‘How can this be happening?' The coincidence that put my family trauma in a new light.

Boston Globe

26-07-2025

Frankly, I was happy to put Boston behind me. My childhood was miserable, filled with trauma. I never wanted to return to this place, except perhaps for holidays or funerals.
Or so I thought. I had received a job offer from The Boston Globe, a paper I long idolized, and just had to take it.
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The Facebook invite was from Kellie, a person who wasn't quite a friend in high school. But we got along — I recall we danced a bit on stage when we performed in our high school musical.
'Who would you like to invite?' Kellie asked.
Good question.
I didn't really keep in touch with anyone. But I was Facebook friends with several people like Kellie, classmates who were friendly acquaintances but people I never spent time with outside of school.
When you're a kid and struggling, you think you're the only one who's struggling. Trauma is not something people easily speak about, especially in high school where the number one goal is conformity. You sit in a classroom and stare at the other kids and wonder what it might be like to be normal.
So, it was shocking to see them at the cookout now as adults, stumbling through life just as I was.
Not everyone I invited could make it. A few weeks later, I received a Facebook message from someone I'll call Madeline for the purposes of this story.
'Hey Tom, sorry I missed your welcome back party! I was away. Wondering if you would like to come have dinner sometime. ... I live in Watertown with my husband and kids. I think you'd like my husband. He's nice.'
'Sure,' I replied. 'That's nice of you. What's your address?'
Her response froze me.
For several seconds, I stared blankly at the number and street name.
No.
That's not possible.
Good and bad reality
My parents emigrated from China to Boston in the 1950s. They started a laundry business before Dad went to work for New England Telephone Company. He would sit on a bench and assemble parts into landline telephones.
Like many Chinese families, they wanted desperately to have a son, which proved difficult for them. By the time I was born in 1977, Dad was already 49 years old and father to four daughters.
No one would ever mistake us for the Brady Bunch. Dad was an angry, abusive man who frequently unleashed his verbal and physical wrath on his wife and daughters. He never laid a hand on me, though he was psychologically abusive.
Mom suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. She could be loving and caring in one moment and then suddenly attack me with a ruler or Wiffle ball bat for the tiniest of infractions. She heard voices and insisted that the neighbors were using a machine to monitor our thoughts.
My eldest sister, whom I'll call Susan, started to lose her grip on reality in her late teens and was also diagnosed with schizophrenia. She would chase me throughout the house with a pair of scissors, threatening to castrate me. She would frequently try to climb into bed with me.
I coped with the chaos the same way many trauma victims deal with such things: I buried it deep inside me.
I started to compartmentalize reality. There was the 'good reality,' the one where I hung out with friends, crushed on a girl, acted in high school plays, and wrote for the town newspaper. The world in which I exercised a degree of control and provided my life with some measure of hope and meaning.
And then there was the 'bad reality' of the horror and fear that I endured at home. The reality that still terrifies me.
I vowed to keep these realities apart. Not just out of self-preservation but also out of fear that my bad reality would somehow pollute or 'infect' my good reality.
That's why I rarely spoke about my parents or siblings or why I freaked out when someone I knew saw me in public with them.
No, these two realities must never meet.
'What else was I missing?'
After high school, I went to college and tried not to look back. Over the next 25 years, I lived and worked in New York, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, and San Francisco.
One of my sisters died from cancer in 2003, and Dad passed away three years ago. Both times, I kept my distance, though before my dad died I did return home once to help my parents move into a more senior-friendly house located just down the road from my childhood home in Watertown.
Susan's life had rapidly deteriorated. She could no longer hold a job or live on her own. So she moved back in with my parents in their new home.
Unfortunately, Susan's schizophrenia started to mirror Mom's. Susan thought the neighbors were out to get her. She accused them of trying to break into the house and prank-calling us. She convinced my mom to change phone numbers and to install a home alarm system. She even called the police on the neighbors.
Yet my view on Susan gradually softened. Thanks to some difficult therapy and introspection, I began to see Susan as less of a monster who terrorized me and more of a human who was also a victim of my father's abuse.
Once, when our sister was dying from cancer, Susan sent her a note that read: 'I'm sorry that you're sick. I would help you but as you know I'm not feeling really well myself.'
The note stunned me. I didn't know Susan was even capable of such compassion, such clarity of thought. She had gotten so bad that I had doubted she could even read and write anymore.
What else was I missing? What would have happened if Susan hadn't been abused? If she had received the care and treatment she needed? What kind of big sister would she have been? Would we even be pals?
My thoughts were racing. I started to process everything by writing about mental health and familial abuse on social media.
'Over the years, I came to accept she had an awful illness and was also physically and sexually abused,' I wrote on Facebook on Oct. 16, 2022. 'I'm also sorry that she suffered so much in her life and that her sickness produced so much collateral damage.'
My posts found a wide and compassionate audience.
'The fact that you came to understand how sick she was shows how you've grown in your awareness and understanding,' one friend wrote. 'It does not make your pain any less. But you are managing.'
Said another: 'We grow through our painful experiences, but also through the experiences of others willing to share.'
The things that bind us together
When people learned I was returning to the Boston area, they assumed the reason was family.
'No,' I said. 'I'm here for the job. That's all.'
That wasn't quite true.
I wondered how Boston would look to me as a middle-aged man rather than as an angry, emotionally volatile 17-year-old.
The dinner invitation from Madeline came as a surprise. For one thing, I was shocked that she had moved back to Watertown.
Madeline, her older sister, and I had performed in the same high school plays. In fact, I had a major crush on her sister. That was a major part of the 'good reality' that I so desperately tried to protect from the 'bad.' And later, Madeline had tried to pursue a career in acting. She attended theater schools and auditioned for movie and television roles.
I imagined her in New York or Los Angeles maybe. But yet here she was, married and raising a family in Watertown.
But until I received her dinner invite, I didn't know exactly where.
As it turned out, Madeline lives right next door to Mom and Susan.
Could it be that Madeline and her family were the same neighbors my sister fixated on? The people she called the cops on?
During the dinner, I tried to read Madeline and her husband, whom I'll call Greg, for some clues about whether she knew that my mom and sister lived next door. But they gave no indication of that. I started to think it wasn't them.
I decided to find out.
'Hey, this is pretty weird,' I said. 'But did you know you live next door to my mom and sister?'
Greg's face changed color. Madeline stopped eating.
Silence.
OMG.
They
were
the neighbors.
No, they didn't know it was my family. And yes, my sister called the cops on them. Three times. She accused them of racism.
The cops had taken Susan's complaints seriously. Each time the police arrived they brought some kind of crisis interventionist/social worker to teach Madeline and Greg how not to be racist.
'I am not racist!' Madeline insisted to me.
No matter how hard Madeline and Greg tried to convince Susan, she heard something different.
'First of all, I am
so
sorry," I said, mortified. 'Secondly, it's better that you do not say anything to her. No matter your intentions. She is just very sick.'
'I know,' Madeline said. 'At first, we were very upset. But then I started to read the social media posts of this guy I knew, who wrote on Facebook about mental illness and his family. He taught me compassion toward people who were struggling like this.'
Who was this guy?
'You,' Madeline said.
The world grew exponentially smaller. Let me get this straight: Madeline, an acquaintance with whom I had not spoken in 30 years, read my social media posts about mental health, which allowed her to better understand the actions of her ill neighbor,
who turned out to be my sister
. So in a sense, I was paying it forward to myself when I wrote those posts.
To this day, I wrestle with what happened. I don't believe in coincidences. Everything has a reason. What was I supposed to take from all of this?
I concluded that I had been mistaken to draw a distinction between 'good' and 'bad' reality. There is just reality. We view our lives holistically if we want to heal. We have to confront past trauma and reconcile it with our present and future.
The bad stuff in my life occurred simultaneously with the good stuff. It's true that my sister chased me with scissors. It's equally true that I happily performed plays with Madeline and her sister.
And somehow the universe saw fit to remind us that life can be filled with mysterious little coincidences that seem unrelated but ultimately bind us together.
The question is whether you want to see the big picture.