We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break.  And it's there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.  Nicole Krauss

PUP TENT:  A-frame, two persons, flap door with ties, 1974.

First, my memory, not Dad's.  When I was almost five and my brother was a newborn, we had an army-green canvas tent, a hollow wedge with low sloping sides that felt safe and cozy. 

In a second memory, Daddy frowned, surely disappointed in me, as if I were a bad person.  Eventually, I'd consciously connect these two memories, but not then.  Instead, some side of me slipped into a fissure and waited. 

I learned to perform the good girl.  Sundays, after Daddy left early to don his black robe and prepare for the service, I got ready with Mommy, the preacher's wife, who was lovely with her petite nose, breasts, and skirt.  As she pulled the tangled sponge rollers from my hair, I cried out in pain, and she responded curtly:  "you're too tender-headed."  She didn't slow down or try to be gentler.  I cried.  We were running late and because of me, she had less time to do her own hair and makeup. Somehow the two of us had to arrive promptly and appear composed, which I learned to do, like flipping a switch.

Mondays at home, Daddy called me over to tell him a story.  I skipped to his desk and stopped just out of arm's reach.  He didn't reach out to pull me onto his lap as he'd done before. Standing close enough to smell the pipe tobacco and ink in his desk drawer, I made up a story while Daddy typed: click, clack, ding, keys to typebar to ribbon to paper.  When I was done telling, he pulled my story from the carriage and read:  The wish fish said that the book with no pictures had everything, so it was better than a doll, so that's why.  That's why the girl traded her doll for the great book.  Or I could have made up anything, but in my stories, there was often a wish fish and a girl and a trade.

Childhood identity formation is crucial to adult mental health.  I exchanged my sense of self as a child, unconditionally loved and safe, for the identity of a student who performs.  I knew who I was when I relied on words on paper, and then on teachers in school, my professors and research, and then finally, my academic colleagues and my students. 

 GHOST TENT:  suitable for lost childhood, best pitched in the shadows, 1974.

I was losing both my parents, even when they were right next to me.  I wanted Daddy to go back to the way he used to be when he was fun and adoring, but the pup tent was gone, and only a ghost of it, like longing, remained.

I went across the street to see Mommy, who was visiting with a neighbor. Mommy ignored me, so I left.  Crossing the street, I bit my arm, etching into it an arc of reddish-purple dents that faded by dinner time.  I couldn't find emotional space among the grown-ups and wasn't old enough to process feeling on my own.

My parents had moved me out of our house's small bedroom and into what had been their room, complete with their heavy French provincial furniture­­—a big bed, nightstand, vanity table with chair, and double dresser with large mirror.  I preferred the small nursery with the toddler bed, but that belonged to the baby now.  

Every night, Daddy sat on the floor next to me while I said my prayers, thanking god for every family member and neighbor, naming each one, and then every insect, plant and animal I could think of.  Long prayers bought time, because when I ran out of things to give thanks for, Daddy would leave, and then the foxes I feared were hiding under my bed would emerge and gobble me up.

MODERN RECREATIONAL TENT:  Synthetic, Zippered door, Angular but not A-frame, 1976-1996.

As a child and adolescent, I camped with my friends in the backyard or in a state park with a church group.  On one of these trips, around age 14, my friend Tilly and I roasted weenies over a campfire, and then tried to outdo each other in the ability to self-starve, leaving most of the hotdog uneaten.  Within a few years' time, hunger won, and I let myself enjoy food again.

Scotty, my husband (then-boyfriend), took me camping in the smokey mountains in a tent for two.  I slept poorly and had a hay-fever attack.  Bessel van der Kolk famously says that "The body keeps the score," by which he means that childhood trauma, left untreated, can lodge itself in the body and cause auto-immune diseases in adults.  Hay-fever is a condition in which the body thinks something is harmful that isn't.  I was, in fact, safe with Scotty, but according to the score my body kept, I had to be vigilant, awake.

FATHER'S TENT: Heavy canvas, dark inside, no ventilation, about 1994.

I was 25, in New York for grad school and seeing a psychoanalyst four days a week to take the edge off my depression and insomnia.  I still visited my parents dutifully, and on one of these trips, my dad told my mom and me to sit down because he had something to say. The two of them sat in chairs, while I took the sofa, the window light behind me. 

Dad cleared his throat and rolled his lips up and out before speaking.  Something happened when you were little, and you probably repressed the memory.  You were lonely because your brother was just born and your mom was busy, and you had been wanting me to camp out with you in the pup tent in the back yard, so I did.

Half asleep, he said, I thought you were your mom. 

He talked some more, concluding with what happened the next morning, when, he said, I asked him if he remembered what happened in the tent. He did remember, but he was so ashamed that he denied it.  He said he asked my mom to talk to me about it, but she never did. My mom was silent, and it didn't occur to me that she might have been afraid to contradict my dad.

I cringed, as if Dad's confession had nothing to do with me.  No longer able to trust in the love and safety I'd associated with that little tent, I began to rely on the emotions I could control, like shame, which could be temporarily relieved through achievements, like high grades and graduate degrees.       

I didn't ask why Dad chose that moment to confess, or if his version was true. In his robe behind the pulpit all the Sundays of my childhood, he was a powerful and omniscient man of god, whose actions could not be doubted.  His willingness to confess was an act of courage and helpfulness.  I minimized what he'd done and didn't ask any questions.  My need for decades of therapy and analysis, then, was on me.  My eating disorders, depression, and insomnia were character weaknesses. 

Back in New York, I lay on the analyst's chaise, staring at the abstract watercolor on the wall in front of me while speaking with Dr. E, who sat behind me. I hoped she would help put my Dad's narrative in perspective, and then my depression would lift, and I'd enjoy deep sleep again.  It would be that easy, but her unsurprised voice was disappointing, as if she had already known something had happened that made it hard from me to trust people. 

My dad's story remained his story, and I didn't recognize myself in it, except for the pup tent, still pitched in a far corner of my heart.

RED TENT:  consisting of skins, held in place by strong cords, tethered to wooden pegs that were driven into the ground, which was covered with bags of millet that soaked up menstrual blood, 1500 BCE and 2007.

The woman who had ordered The Red Tent had taken a sudden a medical leave, and now I had agreed to teach this book to a lecture hall of freshmen and sophomores.  Scotty and I had been married ten years, had a daughter, Clary, who was in kindergarten, and a son, Derek, a few months old.  I had just defended my dissertation about the novelist Ana María Moix, who fictionalized a man's sexual abuse of a girl.

The Red Tent is named after the place women might have gone to menstruate during the Biblical era of the Jewish patriarchs. Had I lived then, I would have joined the women in the tent at age 11, which is younger than average.  Early menarche is linked to childhood sexual abuse, but there's no way to know for sure what caused me to get my period two years before my friends got theirs.

The textbooks I used for a decade of teaching Women's and Gender Studies say father-daughter incest happens at a rate as high as one in three and is "a cruel exercise of power" that causes "deep and lasting trauma."  I required students to read this chapter, but in my lectures and assignments, I skipped the incest part.  Truth be told, I missed an opportunity to heighten awareness, and to let them know that if it happened to them, they were not alone.

Avoidance is a form of complicity, and my compliance came from fear.  If I let that bad girl displease my parents, they might reject me.  Into my early fifties, I was afraid of the reemergence of that neglected four-year-old in the fissure.  Fearing she might emerge in dreams, I slept lightly or not at all.

SHRINKING TENTS:  claims to sleep 3 people, 43.3" center height, poor ventilation, 2020-2023.

Before Derek was old enough for school, we began an annual tradition of camping with other families at a park in Wisconsin.  Our family shared a single tent until the kids got bigger and wanted more space.

After Clary went to college, I skipped one of the annual trips, but Derek still loved to camp, and I felt like I was missing out, so the next year I vowed to go.  Scotty and I sat on the deck eating toast and eggs while we planned for camping.  Birds were chirping, and the mosquitos hadn't yet swarmed in. Clary had taken our big tent to college with her, and Scotty had bought a new one, smaller than what I was used to, and I was nervous about it, but didn't say so.  Instead, I said,

 "I think we should get a bigger tent." 

 He spoke the word, "okay," but the wrinkles in his brow were disagreeable.

"It would be more comfortable," I said. 

He praised the small tent (easier to carry and store, less expensive) and said there was no point in getting a bigger one.  I didn't insist. After all, we would sleep in it only one or two nights a year.

I couldn't justify money spent on a new tent.  We had bills to pay, and our budget had been cut by nearly half because I was laid off.  I had earned tenure at a regional university, but during a state budget impasse, I was told they didn't need anyone with a graduate degree in Women's Studies.  I could no longer rely on my colleagues, my classroom, or my research.  Even words on paper began to feel untrustworthy.  My default emotional state became self-doubt and worthlessness.

While I was playing out the final semester of my contract, my mom left my dad and moved to my town, and then my dad followed, getting his own house.  My dad and I were neither estranged nor close.  A few months later, no longer a professor, I resumed the role of dutiful, self-harming daughter.  The first thing I did after the university took my keys was go on a keto/fasting regimen that had me losing weight down into the double digits.  A runner, I was already lean, and to shed even a few pounds hardened my body into something sinewy and reactionary, like a reptile.  

Shrunken down into a scared and lonely version of myself, I gave up on the idea of a bigger tent and joined Scotty in the small tent, because I didn't deserve to stretch out and be comfortable.  I didn't sleep well and camped only one night.          

EXPANDING TENT:  Coleman SunDome 6-person, 72" center height, Domed-top rainfly, covered entrance, venting windows, 2024.

To comply with the silence that I believed was the condition for love and acceptance, from early childhood, I sacrificed my self-worth.  Indeed, I tried to sacrifice my very self, biting my arm, denying my hunger and abandoning a side of myself into the dark cracks of my psyche. 

In the pup tent at age four, not knowing that what Dad did was abuse, I must have gone back to sleep.  The next day, when I brought it up and saw the scowl on his face, I must have assumed that only a very bad child could sin like that in her sleep.  Even sleeping, I wasn't innocent.

The score my body keeps had designated the tent as symbol of betrayal, but instead of accepting that truth, I have wanted to prove myself an able and happy camper.  There are inexpensive hotels down the street from the state park, so I could have chosen a place to sleep with a locking door and a roof, and then joined the group during the day, but I was determined to camp with everyone else.  Maybe, I reasoned, it was a question of finding the right tent, something that didn't feel like the pup tent I'd slept in with my dad half a century before.  I insisted that I wanted a tent I could stand up in.  At the store, when I pointed out to Scotty the 6-person Coleman SunDome, he looked at the smaller one next to it and said, "How about that one?"

"I want the one you can stand up in."  My voice was calm and sure. Scotty slid the SunDome off the shelf and into the cart. 

On the first evening at camp, clouds hid the stars.  I hunched my back to step into the tent, and once inside, stood up straight to hang a lantern, before resting on the air mattress.  While cuddling with Scotty and listening to Derek and his friends, who were chatting and singing around the campfire, I fell asleep.

I managed to sleep for about an hour before the storm hit.  The lightening ended early, ceding to heavy rains, which, even in the water-proof tent, felt dangerous.  The tent stayed dry, but I vowed never to sleep in one again, and only later did I reflect on what that means. I will have to give up the goal of performing the happy camper, and instead accept myself as I am.  I will have to go back for that side of myself, four years old, that slid into the crevice. Go back, sit and cry with her, and reassure her, as many times at it takes, that she is good and nothing wrong.

-Holly A. Stovall

Holly A. Stovall's fiction and essays appear in Midwest Review, Writers Resist, Litbreak Magazine, and Belle Point Press's Mid/South Anthology. She's been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A former professor of Women's Studies, she holds a PhD in Spanish Literature, an MA in Women's History, and an MFA in Creative Writing. She lives in Chicago, with her partner and her poodle, and teaches writing at Loyola University.