From what I remember, most of my parents’ fights were about money, and about the fact that neither of them felt like they were in the marriage they wanted to be in, or more precisely, that they were married to the person they wanted to be married to. They argued about my dad’s spending versus my mother’s thriftiness; my dad’s failures to earn versus my mother’s failure of ambition; my dad’s regular absences versus my mother’s obsession with me.

They both harbored deep disappointment over what their lives had become—my mother was disappointed in my dad, and my dad was disappointed in the marriage. I had the sense that I was the only thing keeping them together, or that I had to try to be. I was supposed to deliver them to happiness, to avoid triggering in them any emotion even close to disappointment. So, when they fought, I took it as my failure, and felt like it was my job to fix it.

Like a lot of families, the magic trick was in the pretending. We pretended to ourselves, to each other, and to the outside world that our family was not suffering the pain of life’s disappointments. We were fine—but I learned a long time ago that FINE can be an acronym for fucked-up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.

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I had the sense that I was the only thing keeping them together, or that I had to try to be.

As a young child, I would lie in bed and listen for signs of how serious each battle was and when it might come to an end. Sometimes the entire “fight” would consist of my mother slamming a door to signal that she was done. But sometimes the yelling carried on.

I developed panic attacks at night. They manifested first as a rhythm of anxiety that encircled my brain, then evolved into a rapid pulsing, a whirling frenzy of metallic thumps, like those nauseating old spinning rides at a county fair.

This was not just a feeling. It was a sound, an internal beat, or series of beats, though they didn’t equate to music. It was the sound of terror, wholly unnatural and unconnected to the rhythms of my heart. I was dizzied with terror, no ground beneath me; it was crazy-­making, endless. And sad. There was something so sad about the rhythm. And I couldn’t make it stop. I couldn’t sleep. It was as though the alarms within me had been triggered and there was no turning them off.

I was 7 years old.

It wasn’t every single night, but even on peaceful nights, I trembled at the possibility of it. Lying in bed, I would race to fall asleep before the sounds would leak from my bones. I would force myself to try to have “good” thoughts. I hated that the rhythm came from within me. I hated that my own brain was not to be trusted. If I lost the race to sleep and got caught by the rhythm, I had no tools to escape it, no way of controlling my own brain as it conspired against me.

I tried everything to avoid it. If I could sense it coming on, from deep within my cells, I would try to sing a song, or recite a poem, or do anything I could think of to simply turn my brain off. But it would take hold in my fascia, then work outward through my muscles and tendons. Sometimes, I would rock my body back and forth, vibrating, rattling, trying to drown out the pulsing noise and regain control of my body. Sometimes I would put my head under a pillow, trying to ignore the fact that the torture was coming from within me.

But only exhaustion would override the rhythm, lulling me to the dream state beyond my fears.

I would fight the haunting rhythm as it rose in me, often having to compete with my parents’ fights in the next room. If my inner rhythm won, I was tortured by the tempo of my own obsessive brain; if my parents’ arguing won, I was trapped by fear. One night around that time, I hurled the pillow to the ground in frustration. I knew that my job was to hide, to stay in my room and pretend that this was not happening—I understood that they were only fighting because they believed that I was asleep. If I let on that I was awake, well then, I’d be disrupting the roles as they had been written.

Thicker than Water: A Memoir

Thicker than Water: A Memoir

Thicker than Water: A Memoir

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But I needed something from them, too—I wanted them to stop fighting because I needed to feel safe.

Part of me wanted them to know that I knew, that I heard them, that I was not being fooled by the smiles the next morning, by the whispers and the denials of their pain. I wanted to be in truth, even then. That night, the pillow thrown to the floor, I’d had enough—I went out into the living room and yelled, “Stop! Please stop!”

They stood still, perhaps in shock. My dad had been drinking; he was at the far end of our narrow kitchen. My mother stood across from him in the corner of our cramped living room, close to the door that led to our small terrace.

Even then I could sense my mother’s frustrated desperation. She looked at me for what seemed like forever, and then she started to cry. In my life, I can count on one hand the number of times that I have seen my mother cry; this was the second. As she wiped her tears, she seemed to me to be sinking, drowning in an abyss of sadness. The mask she wore for my dad, and for me when my dad was around, had fallen away, washed off hours ago in the rage of their argument. But he was not done—he moved to the center of the apartment, pontificating, filling the awkward silence. She remained quiet, her eyes trained on me.

It was clear that they had both said things to each other that would be difficult to forgive—we’d all heard them. Watching me enter the stage in the middle of their war was a final stab at my mother’s already wounded dreams. What she had dreamed of was a happy family. In her mind, she was supposed to be a successful working mother with a loving husband. She was supposed to have 2.5 kids, a couple of nice cars, and a schedule filled with service to her community and her family. She had wanted to create a world that was different from the one she grew up in. She aimed for a picture-perfect, upwardly mobile African American home, filled with joy and love and success. She believed it was her job to have it all and do it all and be it all.

And she was failing.

My entrance into the room was a signal to her of her failure to protect me from the ugliness of the truth that was bleeding out of them both. My mother was overworked and underpaid; she was treading water in her career due to her inability or unwillingness to write in the brutal “publish or perish” world of academia. She was married to a man who seemed incapable of solvency and whose partying and drinking were a source of heartache. They had two nice cars, sure, but only one child, a child who had been virtually impossible to conceive, and whose very existence was a stain of shared lies and shame between them.

Looking back, I think my mother was trapped in the fun-house version of her dream, an upside-down reality filled with anger, fear, and resentment.

Finally, she spoke.

“Earlier,” she said, wearily, almost to no one, “when I thought we were done fighting for the night, I told myself that I should go take a bath.”

Then she looked at my dad, daggers for eyes.

“I thought about the gift that you gave me for my birthday,” she said, “and I thought that I could put that homemade spa machine in the bottom of the tub and turn it on, and maybe just relax.”

And then she turned and gazed at me, almost as though I were an apparition.

“But then I thought, What if he throws the whole machine in the bathtub…?”

With that she stopped, and I stood there, quietly, not wanting to imagine her dead in that water.

The next morning, as was always the case, it was as if nothing had happened. There was no discussion of the painful words that had been exchanged the night before—no reference to them at all, in fact. My mother smiled warmly at me as she prepared breakfast, and my dad slept through the early morning hours as he usually did.

A few days later, I sat at my aunt Daph’s kitchen table and told her that if my parents didn’t stop arguing, I was going to move in with her and my cousins. And I asked her to relay that to my parents, on my behalf.

Although my ultimatum felt genuine, given I was only 7, I was unable to follow through with it. I didn’t want to be dramatic (at least not in that way). I decided not to give Aunt Daph any more details about my parents’ late-night battles. I became more private and withdrawn. I resolved to stay in my room at night while the dreaded internal pulse of the rhythm terrorized me to sleep. My parents’ battles were minor in comparison to the one that was raging within me.

My mind and body became the enemy; I was trapped within them. I tucked away the fear and started to develop a role, a character that would stay with me: The good girl. The perfect child. The solution. It was clear that my parents had lost their ability to express their love for each other, but perhaps a shared love for me could help them find it again. Maybe my goodness could inspire a renewed tenderness between them, which would in turn create more emotional security for me, something that I so desperately needed. Perhaps there was no changing the reality that they had grown disappointed and disillusioned with each other, but I could make it better, or at least try.

After all, I was their dream come true. If their personal failures had made it impossible for them to love themselves and each other, then I would be perfect enough so that they could experience whatever love they needed through me.


Adapted from Thicker Than Water, by Kerry Washington. Copyright © 2023 by Kerry Washington. Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.