Caren Allstrich
SOPHIE LEWIS
As Anglo-German “expat brats,” born in Vienna but now housed on the French side of the wider Geneva area, my brother and I were raised in large part by jeunes filles au pair, i.e., nannies, those central auxiliaries of the bourgeois family. The long succession of characters mostly remains quite vivid to me: Emese, Miryam, Vivian, Gina, Sofie, Carolin, Sonia. Our au pairs were very young women who contracted with Mum and Dad to trade childcare for low pay, lodging, and an “opportunity to practice their English.” When they were white, like us, and drove us around, the border between France and Switzerland—two minutes from the house—did not exist for us at all. When it was a Moroccan girl looking after us, the douaniers stopped the car and asked to see her papers, in case she might be, you know, abducting the small blond boy, the redheaded little girl.
It seems possible that part of me wanted to be abducted. I was always on the prowl for surrogate parents, confident I could win them by being magically mature, intelligent, bubbly, sensitive, and fun. Sometimes, after school, I would witness richer households (on the Swiss side) and poorer ones (on the French side) where parents knew what their kids’ homework assignments were, and even cared about their crushes, and remembered their friends’ names. This seemed extraordinary to me. But our dad didn’t think of the fact that my brother and I roamed loose, unknown, undisciplined—often, for instance, cooking our own meals aged eleven—as neglect. He called it “laissez-faire.” He often didn’t feel like picking us up from places, even when public bus options weren’t available. He told us to hitchhike, like he used to, which would be character building.
I sobbed my eyes out each time an au pair left, unless it was an au pair I detested for some reason (Gina). It was to Sonia that I told the dreadful news, aged ten, that there was rust-colored gunk in my knickers and I was probably going to die. When Mum came home, she found Sonia putting mascara on my eyelashes, girly-sleepover style—a kind of ritual initiation—and threw a shit fit. I was confused, embarrassed, maybe a little gratified. Since when did Mum notice, let alone have opinions about, what happened on my face? I still sided with Sonia, toward whom I felt apologetic, mortified, in the face of my weirdo German parent’s screeching. I could detect some jealousy, but it was still clear that Mum wasn’t going to congratulate me, or hug me, or explain what menstruating was, even if I let her. I was ferociously hateful toward her at that time, and vice versa. She had reached menopause years earlier. By her own much later account, when I hit puberty and became “sexual,” she “panicked.” She was training to be a psychotherapist. I remember an incident where she traveled to England to pass a psychotherapy qualification, but came apart in some way, drank, and crashed her rental car.
Mum took me to a doctor in our small French town to find out what was wrong with me, menstruating so young. She stood by while the doctor parted my labia with his bare, hairy hands, splaying me painfully open like a frog across the desk in his office. I cried a little when I finally got outside, and noticed—again, that unfamiliar feeling, tinged with satisfaction—that Mum was feeling upset and guilty about the whole thing. The doctor put me on the pill. It occurs to me now that, in the twenty-four years since that time, I have never not been kitted out with some kind of contraceptive. “It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us”: my first book’s opening line. “Birthing me at the age of forty-two almost killed my mother”: the opening line of one of my essays grieving her death in 2019.
Some stories I was told: when Mum was very little, her younger brother was born disabled, at which point her Hitler-supporting father and ex-Jewish mother sent her to the countryside to live with grandparents, telling her that she was now “bottom on the list of the family’s priorities.” When Mum was eighteen, she insisted that, though a girl, she should go to university. She managed to escape her parents and was a radical student at a West German university minutes from the East German border, in 1968. By the time she was forty, she had twice married and twice divorced one of her Maoist comrades, moved to London to work for the BBC, and become a liberal Anglophile. She met an Englishman ten years her junior (Dad) at a journalism party in Vienna.
Dad was as chauvinist about England as only an expat can be. He had studied German, yet disrespected Germany perhaps as much as Mum did (or as much as she disrespected herself). She began to affect an aristocratic English accent. He despised his working-class part-Welsh father, and idealized his middle-class English mother, a schoolteacher, who worshipped him in return—her eldest, who had gone to Cambridge (the most important aspiration, I was given to understand as his eldest, in the world).
Apparently, Dad once told Mum that he had married her because he thought marrying an older woman would spare him sexual jealousy down the road: other men would not desire his wife. It might have been shortly after this that my (gay) brother and I informed Dad that we did not intend to have children. “Well, then, if you two aren’t going to give me grandchildren,” he replied, “I’ll have to find some fertile young popsy to impregnate myself.” I like to think that I told Dad point-blank in that moment that he was an anti-feminist. “But I love women,” he exclaimed. “In fact, part of me wishes I had been born a woman. Women are so much nicer.” I still struggle with the possibility (the probability?) that I reproduce even an ounce of that disingenuous brand of “love of women” in the world, day-to-day.
Dad’s unpublished memoir about his gap year in Germany, penned in 2015 during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), was unironically entitled Desperate Virgin: Sex, Death, and Manhood. He mailed two glossy bound copies to me and my brother, complete with fake back-cover blurbs—effusive praise written, you understand, by him. He admitted this to my brother over the phone, but then denied having mailed us anything. For my sins, I could not resist skimming the text. It features a young man abroad with a place at Cambridge (as he reminds the reader many times), who fends off efforts by everybody he meets to get into his pants, on his way to finally getting deflowered by the appropriate young English rose, “Sally” (this momentous, “spurting” occasion is delayed first by his mother’s death—he has to return to England for the funeral—and then by Sally, annoyingly, not being in the mood for “a few weeks” on account of having been “raped by an ex-boyfriend”). Along the way, Dad’s thwarted would-be seducers include a caricatural gay air steward and an old, motherly, “ugly, fat and whiskery” ex-Nazi woman who offers to give him a hand job—he declines—on a rowboat. In 2016, Dad began referring to the latter memory as a sexual assault. This seemed to function, for him, as a way of nullifying my feminism in general and my own testimony of rape in specific (more on that later).
My often-naked, housework-hating, no-fucks-giving Mum was maybe not a woman, according to the “women are so much nicer” definition. She was radically, almost comically, different from her self-abnegating mother-in-law and the fictional pliant “Sally.” Why did she fall in love with Dad? She was a smarter journalist than him, and interested in psychotherapy. Dad did not believe in psychotherapy. He believed in bourgeois gender equality but did not believe in hiring cleaners (his perfect mother had managed without). When Mum didn’t bring in an equal share of income over the years, he said he had gotten “a bad deal” out of the marriage. Consistently, with us, his children, he modelled derision vis-à-vis the lesser (because German), pathetic, ridiculous, bad-cop parent. Mum screamed and screamed at all of us to clean the house, to no avail. In the end, she preferred oblivion, via pills and booze, to wifehood under those conditions. She gave up her psychotherapy practice.
My often-naked, housework-hating, no-fucks-giving Mum was maybe not a woman, according to the “women are so much nicer” definition.
By the time I was thirteen, I was as horny and unhappy as only a thirteen-year-old girl can be. I was a peculiar species of uncool—both slutty and nerdy, underparented and clueless, an excruciatingly self-conscious wannabe nonweirdo. I didn’t ever do homework, yet got good grades easily. I didn’t know how to dress, yet smoked cigarettes. I kissed any girl who wanted me, and let popular boys finger me behind the bench in chemistry class. In every sense, I didn’t know my place. I was a loser with one ultrahot friend, Méli, in the ruling clique of our grade, albeit she only associated with me outside school, and more or less disowned me in the schoolyard. As chronicled in my secret diary, which Mum broke into one day and read (Oh, now you’re interested in my life, Mum?), I was bulimic, and regularly shoplifted chocolate and ice cream from the supermarket to binge on, then purge, at home. Finally, I was madly in love with an older, popular boy who spoke English, dated alpha girls like my unofficial friend, and dealt pot.
One day, this boy and another boy, a stoner, accepted my invitation to cut class and walk the forty minutes to my parents’ house. We held hands on the walk, and possibly took a little liquor from my parents’ cabinet when we arrived. At one point, we went to my bedroom, where I was initially giddy with happiness: wanted, accepted, maybe loved back!? But then the other boy left, saying he would wait outside. I became flustered. I did not want to have sex. I did not, however, decisively act to prevent it. I said “no” as my crush’s penis tried to enter me, which hurt. Giving up only when I yelped outright, and leaving me in my bed, he got up and vanished along with the other boy. Forty-five minutes later, my Ghanaian best friend, Louise, phoned the house to see if it was true—as “everyone was saying” at the school gates—that I had let myself be used, like a dirty slut. “We’re no longer friends,” she said.
In the aftermath of this experience, I vomited a lot. As mentioned, Mum became worried enough to read my diary. Upon learning of the above events, she ran screaming to the bathroom, where I was masturbating in the bath, and tried to break down the door. We came to blows. Her nails drew blood on my forearm when she dragged me physically from the parked car to a psychiatrist’s office. Additionally, Mum marched right into the school, to try to get the boy expelled, although I begged her not to (Since when do you even try to be a mother?). After this visit, the head teacher summoned me and questioned me as to whether I’d let the boy in question fuck me. Dizzy with shame, I replied: sort of.
School hours became a living hell, exactly as I’d told Mum they would if she tried to prosecute. Kids older and younger than me hissed the words poufiasse, pétasse, sale pute at me on sight. Méli told me that I’d gone too far this time; she couldn’t protect me anymore (Since when did you protect me from anything?). As I walked down the piss-stained corridors of the school, small stones bounced off my cheeks. The boy himself seemed relaxed: decidedly uncanceled. I wonder if he was enjoying martyr status. I fantasized a lot about ways to make him respect me—fantasies in which I reseduced him, only to tie him up and beat him to a pulp in revenge.
I spent six summer weeks in a clinic for my eating disorder. Those weeks, spent almost exclusively in the company of sick women, felt like the best weeks of my life. But they didn’t “solve” the problem of my family. I have no doubt that I helped make Mum’s life unlivable. “I hate you,” we said to one another more than once. Eventually, Mum declared it was either her or me: one of us had to move out. I guess Dad picked her. I had just turned fifteen. For a few months, I lived by myself in a tiny bedsit in an apartment block close to the school. Later, I would move in with the families of two different school friends—a way of running away from home that still allowed me to pass my baccalaureate and get into Oxford (so rebellious of me). But that year, the year I was fifteen, I lived alone for a spell.
At the end of my treatment for bulimia, Dad and my brother had picked me and my luggage up in the family car. We pulled over to the side of the road about halfway home. And that was when Dad disclosed to us, staring straight ahead, that Mum had tried to kill herself and was in hospital. Later he added helpfully, to me, that my imminent release from the clinic had directly precipitated the suicide attempt. This culpability was not something Mum ever put on me herself, but it was something Dad insisted aggressively upon his inviolable right to say, for years. It was not, alas, the last of Mum’s attempts.
I can’t place exactly the first of my real attempts to break up with my father, because about five years ago I deleted all our email correspondence. It almost certainly predated Mum and Dad’s trial separation and subsequent divorce, and the intervening period where they blocked up the doorways in the middle of the house and lived on separate sides. What I know is that, some months later, I began framing what happened to me, prior to my hospitalization, the incident that made my best friend break up with me, as rape. I’d loved the boy, I said, and the boy had raped me. Perhaps a statutory rape, Dad first retorted.
Nobody (apart from, to an extent, Mum, I now see) acted like my suffering mattered at all. No one seemed to believe that rape could happen to a weird outspoken slut like me. My sweet brother initially said it was impossible because I was so strong (I think he also meant: so appetitive, so moony for that boy, so much). He apologized. But Dad’s response was far more tenacious; his became essentially a decades-long campaign to refute and refuse my claim. In 2015, he sided with the Stanford rapist Brock Turner. In 2017, he wrote an email to my partner noting I’d probably spun her a yarn about having been raped at thirteen; this was a fabrication, he said; “rape is good for the feminist cv.”
My snap reaction to the “feminist cv” email was scarcely less desperate. I made a Googlemail account in the name of a male fiction—“a psychotherapist based in Michigan”—called Kieran Aldridge, complete with a stock image of a pepper-and-salt white yuppie. Then, from the depths of an un-air-conditioned Brooklyn night in July, “Kieran” wrote to my dad, saying that he was a very close friend of mine who’d followed the estrangement between us for years. He couldn’t stand by any longer and watch me get hurt, Kieran wrote, without at least trying to make Dad understand how wrong his actions were.
And Dad replied to this man, visibly impressed by him, while trotting out his usual apologism and vanity. But Kieran tried again, and again, and again to educate him. The correspondence blazed for days, running to many thousands of words. Finally, Kieran said he wanted to hit Dad. And that same day, Dad emailed me, Sophie. Did I know that my friend Kieran had been giving him some useful lessons? “He wants to hit me,” Dad wrote, in a mood I sensed was charged with rueful, homosocial excitement. “He’s made me see, though, that I owe you an apology. I am very sorry.”
I forwarded the entire Kieran-Dad correspondence to Mum, including the subsequent email—sent to me—saying “sorry,” a word we thought Dad wasn’t capable of uttering. I assumed I didn’t have to include an explanatory note. My hope was that Mum would perceive immediately how Kieran was, in fact, me, pretending to be her, the psychotherapist. I’d left enough obvious clues, I thought. I hadn’t plotted Kieran carefully. Just as the telltale signs of my bulimia hadn’t been concealed effectively around the house, in the hopes of being recognized, when writing as Kieran, I’d been sloppy.
But Mum didn’t see. I’d been too good, or else she didn’t know me at all, or was tired. “Well well well. Who’s this Kieran?” she wrote back. My heart broke. “It’s me, Mum. It’s me.” After being forced to explain my subterfuge to Mum, I revealed it to Dad, whose response was, simply, congratulations, he’d really been taken in, I’d been very clever. If he felt shame, he didn’t say so. If he ever subsequently ruminated on the fact that he had only listened to me and believed me when I was a man, I don’t know of it.
Kieran Aldridge was a self-defeating gambit, of course. Even his name, with its sounds of “care” and “all” and also “ostrich,” seems to me to evoke some level of awareness of my stubborn, head-in-the-sand insistence on trying for a total reversal of my pain in a hopeless place. On the one hand, he was the friend I wanted, an imaginary friend who enacted meaningful solidarity by confronting my tormentor. On the other, nothing could ultimately be gained by demonstrating that, actually, a woman wrote the text that could successfully extract verbal contrition from my father at long last; it proved nothing we didn’t know already. The woman in question was, after all, me: the male-coded daughter/heir he tacitly regarded as the exception to the rule of femaleness; the female son he made the vicarious vehicle for his thwarted literary ambitions.
In my Dad’s terms, the unmasking of Kieran could also only be the substitution of a woman for a man. But I am an enby. Still now, part of me wants to want to be a woman—for a long time, I felt goaded into identification. In childhood, I was furious at the injustice of my function as a patriarchal eldest son, albeit one my father could taunt, from infancy, for my sex: “If women and men are equal, why hasn’t there been a female Mozart? Why hasn’t there been a female Shakespeare?” and so on.
By laboriously earning myself an apology for my dad’s rape denialism through the heroic combat of Kieran the Michigan psychotherapist, I ensured that the apology itself would feel dead on arrival: purely an intellectual victory, a moment of healing that undid itself. Kieran’s comradely championing of me was a fictive gift to myself, or a foil against something else (Enbies will literally write a book-length correspondence with their dad in the persona of a therapist of the opposite sex, rather than go to therapy…). But both the game itself and the giving up of the game reinforced the anti-utopian position I supposedly had set out to disprove: that men cannot be feminists; that Dad would never respect me.
I started psychoanalysis in early 2018, at a time when my efforts to cultivate parents in my life were blowing up in my face for the umpteenth time. My father and uncle, themselves not on speaking terms, had both just behaved to me in ways that made it definite they could not be invited to my wedding (scheduled for later that year). Also, in an uncharacteristically loving gesture, my mother had traveled over the Atlantic to meet my American partner’s parents; but she subsequently dropped a small bomb on my thirtieth-birthday toast in their house, accusing me of acting with excessive sweetness toward my future mother-in-law on purpose as an attack on her. The trip had ended in one of Mum’s alcoholic meltdowns, in a hotel room in my town she’d holed up in without speaking to me. Shortly afterward, she was diagnosed with cancer.
I was hanging out a lot, at the time, with a group of self-described communist faggots who enjoyed spontaneously identifying strangers, celebrities, and even inanimate objects as their real dads.
When I first contacted the Lacanian psychoanalyst I’ve seen twice a week ever since, a few days had elapsed since Mum’s departure. I was in horrific pain, hurt and abjected by these latest failures in a long series of attempts to convince my parents to care for me. After my preliminary intake session on the professional’s couch, I googled her, found out that she was into falconry, and fell into a reverie in which I was a falcon—some kind of wild bird—whom she would proudly set free and then skillfully bring home again. I told her haltingly about the “falconer” fantasy, contrasting it privately, in my mind, to the image of myself, on my back, as the frog ready for gynecological dissection (usually the only position I can orgasm from). I also told of my joking tendency, during the first few months of psychoanalysis, to refer to her, my analyst, as my “real dad.” I was hanging out a lot, at the time, with a group of self-described communist faggots who enjoyed spontaneously identifying strangers, celebrities, and even inanimate objects as their real dads. Tentatively, I began exploring the appeal of the queer usage of “daddy.” (What could be more daddy than a dyke falconer’s glove?) When my analyst kicks me out—which she once did a mere fifteen minutes into the session, leaving me strangely outraged and elated—it is quite different from when my mother, together with the man I used to call Daddy, evicted me when I was thirteen.
I married my partner in a ceremony to which Mum was, in the end, invited (although she couldn’t make it because of medical treatment), even though I hadn’t forgiven, and do not forgive her, all. The ceremony was simultaneously a capitulation to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, a betrayal of my marriage abolitionism, a deeply felt ceremony of open coupled commitment, and a ritual in which everybody present “married” everybody. Since then, in addition to my gentle, “mama bear”–identified wife, a boyfriend has started featuring in my life who loves more than anything to cook for me and support my work. I have ended relationships that resembled too closely my unrequited, unrequitable, competitive relationships with each of my parents. I have begun to feel genderlessly mothered—held—and known, in a surprisingly sustained way.
Unlike my au pair girls, and unlike my best friends at school, neither my loves nor my analyst have gone anywhere, including—sometimes—when I have tried to push them away. My “real” mom, as I’ve mentioned, died, telling me, for what it’s worth, that she loved me. I believed her. A pandemic came, as did two car crashes that utterly undid me. Yet I have not been abandoned—quite the contrary—for being what Eva von Redecker calls a “care slut,” or for being a utopian (von Redecker: “care sluts are from the future! What they do makes sense. Just not here and now”).
When I was seventeen, my brother wrote a song for me on his guitar—“Sophie’s Song,” which he still performs publicly now and then, around Geneva. In it, I appear as a solitary, heroic, intergalactic bird who is leaving the onlooker behind (the melancholic, slightly self-pitying refrain is “But I can watch her fly”).
I know a girl who lives inside a cage,
She was born with passion, and fed with rage.
They tried to stop her, but she grew a pair of wings …
And she will fly, past the sun and past the stars, and they’ll wash away her scars.
I think part of me always recognized how exhausting, how lonely, how guilty this flying (forever?)—while leaving my beloved sibling in the dust?—sounds. Perhaps, after all, I won’t always need to escape in this way, nor feel perpetually guilty for doing so. Stopping, so far, has been a frightening and arduous process. As I frequently complain to her, my falconer doesn’t do any washing of me. I have to do that all myself, pretty much, on her virtual couch. But that’s OK. There are comrades almost as good as Kieran around me now.