Resistance: The Primary

Tags: family

What spills forth below is the end result of the 649 days in between this very moment and the day my mom crossed the bridge to her next journey.

It is the compendium of waking up relentlessly exhausted, dreaming about her, night after night. These words attempt to encapsulate the endlessly conflictive journey that she and I took together, especially over the last 35 years. I have revised countless times, hoping to instill the right amount of love, anxiety, hopefulness, and acute sadness that percolated within me during that lifetime. I have softened wording, only to recover my resolve and punctuate the space in between words with as much sharpness as I could.

If I offend anyone, know that my intentions were as altruistic as humanly possible. I am, at my core, a wounded child doing their best to make sense of the legacy I was given. All are invited to feel as they feel; I hope that the life and service I give as a son, a brother, or friend makes up for a tiny portion of the discomfort some of this narrative undoubtedly provokes.

I have especially dithered over the final product because, like my mother’s paradoxical personality, this essay is impossible to hold within the confines of rational thought. As I spoke on the phone with people who knew their version of Karolee, I was pulled across the threshold of painful bursts of tears and irrepressible laughter and joy. I learned things about her that I never knew before. I experienced the pining of a child to know more about the ‘soft love’ of a parent who is able to express emotion in sweet, undulating waves of peace.

All of this to say: I loved my mother very much. She was the fiercest and most resolute champion of my life. It is easy to say of most mothers that the pride they feel in their children is only paralleled by the intense sense of protection they wish to cast over their children’s lives. But I feel, now more than ever, that Karolee Evans Burningham put her own unique spin on her love. Her spirit was tempered by countless unknown variables, but what resulted was paramount and true; she loved her children, and her husband above all.

She carries on the work behind veiled doors for now. Until we meet again, mom.

The language that follows is technical because it is the only way I can map the invisible. While my father spent his life in insurance—calculating risk, mitigating loss, and providing a safety net for the unforeseen—I have always processed our family dynamic through the lens of hardware. In our house, we didn't just have feelings; we had surges. We didn't have disagreements; we had impedance mismatches.

I use these metaphors because they ground the abstract weight of my childhood into something relatable. Here is the schematic:

The Primary: In a transformer, this is the first winding. It is the intake. It receives the raw, unmitigated power from the source. In this story, the primary is the mother—the one who catches the initial surge of generational trauma.

Resistance: This is the friction that converts electrical energy into heat or light. Without resistance, there is no work, but too much resistance leads to a total meltdown.

Impedance Mismatch: This occurs when the input and the output do not align. When the signal doesn't "fit" the receiver, the energy doesn't pass through; instead, it reflects back, causing distortion, heat, and eventually, system failure.

Dielectric Breakdown: This is the moment an insulator fails. Under enough pressure, even the strongest protective coating—be it "class," "silence," or "drywall"—reaches a terminal point where the current simply punches through.

The Ground: This is the path of least resistance. It is the safety valve where dangerous levels of energy are sent to be neutralized. In our house, the ground was found in the silent patches of a repair or the aerodynamic grace of a paper airplane.

In electronics, resistance is what converts electrical energy into something else—heat, light, motion. Without it, you just have a short circuit: a frantic, destructive loop of energy with nowhere to go, consuming itself until the wires melt into an ozonic slag of copper and regret. To move a needle, to light a bulb, or to forge a soul, you need the friction. You need the "No."

My mother, Karolee Evans Burningham, was The Primary.

In a transformer, the Primary is the first winding. It is the intake, the point where the raw, unmitigated current of the world enters the system. My mother lived in that high-voltage state—supernally gifted, deeply cursed, and vibrating at a frequency that hummed with a heavy, generational load.

The current didn’t start with her. It was wound through her grandmother, Noni—the hard oak depression-era survivor who used feminine refinement as a suit of armor to hide a life of raising children alone against a judging world. It was then refined even further through the shallow mirror of Normalee, her mother.

The most graphic residue of her childhood was the weekly weigh-in. Every Saturday morning, my mother was forced onto a scale. Under Mimi’s surveillance, her body was analyzed, and if a technical error was found, to be corrected. This was the birth of her "blush of unworthiness"—a dc offset that displaced her from her own center. She grew up believing her signal was so weak it couldn't be trusted. She was a woman who inhaled a peanut as a child, felt her lung collapse, and spent the rest of her life terrified of the reality that life gives and takes away at random—the grit in the smooth machinery of life.

During the warmth of the prepratory phone call I had with Susan Robison, my mother's life long best friend, a ghost appeared, flickering to life in the air: the original signal of Karolee Evans Burningham. Long before Arizona turned her into a silent recluse, she was a long-legged blur of kinetic energy, a girl who didn't just ski but "floated" down the mountains of Brighton, sidestepping up the slopes with a natural grace that made the heavy physics of the mountain look like a choice. She was the girl who dared to challenge boys to foot races on Center Street, her momentum so fierce she practically slid into the drugstore on the corner of the post office, laughing at the sheer, breathless velocity of her own body. She wasn't a "bad" girl; she was a high-frequency soul trapped in a low-bandwidth house.

She was the flagbearer for the band, a position of rhythmic precision and public visibility. I can almost hear the wooden poles and the sharp, military snap of the fabric as she caught the wind, a literal signal-corps of one, broadcasting her presence to the bleachers. She spent three years in the high school choir—a voice of clarity and depth; I was staggered to learn that it was a staple of her identity.

Yet it was a frequency I realize, with a pang of grief, I never heard a single time in my life. This was the supernal gift before the attenuation began—the boisterous Karolee who would stay out in the middle of the night just to walk through the Bountiful snow or play Ouija boards in the church parking lot, desperate for any space that wasn’t defined by the heavy "No" of her mother’s surveillance.

To her father, Bill, she was the supernal gift he cherished but didn't quite know how to protect without smothering. He was the sensitive core of the household, the man who made the pancakes with nuts and filled the refrigerator with soda for her friends. He was the buffer, the soft ground who tried to absorb the high-voltage tension of the home. Yet, he was also the surveyor. Whether driven by a forced duty to his wife’s rigid standards or a quiet, desperate fear for his firstborn’s safety, he was the one who metered her freedom. Every night, he checked the odometer on her Volkswagen—a tally designed to ensure she hadn't strayed beyond the perimeter of his protection.

But Karolee understood the mechanics of bypassing resistance. She found her allies in the dark; boys at the local service station with grease under their nails who knew how to reach behind the dashboard and alter the odometer. For those few hours, distance didn't matter, and the numbers may as well have stayed frozen in time. She drove through the Utah nights as a ghost in the machine, her distance unmeasured and her movements unrecorded. She wasn't seeking trouble; she was seeking unmonitored air. She was outrunning the tally to find a world where she wasn't a measurement to be judged or a risk to be managed. She was simply a singer in the dark, finding her own frequency before the world could tell her she wasn't worthy of the air she breathed.

The Barbed Wire Exit

In the taxonomy of my mother’s life, her marriage to my father was not only a simple act of union; it was seemingly an act of escapism. Dad was not just a partner; he was the getaway driver. She was a high-voltage soul looking for a vessel that could carry her beyond the reach of the primary current that defined her childhood home. But before she found her getaway driver, she found a literal fence.

My Aunt Debi’s earliest memory of her sister is a study in isolation. It is a story that feels like a foundational crack in the family. My mother was a teenager, vibrating with the strong-willed intensity that terrified her younger siblings—a girl so desperate to outrun the "No" of her mother’s house that she became a fugitive in her own backyard.

She had been told to babysit four-year-old Debi. Instead, she decided to choose herself. She walked to the back of the property bordering Adelaide Elementary, where the world ended in a line of rusted metal: a barbed wire fence.

Debi remembers the "No" of that afternoon as a physical wall. She remembers her sister—her mother figure, the one who was supposed to be the insulator—simply stepping over the wire and walking toward Susan Hansen’s house. "You have to babysit yourself," my mother called back, a sentence that functioned as a total system failure. Trapped in the panic of a child abandoned in the current, Debi tried to follow. She tried to climb the same fence, but she didn't have her sister's long, athletic legs or, I imagine, her practiced immunity to pain.

The wire caught Debi. It bit into her small arm, tearing through skin and muscle. There were stitches. There was blood. But more than that, there was the silence of a childhood being stolen in real-time. Debi admitted to me, her voice steady across the line, that she was afraid of my mother. That fear acted as a signal jammer, erasing years of memories that should have been hers to keep.

Yet, as an adult, Debi became the long-distance searcher. She would bridge the gap that the barbed wire had created, seeing my mother as a woman with so much to give, even when Karolee was too burned out to give it to herself.

She watched the fiery brilliance of my parents' marriage with the eyes of a witness who knew the cost of the getaway. She knew that my mother hadn't just married a man; she had married a frequency that would allow her to keep running. The bounteous supply of distaste they shared was the friction generated by two people who had spent their lives trying to escape their own primary windings, only to find themselves trapped in a new, shared circuit.

Debi’s stitches eventually healed, but the residue remained: a sister who spent her life trying to patch a relationship that started with a four-year-old girl bleeding on a fence while a teenager screeched away into the dark.

The Era of the Yank

Ten years before my own memory of the "No" solidified, the transformer was already sparking under the weight of a non-nuclear decay. This was the era of my eldest brother, Adam. He was the first load the system couldn't quite handle. He remembers the mother who would seize him by the arm, her fingernails digging into his skin like talons, thrusting him into the backseat of a vw bug.

In this era, the system tried to shed the load to prevent a total meltdown. They sent Adam away—an exile to the grandparents. While my mother operated as the fugitive, my father was a man trapped in a different frequency. Professionally, he was a man of actuarial precision, someone who understood the fine print of survival and the mitigation of risk. But at home, he was struggling with his own internal primary. He found a way to send a signal of grace through the mail; he would write letters to his exiled son and include a single, perfectly folded paper airplane. It was a silent, aerodynamic promise of a ground that he couldn't yet provide in person.

Adam’s earliest memory isn’t of a mother’s touch; it is the memory of a small boy's fall. He was four years old, a child running through the house with a squirt gun, caught in the kinetic joy of a summer afternoon. He slipped. His head hit the floor, the skin splitting open in a red-streaked gash.

But the 4-year-old brain of my brother didn’t register a need for comfort. There was no "I am hurt, help me." Instead, the primary had already programmed him with a different frequency: terror. His first thought as the blood began to flow was, "oh god, i’ve messed up. i’m in trouble now." To be injured in that house was to be a technical glitch. It was to be a disruption to a woman who was already vibrating at her breaking point. Adam didn’t see a healer; he saw a judge. Whether or not the end result was kindness or correction, he had to go to her for stitches and sentencing. This was the first yank—the realization that the "No" in the house was so loud it drowned out the survival instinct of a bleeding child.

The Clipping: Public Distortion and Visceral Violence

My mother was a woman of schizophrenic frequencies. To the ward ladies at the Tupperware party, she was the classy insulator. But under duress—in the friction of a traffic jam or the heat of a crowded restaurant—the insulation would vanish, leaving a raw, sparking wire.

Adam was the witness to the public breakdown. He sat in the backseat of that vw bug while she clipped into madness. She would scream at cops; she would berate waitresses; she would broadcast her miserable internal state with such high-decibel vitriol that the world would eventually swing back at her.

He remembers the rage. He was in the car when her terrible demeanor pushed a stranger past their own limit. He watched as a man, pushed to the edge by her unmitigated "No," took a cup of soda and hurled it with violence against her windshield. He watched the beverage coat the glass, a physical manifestation of the world trying to ground a woman who refused to be quiet.

He saw her rear-end people in traffic, only to emerge from the car not with an apology, but with a tantrum. He watched as the world met her unworthiness with physical aggression, and he had to sit in the silence of the aftermath, wondering if the next surge would come from the stranger on the street or the woman behind the wheel.

The Schizophrenic Signal

For Adam, the trauma was in the duality. He watched her scream until her veins stood out in her neck, and then—Hello? Why, yes!—the phone would ring, and she would instantly shift into the sweet, polite doting mother.

To a child, this isn't just fake behavior; it is signal jamming. It taught him that the mother was a mask, and the primary was a monster. He lived in the rue of his own heart, watching her defend her children with the tenacity of a mother bear at school, only to return home and dig her fingernails into his arm.

He was the exile because he was the first one to realize that the only way to survive the distortion was to get out of the circuit entirely. He was the first to see that the classy woman on the hill was just a casing for a current that was, quite literally, out of control.

By the time we hit the Glendale heat, the nuclear family had suffered a near total meltdown. My siblings had escaped the circuit, leaving me as the unterminated line—the only thing left in the house to absorb the unmitigated voltage of my parents' fractured and unusual partnership.

Paul and Karolee had traded consistency and spiritual familiarity for financial stability, uprooting their lives for the promise of a paycheck, and in the process, they had cut the wires to the world. My mother, the bubbling socialite Susan knew, had finally gone dark. She gave up her friendships, her ward life, and her confidence, retreating into the air-conditioned silence of an ascetic. She and my father were planets of duality, circling an unknown sun of immense gravitational pressure—a marriage of fiery brilliance that had soured into a mutual, daily if not hourly distaste.

I lived in the reflection of their "No." The Arizona heat wasn't just outside; it was the ambient temperature of our home. When the impedance mismatch between her unworthiness and my desperate need for an identity reached a terminal peak, I experienced a dielectric breakdown. There is a specific frequency to a frontal lobe shutting down—a rising static in the mind so loud it silences even the permanent ring of tinnitus.

In those moments, I didn't just feel the resistance; I became the discharge. I disabused my body of its flesh and blood within the powdery confines of the drywall and doors of the home, my fists finding the only "Yes" they could in a house of "No." I remember the white dust of the gypsum mixing with the red blood of my ruined hands, a visceral attempt to ground a current that was burning me alive. I would wail into the void with red-streaked tears, wiping the confusion from my soul with hands that didn't feel the pain because the emotional static was so much louder.

The fallout was always binary: silence or utter chaos.

When the static cleared, my father would emerge as the insurer of the facade. He was the man I expected to finally mete out the punishment I felt I deserved for the violence of my discharge. I wanted the recognition. I wanted him to see the bloodied residue. But instead, there was only the naked silence of a man trapped in frequencies. He would arrive with his tools, meticulously patching the holes and replacing the broken light switches and broken mirrors. He wasn't fixing the emotional problem; he was insuring the appearance of stability.

By smoothing over the drywall, maybe he was telling me that my breakdown didn't happen, or that it was just a technical glitch to be painted over so the policy wouldn't be canceled. He provided the ground, not through discipline or conversation, but through a haunting, sterile maintenance. He reset the circuit so we could pretend the primary wasn't failing, leaving me alone in a patched room, waiting for the next surge to hit the wires.

And when the pressure inevitably reached its next terminal peak, my mother would head for the garage. I can still hear the tires fighting the concrete—a tires-burning, visceral "fuck you" broadcast to the two men she was leaving in the dust of her departure.

The Haker-na: The Mirror of the Signet and the Cord

From a very early age, I called her "Mother" with a sterile, crisp finality. I took the word from her own mouth—the same razor-edged title she used like a weapon against the matriarch of her family. It was my version of the biblical haker-na—the "please, recognize" that Tamar used to trap Judah. By uttering that word, I was holding up the bloodied coat of our shared history and forcing her to look. I was saying: recognize this coldness. Recognize the signet and the cord of your own anxiety and depression. Recognize that I am the item you left behind.

But in the very act of this speaking, in the mastery of my own prose, I feel the crushing weight of the hypocrisy. I am using my eloquence to dissect her, to categorize her, to insulate myself from the raw heat of the memory. I am doing exactly what she did: using the class of language to survive the unworthiness of the soul.

We are the same winding, she and I. I am the primary she tried to outrun, and she is the secondary I tried to ground. We were never two different people; we were just two sides of the same collapsing field.

This section of the compendium is where the geography of her life—from the suburbs of San Jose to the sweltering isolation of Glendale—finally collapses into a single, metabolic truth.

I heard about the birds through another phone call tonight. My mother's friend, Joyce Wright, remembered a version of my mother that I had almost entirely unknown: the homemaking teacher who lived in a court off Portobello Drive. Joyce spoke of a woman who clicked with the world, a woman who maintained a connection for decades through birthday cards and accidental 2:00 am phone calls.

The Finch and the Terminal Short

Karolee was a finch. Joyce remembered the birds always being there—in the California sun and the Arizona heat—small, twitchy, high-metabolism witnesses to my mother's internal state. It is a beautiful, devastating metaphor that I never fully saw until it was whispered to me by a woman who loved her.

A finch is a creature of frantic motion, a blur of feathers and hollow bones that must consume itself just to stay aloft. Its heart beats at a rate that would shatter a larger creature. That was her. She was a high-voltage current trapped in a fragile bird’s frame, her internal frequency vibrating at a staccato pace that was never meant for the heavy, stagnant air of the Arizona desert. She was a metabolic wonder of anxiety, a fragile percussion of "No" that never found a true ground.

The Daughter and the Coattails

In her mind, the primary was not a source of light, but a source of judgment. Yet, for all the silence and the "No," she kept trying.

Her brother David remembers the original signal of her faith: 1960. It was Karolee—not the parents, not the perfect siblings—who acted as the spiritual conductor for the family. She was the one who pushed them toward the temple; she provided the initial surge that got everyone else across the threshold.

But once the door was closed, she retreated. She spent the rest of her life in a state of coattail theology. She believed she could simply ride the coattails of her family’s righteousness back to heaven, because she was convinced her own circuit was too damaged to carry the current. When her friends like Susan and Joyce tried to cast shadows of spirituality into her vector, the momentum always decayed. The classy mask she wore was too thick to let the light in, and the unworthiness she felt was a lead-lined insulator.

The Natural State and the Waning Signal

As she aged, the mental illness and the generational trauma stopped being psychological and became biological—the natural state of a failing machine. Dementia didn't just take her memory; it took her confidence. The woman who once sought unmonitored air in a VW Bug found herself trapped in a body that was losing its capacity for the adventure.

Her desire to be sealed to my father, Paul, remained the great, unreached frequency of her life. She wanted that eternal ground, but she was terrified of the audit. She was a woman who had been weighed every Saturday of her youth and found wanting; she couldn't imagine a God who didn't do the same. So she withered—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—succumbing to the wiles of a natural state that had been eroding her insulation since the day she climbed that barbed wire fence.

The Signal Through the Noise: Emily’s Witness

By the time my sweet wife Emily entered the foray, the insulation was almost gone. The dementia had begun to scramble the broadcast, leading to loops of repetition—offers of drinks six, seven, eight times in a single afternoon. But Emily saw something the rest of us, blinded by our own histories and biases, often missed: the friction of the spirit. She saw that Karolee, even with a broken mind, was fighting a high-decibel battle to hang onto the things that mattered. When she reached through the static to remember a detail about Emily’s children, it was a valiant and sacred effort. It was a daughter of God refusing to let the natural state win without a fight.

Emily recognized the "signet and the cord" of my own trauma reflected in my mother’s tired, unhealed eyes. She saw the impedance mismatch between my parents—the mutual agitation that had turned a marriage into a cycle of nagging and harshness. She heard the burden in my father’s voice, a frequency that acted as a slow, psychological breakdown of my mother's remaining confidence.

The Bathroom Floor: The Outsider’s Ground

To my wife, the most graphic image of my mother's isolation wasn't the hermit wandering the mall; it was the woman on the bathroom floor. Emily recalls a conversation on the couch—my father, my wife, and I—a trio of voices forming a closed loop. My mother sat there, a secondary coil failing to catch the induction. She simply stood up, walked into the bathroom, and locked the door. When Emily knocked, she found her on the floor—a literalization of the loneliness she had lived with her entire life. She felt left out, an outsider in the very home she had facilitated.

My mother was deeply bruised by a past that offered no grace, and as a result, she lacked the capacity to offer grace to others. She was a woman who was beaten down by the perception of being a burden, her belief in herself eroded until there was nothing left but the raw, sparking wire of her anxiety. Yet Emily saw that under the harsh exterior, under the mask, Karolee was good. She saw the love rising above the harshness—a signal that was still trying to broadcast a "Yes" to her children and her grandchildren.

The Ground of Mercy

I have to believe that the God she feared is not the God who received her.

For near eighty years, my mother navigated a cruel, fallen world under the shadow of a spiritual audit. In the rigid architecture of the dogma she lived by, she was haunted by a binary terror: if you do not live up to the commandments, you are cut off from your family forever. To a woman who felt she hadn't even earned her first chance to begin with, the demand for perfection was a high-voltage line she couldn't touch without burning. She begged for spiritual momentum in her most vulnerable moments, and in my own fear, I offered her an "overly eager manifesto"—the discourteous fabrications of a little boy who didn’t have a firm enough testimony to carry himself, let alone a mother drowning in the madness.

But as I wander the paths of spirituality in the shadow of her departure, I have received a gift sent directly from her—a signal broadcast from a place free of mortal exhaustion and mental anguish.

It is this: the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars all exist under the same great sky. They occupy different states; they vibrate at different frequencies; they may not even occupy the same space—but they live within a shared reality. My mother thought she was a flickering star destined for the dark, but in the great sky of the infinite, she is part of the same celestial machinery as the sun.

I believe now in a God who does not tally the odometer or check the saturday scale. I believe in a God who provides second, third, seventh, and 1,394th chances to all of His children. My mother’s tragedy was the discordant belief that she was unworthy of even the first chance. She lived in a state of signal interference, unable to hear the radiation of a love that requires no class and no insulation to receive.

The Foundling and the Truth

She is no longer the finch trapped in the desert heat. She is radiating a new, quiet confidence down to me—her youngest child, the foundling born in the wilderness. I am no longer the boy punching the drywall, trying to ground a current I didn’t understand. I am the speaker for the dead, receiving the transmission of her peace. She was a transformer that had been pushed to its thermal limit. She bore the voltage of her ancestors and the static of her own mind, and she kept the air moving as long as she could. In the end, the "No" wasn't a rejection of God; it was the exhausted sigh of a daughter who had spent a lifetime trying to be classy enough for a love that was always free.