In my family, we keep scores. These scores are elaborate affairs, and each family member gets to keep theirs on a ledger that is longer than their own natural life. The way scores are assigned is equally byzantine, and subject to discretion. However, in all this complexity, the events that trigger our score-keeping activities are at least very simple. On this, at least, there is a clear consensus – not that we ever set down to consent to any part of the score keeping game, but we all know the rules. We breath the rules. The experience worth of our meticulous recording is pain. But then, pain in all its possible flavors: self-sacrifice bordering immolation, unrequested self-effacement, any form of self-debasement, ancestral mental and or physical trauma, endured harassment of the verbal and physical kind, financial exploitation almost always. And a special section of the ledger is dedicated to all the pain one member of the family had to endure at the direct hand of another member of the family.
We do this, you see, because any entry in our personal ledgers serve as permanent token we can use to command love from other family members at any point in time. Either because we endured pain for them, or they directly caused us pain, in any case we are entitled to acts of love. And again here, when I say acts of love, I mean silent compliance, selective blindness, the careful withholding of any outlier opinion, the subordination of any personal activity to a faceless, nameless family agenda, the submission to a moral assessment of any eating habit, and the abstinence from any comment on any drinking habit.
The game can be plaid individual vs individual, but the real tournament, the Wimbledon of this family Grand Slam, is the inter-generational game. In this lifelong match, the newer generation needs to prove its very right to play by having any major painful life event assessed by the previous generation against their own ledger entries. The game is openly rigged, in the sense that it has been the older generation to decide the value of each score (not all scores are created equal, they work a bit mysteriously like the tennis points), they have not only a longer life to draw form, but they have the exquisite advantage of having recorded memories of the pain you, yes you, have inflicted to them at an age that you cannot possibly remember – or at the very least you feel you should have some kind of handicap for.
And now I will make the examples you need to understand what the heck I am talking about. Our family lore will illustrate this pretty well:
My father was a young promising photographer. He was 23, and handsome, and dreamed of going to Afghanistan and take the pictures the world needed to see, he had started taking some photos for ads that were well received and....he had me at 24, never went to Afghanistan while his friends went, sold all his photographic gear to buy a van to become a courier and, naïve as he was, he believed for a full day his first assignment was to deliver manure. Yes, manure. In a city. And while he did worry about how to load cow shit on his “new” used van, he did not decline since he had a family to support. True story, and one I heard told in countless situations. The death of your juvenile dreams, the pain of seeing others do what you could not, the denial of your creative self, the self-debasement of dealing with manure (spoiler, he did not have to actually carry manure), the selfless life in service of your family. Score: pretty high. It also makes for an excellent dinner tale, so bonus points.
Another bit of family lore: my mother finally got the job she studied for, after suffering through some insignificant jobs and the indignity of briefly being a stay-at-home mum – because I cried too much when I went away (a solid entry on the ledger in itself). There was only a catch: the office was in another city, 2 hours by train away. Eventually, they became 1.5 hours with a company car and a better pay. Here you have the heroine’s journey through pain and self debasement, and then the reward that however does come at high personal cost, day in and day out. Overall high scores, less of a dinner party tale and more of a reckoning among intimate female friends.
You see, I truly, truly (!) feel for the stress and troubles of my parents’ younger self. I know from my own experience how much pain a squashed creative dream can hurt and how much work can suck out of you. I also understand the power of telling the story of your life in a way that makes you feel good about and that it was not all just a gross mistake. I truly do and I am happy to acknowledge with warmth their toiling while at the same time wish they had made more selfish choices, that would have made them happier and weighted less on the beneficiary (me) of all their pain.
And yet, what the family lore, or the mainstream telling of it always left out (and which took me years to put together and assess independently from the family score system), was: my dad wanting a child so early was probably a misjudged effort to fix a childhood with a demanding, unloving, bossing father and a submissive mother, that he probably has always been some flavor of neurodivergent and that he shared with many of his generation the disillusionment about the possibility to topple the system, in Italy as well as elsewhere.
And as for my mum, I know she is the very first woman of her extended family to earn a university degree and NOT become an educator or a high school teacher. I know she had a tough relationship with her mum, who was not a loving woman and harbored hostility against my mum’s career ambitions. I know she has fought so many prejudices as a good-looking woman in a world where the business makers where all men in suits. I know how her aggressive looks with Valentino suits, read lipstick, done hair and nails and high heels were camouflage, a way to feel adequate. I know she did work long hours, and the commute was indeed long, and the stakes generally high. And she might acknowledge, from time to time, that her time alone driving was her favorite time of the day, that she could unwind and be herself, listen to the radio and driving fast.
What she will not be caught dead acknowledging, however, was that throughout their life, they also received help. We are not islands, we do not have to suffer all alone to deserve life. Which, if nothing should teach about gratitude and interconnectedness.
My parents lived in a flat gifted by my grandad and my grandparents soon moved in the downstairs flat to care for me.
Now, housing and childcare not only suck way more than half of my salary, but they are a source of constant worry and negotiation: if I want to get well and truly fucked by my very excellent partner, there is a negotiation with the babysitter right there, if I want to go to a movie with a friend, same, if I need to, you know, work a full day and THEN go to a doctors appointment, same. Wanna take a quick vacation, but the flights do not agree with my custody week? There is a heavy conversation with my co-parent to make happen. Spontaneity is almost never an option in my life.
My parents did not allow themselves too much spontaneity, which is a real pity, but they had the option to.
Ah, but you see, now I am starting to play the game too. Look at me, thinking I can just stop playing the game. I breath the game. I just have to forget for a moment, and it comes roaring back.
As a child, I listened to the stories my parents told about themselves and their choices, and it always felt that it was for me that they had gone through all this pain. I was their crowning achievement; I was the reason that made it all worthy. I was loved, but I also felt the weight of this love. I felt all the responsibility of it: when my parents talked about money issues, I felt this surely was because of me, when they said how tired they were, it surely had to do with me. When they fought, I felt I was somehow partly responsible, at least because I was ever so demanding with all this existing I was doing. To be clear, my parents never meant for these thoughts to become the foundational layers of my identity, I just took everything so desperately at face value. The stories were the truth, and all the stories told me I was the one that had to make all the pain worth it. I needed to deliver.
To do that I felt, I soon concluded I needed to give the least amount of trouble for a starter. To take the least space, to not bring problems home, and then to do my work (as my father defined going to school) well and in silence. Basically, I unknowingly adopted Queen Elisabeth’s mantra: “never complain, never explain” and the stiff upper lip to match. It occurs to me only now that maybe that stiff face was the ‘boiled fish’ expression my mum joked about. It might also explain why as a teenager I resented my mum starting a conversation in the car to school with variations of “so how is it going in school?” – I felt without having the words for it that I had been left in the sticks since my first day of school, left to fend for my own, and NOW she wanted to know how it was going? Like shit, mum, consumed by anxiety mum, as always mum. Move on mum.
Because yes, I suffered from panic attacks before every school test, but it was all perfectly confined within my head (slight giveaways, at least in the first years, was a compulsion to urinate and then during high school, a strict nihil-by-mouth morning ritual). I was one of the best in my class, I was reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own when my peers were struggling through the past tense continuous (the professor had a hard time deciding how to punish me when she finally caught me) and yet, I never ever, ever felt, in my heart of hearths, that my “being good” was something that I just was permanently, and that the test scores were just an impermanent and transient reflection of an inner “goodness” I possessed.
I felt more like a Greek or Roman citizen asking the Gods for a favorable intervention, never fully confident the offerings were enough. My anxiety, my stress, my sleeplessness WERE my gift to the Gods: if they were not deep enough, sincere enough, then I would surely fail the test. I needed to leave my own entrails on the altar, and they needed to be bloody enough, to keep up the trick of being “good at my school job”. To feel, for a very brief moment, actually “good”, actually worth all the pain that was going on.
I “got” the rules of the game pretty soon, indeed I embraced it. I understood the assignment: a pain for a pain, and nothing else matters if you want to sit at the table of your elders. Not even the elders had their place saved at the table, you could always be found insufficiently tempered by pain.
I heard family members and intimate family friends’ troubles being dismissed – in the privacy of our own family nucleus, we did not say what we thought in front of our closed ones! – time and time again, and the constant base for such dismissal was always: because they had not had it hard enough. Their family was wealthy and helped them, they could rely on a relative recommendation to get the job they now were complaining about. They did not have to suffer, not nearly enough to clear the bar. In short, they were found wanting against the ledger of one or both of my parents.
I took notes, good (even if unthinking) student that I was. Take the high road cause it is harder, it will take longer and give you more blisters. Fuck the view. It was all in service of the ledger.
This game and the pain ledger ruined my life.
They have given me an uncanny ability to suffer through physical and mental pain. Ask my tattoo artist and my ex-husband. No maybe don’t ask him. But my therapist might want a word. More suffering, more love to be claimed later on, that was the promise.
The pain ledger and the way my mum keeps faithfully at it still these days are the reasons I might not want to speak with her again. The ledger does not need a scene to make its case. It just needs years.
I want to stop playing the game, even if at times I feel life gave me good ammunition to actually win a round or two, but I really want to leave my life with the ledger behind.
If I allow myself to play the game by myself, the way I learnt to, the way I played for most of my life, I find myself oddly proud of my many sorrows: the failed dream of an academic career, the mild sexual harassment of a boss, the big misunderstanding that was my marriage and the ongoing insults of co-parenting with someone who fundamentally disrespects you without even realizing it. The indignities of the 40s, perimenopause, the lack of any support, the child who is oddly fixated on weddings and keeps asking “why did I cancel my marriage to my dad?”, the late diagnosis of AuDHD, the job that is five minutes from being erased by AI. The pain of being too tired and wary to be the mum I could be. The fear of dying a stranger to myself for lack of time and sheer tiredness.
But you know what? All these things happened and are happening to me, and yet, I see them, I see how they make my pain ledger heavy and worthy of consideration, AND I chose to not carry the ledger in my new life.
I chose to be content of living closer to my values, as I slowly uncover them. I chose to not compare my pain to the pain of others’. I chose people who accept my statement of “I am in pain” without needing receipts.
I absolutely, unequivocally want to lose at the pain game. I want to be at peace, and content, and even dare to be happy at times despite what has happened to me. I want to be a model for my kid for teachings like: you will never have it all and you fail a lot, and life is generally fucking hard, and the world will never be fair, and yet you can chose to live your own life, you can look for your own people, you can claim your independence from your sorrows. You have to say no a lot in order to say yes to a handful of people and situations. No win is permanent, no failure is permanent, and neither of them are a sign of intrinsic worthiness.
At times, during the past two weeks, the pain of living has been so intense it has felt like being in an iron maiden, with nails running through me from all sides, slowly but surely. I don’t like it, I don’t want it, and at times I am even too tired to think what I can do about it. But no, I don’t deserve this, and no, it will not go on the ledger for future misuse.
My child does not need to have this pain held over her head in an argument, 20 years from now. I am not doing it for her. I am not taking this pain for her. I can only hope she will care to sit with me at 25, I would love to talk about how hard it was for me to claim some of myself back. For me first. And then for her.