SILENT ALL THESE YEARS by TORI AMOS. Story by Genevieve Thurtle.

San Francisco, 1992 (and 1998)

The song entered my kitchen like a ghost. I had a knife in my hand, was mincing garlic, when the piano’s opening notes to Tori Amos’ Silent all These Years came to me from the speakers, released by a Spotify algorithm. At least a decade had passed since I’d last heard it, and I was now 47 years old, mother to a teenage son, and 17 years into my second marriage, vaulted back to 1992.

The song had hung over me then like an accusation and an exhortation: You’re silent, you need to say something.

In 1992, I was 21, and almost a year into my first marriage. I had moved to San Francisco from LA with my new husband, George, both of us starting our grad programs, he in law school, me in an English master’s program. Just months into the marriage, I’d suspected that I’d made a mistake, but whenever that recognition descended, I shook it off. I told myself that I had seized control of my life. Getting married young was an audacious act of independence. I was a diehard romantic in the Age of Irony. I was defying the practiced indifference of my generation. I saw my choice as radical.

But what I didn’t quite fully understand then was that my decision to marry was anchored in something dark and old. When I was a young girl, my mother’s brother, who was himself only a teenager, and more a beloved older brother than uncle, sexually abused me.

When my parents found out seven years later, they made confused and contradictory decisions, including the filing of a police report and then, in the spirit of forgiveness and redemption, a reintroduction of him back into the family that very same year. They had a rationale: he was going to counselling, he was remorseful, he was only 24, and his life was on track. I spent subsequent holidays and birthday gatherings avoiding him, folding myself into the corners of rooms. Marrying George would give me an exit from this life. We would set up a home. We would create our own family.

But marriage as a means of escape eventually disintegrates. The voice in Amos’ song reflects on a sometimes warm, sometimes distant relationship with a person who seems ambivalent about her. She’s angry at him, but also in love. Her voice, both nascent and old, comes to her in flashes. It’s been here, silent all these years. It’s a dangerous force, threatening to attack, like a dog that won’t bite if you sit real still.

George was neither ambivalent nor remote. He was loving and devoted, but his love was no match for the rage I hadn’t yet worked through – a rage that my family never allowed themselves to imagine, even as it spread through me like a toxin. When Amos sang but what if I’m a mermaid, I didn’t imagine Disney’s Ariel, but a young woman fighting against the fate of drowning, despite her powerful fluke, despite her ability to breathe in water. Treachery surrounded her in her own home.

In 1998, after a major depression that had me contemplating suicide, I decided that in order to live, I needed to shatter the complacency my family had lived under for years. I told my parents that I was cutting off contact with my uncle and that I wanted them to do the same. If I was forced to forget what he’d done to me and to witness their own wilful forgetting, I wouldn’t be able to go on.

Then I held my breath. My mother had nearly raised him. I had seen the photo of him in her lap, her adoring gaze on his face, her slender brown arm tight and protective, encircling his round toddler’s belly. But I was her daughter.

“Yes, of course,” she said through her tears. She was fighting for the words. And for the first time, I saw that she was going to fight for me. “I understand. I’m so sorry, honey. For all of this.”

Within the year, I asked George for a divorce. It broke both of our hearts. He had done nothing wrong and neither had I. But at 27 I needed the freedom to speak and feel everything that I’d hidden, and our marriage didn’t allow for that. I would always be a girl in it, and my life demanded I be a woman: I had to birth my voice, to mother it through its newborn shakiness. Amos’s song stayed with me through the transition, this time as a hymn to the power of voice. I wasn’t going to let the years slip by, wasn’t going to be the casualty of silence she sang about. I was going to live so that I could say it all.

Stereo Story #712