FOUR
The knife-fork
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This is not about how, when I was eight, I was tested for learning disabilities, and though I was noted as having problems this is when it was discovered I could read, even well above my grade level, which will come off as a brag but shouldn't because the list of things I am not good at is long, inconvenient, and like everything else the reality of the supposed discovery fluctuates for me, what it all meant in respect of school, my family, and how I perceived myself. One minute I’m on solid ground concerning my brain and the next I’ve dropped into a bog of uncertainty. This discovery—“Oh, she can read after all”—that sounds like a brag signifies the failures of most of my teachers who damned as unworthy trouble those who were neurodivergent as well as those who came from troubled circumstances. Neurodivergence was not a term that was used at the time, it only came later, and my reasoning is that everyone is in some respect neurodivergent just as I reason that “normal” can be a myth that turns out to have very little meaning unless we accept it as an ever-shifting measure for society’s determination of who it’s okay to discount as abnormal for not falling into lockstep with the status quo. What is counted as normal and normalized as normal means peril for those outside the safe zone. Everyone should eventually comprehend that humans are “normal” at different things and “not normal” at others, and that normal too often works as an explicit societal control for conferring value to the select and denying it to others. I’ve observed that after we’re born we’re typically given a grace period of being permitted to be what we naturally are, but that soon ends and the critical eye for who is and who isn’t normal in even the minutest respect kicks in with the rush to define who is serviceable and marketable, who might be allowed into the familiar teen trope of the privilege of a seat at the cafeteria school lunch party table, while those determined as not normal are not only expendably destined for Pluto’s chill in the outer limits, they must be disallowed so to give “normal” meaning. Extra redemptive booster points are reserved for society’s cream of the crop, those who are honored by the rank-and-file as naturally better than, by which I mean class definitions that are also involved in the sorting of value, for the power of the middle class is different from the power of the elite. The values allotted to the upper, middle and lower classes are contradictory and those differences muck up everything if honestly taken into account, which is why they aren’t, it’s why the classes must be kept separate for the preservation of each their own allotment of what is normal and acceptable. If I include here the issue of class, which may seem irrelevant to the subject of neurodivergence, it’s because of America’s dissonant denial of classism by way of Americans being, as stated by Dust Bowl depression author John Steinbeck, spiritually “temporarily embarrassed capitalists”, for which reason socialism never took too fruitful a root. This isn’t wholesale true, but it’s true enough, and impacts the gatekeeping of the mainstream and those rejected from it, how we are chastised not to resent the elite, a body to which we are expected to aspire, to want to be like if not able to become. Brandishing the flag of the carefully curated fantasy of the normal, we crush divergence that isn’t even radical and inherently anarchic because odd souls threaten the illusions of right order that are the sustenance of class boundaries, even of fascists.
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If one is advanced in an area educationally might mean not very much when children are different in how they develop, when there are a variety of reasons for why children develop as they do, when one takes into account neurodiversity, personality as well, and home life, even what holds a child's interest and has meaning for them. My husband’s second-grade teacher, upon observing his attempt to draw, took away his school allotment of colorful crayons and gave them to another who she said could make better use them, which was his shame as a five-year-old and the moment of pedagogical determination that helped mark a destination. Working in concert with the corralling expectations of a hardened class system, those seeming small pedagogical determinations all add up in the end to where you are pointed in life, in what areas you will be accepted. My husband’s mother, when our son was young, told me with a disconcerting level of shame and concern, in a very quiet voice, that when he was small my husband was not good at swinging like the other children, which I instantly understood was her nervous forewarning that this deficit might spell doom for our son in that critical area, and it’s true that our son wasn’t good at swinging but he also didn’t care as he had no desire to swing up and down and back and forth. As it turned out, others do watch to see who isn’t good at swinging or rejects it as a fun sport, and with an ever-present competitive drive that is disconcerting as everyone seems to be a ready and eager participant in marking judgments in all areas of who will and won’t fit based on such crucial areas as swinging. On the other hand, I was great at swinging as a child and look how much good it did me. As a child even I was inculcated to think if you weren’t good at swinging then something was undeniably bad wrong with you, so thank god I was not only good at swinging I was great at it. I was terrifyingly fearless at it and looked down on others who were afraid of swings. What this really only signifies is that when my husband and I were children and when my mother-in-law was a young mother it was a time of playgrounds with badass swings and other equipment that could and would maim if not kill you. If there hadn’t been swings no one would have noticed that so-and-so wasn’t good at neurologically pulling themselves together to be able to capably swing so therefore keep an eye on them for probably not being good at other shit because they’re obviously not normal. Playgrounds are competitive fields of war for society’s mothers and fathers and consequently their children also determining who will become the masters and who it’s fine to kick in the face on your way up the ladder, and I say this as someone who was pretty good on the playground. The more dangerous the activity the better. I loved the splintered playground merry-go-round that looked straight out of medieval blueprints for instruments of torture, which if you were one of those pushing threatened to drag you underneath if you didn’t capably leap on once you’d gotten the great creaky wheel going as fast you could, I never got enough of the whirling that didn’t make me ill or dizzy, I wanted it to go fast, faster, fastest, I wanted to get off that merry-go-round and collapse on the ground and have the world continue to twirl around me. I loved the seesaw bouncing me high like a bucking bronco so I’d be catapulted up out of my seat and nearly thrown off. Yippee yi yo ki yay. It was near impossible to find a seesaw partner who was willing to co-partner in attempting to kill one another, at least not without any trace of bullying. I loved riding the swing so high that it was nearly higher than the high bar from which the swing was hung. I
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loved as the swing’s moment of indecisive suspension, when it reached its high point, before descending, became longer and longer the higher you went, and I loved leaping off when there was just the right propulsion, soaring through the air and managing to stick a landing on my feet. I loved climbing and would ascend so high in trees it would terrify into tearful rages my other playmates who would yell at me to come down, please come back down, but what a thrill it was to go higher and higher, and then to be alone as high as I could go and look down over the world. Was all this safe? Friends broke arms and I would have hated to be the school nurse coping with the busted chins, bloodied noses and noggins, the sprains, strains, the split open knees and the occasional fracture. Those playgrounds drew blood because, as children, we assumed if it was planted there by the adults then it must be safe, even if we were warned of dangers we still assumed if it was there it was reasonably safe and that injuries were a matter of bad luck or not enough esprit de corps. Was I good at sports? No. Like my husband I was terrible at most sports, but I was so good on the playground—not at everything, but at what mattered to me—because it was my way of surviving my parents. I had to be able to leap over tall buildings when running from them. It was important I be fearless but attentive to danger and outsmarting it. I had genetically inherited some physical divergences from the “norm” that made me horrible at a lot of sports, differences that made me the kid to be bullied by peers and PE (physical education) teachers who thought everyone was born with the same physical equipment and capabilities. But those also weren’t sports that demonstrated my ability at just plain fucking surviving. I hated all team sports except dodgeball, which everyone else loathed, and which I was great at. No, I was superlative at it. Playing dodgeball, I was always the last one in the midst of the circle of assailants, no one could hit me with what was then a rubber ball that hurt when it hit, I was indefatigably able to elude and bend around the ball, which perplexed and annoyed everyone because when you’re too good at something that means the game doesn’t end and everyone wants you to finally get slammed so the game is over. I knew I was so good at dodgeball because everyday at home I was dodging, running, jumping, eluding, bending in impossible ways around possible bad bodily harm until I was able to make it out the door and into the middle of the street where my mother wouldn’t follow. Playing dodgeball for me was nothing less than becoming so magically in sync with my enemy, the ball, that it was more like a dance, all else in the world falling away, time would move in lovely slower than slow motion as I focused exclusively on never coming in contact with that ball, shape-shifting around it, and it was imperative to me that I be good at outwitting the ball, that I be the best, because it meant I had a chance at surviving, it meant to me that I was good at surviving. I was proud of surviving. To me, if I ceased being the best at dodge ball that meant I might not survive. All of this was relative of course to my small scale of a world, which one doesn’t realize until a grasp is had of how big the world is, the relativeness of everything that isn’t corporate bullying by law. I was able to climb higher in trees than any of my friends but that didn’t mean I was the best ever. I was good where I was. I was good at dodgeball at that point of time in that place. It didn’t mean I was the best ever at dodgeball. I was good there in that place amongst those other students when I was in elementary school, but it formed a part of my identity and for a while I believed
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I was the best. I didn’t think about whether I was the best in the world, no. I was the best of any with whom I’d played and that was enough, that was like being best.
My mother, who paid no mind ever to what I was doing as a child, when we were in contact again for some reason got it in her head that my elementary school age son was not right because he didn’t like to play catch. He was sculpting all kinds of game and cartoon figures out of the difficult substance of air-drying clay and shooting stop-animation movies with the figures he’d made, but he wouldn’t play ball, which she decided was a massive meaningful couldn’t, and during our once-a-year visits she treated him like a dog, following him with a dog’s soft toy ball, throwing it at him without even announcing she was going to throw it and he was supposed to sonar sense incoming and catch it. She by then had kept a succession of small dogs as companion children for whom she had many small soft ball toys used for playing fetch, and she employed these same small balls with my son and focused on him like he was the dog she would improve or prove was so wrong he was faulty. When I realized what she was up to, for she hadn’t brought the matter up with me, I told her, “He can catch a ball, he just has no interest in playing ball and never has.” Was he good at catching a ball? No, not really, but I knew from our play as he grew up that he could and that he would also never be coaxed into being interested in more than one or two catches as he disliked playing ball as to him it seemed like pointless play. He preferred to play with the camera and draw. He was like an Irish Setter we had (love you, Nessa) who, when she hit the age of three, looked at the thrown ball and suddenly a light went off in her head, I saw it happen, she realized that if she brought it back to me I’d just throw it again and this no longer made sense to her and she sat down and never fetched the ball again. Plus he’d been the subject of playground bullying just as most everyone who is different becomes the subject of playground bullying, and according to the adamant norm my son was different if only for not caring about competition. He also had long hair like his musician dad and when my son was young for some reason boys had short hair and had a hostility toward long hair on boys that they expressed by bullying. My son liked playing together with others but he disliked aggressive, rough play, and that was often enough what play was, of which he wanted no part, but he enjoyed and did well with Aikido when he was older, a sport to which he saw a point and in which people were trained to be restrained, and which he enjoyed until he was injured by a too aggressive individual, which will happen to many Aikido practitioners eventually. My mother, I knew, had been the object of school and playground bullying, she had complained about this, and she didn’t like sports, she was bad at them. When I was a child she’d never expressed any interest in whether I was good at sports or not. My father had never expressed any interest in sports either, and I doubted whether he was good at them as he never mentioned playing them (I’ve since found news articles that show he was good at sports as a young teen). My siblings had no real interest in sports, at least not to my knowledge, but when they were preteens and teens they got into swimming, which though competitive involves no direct physical interaction with another and is a breed apart from the prioritized ball sports. My siblings did well at swimming and were on a swim team but to my knowledge they didn’t do so well as to pursue it beyond high school, it
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was never more than a hobby. As far as I know, not even my grandparents had ever been involved in sports, nor were they interested in them, and if this is wrong then my wrongness shows at the very least they weren’t so big on sports that I knew about it, they didn’t watch sports on television, they weren’t fans of a team. My husband had been good at biking and running as a teen then stopped when he was injured, but again those weren’t ball sports, and his parents and siblings had never been involved in sports though his parents did enjoy watching them. We were decidedly a family that on both sides was not good at ball sports. But suddenly my mother was convinced my son couldn’t catch the ball and it was her mission to train him to play ball with her like he was her dog. I reasoned she had likely decided he didn’t have the motor skills or coordination and this was the negative she could focus on, because she did kind of support him as an artist for a time, impressed by his skills, even by his fine motor skills, until it became perhaps not as interesting as having a negative to zero in on. My son wasn’t aware of what was happening, that she had decided he was way wrong because he shunned playing ball with all the doggie soft balls, he would laugh and try to interest her in other things then go play with her dog, but I was aware and would negotiate her away from him, eventually hissing at her, “Stop that!” My son thought of the balls as toys that you enjoy for their simply existing in so many fabrics and colors, plus he would use them to play fetch with her dog. I didn’t want him aware that his grandmother was ferociously pursuing him judgmentally incessantly over the fact he wouldn’t play ball, and that this was why she a couple of times mailed him an assortment of soft dog balls, they were not simply odd presents for a boy who lived in an apartment and had no dog. By this, I knew that my mother was likely incessantly talking about it with my father, about how my son didn’t play ball and how I was neglecting him by not attending to this. Maybe she was right, though not in her way, maybe I should have placed more emphasis, any emphasis, on ball sports (except for any sport like football or soccer, I was adamant he not be daily concussed, I didn’t want his brain bounced around), society can always criticize me for this as well, but he was decidedly disinterested, and my reasoning was to help him instead pursue what he was passionate about. As noted already, we did eventually interest him in Aikido, which he enjoyed for several years (then had a couple of long-term injuries and quit), and I ceased to be concerned about whether or not I should be concerned.
We are all built a bit differently. Trivially, I loved the thrill rides of the carnival, my husband is made dizzy by them and hates them, our son was satisfied with the gentle horses of the colorful carousel. I wouldn’t do a thrill ride now.
Trivially, our son is a hot sauce and water junkie, he won’t touch coffee; I am a coffee junkie and just poured myself a fresh cup.
The story told me by my parents was that no one could understand what I was saying so they didn't think I could read. The story told me was also that no one could understand my conversational speech because I spoke too quickly, all in a rush, no separating punctuation, no commas or periods. I was also told that I sounded "Italian", ending all my words with an "a", but I associate that tale with when I was younger, around five and six years of age, the dining room table in Seattle always comes to
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mind as being when I first hear this story, and some materials on children and language peculiarities suggest this likely isn't a problem, at least not when the child is three years of age. When I was young, and even not so young, and had occasion to remind my parents I'd previously told them about something such as a personal experience or an item I needed for school, really just about anything, they would sometimes say they didn't know as I’d not told them and if I said I’d told them then they’d say I’d not made myself understood, but I'd also long since taken it for granted they had selective listening, which they did. But now I'm eight years of age, and the evening my parents learned I could read, to test this, my father had gone from the kitchen table to our one small bookcase in the living room, composed of several walnut-stained wood boards separated/supported by glass blocks, to pull out one of the research papers he'd had published on the physiological effects of radiation, and he sat me down on the floor in the living room, and said, "Read this." My father's habit was to never speak to me about anything except to tell me things to do or to reprimand so I took this as a prime opportunity for making a connection with him. I would now become a person. That he was a scientist meant to me, at the time, he prized learning, and that I was an advanced reader would show him I wasn’t a throw-away child, I had worth, a mind. I didn’t read for his approval, I read because I had long loved to read, even the text on a toothpaste tube was a story, but now I saw how it might make me special to him. I started to read the text he’d placed before me, uncertain about pronouncing words I’d never seen, eager to prove I could read but nervous that because of his choice of material I would necessarily fail. I understood he'd chosen that material because he wasn't just testing if I could read but the notion I was advanced. It occurred to me it was perhaps a little unfair he’d set before me a science text written by a man with a PhD, but I accepted it as a challenge. He let me get into it a couple of paragraphs, then he abruptly pulled the text away from me, tersely saying, "That's enough," went into the kitchen, and I heard him say to my mother, "She can read, all right." Which was the last time we ever had that kind of sharing, he never asked me to read aloud again. In my child way I would wait years for my being an advanced reader to activate a meaningful relationship between us and it never did. The only books he sometimes purchased and brought home to read were science fiction novels and compilations of stories, and I read every one of them. Later, when I brought up the subject of some of my favorite sci-fi authors, he disavowed any interest, I had to remind him about the books he’d brought home and he vaguely acknowledged he may have done that but still disavowed any interest and that was the end of that. When I was a teenager and the IQ of my youngest brother, W, became a subject of discussion, my brother prideful over it and believing he was the smartest in the family (which was his role, he was told he was, treated as the one with potential, the intellectually gifted child who makes good grades), my father acknowledging my brother was smarter than him by a few points, it seemed odd that though I knew I had a higher IQ than them both my father didn’t display the same interest in me, instead he seemed intent on devaluing IQ in my case. I did tell my brother my IQ was higher than his because I didn’t like his lording his IQ over the family, I wanted to reorient him, and at that moment what it did was reorient him to dislike me because here he’d had hard numerical confirmation he was the smart one
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of the family and I’d shot him down. But I wondered even then about the validity of an IQ test (I don’t even know what test it was) because I’d had mine taken when I was under great emotional duress, during the time I was hospitalized while in junior high, I reasoned my mental state must have had an impact on my results, plus I’d been on a considerable amount of tranquilizing medication that so slowed and numbed me that it had been a struggle to think, which I had liked as I didn’t want to be aware and in this world, I wanted to be a zombie and escape pain. Based on my experience I was already wondering about environment, context, and health impacting IQ tests positively or negatively, and from there I’d easily moved on to wondering about deceptive results and expectations tied to a test that could be compromised by any number of factors including how good one was at testing or if one balked at testing and disengaged from trying. Not to mention I was dyslexic. I knew some people were good at things I was no good at, and that I was maybe a little better at some things than others. As a teen, I wondered about cultural bias. It seemed to me there were a great many obstacles to ethically measuring intelligence in such a way as to attach a forever and absolute number to it. In the interest of not misleading one to believe my mind was a hot item, I will not now reveal I’m a genius, I just missed being MENSA quality, which is as good as being off by a mile. But often enough when I met a person who would for some reason spontaneously voice they were MENSA worthy, if we can take for granted they weren’t lying, I saw how that absolute forever IQ number had little to do with producing quality outcomes in critical reasoning, even seeming to get in the way due a certain over-inflated self-confidence in one’s own decision-making. What I did know was that in respect of my brother the IQ test would make a difference for him in his educational path, the quality of support he would get, whereas mine hadn’t and wouldn’t for me, and not only because my testing had been part of a psychological assessment rather than educational. In our family, what was the difference between me and my brother was that my father wanted my youngest brother to be exceptional whereas he seemed to want to expect nothing of me. In school as well, I felt that teachers had heavy bias as to who they wished to succeed and who they didn’t only want to see fail but did what they could to ensure failure in order to fulfill those biases against children over whom they had considerable power, the children possessing no power except that of rebellion which also would almost certainly result in failure in school.
Would I have been disappointed had my brother been by-the-numbers smarter than me? I don’t know. As best I remember, because he was considered gifted and was in classes for the gifted, I thought he would be, but I wasn’t surprised either when this wasn’t the case because I already didn’t trust such tests and how they were used to elevate some and push others into the slush pile. I was just glad my number was slightly higher than his because that meant he’d have to re-evaluate his by-the-numbers pride. I also reasoned that I’d been not only compromised when taking the test, I had also intentionally manipulated it by failing to do certain things in the hope it would send a message to the testers of how helpless, imprisoned, and traumatized I was. But that didn’t mean I was confident my score would be higher if I took it again. I didn’t trust those inflexible no-shades-of-gray numbers because they couldn’t sit in
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my brain and body and see how I perceived and everything that impacted my perceptions and which of my abilities were even valued by me. It seemed what I valued wasn’t part of the test. Plus, I was much like my Irish Setter. There are all kinds of puzzle and word games I won’t do because to me there is no point to them and are thus a waste of my time and energy. My brain cuts off. Instead, I want a game with a point, preferably one in which a story can be discovered.
When I was eight and it was learned I could read, my brain was a static muddle of cognitive dissonance because the story about me had become that no one knew I could read because no one could understand what I was saying, yet suddenly, magically I was understood. Sitting there, I wondered what had changed. Why hadn’t I been understood the previous day, the previous week, and yet I suddenly was. Something was wrong and it wasn't necessarily only with me.
My mother, I believed, had known since I was little that I could read. As far as I could remember, I’d been reading since we lived our first time in Richland. I remembered reading when I was at most somewhere between two and three years of age. I may have then only been reading coloring books and The Littlest Angel (hey, little child, here’s a child who dies and even the angels don’t understand them and how they are lonely) but I was reading and would read the few materials available to me over and over again. My parents, I thought, must have known I read everything I could get my hands on. My parents, I knew, didn't pay much attention to what their children did, the responsibility left to me to caretake and look after my younger siblings, to make sure they didn't run out into the street, to make sure they weren't doing anything that might harm them, to ensure they were relatively well-behaved and would leave my parents alone, it was up to me to keep them from seeking the attention of my parents. But I still assumed that my parents knew such an important thing as my being able to read. In fact, I knew they were aware I could read. When I was six, a fat red hardback of moral stories suitable for Roman Catholic children had landed on the bookshelf in our dining room in Seattle, which glaringly stood out as the built-in shelves held almost no books and this one seemed exceptional to me as it was bright red. A real official book, not a paperback, and if it was bright red that might mean it was special as it had stand-out color. My parents had been going through instruction to become Roman Catholic and if I remember correctly the book was a gift. I read it through as soon as it appeared and was horrified by a story that I would later realize must have been Hilaire Belloc's "Matilda Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death" from Cautionary Tales for Children, though the book wasn’t Cautionary Tales for Children. Belloc's book was a parody of disciplinary books of moral stories. This was instead a disciplinary book and the idea that the child who told lies was punished by burning to death was only horrifying, plus for some reason I had the idea, perhaps from accompanying text, that the girl was Jewish, and according to the book she was forever alienated from God, which made it all the more grotesque as I thought it was antisemitic. I think it’s likely the story in the book was the original Belloc poem saddled with absurd religious commentary, because I have since learned that Belloc was fiercely, conservatively Roman Catholic, which would have been good reason to include the poem in the fat red book of stories for Roman Catholic children despite the fact he was
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also antisemitic in the kind of way where people argue whether he was really an antisemite or not, but, "Yes, well, one can't deny he said that, but did he really mean it as it sounds?" I don't know now whether the book was explicitly antisemitic, vaguely antisemitic, or if I'd made an assumption based on accompanying commentary, I wish I could find the book so I could make this not be a mystery but I’ve searched and searched and thus far not found anything like it on the internet. Instead, all I have is a vague memory of the book and, partly via it, my growing comprehension of Roman Catholic nuns and priests as being set in cosmic opposition to not only those outside the Roman Catholic faith but even their congregation of believers that was always in danger of falling outside the limits of the church's mercy, which seemed an easy thing to do. I don't know how but already at the age of six I was sensitive to antisemitism and told my mother it was a terrible book and had stories that shouldn't be read to young children, meaning my siblings. When the book didn't vanish from our shelves, I reminded my mother about the girl who had perished by fire because she told lies, who I believed was Jewish and therefore the book was antisemitic, and this time she put the book away.
I have a picture from when I was four years of age and the toys that I used to take to bed with me have been replaced with a slim stack of three thin children’s books as well as one I’m holding in the photo. I don’t recollect my parents purchasing me but a very few books throughout my entire youth, when I was older I used to go to the homes of friends and devour their books, including those for younger children that I’d missed out on as my parents didn’t buy books, such as Dr. Seuss, and the books in this photo could very well have come to me from friends of my parents as I know some books did. For instance my parents had friends who made a present to me, when I was five, of the only art books I would ever be given, a slim little hardback on how to draw trees and a slim little hardback on how to draw horses. In Seattle, these friends of my parents called me into the dining table and gave the two books to me, which belonged to them, because they said they knew I had talent and would have better use for them. That evening I drew in the horse book a perfect copy of one of the horses and my mother took the books and put them away, saying I wasn’t respectful of books and didn’t know how to use them, and I didn’t see the books again until I was a teenager, I managed to get them as an adult but I can’t now locate them, our repeated moves have meant having to give up portions of what was once a massive horde of books my spouse and I accumulated and I can’t imagine my having intentionally given the books to a used book shop but they’re gone. With the photo of me on the bed (a fold-away cot) when I’m four, I’m able to make out the title of the book I’m holding. It’s Let’s Go Shopping, a Wonder Book from 1958, and the cover shows a mother with children, a young girl and small boy, around a shopping cart in a grocery store. I’m fortunate to find that the book was once for sale on Etsy, with images of all the pages provided. One page reads, “Sally stopped to look at a round yellow pumpkin in the fruit and vegetable section. ‘Look, Mommy, a jack-o-lantern,’ she cried. ‘All it needs is a face!’ ‘That’s right,’ Mother agreed as she weighed some potatoes. ‘Do potatoes grow in the back yard here?’ Sally asked. ‘ No, they grow in the ground out in the country, and the supermarket brings them in here on trucks. Then
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people like you and me come along and buy them for our supper.’ They walked on down the aisle.” I was reading this book at the age of four, and I know I was reading it because I wouldn’t have been satisfied with it if I couldn’t read it. Plus, I remember, those earliest years in Richland, my mother protesting I wasn’t reading, that I was parroting by memorization, then when I insisted I could read she tested me with a book I’d not seen before and she realized I could read.
So, at eight years of age, I had known how to read for a long time. I read the fat red Roman Catholic book when I was six. Any dark humor in the burning up of Matilda went over my head (recommended grade level for Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children is third or fourth grade through seventh), I thought it horrifying (perhaps because of the commentary provided), but I read it. I gobbled up the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, his author’s bio was probably the first I paid attention to because of the fact that when he was a child and ill at home he’d write stories. The Beatrix Potter stories (ATOS Book Level 4.0=beginning fourth grade) and The Velveteen Rabbit (ATOS Book Level 4.9=late fourth grade) were favorites of mine when I was five and six.
But there is supporting evidence I also could not be understood as when I would begin to speak adults had a tendency to listen for a moment then turn away from me, as though I had disappeared, and talk to someone else, such as another more amenable child who wasn’t so shy when I was shy, or not so excited when I was excited and speaking a mile a minute. I loved to read aloud but when given the opportunity in second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Rainier (I’m not confident this was the spelling of her name), angrily stopped me. One day she said, "Stop pretending you can read," and took the book from me, as though I was a polluted being who had tainted the sacred alphabet. I'd listened to the other students reading aloud before me and had been confounded at how stilted they were, how they didn’t put any emotion into what they read. I had been excited for when my turn came as I practiced in my head how I would assume the individual voice of the character and give the text life. I had no idea what the teacher meant when she said I was pretending to read, but after that she separated me off from the rest of the class and while all else would read aloud I was instead off by myself with an old nineteenth-century primer, a McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book, which baffled me with its lists of words decorated with diacritical marks. Mrs. Rainier explained she had dug out this old book as it never failed in giving even the most difficult of children the foundation they needed for reading.
An endless source of exasperation for Mrs. Rainier, I was the sole student she also had tasked with coming in early every morning, about fifteen minutes before school started, in her bitter struggle to teach me my multiplication tables, which I couldn't begin to grasp for a long time. I wholeheartedly confess to being bewildered by math. The felt multiplication chart, placed before the chalkboard, was illustrated with a skier on a mountain, and I would stare at that skier with his long pointy cap with the ball tassel at the end of it and try to comprehend what the rest of the class had learned but I had not, what was the magic involved as the skier moved
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from number to number. What did it mean? How did this relate to the magnificent Mount Rainier that loomed over our state home? I wondered what relationship did Mrs. Rainier have to Mount Rainier and if it was named for one of her ancestors? How did the numbers on the felt board motivate and change with the man skiing the snowy mountainside? She complained about the time she was having to put into me, and I was thinking it was difficult for me as well because my mother was in the hospital with something we weren't supposed to call a nervous breakdown after she'd decided she didn't want kids anymore and had apparently tried to run off to California (I would never know the whole story, I just came home from school one day and she wasn’t there). Before going to school in the mornings I had to take care of the dog and chain it outside, feed it, help dress my two younger brothers for day care, get them their cereal for breakfast, fix sandwiches for lunch, then walk the mile (a little under) down George Washington Highway to school by myself and hope to get there in time to stare at the skier for fifteen minutes, and if I was late I was scolded for not respecting Mrs. Rainier’s time. With my mother in the hospital because she’d tried to run off to California, my not knowing how to wash clothes, and my wardrobe not having received any attention in a while, I was shamed when Mrs. Rainier scolded me for wearing the same unironed dress to school every day and told to pay more attention to my appearance. When that cotton green-plaid dress, which was several years old, ripped in front from the bottom of its skirt to above my waist while I was playing at recess, and I went to Mrs. Rainier for help, she said there was nothing to be done and I'd have to go home. There was no one to go home to, and it horrified me that she might call my father at work at Hanford as work was sacrosanct, he couldn’t be disturbed, besides which he took a bus to work. On the spur of the moment I picked up the stapler from her desk and stapled my dress back together. I hoped she would remark on my being clever enough to come up with that solution. When no praise was forthcoming, I began to understand that maybe some people just didn't appreciate creativity, which I decided was a skill I possessed and of which I could be proud, that I had been resourceful and capable enough to mend my dress with metal staples and so be able to finish the school day. Mending the dress with a stapler was an a-ha moment for me in which I realized that one didn’t have to go by the rules, one could come up with alternative solutions through innovation. Just because staples were usually used on paper didn’t mean they couldn’t also be used on a dress. I knew this was a big breakthrough that I could use in other areas of my life.
But the most significant injury that second grade year, other then being accused in front of the whole class with only pretending I could read, was that Mrs. Rainier wouldn't let me participate in the school Christmas play. Everyone else in the school had a part in the play. I was the sole student, out of the entire school, left sitting in their classroom alone while all went off to rehearse, and then all together give an illustrious performance on the last day before Christmas break, which sounds straight out of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Past taking Ebenezer Scrooge back in time to see himself as a boy spending a solitary, lonely Christmas at school while all else were having a jolly holiday. And yet it happened. While they were performing I sat alone in the classroom. I had no idea why I wasn't
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permitted to have a part in the play because as far as I knew I was as intelligible as anyone else, and I firmly believed I could be a good actor, just as I believed in myself as a reader. I loved plays. I loved stories. Plus they were in costume, and how much fun was that. Everyone who didn't have a part in one of the many skits was in the chorus as an elf, and I thought I should at least be in the chorus, but for some reason I wasn't allowed to stand with the rest of them and sing even though singing Christmas carols was the easiest thing in the world to do and I loved to sing. To compensate, because I could draw I sketched portraits of the other children in their costumes. This made me feel I was participating in a way that I could, of my own initiative. I also wanted to show I could do something to contribute and hoped maybe the teacher would notice and put my drawings on the wall as part of the Christmas celebration. That didn't happen, but a boy I liked asked for the drawing I'd made of him, and months later had me take time out of my mile-long walk back home after school to visit his home where I met his several hares and rabbits and his mother. She had my drawing, which I'd forgotten about, on the front of their refrigerator, the boy in his green and red Christmas elf costume with its green cap, and told me how much she loved it and how talented I was. That was novel to me, anyone taking notice of the art I'd done and saving it and displaying it. The boy asked if he could walk me the rest of the way home then when we parted on the corner outside my house he gave me my first little kiss. The last day of school he asked me to come by his home again but I had to go with my father and brothers to the hospital to pick up my mother and new baby sister.
Fork or knife.
I wasn't the primary subject being tested for learning disabilities. My next youngest brother didn't speak until he was around three years of age. In the kitchen in Seattle one morning I became aware this was a perhaps possible problem when I learned he was going into the hospital for testing to see if there was anything physically wrong with him that caused him not to speak. I was six, and I remember being skeptical. As far as I knew this wasn't a problem as I had never thought of him as not speaking, he had his own way of speaking around me and we communicated perfectly well and had full-blown conversations. I knew nothing would be found to be wrong with him. But for a moment he was a potential problem and the adults seemed to like busying themselves around this being a potential problem. After physical tests were run (which included a barium x-ray which he hated, protesting it was icky chocolate milk) it was determined he was fine. The doctor said he would probably soon start speaking, and he soon did to the satisfaction of the adults. Then when he started kindergarten in Richland he must have exhibited some potential problem or else it wouldn't have been suggested he be tested for learning disabilities. Because he was being tested, I was told that those who did the testing suggested I should be tested also. At least that was the story given me.
In third grade, away from Mrs. Rainier, while everyone else was having fun with more advanced texts, I was stuck with level one Sally, Dick, and Jane readers, the product of the John Dewey look-say method of whole word recognition (yes, the same Dewey
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librarian who gave us the Dewey Decimal system) that proponents of Guffey phonetics deplored and upon which rampant illiteracy would soon be blamed. I was fascinated by the illustrations and stories of a bizarre and perfect universe that despite all its little confusions was a place of happy safe spaces where every problem was minor and ended in laughter, an enviable world of order that was also worrisome as it was so exclusive in its hermetically sealed middle-class white picket fence boundaries. Sally, Dick, and Jane were so radiantly pink and otherworldly perfect they were almost embarrassing in their irrelevancy to anyone whose lives didn’t begin to even marginally border their version of this-is-a-normal-neighborhood, but it was also vaguely reassuring that out there was a world in which children didn’t forage empty refrigerators and cupboards looking for food to eat when the daily breakfast lunch and dinner of cereal ran out because their father barely cared to notice while their mother was drugged out on a mental health ward. I wanted to like the books, but I was so bored and frustrated by them that I surprised myself by one day completely forgetting myself and lying down on the floor and completely zoning out, unaware I’d done so until the teacher scolded me and asked me what I thought I was doing. Embarrassed, I took my seat again to apply myself to whole word repetitions.
Whereas before the testing I had been set off by myself as slow, the teachers were confused about what to do with me subsequent the testing as I was far ahead of the other students in respect of reading, which resulted in my being again set off from the rest of the class but this time it was because I was permitted to pursue my reading as I liked. While the other students were taught together, by myself I went through the levels of readers supplied, which felt like being gifted a massive treasure trove, what had been previously denied me as I had been considered too slow to tackle them. What wonderful thing had happened that made them now accessible? Why had I been forbidden access to them in the first place? At the beginning of this new arrangement, each time I finished a level, the teacher expressed disbelief, stating I couldn’t have read all of it, then she would orally test my comprehension and realize I had read all of it and understood it all very well. (See what I mean? Suddenly everyone understood me? It was so confusing when my parents said no one could understand what I was saying and now after the testing I was understood.) From then on she let me continue at my own pace without comment. This would have been the SRA (Science Research Associates) Reading Laboratory Kit with its color-coded levels, first published in 1957. A lot of kids didn’t like them, they even hated them, but for me they were reading heaven and the most rewarding challenge in the world was to read them quickly and have the accomplishment of finishing them all, pocketing those stories, that knowledge, and moving on to something bigger.
I was also set loose in the school library. Like now that it was known I could read they had decided it was okay for me to be around books, as if I was now responsible enough to have access to them, but not before. This made no sense to me as it seemed the way to ensure a non-reader would remain a non-reader was to limit their reading material and make it seem to them that they’d not proved themselves to be privileged to read. I was just glad to have been given free roam of the library now that I was a trusted reader. I would have loved to visit the public library, and had gotten
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my own Richland public library card during the summer with the hope of meeting the library reading challenges, but my mother took me once and then never again because, I don’t know, she couldn’t be bothered, maybe because it was just another one of those places where you couldn’t drink alcohol, which was her excuse for not going to PTA meetings. As a child, when my parents didn’t go to the parent-teacher meetings, and my mother said they were too uptight and prudish, forcing adults to be juveniles as they didn’t serve alcohol, I agreeably laughed at how stupid the meetings were, looking from her vantage and seeing the comedy of it, but I was also aware the point of the meetings wasn’t about entertaining my parents. One could argue that my mother didn’t have good memories of school and so was protecting herself by not engaging, but neither did my father engage. They refused to do PTA and parent-teacher talks. “If they really want us to come they would pay us for our time,” my mother said.
The passion for reading was where I did well, it didn’t cross over to being good at math, and when I was ten and we moved to Georgia that brief spell of a more rewarding time in education ended. None of my school progress reports, given to my parents, made it to Augusta, my parents said they didn’t know what happened to them, I showed up in November and because I was ten I was placed in fifth grade and I couldn’t understand half of what was being said to me by all these adults and the teachers because of their thick southern accents. I was especially confused when three things collided in my seventh grade year: a teacher who had again decided I wasn’t an able reader worked with me a little while on a program of speed reading using a tachistoscope and claimed success; I so failed an en masse eye test by the PTA at school that in front of the entire class I was declared legally blind by the tester; and whatever was the assessment that was given seventh graders to measure our skills rated me as in the 98th percentile on reading and comprehension, which was a twelfth grade level or above if I remember. Albeit my being dyslexic, it made no sense to me that I was being treated as a failed reader when I was testing so well in reading and comprehension, but because the teacher showed an interest in me, acting as though she cared, I did a painting for her as a gift, for some odd reason choosing to copy a
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wondered if the teacher was trying some psychological tactic to shock me out of stuttering? I was surprised by the hatred in her voice, when previously she had just seemed to ignore me. But more than anything else I was shocked that my body was harboring and expressing stresses that I couldn’t talk about, and that it would express the stress in this way. I was perhaps able to make the connection because I was, that day, preoccupied with the intensity of what had occurred the night before, burrowed down in it, not thinking of what was happening in class, not present. The teacher, who as I said generally ignored me, had never previously called on me to read aloud, and it could be she saw how disengaged I was that day and was hoping I’d not know where we were in the reading and have cause to chastise me. Maybe I sound like I’m being paranoid, maybe I am, I’m just wondering why she called on me that day. I had been following the text and knew where we were, but was unable to speak when called on, I stuttered and then choked up, I froze, the words wouldn’t come, no matter how I tried to make words I couldn’t, I made horrible gagging sounds trying to vocalize.
Though the seventh grade teacher who was nice to me didn’t know what to do with me, she had been nice, and that’s all that mattered. We didn’t have in-depth conversations, she didn’t know anything going on in my home life, I didn’t take refuge in her company at school, I barely spoke with her. But she would smile at me. She was just nice and smiled at me and because she was nice and smiled at me she was felt to be a friend rather than an enemy. At the end of the school year, as I was leaving elementary to go to junior high and we’d no longer be seeing each other, she invited me to drop by her house some time. I did once. In the eighth grade, on the spur of the moment, I dropped by to just say hello and congratulate her on having become the principal of the elementary school I’d attended. I was surprised she remembered me and surprised to see the painting I’d made for her hanging in her living room and was then embarrassed by the art as I didn’t think it very good, plus I was also wondering why in the world I’d chosen a National Geographic photo to paint.
With the failure of the eye exam began four years of medicine’s attempt to work experimentally and non-invasively with a genetic eye problem that was progressive and now severely impacting me, and which eventually would be decided required surgery else I would go completely blind in one eye, so I was told. Because of the problem, I had no depth perception. I was so used to my eyes being what they were that when I was given depth perception tests it was a struggle to try to determine what it was I was supposed to be seeing, I didn’t know what they were talking about as far as selecting from images objects that were closer rather than distant, and when I completely failed I wondered how that was because I couldn’t “see” what I was somehow supposed to be seeing. It dawned on me that one of the contributing reasons for which I had been unable to play games like baseball, in physical education, was because I’d had no depth perception. This was information that was somehow not passed on to my physical education teachers as in junior high I was still being tasked with playing such sports, and forever called into my PE teacher’s office to be lectured for not trying and being a failure. By the time I was in high school I was of an age to realize I didn’t have to put up with this nonsense and was able to be exempted from
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PE because of vision problems. After the surgery, which I had at sixteen, when given the depth perception test again, I got everything 100 percent correct, but I had to rely on being told everything was 100 percent correct because I still didn’t know what I was supposed to be seeing, I could only say what I saw, which I didn’t have to guess at and turned out to be right. The excruciating eye pain I’d had, however, disappeared, as did the bouts of tunnel vision in which everything would go black and for a short amount of time I would only be able to see a dime-sized area before me. I used to wonder if I was making the eye problem up, if it was all on my mind, just as my parents had told me, when I was twelve, that I’d made up the cement mixer man (I knew I hadn’t), and was so plagued by doubts that the fact my depth-perception score went from complete failure to complete success was the only thing that assured me there had actually been a problem, that I wasn’t accidentally somehow fabricating the problem, that I hadn’t unintentionally managed to delude the ophthalmologist into believing there was a problem when there wasn’t.
The dyslexia as well—or rather a suite of problems associated with dyslexia—have I made them up all my life or they real? There’s that same insecurity when your life experience has been repeatedly erased because you had to pretend none of it was ever happening, and the stories one’s parents tell concerning you change and change so there are multiple versions. What’s real? It’s real that when I was in third grade I was tested for learning disabilities, the exact breakdown results never related to me other than my parents telling me I had some sort of auditory processing problems and apparently had dyslexia-like problems but I would outgrow them. When they said my problems were dyslexia-like but I’d outgrow them, I translated this as, “You have dyslexia but we’ve decided to not admit it out right because that would mean we’d have to deal with it and we’d prefer to ignore it and place the burden on you to just cope.” I already intuited that I wasn’t going to outgrow whatever this was, I was just going to have to find ways to cope where I could. The big thing was that I knew how to read after all yet somehow no one had known this, but now they did. But I didn’t outgrow the problems and it was always confusing to me that I could actually read very well. How did this fit together? I didn’t know about dyscalculia but I knew I had a tough time with numbers and for this reason did poorly with math in school even sometimes for no other reason than I would always invert numbers. 319 would become 391. I would have intended for the answer to be 319 but would somehow write down 391 and so it would be marked wrong on a test even though I could point out how I had done the work (we were required to write down our process, to not have it be only in our heads) and gotten the right answer but reversed part of it. I inverted numbers at work when I was an adult. I’d think I was getting better and then it would turn out I wasn’t, such as when I was a waitron and a bartender pointed out to me I was sometimes inverting numbers and from then on they helped me out by checking my tickets for accuracy. Dysgraphia. I had taught myself to type when I was eleven because of difficulties handwriting, and finally when I was seventeen a teacher didn’t just allow me to use a typewriter for my homework but demanded I use it, the same teacher who gave me a bad speller’s dictionary. I nearly failed with my first stab at French in college not because of getting it wrong but because the professor couldn’t
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read my handwriting though I’d long since returned to only printing in order to try to make my work legible. Then I got a better French professor, one who was Parisian and liked me, and we did everything orally that couldn’t be typewritten and I got straight A’s under her. As for spelling. I would think I was getting better, even doing great, and then every few years someone would surprise me with the gift of a bad speller’s dictionary, which went into the trash like the other bad speller’s dictionaries given me beforehand because they did me no good and were seemingly not intuitive for my kind of misspellings. The arrival of the computer with spellcheck was a godsend. And my iPhone. I can check my notes in it for my correct address, to make sure I’ve not inverted the order of numbers or flipped them (such as with 9 becoming 6), which happens a lot, so I check it to make sure I’ve not messed up my phone number or house number. Same as my son does on his iPhone as he has my same suite of problems. Excuse me while I run down the adult dyslexia checklist. Do I confuse visually similar words such as cat and cot? Yes. Do I lose my place or miss out lines when reading? Yes, but I know I do and am careful about it. Do I confuse the names of objects, for example table for chair? Yes. Knife and fork for a different reason, but yes. Do I have trouble telling left from right? Yes, when writing stage directions for my plays I had to tape “left” and “right” on my word processor then computer in order to make sure I got it right, I always make sure to check left and right in what I’ve written to make sure I’ve not gotten them confused, and directionally I often accidentally say we need to go left or right when I mean the opposite. Is map reading or finding my way in a strange place confusing? No, map reading is no problem at all. Finding my way in a strange place can be disorienting but if I’m shown a graphic map I have no problem. Do I re-read paragraphs to understand them? Yes, but it’s a method I’ve long had in which I do a quick first scan and then reread for detailed comprehension. Or I sometimes have to read through a paragraph several times to absorb different levels of information, for main ideas are taken in first and then things like names and dates. Do I get confused when given several instructions at once? It depends on what it concerns. Do I make mistakes when taking telephone messages? I’m not bad at that. Do I find it difficult to find the right word to say? Absolutely. Do I often think of creative solutions to problems? Yes, or I like to think I do. Do I have trouble pronouncing new words or processing words with similar sounds? Yes. I’ll think I have sounded a word out correctly and thank you for being able to check pronunciation online, I make use of such available assists, for I’ll find out I’m wrong, and I have to check over and over again because I can’t remember how it’s supposed to sound. Do I find it difficult to organize thoughts on paper? That depends. Did I learn my multiplication tables easily? God, no. How easy do I find it to recite the alphabet? It’s OK as long as I sing it internally. Do I find it hard to read aloud? That depends on the situation, but I wouldn’t want to give a reading of my work. Do I find it hard to listen and maintain focus? Yes. It takes intense concentration. Watching movies and television programs I like to have closed captions. Did I have delayed speech development? As far as I was concerned, no, I believed I was fluent, but people apparently could have difficulty understanding me. Did I have difficulty memorizing letters and colors? I don’t know. Do I choose wrong words, reverse sounds or have confusion between words that sounded similar? Yes. Did I read more slowly than
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others? No. Do I have difficulty processing information and memorizing things in sequential order? Yes, to memorizing things in sequential order. And I best process information by example. Did I or do I avoid reading? Never. Does it take time to summarize what I read or write? Yes and sometimes. Do I struggle with spelling or learning a new language? Yes. Do I have difficulty memorizing text or doing math? Yes. Do I have difficulty conveying a story? I like to believe that I don’t. Do I have poor handwriting? Profoundly poor handwriting. Did I have poor academic performance? Not if I stayed away from math and fill-in-the-blank tests and could use a typewriter. I was always on the Dean’s List in college. Do I have non-linear thinking? Yes. Am I a visual learner? Yes. Do I have trouble remembering names? Yes. For which reason I hated fill-in-the-blank tests, I couldn’t remember names and my dates would be skewed. Now this website on dyslexia I’m currently looking at gives conditions that may give a disposition for dyslexia. Genetic? My father once confessed to reversing left and right but that’s all. My son is like me only worse. Was I premature birth or low birth weight? Both. Four pounds fourteen ounces. Did I experience exposure to harmful substances such as nicotine, drugs and alcohol during my mother’s pregnancy with me? Yes, nicotine and alcohol, my mother didn’t give up either for any of her pregnancies but I don’t believe many women did back then. Did my mother have infections during pregnancy? My mother had mononucleosis. Did I have exposure to stress at a very young age? Yes.
Don’t forget tying shoes! This website overlooks that issue. Dyslexic children can have a difficult time learning to tie their shoes. I was six years of age and still couldn’t tie my shoes and my mother was yelling at me every day, “What’s wrong with you! Are you retarded?!” Then some woman, I don’t remember who, realized something was up with this and said she had a no-fault way of tying shoes, and I learned in one lesson from her how to do it. She was magic. I was astonished. I wish I could remember who taught me to tie my shoes in a perfectly painless way. I had never before met anyone who was so kind. Had she been a regular in my life I would have lavished her with drawings.
Despite all this, I often wonder if I have made up my dyslexia and I may not actually have it, I just have imagined that I do. Then the day after I’ve written something I will look back over it and see—even if I had read over the material immediately after composing it—repeated phrases or words and words left out and words replaced with other words that don’t mean the same thing at all but may have one like letter difference or maybe be bizarrely not at all what I had thought I was writing, it will be a complete mess. I may have inverted word order, which is not uncommon for me to do when speaking. “We milk from need the grocery store.”
Occasionally when I’m speaking with someone, I won’t be able to understand a word they’ve said and will have to ask several times for them to repeat it, and still somehow the sounds won’t coalesce into being a word. It’s gibberish. I hate having to tell anyone I’m dyslexic so I don’t. I feel like I’m going to have to provide papers and prove it. I don’t feel it’s a weakness for others, and I don’t feel it is for me, as in we dyslexics have our strengths, we supposedly are good at making connections, have strong narrative
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reasoning, are good at three-dimensional thinking, are big picture thinkers, think outside of the box, are creative, but I’ve been embarrassed over it enough times with the gifts of dictionaries for bad spellers and my number inversions and my getting my phone number or address right so I panic every time I’m asked for either one. I worry that the confession I’m dyslexic will have readers looking for this in my writing, for the weakness of dyslexia, that they might not consider very intentional choices of style as intentional. I worry then that my dyslexic brain has actually an impact on my writing style that others would be able to pick up on if they knew I was dyslexic, and that this will be then interpreted as a pathological negative.
In one job it was my privilege to read through applications for scholarships for those wanting to go into journalism, and pick out those that were more worthy than others, and one of the applications that stood out to me was from an individual who was dyslexic. He was good. He was deserving. I pulled for him. I convinced the person for whom I was doing the selections to recommend him. So many of the applications for scholarships were from privileged students who were young and had parental money and a number of other scholarships already, this would be just an additional prize, there was nothing at stake for them, there was often even no personal connection to the career path to which this scholarship was dedicated, they weren’t even interested in becoming journalists. That wasn’t this guy who was Hispanic, dyslexic, older, had been attending night school, was not among the privileged or elite, and had impassioned recommendations from his adult-education instructors. No matter. He wasn't selected. But my employer had argued for him.
I remain grateful to the bartender who, when I was a waitron at a nightclub, guessed I was dyslexic, catching how I would sometimes invert the order of numbers, especially on busy nights, and quietly offered to check my tabs. I was head waitron and I think his care at being quiet about it was to save me from embarrassment.
One employer told me, after I’d quit, the day I went to pick up my last check, she having learned in the meanwhile from someone else I was dyslexic, that she never would have hired me if she’d known I was dyslexic as she had never met a dyslexic person with whom she got along, they thought too differently. And while that job didn’t end well, I was lucky to have it when I did. No hard feelings. I had quit because I realized she was about to fire me, and I had no idea what the problem was as I was a good worker. I could have sued her if if I hadn’t quit, if she’d fired me then told me this, but I probably wouldn’t have sued her, and as I was no longer working for her she was in the free and clear.
Neither my mother nor father did my homework with me as a child and never read what I wrote, and never listened to me read. My father not only expected me to fail out of life, he wanted me to fail. I couldn’t be better than him or my brothers, one of whom went into medicine and to a highly prestigious Ivy League school (not Harvard, the other one), became among the top of his field, much hard work, and the other went to university and did quite well in a computer-related field. My father never encouraged me to do anything or displayed any interest in my going to college, except
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for the one time he took me out by myself when I was fifteen to buy me an ice cream cone and told me that he knew things had been tough for me, taking care of my mother and siblings, but if I kept things pulled together then he’d send me to college in another city where I could live in a dorm, in other words where I could have a life. That was the extent of the conversation, that sentence, and that sentence was the last time I ever heard that promise. He did once say I was smarter than him, which was a shocker, and I can’t remember the context of his making that surprise admission but he wasn’t talking about IQ. Despite his refusal to expect me to do anything, his refusal to support me in any way, he never did call me stupid or tell me I wasn’t intelligent. That’s something decent about my father.
2
Knife or fork.
The learning disabilities test in third grade. Was I nervous about being tested? I don’t remember, but instead of it being scary the testing process turned out to be rather fun and whoever was giving it was nice. There were multiple parts to the test, including auditory. For one of the tests I was simply shown pictures and asked to identify what I was being shown. I heard the tester say afterward that I had gotten them right except for one. When shown a picture of a knife, I had said, "Fork." I was shocked, because I had known exactly what I had said. I had seen a knife and said, "Knife". I had heard me say the right word in my brain. Had heard me think it. I had heard me say it out loud. And yet I had not said it, I had said, “Fork.” And I had thought, "No, this doesn't have to do with a learning problem.” Which doesn't mean I don't mix up words. This had to do with a confusion with knives and forks when I was five. It had to do with a specific incident.
There's dissonance here as well. I am still muddled on forks and knives. Actually, I can no longer remember if I was shown a picture of a knife and said it was a fork, or if I was shown a picture of a fork and I said it was a knife. I forget if I almost immediately forgot which picture I had been shown or if that happened later. But I never forgot, obviously, about the confusion. What I imagined was the real reason for the confusion was a big deal for me.
We have these fun plates from Ikea that we all love that are white china with a design of black figures around the border that resemble eyes—eyes made of Bs, eyes in triangles, eyes in circles and ovals and squares. These plates were only available for a short while and it’s been many years since we purchased them so we are cautious with these plates, determined to preserve them though using them daily. When I first began working on this book, after dinner one night I was scraping the remains off my plate into the trash can, the lid held open with my foot on the trash can’s pedal. This was a relatively new can and it sometimes behaved a little differently than our old one. If I even slightly lessened my pressure on the pedal, the lid would sometimes
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snap closed, and quickly, so that it's startling. You'll be throwing something away and part of what you’re throwing away ends up on top of the can or on the floor because of the lid snapping shut. So I am scraping the food off my plate into the can, I had been turning away as I did so and the pressure of my foot lessened on the pedal. Suddenly it was all a confusion with it seems the lid having snapped closed and in so doing it had hit my hand and the plate I was holding, and I was now only holding half a plate, the other half of it shattered on the floor. I was irritated. A broken plate. One of our favorite ones. What an idiot I was. And I was confused because it happened so quickly that the sequence of events was mushed together, but I knew my hand hurt like crazy. Then as I opened the can to toss away the part of the plate I was holding I saw my hand was covered with blood. Not just smeared with blood. Blood was pouring down my hand in seeming streams, so much of it that I couldn't tell where I'd been cut. As I couldn't see where I'd been cut, this was also confusing. I saw the blood pouring down between the knuckles of my hand and it seemed like I saw it pulsing out of where I have the faint remains of what for many years was an obvious scar between the knuckles of my middle finger and ring finger. I felt a profound disassociation that I tried to shove away. My husband and son had heard the crash, and by now they had seen that the plate had not just broken but I'd been hurt. I was disassociated enough that I had to make the effort to will myself to go to the bathroom to wash my hand and stop the bleeding, I had to reason myself into walking toward the bathroom to do this, it wasn't an automatic, easy decision. I didn't rush as I was discombobulated and trying to pull my brain and body together into a unified functioning unit. My husband and son were both talking Neosporin. I was just trying to get in touch with carrying out what common sense should automatically tell you needs to be done. I knew I should tend my hand but I had difficulty focusing to do it. My hand was still pouring blood as I went to the bathroom sink and put it under the water rushing from the faucet, so much blood, still, even under the running water, that I couldn't tell where in the world I'd cut it. Then the blood began to wash away a little and I saw the middle knuckle of my third finger had been sliced up the side and over the top. It concerned me that it was deeper than I’d thought it would be but it was a clean slice and wasn't gaping. I didn't want to spend ten-thousand dollars on an emergency room visit and stitches and was bound and determined that just applying pressure would take care of it, and it did. I applied pressure and walked around waiting for the pressure to work. The paper towels I had wrapped around my hand becoming saturated with blood, I discarded those several times, applying more paper towels, and in a couple of minutes the bleeding stopped and a bandage was applied. All done and over with. No big deal after all.
I went in to sit on the couch, my nerves still frayed. My son imagined I was upset over one of our prized plates having broken and reassured me the plate could be replaced, he'd find one like it online. He also wanted to make sure I was feeling all right. And he wanted to give me a hug. I told him not to touch me, please, not right now. He didn't understand. Hugs are comforting. I gave him hugs throughout his childhood and he’s become an adult who isn’t embarrassed to hug. He returned after a bit and asked if I was ready yet for a hug. I told him no, that I was realizing I had been profoundly
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affected, I was having a flashback, also that growing up I wanted no one to touch me because when my parents touched me I'd always be hurt. I couldn’t be touched during a flashback.
It was the shock of the blood flooding down my hand, looking down and seeing it that had triggered me. I had in that moment, in the kitchen, flashed back to when I was five and how I had gotten the scar on my hand, between my knuckles, which one can still see a bit all these decades later and used to stand out. I had shot back to being five years of age and watching in shock as blood pulsed out of and poured down my hand. I had always remembered something about it, and had been confused that I had also forgotten what exactly had happened. I knew I'd been shocked, so stunned by all the blood that I couldn't think. I had always thought that somehow a knife had been stabbed in my hand but my brain short-circuited when I tried to unravel how it happened. One day, when I was five or six, sitting on the kitchen floor, I brought up to my mother the scar and how I had been somehow hurt by a knife, and her response had confused me as she scolded me that I hadn't been cut by a knife, that I was standing on a stool at the sink, washing dishes, I had fallen off the stool and when I fell on the floor a fork had fallen and a fork tine had gone into the back of my hand. I remembered standing on the step stool while I was washing dishes. But I remembered being shocked by a knife being plunged in my hand. After my mother told me that story, I kept looking at what was then a big scar on my hand, and trying to reason out the possibility of my having fallen on the floor off the stool, which was understandable, and the back of my hand somehow being stabbed with a single blunt tine of a fork, and with such force it left a scar.
Looking down at my hand as an adult and being surprised by the blood pouring down it, and in the same moment flipping back to when I was five and stranded in shock as I watched the blood pouring down my hand, I felt a glimmer of truth regarding a fragment of memory I’d always had. Which was that my mother had stabbed my hand as it was resting on the edge of the kitchen sink, which was what had caused me to fall off the stool in stunned amazement as the blood poured. But I also didn't remember it, instead there was just the moment of profound shock as I looked at my bleeding hand as a child, as I still stood on the stool, trying to comprehend what had happened, then becoming so overwhelmed that I collapsed, thus falling. It's weird how the brain works that way. The day I was tested in third grade, when I was shown a picture of a fork and I said knife (or vice versa), it was this incident I thought back to. I knew this was where my brain had shorted out on those two words, because I saw a knife plunge in the top of my hand as I stood there on the stool, but my mother said it had been the tine of a fork on the floor and from then on my brain would have problems sometimes confusing the knife with the fork.
This was a small thing in my life, and youth, comparatively. When I was older and my mother would often impulsively grab for whatever was at hand with which to attack me, when she grabbed up a steak knife or one of her sharp crochet needles, holding it like in the movies, the instrument clenched in her fist and raised above her head, no nonsense, I would run as much for my sake as for hers, not just so I wouldn't get hurt,
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but so she wouldn't reap the consequences of that impulsive action. I ran because I knew if she caught me she'd strike. We would run around and all over the house with her screaming at me to stop, to mind her and stop, me leaping over things and pushing things in her way until I made it to the door and would run out into the middle of the street, because I knew she wouldn't chase me out where the neighbors would see. If anyone was watching from outside, all they would see was me barreling out the door and running at full speed through the front yard and out into the center of the street where I'd stop and regain my breath, huffing and puffing, inwardly taking a moment to pat myself on the back for being nimbler and faster than my mother. Those all count as small things to me, all the times I got away, because nothing happened, which was the must and point of my running, to flee anything happening, to make sure what could happen didn’t. Afterward, nothing had happened in another way, my mother had done nothing, but I had been bad because I hadn't minded her, and my father would "discipline" me with a beating when he came home because I’d not minded my mother, I’d not stood still for her to discipline me, and I’d made her upset.
As for the cut on my hand from the plate, it turned out to not be bad at all. I wore a bandaid a couple of days and it healed right up.
I still feel a hard resistance within myself against the belief I’ve always had that my mother had stabbed my hand with the knife, which had caused me to collapse and fall. Because since I was five that has always been my belief. One doesn't like to accuse one's parent of stabbing them. But I was also always afraid one day my parents would kill me, then they one day made a solid effort in an attempt, which is when I fled home. So my fears proved to have a reasonable foundation, and I can, after decades, talk a little about that now.
And, still, writing, or thinking, "My mother stabbed me in the hand," is so...as with some other things in my life...it's so difficult, because what I most remember is the shock and the blood and everything turning weird around me, warping, because I was so overwhelmed. I was even confused as to how this had happened.
I do know for a fact that when I was hurt with the knife I was five years of age and had been standing on the stool before the kitchen sink in Seattle washing dishes. As I’ve said, my mother told me I fell off the stool and that a fork I went into the back of my hand when I fell on the floor. I remember washing dishes and then my mother is upset at me about something, my left hand is resting on the edge of the counter, and something suddenly happened that I wasn’t expecting, which shocked me, I had a flood of red blood pouring from my hand while I was still standing on the stool, I was bewildered, my senses couldn’t process this, and then I’d fallen, everything going dark. I must have momentarily fainted.
Children can misremember and misinterpret. Is it possible I did fall off the stool and onto a fork? I don’t know.
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I’ve more than once put a fork on the floor and experimented with trying to imagine how my small five-year-old hand fell on a fork in such a way that only one blunt tine jammed into my hand between the knuckles with such force as to leave a sizable scar. And what about the neighboring tines? Why would only one tine penetrate?
Also, for the first time it occurs to me that when we fall, if it was a normal fall from a stool as my mother had told me, our instinct is to break our fall with our hands, the palms of our hands, maybe our elbows or forearms, there’s even a name for this, it’s called the parachute reflex. But if the fork had gone into the back of my hand, as my mother asserted, that meant I had fallen on my back with the backs of my hands striking the floor, and it seems to me the weight of the fall would have been absorbed by my back, maybe even my elbows, and the back of my hand wouldn’t have struck the floor with such force as to drive a fork tine into it. A single tine. The back of my hand wouldn’t have even struck the floor first, receiving the full weight of the fall. It took me decades to reason that out, how when we fall, if we're able we automatically put our hands out, palms down, to catch ourselves.
Several months after the injury caused by the trash can lid slamming shut, I was washing dishes at our apartment’s old farmhouse-style original porcelain sink, and my son suddenly approaches from my right side and turns on the faucet to wash his hands. My response was sudden and involuntary, I reflexively slapped his side, which I know would have hurt as the slap really stung my palm. I also yelled, though I don’t recollect what. Immediately, it struck me how over-the-top my response had been, and I profusely apologized, I felt horrible about it, but I also wondered at my response. I’ve always had in my memory, that I was on the left, and my mother was on my right, and everything happened suddenly, unexpectedly, I’m standing on the step stool washing dishes and the next thing I know, there’s this abrupt movement from the right, and I’m shocked by what has happened, the blood, and I fall. I wondered if, when I reflexively slapped my son’s side in response to his blindsiding me by coming up from the right and turning the faucet, iI wasn’t responding to the present but to the past.
Perhaps what is most telling is that after that one time I asked my my mother about the scar, and she corrected me and said I’d gotten the scar by falling off the stool onto a fork, I never discussed it with her again, I never mentioned the scar again, I never again asked to hear the story of how I had gotten the scar and had fallen from the stool when doing the dishes, and she never brought up the story. I knew I didn’t believe her, that what she’d told me didn’t match up with what was the truth, and I knew not to bring it up again, that it was taboo territory.
When I was in my early thirties, I found I had a couple other scars about which I was having repeat, terrifying nightmares, but I didn’t even know the scars were there though they weren’t hidden. One day it occurred to me to take a look, to see if the scars I was having nightmares about were there, and I was amazed to find they were real, and that I’d been functionally blind to them. How was this even possible to have never seen them? How was it possible that I was so unconsciously, resolutely blind to them, while my dream brain kept yelling at me they were there and what had happened to cause them was so horrifying to me that each time they were brought up
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in a dream my dream self would seemingly pass out with overwhelming terror, the dream world going black, and I’d wake screaming.
Damn, you know, that sounds bad in the kind of way that it makes me want to delete it all and forget it. I don’t want to say anything definitive. I don’t want to say, “My mother stabbed my hand.”
One may not ever quite get over things. I don’t feel stressed while I’m writing about this, other than my brain is awhirl with whatever happened when I’m immersed in remembering, I’m in the kitchen again, outside the window above the sink it’s black night, the light from the ceiling lamp is both dull and bright, above my head from behind it glares but before me, at the sink, I can see very well but the light is dimmer. The stool isn’t a simple step stool, it has a seat like a chair and a backrest, and two steps set permanently like little stairs, they don’t fold out, to use the second stair you have to raise the seat, I know this because I’ve got several murky night photos of the kitchen that show the stool but not the sink and I’ve easily found it was a Cosco step stool, “hourglass” shape, sold for twelve ninety-five in 1961, I was surprised at the expense, that’s supposedly about 142 dollars today (!), I was even eventually able to locate one with the exact same printed pattern on the vinyl of the seat and backrest, and it happens to have been part of an auction out of Tacoma, Washington, below Seattle, that stool having sold for twenty-nine dollars in 2023. As it was the only one I’ve located with the same type of patterned vinyl, and it was in Washington, this makes me wonder if it was a style that was sold only in that area. I know if I am standing on the floor my shoulders meet the top of the kitchen counter, and that sometimes I stood on the first step of the stool and I think sometimes I knelt on the seat. In one of the photos, I’m seated on my heels in a kneeling position on the seat as I read the newspaper on a counter, turning a page that is very oversized in respect to my five-year-old body, I’m far in the background in the dark, the focal point of the photo being my littlest brother immediately before the camera, he has a cookie in hand and smiles happily for his picture. I do remember it was a little awkward for me washing dishes from the stool, I don’t have much room for flexibility on it, I can only reach so far, but I know also I’m well used to this job, washing the dishes, and I’m rather proud of myself for being grownup enough to do it, which doesn’t mean I like the chore. My hands are wet. The water may still be running in the sink. No, I know it is because I can hear it when I’m on the floor and when it’s turned off. My mother becomes upset with me about something, which isn’t unusual because one day she’ll tell me how good I am at a thing, which makes me feel proud and capable, and the next day she’ll get upset and tell me I never do anything correctly. Either I’m good or the worst and I know the praise or criticism has nothing to do with my performance as one day I will be told I’m good at a thing and then even if the outcome of my task is the same on another day I’ll be told I’m terrible. She’s on my right. I’m not looking at her because I’m concentrating on what I’m doing, she escalates very easily and quickly, and maybe I’m trying to appease by being super attentive with the washing which she complains I’m doing wrong there is no point in my washing dishes if she has to do them again so I’m already washing a dish over again to show she won’t have to do it, or I’m simply trying to avoid her agitation because one could never appease once she became upset, when she would erupt out of nowhere into an upset
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she’d always wind up to physically lashing out, as if that was the only way that energy could be dispersed and spent, there was no diverting, you couldn’t bargain. I only see her out of the corner of my eye. I am very focused on the washing, not looking at her as she flares. I can’t escape the wrath, there’s nothing I can do, I am trapped, so I keep washing the dishes demonstrating how I’m a good girl. Then whatever happens happens so suddenly and incomprehensibly I don’t scream, I’m speechless. I’m staring at my left hand, stunned. With the shock, I feel very small all of a sudden. I may be only five but with my responsibilities I always feel adult big. Now I am small. My brain cuts off. I don’t fall, I collapse, then I’m on the floor and I hear something said about my having fainted and it also argued that I’ve only fallen. Maybe both my parents were in the room or my father had entered. I think, no, I fainted because things went black and then I was on the floor. I know that I had fainted but now they won’t want to admit that either. The reason I know the water was still running is because I heard it and then heard it being cut off and it was so incongruous, it felt so out of place with what had happened, like when you are shown a picture and you’re supposed to point out the thing that’s out of the place, that’s how the running water sounded, out of place. Then I don’t remember thinking at all about the cut and then the scar until some time later, long after it’s healed and there is only the scar, yet I have also always remembered it in some way because I know that a knife caused the scar and that I’d been on the stool doing dishes. Maybe it’s a few months later, maybe a year, I’m on the floor of the kitchen playing with my siblings, my mother’s at the sink, and I don’t know why I do so but I ask my mother to tell me about when I was cut by the knife and fell off the stool when I was doing dishes, and she surprises me by telling me I’m wrong, I hadn’t been cut by a knife, instead I had fallen off the stool onto a fork. I’m surprised because I remember the knife and the shock and the falling. And I also know my mother did it. In silence I decide to not let go of my version of what happened for my mother’s. Because she has lied to me about what happened I know never to bring this up to her ever again, and never to my father either, I know we will never speak of this again. Still sitting there on the floor, I continue with what I was previously doing. However, despite my surprise at the story of the fork, and my rejection of it, a tug of war has begun between the two versions. I don’t accept her version but that second version now resides alongside mine, telling me I’m wrong. It was a little like a big burn I got on my elbow from the stove in Richland when I was three, for which I had to go to the emergency room, and hurt so much every day when the dressing was changed, the flesh sticking to the gauze, that my mother would give me a frozen Girl Scout chocolate mint cookie in order to coax me into letting her change the bandage because I didn’t want her to touch it. These special cookies were for her consumption alone, and I accepted the exceptional treat. For several days I looked forward to having the cookie, despite the pain, then on about the fourth day I was promised a cookie but I wasn’t given one as we’d run out. My mother had known we’d run out but had still promised a cookie, which I thought was unfair, and from then on there was no consoling cookie. As for the stove, I’d thought my mother had calmly told me she’d show me how much it hurt to be burned by the stove so I had to be careful of it, which had made no sense to me, but then I learned that instead of her holding my arm to the burner I had somehow carelessly done this on my own and I couldn’t remember how that was but it must have been the case as that was the story being told, so I decided I must be wrong, that it must have been as my mother said, that I’d
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put my elbow on the burner when I was climbing up on the counter, but it hurt to be burned and I didn’t know why I would have left my elbow on the burner for so long/for as long as she held it there. That was my confusion, that I could think I didn’t know why I would have left my elbow on the hot burner for as long as she held it there. It was also confusing to me as I had climbed up on the counter from a chair to get myself things from the cupboard for as long as I could remember and I knew to be careful because she’d taught me to be careful, she was a good mother in that she had taught me to be careful of the stove, to hold anything pointy with the pointy end down so I wouldn’t trip and stab out my eye, to look both ways before I crossed the street. I always prided myself on how I capably took care of my needs by myself, able to get a drinking glass from the high cupboard, and that I wasn’t careless, my mother even a couple of times had mentioned to her friends about how from the time I was small I would climb up to the counter to get what I needed which was mentioned in context of her story of how I had climbed up to get my chewable vitamins out of the cupboard, that she and my father got up one morning and found the empty bottle, which had been full, on the floor, I’d eaten all the vitamins, and I’d had to go to the emergency room and have my stomach pumped, an event I didn’t remember and so I was surprised to learn of it. Though I accepted my mother’s story about the burn as the truth, every time I thought of the burn I felt her story grate against my initial memory of her holding my elbow against the burner, for which reason I always remembered my version as well though I accepted my mother’s story as the truth. Photos of the first Richland kitchen remind me that there was no cupboard above the stove, it was instead above the counter next the stove, so there was no reason to climb up on the stove to reach anything. My brother, B, was also a climber and in what I think are our last photos taken in Richland, before we move to Seattle, it’s Christmas, he’s shown standing on a chair to reach a light switch in the living room by the front door, then in the kitchen standing on the seat of the step stool, at a year-and-a-half, reaching onto the counter next the stove for a treat. My parents were proud of how active he was, what a climber he was, how he was so strong he busted out a couple of bars on his crib to be able to get out of it. He was a handful, I know, because it was my job from when he was small to watch after that handful and keep him safe and entertained. When I try to think about that burn, which I have rarely done, I’ve occasionally recalled an excuse for suffering the burn was that it would teach me to look out for B, to make sure he was never burned, this is how much it would hurt him if he was burned, which means I would have been four when I was burned. I don’t know. I check the news and Girl Scout cookies were sold in March in Richland in 1960, I know B was very active physically at nine months, which he was in April, I was walking at about nine months, my son was walking at nine months using furniture to support him, and it’s within the realm of possibility that I was burned around then, when B, was nine months old, or even a little later if my mother dealt the cookies out parsimoniously to herself from the freezer. The burn was never mentioned after it healed, and I never brought it up. Though I’ve always retained my version of the event, though I might wrestle with it, I didn’t want to too deeply pursue the matter, and as I write about it I do realize there is some deep upset as I feel nauseous, I don’t want to go there, I don’t want to include that memory, but I have resolved that I will. In Seattle, despite the fact I know my mother injured me (stabbed me, which is difficult to write out loud), it is a struggle to hang onto that knowledge, because my mother says I did this by falling on the fork and I don’t want to accuse her falsely.
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Because her version of the story is different, even though I know it’s not right, though I know she’s lying, which is why I never ask about it again, I then felt that even to think she had done this is to risk accusing her falsely. It was also tough to hang onto the knowledge she did this because I was completely unprepared and hardly knew what was happening when I was stabbed. I couldn’t process it. It made no sense to be stabbed while I was washing dishes. It was decades before I told anyone what had happened. The first person I told was my spouse, then later a couple of other people. But I had always remembered, and I had always not wanted to accuse falsely as my mother’s story was different and she was the adult so her story had more weight. I even rather felt I should accept her story and let mine go, it would be easier, I understood this was an alarming thing to believe one’s mother had done, a horrible thing, which made me feel guilty for holding onto my story even though I told no one.
As I write I’m not stressed with thinking about being stabbed, more bewildered, still bewildered, my head feels congested with bewilderment like it’s a whirling gale of interference in my cranium, like my brain is still fighting to comprehend what happened, but I’m not distressed as I write, not how I would define distressed, my head just hurts with that whirling gale of congested interference. After I’m done writing about this I realize oh I probably may need a hug, I need connection, I’ll take care of myself in the now by getting a hug, so I ask for a hug. I have a long conversation about nothing to do with what I’ve been writing, I don’t want to mention this is what I’ve been working on. Feeling alright, I get up from my desk and it’s when I leave my desk and go in the other room and sit down that it hits, my right leg starts shaking and jumping and I realize I’m shaking inside. After a little while I realize I can gain distance by moving myself in time, away from Seattle, and thinking instead about when the trash can lid hit my hand in this apartment and the plate broke. I had been briefly bewildered but I understood what was happening, then when I saw the red blood not just flowing but pulsing from my hand time shattered and I was amazed to realize I was literally seeing two things at once as I looked at the blood, present and past, to see the past through the present, through the blood pulsing out of my hand, the past looked so crystal clear in that moment and still does, it was the pulsing of the blood that was the bridge, and as I look at it again in memory the congestion is cleared away where the blood pulses out like a small break in the clouds, however I became also uncertain if I was actually seeing my blood pulsing out in the present or seeing through all that red to how it had been in the past. As I stare again, in memory, at where the two events merged, I have realized that I’ve been breathing shallowly and I begin to inhale, to breathe more deeply, because it’s easier to not be in the kitchen in Seattle, it’s easier to examine it all in our current kitchen, when I move myself in time to when I was sliced by the plate and experience both events at once it is somehow easier to cope with Seattle.
A day later, after I finish the chapter, I feel even a little more resolution.
Then I look at the photo of my mother holding my little sister, A, at her baptism, the one in which I’m standing before Father Dolan, I look at how none of us are smiling in the photo except for Father Dolan, and I wish that I could give my mother the gift of having been a good mother and shutting all this down. But I can’t. I don’t believe it was important to her anyway. She was never interested in mothering. What she
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most wanted was comfort and security, privileges which she had. She did not, I honestly believe, feel any guilt. One might imagine she did as why else would she live in a state of denial, she must have known she had committed grievous harms and was ashamed, for which reason she lied. But wanting her versions of our history to be believed, to be the ones we remembered, is a different thing from guilt coupled with a desire to do better, to make up for past wrongs, to care.