Red Flag – Chapter 1 – I Am A Red Flag

My name is Kate and I am a red flag.

Not metaphorically. Not kind of or in certain situations or when I’m stressed. I mean the actual thing – the behavior that your friends describe when they’re trying to talk you out of someone, the pattern that shows up in the third month when the new relationship smell has faded and what’s underneath it starts to breathe. The cheating. The manipulation. The specific, practiced art of making someone feel like the problem when you are the problem.

We used to use the phrase for men.

You know the type. Lives with his mom. Doesn’t call back. Flirts with everyone at the party including your sister. Tells you you’re crazy when you notice things that are real. Gets you to apologize for reactions to things he actually did. That guy. We all know that guy. We’ve dated that guy or watched our friends date that guy and spent hours on the phone afterwards going through it beat by beat.

That’s me.

Except I live with my mom too, which is either poetic or just depressing, depending on how generous you’re feeling.

I am twenty-eight years old. I work at a small IT company in the city, where I design interfaces and promotional materials and internal communications for a company that makes software for other companies. It is not glamorous. I am good at it. I keep my personal life completely separate from it, which is the one healthy habit I have and I maintain it with the ferocity of a person who understands that she cannot afford to let the two things touch.

I have a desk near the window. I have a coffee mug that says “Deadline” in bold letters, a gift from a colleague who thought it was funny. I eat lunch at my desk most days. My coworkers find me professional and slightly private and occasionally very funny in the specific way of a person who uses humor as crowd control.

None of them know what I’m like.

This is by design.

My father left when I was eleven.

I want to tell you that cleanly and let it sit there without decorating it, because the decoration is what makes it a story and I am not interested in making it a story. He left. He had his reasons, I’m sure. I was eleven and my mother sat me down at the kitchen table – the same kitchen table I still sit at, which tells you something – and told me that sometimes people leave and that didn’t mean anything about me and that she loved me and everything was going to be fine.

Then she got sick.

Not immediately. A few months later. Heart palpitations, the doctor said, stress-induced, not dangerous but requiring monitoring and rest and, increasingly, company. She didn’t like to be alone. The palpitations were worse at night. There was a period when she slept with my bedroom door open so she could hear me breathing.

I’m not going to tell you she was faking. I genuinely don’t know. I have considered this question from many angles over many years and my honest answer is: I think she was frightened, and I think being frightened and being manipulative are not mutually exclusive, and I think my mother found, without necessarily planning to, that the illness was effective in a way that nothing else had been since my father walked out the door.

It kept me there.

“Stay tonight, Kate. I don’t feel well.”

“You wouldn’t leave your mother alone, would you?”

“You’re all I have.”

I heard these sentences so many times between the age of eleven and the age of eighteen that they stopped sounding like requests and started sounding like facts. Like the weather. Like something you simply moved around.

I missed the school trip to Washington because she had a bad week. I didn’t go to the graduation party because she had chest pains that turned out, the following morning, to be indigestion. I dated my first boyfriend, a boy named Ryan who smelled of deodorant and nervous energy, exclusively in twenty-minute windows at school because there was nowhere else to go, nothing else permitted, no space in my life that wasn’t already occupied by the management of her fear.

Ryan broke up with me after three months. “You’re never actually here,” he said, which was the most perceptive thing a fourteen-year-old boy had ever said to me and which I have been thinking about, in some form, for the last fourteen years.

He wasn’t wrong.

I learned things in that house.

Some of them were obvious: that love and guilt live in the same neighborhood, that the person who needs you most holds the most power, that staying is not always a choice and sometimes the most dangerous thing you can do to someone is make them feel like leaving would kill you.

But I learned something else too. Something that took longer to surface, that lived underneath the obvious lessons for years before I understood what it was.

I learned that if someone is afraid of losing you, you can control them.

My mother never said that out loud. She didn’t have to. She demonstrated it, consistently, for seven years, with the patient thoroughness of someone who had developed a skill through necessity rather than intention. She was not cruel. That is important. She was not a cruel woman – she was a frightened one, which is different, but the effect on the person being taught is approximately the same.

I watched her do it.

I watched the way the fear worked. The way it kept people in place. The way it reorganized the priorities of everyone around her until her need was at the center of every calculation, unspoken but immovable, the fixed point everything else orbited.

I watched, and I understood, and I filed it away in the part of myself that was already, at eleven and twelve and thirteen, taking notes.

She was not trying to teach me anything.

She was a very good teacher anyway.