I was seventeen when I moved to Enfield, Illinois, a village with a population of 600, to live with my mother. I had only seen her twice over the past few years. At fourteen I ran away from home to live with a man who was nearly a decade older than me. My parents were divorced, and before my mother moved to Enfield, she and my father had been living in separate apartments on opposite sides of the Saline County Housing Projects. My mother had a new boyfriend then, who had pinned me to the wall by my throat because I’d said I didn’t think the Bible was divinely inspired. He was one of those guys who’d sober up every few months and become very emotional about Christianity. When I left home they all thought I was living with the other parent. When they found out where I was, they were either too uncomfortable to say anything or too consumed by their own tragedies to make me come home.

My boyfriend was a horny, depressed 24-year-old who worked as a paramedic. He liked horror movies and comic books and was occasionally suicidal. The first time he threatened to kill himself was after I’d mentioned wanting to go to a concert with a friend. He liked for me to sit at work with him, watching TV on a busted sofa during the long hours between emergency calls. One time I rode along in the ambulance with him while he transported a body to a medical examiner in Indiana. Over the course of a few years he groomed me, perhaps unintentionally, to depend only on him, to distrust my parents and to always be afraid of losing him. Our last summer together a friend came by to ask if I would spend the weekend with her. He smiled from his favorite chair as she stood in our living room, and rolled us two joints to take, but when he called her house the next day and we weren’t there, he left several increasingly desperate messages on her mother’s answering machine, threatening that if I didn’t come home, I’d never see him again. When my friend finally brought me back early Sunday morning, I was vibrating with panic and guilt. There were three kitchen knives laid out neatly on the coffee table, and a dramatic trail of pills leading to the kitchen sink. He wasn’t home. I insisted she leave me there to wait.

Maybe the thing with scaring children is that it’ll keep them close for a while – really close – but eventually they’ll be too afraid to stay. We fought when he came home, and a week later I left to move back in with my mother.

Until I was almost thirty, I’d have probably told you I loved my adult boyfriend and that he was fun and bought me things and that I felt desired and cared for by him, and that the only thought I had when he first grabbed me in a friend’s dark kitchen to kiss me was, ‘Holy shit this guy is so hot.’ But not long after my own son became a teenager, I started to feel very different about fourteen-year-old Chris’s relationship with this grown man. I began to rethink the very nature of adolescence. My child – this more competent, braver reflection of me, who looks so much like me that people have mistaken us for one another at a distance, but who is not me at all – has been guided by his mother with such insistent, nurturing force. She has instilled in him a sense of personal responsibility and self-management that I didn’t have access to at his age.

Once when my son was four or five and still slept next to me every night I dreamt that I was having a conversation with a photograph of my grandfather that sat on the dresser in my bedroom. He said to me, ‘Someone is walking up the stairs in your apartment.’ And I could hear that they were. I was asleep and we lived alone but I could hear the sound of footsteps ascending the stairs, walking into the bedroom, right up to the bed. I felt a hand on my back, someone very gently placing their entire wide-open palm right between my shoulders, and I opened my eyes. My son, who was facing me in the bed, opened his eyes too, so that we were staring directly at each other. He looked at me, then his gaze traveled to something right behind me and a look of terror crept over his small child-face. He said, angrily, ‘Who is behind you?’

‘Why are you saying that?’ I answered, louder and more accusatory than I meant to sound. But then he just closed his eyes again and fell asleep. I sat up and turned around. No one was there. It was just us alone in the room.

How does one relate to a child, except to walk back down that sad sidewalk on the way home from school, on a dry fall day, past the convenience store where my mother worked the second shift, toward the apartment where we lived, to meet a grown man who was waiting in his car on a side street to pick me up and drive me to a cornfield or a wooded area where we would – my God in fucking hell what was I doing out there all alone in the world?

It hurts to think of my mother reading this now. I do not want her to feel some grief over the past, because even if she’d tried to stop me from running away with the man, some bit of damage had already been done long before, and I still would have gone. I’d been heading toward him, or someone like him, for years.

This might be one of the kinder mirrors parenthood will hold up to your terrified, startled face: your own treacherous youth, offering a grain of empathy to build a full-grown fatherly heartache around. It’s an ugly road back to these moments where you now have to reparent yourself, knowing you’re the only one who understands enough about it to do the job right, with your newfound powers of consideration, and a new ability to comfort yourself.

My mother – such a tiny lady but with very long hair, like a wig. If it falls across her face while she is driving with the windows down, she will adjust it, carefully, with just her fingernail. She still carries a vast, shape-shifting version of religion, one that demands at times a tormented judgment of herself and others. She smiles so easily at little children. I have seen her be both generous and darkly critical in her assumptions about others’ intentions. Of course you already know this. Likely I’ve told you before. I’ve told you all of this. But I’m going to tell you again. My mother and I share a tendency to grow tired around people, even when it’s someone we adore, but are sometimes overwhelmed with affection toward them later when we’re alone, eating chips on the porch after dark. We are better at reflecting than reacting. We are very good at sitting in uncertainty. Or maybe we’re not. We like giving gifts – personal, expertly crafted gifts that prove what good listeners we are. Or maybe we never actually give them. Daydreaming is one way of planning the friendships we long to have. Our intentions must seep out just enough. Because I have found friends. I have found such astounding friends.

In a recent letter to my friend Gina I explained how I’d been thinking about the Carl Jung quote, ‘The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.’ I explained how the quote unsettled me, because I worry my son has witnessed his father in too many pitiful moments, watched me made into a wretched person – addicted and incarcerated and unable to cope with the regular strain of a heavy life. But then I think of all the times he has seen me with my friends, when I’m good, when I’m most alive, when I’m seized by messy laughter at some depraved thing. I love that he’s sat on porch steps with my friends and me, watching us cackle at our own sideways jokes. It makes me feel at home in my own body. I like that my son has seen his father turn to comedy as a means of self-criticism, that he’s seen the sharp knife of my friends’ wit cut through his father’s own bad ideas, that he’s watched our attempts to dismantle the terrible things around us by making fun of them.

Some of the best memories of my mother are of her laughing at an old, horrible mistake, seeing her come undone with her friends when she is not my mother, or she is some new mother who cracks open her discomfort with humor. I remember one of her oldest friends swinging open our back door in the middle of the day, saying, ‘Some guy just drove through the alley behind my house with his dick out!’ My mother drew back in disgust, ‘What did you say to him?’ Her friend shrugged, and threw her hands out, ‘I told him to come back later.’ My mother’s face froze. She looked at me, then back at her friend, before letting out a laugh so piercing and sincere that it scared me.

Sometimes when I talk about my mother and father, my friend Amy will paraphrase the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, saying, ‘Every child is the miscarriage of their parents’ unattainable desires.’ Does it not chill your bones? It is difficult not to conjure a gruesome, improbable image.

While I was incarcerated Amy sent me the collected works of Oscar Wilde. She wanted me to read De Profundis (‘From the Depths’), a long letter that Wilde wrote from prison in Reading. ‘You should make notes or highlight things, so we can talk about it over the phone,’ she said. Phone calls from jail are timed, and expensive, so it helped to plan things out. Here are some of the things I underlined while reading on my bunk: ‘A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.’ And, ‘At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.’

Wilde remembers his awful trial. The prosecution attempted to illustrate his perversities, to criminalize evidence of his desire for other men. Some of his friends were called as witnesses, even a few men he’d once flirted with at a party. What would my friends say if they were called to explain every hookup and weird desire I’ve confided in them? Would you say, ‘Oh, Chris? So sane. So very, very sane.’ Because our love is a secret palace?

Wilde writes about how sickened he was by the horrors he heard, until suddenly it occurred to him in prison: ‘How splendid it would be, if I was saying all this about myself. I saw then at once that what is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.’

So much of the anxiety that swallowed me up every day in jail was the fear of what my friends were thinking. You have to pay for the privilege to communicate with the outside world, and so I would have to wait weeks and months for the chance to explain all of my mistakes to them myself.

Time has a way of turning us against or toward ourselves. Laughing is also a way of controlling the narrative of our own failures, of strangling darkness with parody. It grants me a sense of authority over my life, in the simplest terms, a sense that I am the author of it, even if it only means carrying the world one piece at a time into the mirror-filled halls of my imagination.