How I stopped surviving

The art of compromise is a scam

2013-2014 was the year of Annus Anus Horribilis. A horrible asshole reset my entire life. The vibe was basically when Emma Thompson’s character in Love Actually says to Alan Rickman’s character in Love Actually, “You’ve made a fool out of me, and you’ve made the life I lead foolish, too!”

I’ve always been a fool for love. So I didn’t mind that part so much. I saw my own mother humiliated over and over again for love. She loved my father, and he cheated on her repeatedly. He let her down over and over again with his affairs (my father was like a Korean Don Draper with his serial infidelity), his abuse (verbal and physical), and his financial adventures in the stock market of 2008. I expected that at some point, I’d not only look foolish in love but also remarkably stupid.

With my mother as a role model, I steeled myself and gave my then-husband another chance, fully preparing myself to forgive him and move on eventually. I still believed marriage was important, and I’d forgiven him before for a similar infraction. He broke off our engagement (a woman was involved) nearly twenty years before he cheated on me in marriage. And back then, I walked away from him, only to let him into my life again.

Why not again?

Oh hell no, said my friends.

One of them, the one who caught the affair happening and then called me breathless, blocks away from where he saw them near Madison Square Park, was both furious and disappointed in me for giving my Anus Horribilis another chance. I will call him my poet friend (he is a brilliant writer and essayist as well, but let’s go for brevity).

“I’ll survive,” I said, “either way.”

What he said next, I’ll never forget.

“I don’t just want you to survive. I want you to THRIVE. Get everything, gurl.” And he hung up.

Many men abandoned me that year.

The Anus Horribilis did leave me. (“Christine, sweetheart. No one goes to Paris to break up,” said another friend of mine when he’d heard that my then-husband was going to Paris with his paramour for one last hurrah before breaking up).

A dear friend and mentor died of a stroke. I’d texted Justin almost weekly since I’d become pregnant the year prior, and he was a prime source of support. He’d just started work as an EMT and announced he’d quit poetry.

Another close friend died of a broken heart. Or at least, that’s how I would have phrased it to his kids. But his estranged wife forbade us from discussing the cause of their father’s death because she was hiding how he died from them.

In reality, he died from a drug overdose because he was reckless and careless due to a broken heart. I knew he was depressed because we’d meet up and share our heartache. He didn’t say he felt hopeless, but when you’re both sitting on a bench in Dolores Park on a cloudy day because your kids are with the other parent and you both don’t know what to do in your absolute aloneness and decide to meet up, and neither of you has an appetite, and so you just hold hands and hold each other in silence, and you feel steady for the first time in weeks, and someone walks by and calls you a beautiful couple, and you want to say we are a reject pile of two, but you don’t, and you close your eyes and remember feeling loved. And he tries to kiss you because he must feel the memory of love, too. You stop him. And ask him if he’s sure. And he says he’s sure. And you say you don’t love him. You’re not capable of loving him. That this has to be nothing. And that at the first flicker of love, any sort of arrangement must end.

Of course, the arrangement ended.

And then. The poetry friend stopped talking to me. Back then, they called it “ghosting.” When a friendship ends, it is also a kind of death.

Still. The poet friend gifted me with a mission to thrive.

But I had no idea HOW to thrive.

It turned out I had no idea what thriving looked like. At all. I’d gone from my father’s house, where I’d been abused, to college, where I was delirious with semi-liberation and directionless, to marriage with a man to whom I was so dedicated that I lost my own way.

Or rather, I didn’t really lose my way. I just followed his way. Because I’d never forged my own path.

I tried to call the poet. He didn’t pick up my calls. I texted him. Like my ex, the poet didn’t respond. We had been two people who texted each other with abandon at one point and saw each other through deep sadness. But now he was just—gone.

I wanted an answer. I asked him why. I asked our mutual friends why. What had I done?

Eventually, I accepted that I would find no answer. Not there, anyway. Also, I was going broke. My house was on the brink of foreclosure. I was scrounging around for grocery money. I was a little distracted by the goal of survival.

Like I said, I didn’t know how to thrive. And in the face of emptied bank accounts and the fact that I was home with a newborn and unable to work, I was firmly in survival mode. I remember looking down at my body and evaluating whether it was strip-club-worthy. Maybe I could make money that way. I looked at my feet when my friend said she’d been selling pictures of her feet to strange men.

Neither was in tip-top shape. So I “edited” college application essays for foreign students applying to colleges between feeding and diapering my baby.

Over the years, I made room for joy. In the early days, there were maybe ten seconds of joy each day. I went down a concrete slide once, riding a piece of waxed cardboard. That was five seconds of thrilling joy. But they were really intense.

The poet and I ran into each other occasionally in book circles. I tried to make eye contact. There was no contact back. Our books both got published. We ran into each other again. Embraced. We might both have been drunk. He said he was so happy to see me thriving. We wished each other well.

But. I wasn’t thriving yet.

I was doing well. My book was out. I got to speak with Scott Simon on a ten-thousand-dollar microphone at NPR headquarters for Weekend Edition. I was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and wrote reviews for the New York Times Book Review. I was out of foreclosure, thanks to the book advance. My daughter was still amazing and ever more independent. I was building my own chosen family.

It took a long time to authentically thrive, through and through. There was a pandemic that made it feel impossible to write and, more importantly, to focus on my daughter’s psychic well-being. Then my mom died. It was horrific. And not too long after that, my dad died. It was less horrific, but only because my mom’s death was pure agony.

My mom loved my father until her last day. Her last word, according to my brother, was the Korean term of endearment used between married couples. A sort of “darling” or “sweetheart.” She called out “yobo” as she lay dying of the very heartbreak he had wrought upon her. Fuck me. I can barely contain my tears of rage as I think of this.

My father was sad when she died. But mostly, he wondered who would care for him now that she was gone. He reverted back to his childhood wound, which was that of abandonment.

I’d begged my mother to leave my father so many, many times. She said she wanted to. But never did. I wondered why on earth she would stay with him. Was it her deep sense of duty? Was it stupid Confucianism? Or evil patriarchy? Was it because she actually loved him as much as she hated him?

All of the above.

She prioritized my father above all else. She rarely visited me, even when I had a newborn and my husband had left me because my father (who could not fly due to ill health) needed her. She said she wished she could.

I jokingly scolded her for prioritizing him and de-prioritizing me. She apologized and, in her usual act of self-deprecation, said, “Don’t be like me, okay?”

I wanted to cry every time she said that in my earlier years because it hurt not to be her priority. In that Annus Horribilis, I wanted to cry because I had become like her. I’d made so many concessions, even in divorce. And in recent months, I cried because she led a life of utter compromise, one of survival instead of thriving.

I miss my mom so much. But also, I missed her while she was alive, too. In the pandemic, I doubled down on my commitment that my daughter would know that she was actively my most important thing. I didn’t write. I set up a friend pod. I helped her fare the swings and fears of the world.

Throughout all this, I built a sanctuary. My now-partner calls me Ms. Madrigal, and our motley and messy and happy home, 28 Barbary Lane. I learned what it was that made me happy and joyful, starting with concrete slides. I collected everything that made me happy until I became the anti-Marie-Kondo because I was determined not to let go of anything that sparked joy. I wanted to turn and find something that made me feel like living in every corner of a room. My house became very fucking messy. Because tidying up does not spark joy. (I do tidy up when the clutter starts interfering with my happiness—it’s a delicate balance).

I went on vacation to Seoul this past summer, introducing my daughter to one of her homelands for the first time. It was a tremendous, life-altering trip for her. It was a healing one for me. When I saw my aunt, I wept like I saw my mother again. I don’t think I’ll ever stop grieving my mother for myriad reasons.

And when I saw my favorite cousin, I saw the future in his grandson and my daughter, who are three years apart in age. My cousin and my mother were especially close, being close in age (my grandmother had a lot of children, and my mother was a “menopause baby”). He told my daughter how smart and feisty my mother was. How she was going to be a doctor but there was no money to send her to medical school.

“She was the last child, a daughter, of a poor family. If she had been a son, I believe my grandfather would have paid. But for a daughter, there was no money. So she didn’t go to medical school. But she should have because she was brilliant.” His perspective of my mother was different from mine; my cousin saw her as kind of a big sister.

We also shared lessons learned.

As part of a different conversational thread, my cousin told my daughter, “Don’t live a life of compromise.”

And then the light went on over my head. Compromise is a symptom of survival. He, like my poet friend, was stressing the importance of thriving. My mom had lived a life of compromise. From the compromise demonstrated towards her by her father, my mom began living a life of one compromise after another.

Right there are the lunch table, I nearly burst into tears.

It is hard to think about my mother.

For many years, it was my father who was the triggering parent.

As my brother put it, “Dad tried to destroy us every day. And you fought him every day.”

My father was the center for myriad reasons, but mostly because he made sure our eyes were always on him, even if for horrifying reasons. I spent decades in therapy coming to peace with him in my own head. I spent decades writing a fucking novel, selling a novel (and finishing a draft of that novel), and then throwing away that novel just to understand him. Just to try to understand the invisible monster that occupied him and made him the way he was.

And I chose a husband that I had hoped was not cut from the same cloth.

Because I spent so much time focused on my dad and because our temperaments were so similar, I became the only person in our family who truly understood him. Or at least, that’s what my father told me.

To which I responded, “I don’t think I had any other choice but to understand you.”

But my mother? I am just beginning to understand her now. And it’s in her life that the lessons lie. She had been telling me her entire life to learn from her. And I didn’t take her more specific advice to use it as a cautionary tale.

It breaks my fucking heart to consider my mom’s life a cautionary tale. What a waste, you know? But sometimes, a life is a novel. And novels aren’t a waste.