatted over coffee in Aunt Margie’s kitchen while my father and I went to the Bronx Zoo.

After meeting my uncle and two cousins at the entrance, I walked into this 250-acre expanse armed with a bag of peanuts my father had bought from a man holding a metal tree with small brown bags of nuts on it.

When my cousins and I got tired of seeing the animals and were too full to eat any more peanuts, we each ran to be the first to feed the squirrels that appeared among the trees.

Often Lenny and I would outrace Paula, who got there after the squirrels had had their fill and left. Paula cried. We laughed. Paula cried harder, making the game more fun.

For me and Lenny.

As children, we probably passed on the sadism that victimized us. The same may have been true for my father and his brother.

Lenny and I eventually broke the cycle but not yet.

A black-and-white photo exists from one such outing. My 4-year-old self is pushing against my father with all of my might. My small fingers try in vain to loosen his grip.

I’m wearing a white dress and carrying an ever-present purse on my right shoulder. I know the purse is red because I was told many times how cute I was with it.

My face registers something more than the annoyance of having to stand next to my kneeling father for a picture. My mouth is clenched too tightly; my body is trying to escape too fiercely.

I see myself as a vulnerable little girl, thrown into a maelstrom that she could not comprehend and from which she could not escape.

I mourn for her.

Pushing Against

My brother still has a scar on his hand from something that happened when I was 5 and he was 17. He put his hand through the glass of the curtained French door separating the hall from the living room of our small apartment.

I must have been pushing it shut. Hard.

Earlier that day I watched my mother and sister dress for my sister’s wedding shower, then suddenly disappear. Fear overwhelmed me.

I was now alone with my father and brother without my mother to protect me, and I may have sensed that my sister was about to marry and leave me.

My sister’s attention had shifted. As erratic and tenuous as it had always been, it now focused on my future brother-in-law and his family.

After I screamed incessantly, my father and brother took me to the shower. Still sobbing, I remember being lost in the full skirts of the attendees until my mother found me.

As fragile as she was, my mother remained my bulwark against a male sexual energy that I could not name but continued to fear.

Singing in the Rain 

I still remember the fight. First the screaming and crying, then the silent treatment.

My father wanted us to see Singing in the Rain at Radio City Music Hall. I didn’t want to go and said so.

He yelled. I cried. He cried. I said no. Uncharacteristically, my mother said, “Go, Barbara, go with your father.”

That was in our apartment. The next thing I remember is being outside the building, facing him on the sidewalk. He was leaving for the subway station.

I stayed, even though I felt sad (and maybe a little guilty) to see him walk away alone.

When I recalled this incident as an adult, I thought that here was a teenager no longer wanting to do things with her father.

But the movie opened in 1952. I was 6.

If we are all composed of discourses, as philosopher Judith Butler argues, it seems futile to seek wished-for memories when we can turn disturbing narratives into healing wisdom.

“It is not only the ‘beautiful,’ ‘good,’ and pleasant feelings that make us really alive, deepen our existence, and give us crucial insight — but often precisely the unacceptable and unadapted ones from which we would prefer to escape” (Miller 49).   

Armed with multiple discourses shared by therapists and friends, I know I was not to blame.

I no longer have to run away.

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Barbara Chiarello is a child of lower-class, emotionally distressed, immigrant parents and the beneficiary of an excellent New York city public school education, including at Brooklyn College. She earned her Ph.D. in English literature at The University of Texas at Arlington where she has been teaching multicultural American literature for the past 30 years.

Widely published in newspapers and magazines as a journalist, she has authored several academic articles as a UT Arlington graduate student and English professor. Very recently her work has been published in Huston-Tillotson University’s literary journal, 900 Chicon, The University of Texas at Arlington’s Stimulus: A Medical Humanities Journal, The Galitzianer: The Journal of Gesher Galicia, The Manifest Station and Toasted Cheese. Over the past decade her letters to the editor have appeared in The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Austin Chronicle, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Austin American-Statesman.