“The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.” ― Alice Miller (“The Drama”)
Seth Low Junior High School
As a child, I scarcely noticed the black wrought iron gates surrounding the school on the way to my neighborhood park that was also named after Seth Low, a New York City mayor (1901-1903) who believed in education for all.
Then as a teenager I grew older there with students like myself, children of immigrants. Although I lived in a working-class neighborhood, I never felt poor.
We lacked adequate heat in the winter. Many cold mornings I awoke to irate tenants banging on the radiators — an atonal chorus requesting warmth. During the summer, mosquitoes feasted, as we had no air conditioning or screens.
But our rent-controlled housing was roach and rodent free. Friendly Italians painted our apartments every other year with smelly, oil-based paint that eventually dried and lost its odor. Our trash was collected regularly, and the street sweeper came often enough to keep the neighborhood tidy.
Food was plentiful, if not fancy. Soft drinks were a treat since they were so expensive. Lilly would share a bottle of Pepsi on a hot summer day.
Because my father’s union provided healthcare and fought for decent wages, we could afford to eat out at a Chinese restaurant twice a year.
But the biggest gift a civic-minded city in a progressive state gave us was access to a quality education from kindergarten through college.
Based on IQs and academic performance, exceptional students at Seth Low advanced to a Special Progress program after sixth grade. About a hundred of us would finish grades seven, eight and nine in two years. We were a school within a school, only seeing the regular students at assembly, lunch or during gym.
This segregation continued through high school. The public school system then placed us in a scholarship tier, which was more challenging than honors classes.
Those in the scholarship tier did not have to worry about college tuition. All easily qualified for the City University of New York, which was minimal ($25 a semester).
Positive role models surrounded us: older siblings and neighborhood kids on their way to being doctors, lawyers, CPAs, teachers, professors, engineers.
Enthusiastic teachers encouraged us, but others perpetuated gender stereotypes.
As I was about to graduate from ninth grade, Mr. Berger, my science teacher, signed my autograph book: “When you are married and turn on the stove to cook dinner, I hope you are reminded of the Bunsen burners you used in high school chemistry.”
The Gray Wool Skirt
In junior high we wore cotton-that-had-to-be-ironed skirts the last month of the school year.
One June morning I awoke to find all of my cotton skirts either dirty or freshly laundered but wrinkled. I had no time to do anything but put on a gray wool skirt and hurry to school.
My mother, too depressed to dress herself every day, could not muster the energy to iron my clothes. My father, a fur cutter, did not earn enough for me to have more than a basic wardrobe.
I was overwhelmed.
As a member of the Special Progress program (now called Gifted and Talented), I had lots of homework.
Then there was the awkwardness of puberty. I probably could have ironed my skirt in half the time that it took to make sure my hair was right.
Finally, I was trying to be kind to my nerdy friends from elementary school while courting the popular crowd.
Wearing a wool skirt was not a winning move, but I managed to escape detection until assembly that afternoon. Assembly was always tricky because we did not sit with our homerooms but instead had to mix with the regular kids, who didn’t like us.
When the girl next to me said her name and homeroom and asked for mine, I slurred 7SP1 after clearly stating my name.
Seconds passed before she simultaneously registered what I said, noticed what I was wearing, and shouted, “A wool skirt?! How could anyone wear a wool skirt in the summer? Especially one of those SP kids?”
Silence
When I was 14, my mother and I went to see Two Women with Sophia Loren. I don’t remember if I asked her to go, or she asked me, but we went to a Sunday afternoon showing at a theater that was a bit of a walk.
It was the first time, and the last, that we saw a movie together.
I can see the rapist’s face. I can feel the daughter’s terror. I think her mother later became friends with the attackers.
I don’t recall knowing what rape was.
We left the theater in silence. During the long walk home, my mother never addressed the disturbing emotions she must have known I felt.
She Tried
Our final project in junior high sewing class was to make a swimsuit cover-up. We bought the pattern after I said that I wanted a terry cloth robe. My mother was an accomplished seamstress, but she let me choose a pattern meant for a much lighter material.
She promised to help but didn’t. After I cried, she took over. It wasn’t a success. I think the teacher realized that I hadn’t sewn the robe myself.
Years earlier, my mother half-heartedly became the leader of a Girl Scout troop because that was the only way I could join. She had no patience.
One summer after her husband died, Lilly brought over some material that she couldn’t use. My mother had helped Lilly sew curtains for her daughter’s new house, so this may have been a thank you.
I wanted to make shorts. One bolt was light blue, the other light green. I had never put in a zipper before, and Lilly beamed at how quickly I learned.
I loved having two new pair of shorts. Then I tried them on. My underwear showed through the thin material. I never wore them. My mother, had she been healthy, would have known better.
Soon after, I knit a button-up sweater with a red and black picture of two elk fighting on a white background. My mother decided to save some money on the wool and didn’t get the excellent brand that she always bought. I washed the sweater before wearing it so I could block it, and I sobbed as the colors ran. This had taken a long time to make since the pattern changed colors frequently on a single line.
Now I consider these incidents a side effect of my mother’s depression, a reality that an immature teenager could not apprehend.
Stitches
At Macy’s my mother and I bought the tablecloth I was to cross-stitch, along with the neutral taupe embroidery thread that meant I could use it with any dishes I chose once I was married. We also purchased a wooden hoop to hold the material taut.
An adult neighbor wanted to show me a stitch I already knew, but my mother encouraged her to teach me anyway. The neighbor took my work and, instead of leaving each X to stand on its own, overlapped the first stitch with the second, top and bottom, anchoring each X to the one before it.
She did this for several rows.
When I told my mother that I hated this technique and wanted to rip out the neighbor’s work, my mother chastised me for not being grateful.
Later, I replaced the neighbor’s stitches with my own.
Lurking
Had my father been a positive presence, he might have alleviated the effects of my mother’s intermittently harmful parenting.
Had my father been just an average, if absent, dad, he might have had no effect on my childhood.
But he was neither.
My father’s bizarre behavior remained a constant threat.
I Did Not Make You With My Finger
“I did not make you with my finger,” he would shout, apropos of nothing.
The words smacked my soul.
My father often used words that conjured images of his penis.
My brother tried to shush him.
He Goosed Me
I did nothing to provoke him. I was ahead of him on the steps leading to my babysitting job in a nearby apartment building.
I was 13.
I never wanted to live in his house again.
I never trusted him again.
He had no right to touch me. He violated my space, and I hate him still.
I resisted in any way I could. I avoided him as much as possible. I earned my own money. I held onto the thought that I could leave one day. Given the times, marriage may have seemed my only escape, but I never stopped learning. A good education would be my salvation.
Momentary Respite
I remember lying in the bed — the opened half of the sectional in the living room — waiting for him to leave.
I pretended to be asleep, but that did not stop him from playing the kitchen radio as loudly as he wanted.
I hear him make breakfast. Eat breakfast. Walk back and forth in the hall leading to the living room. Forget to turn off the radio. Open the apartment door. Slam it shut.
I dared not get up immediately because he might return, having forgotten something.
I waited.
Then I slowly breathed a sigh of relief and began my day.
Resistances
If I didn’t kiss him as soon as he walked in the door, he would get angry and threaten to withhold my allowance.
I remember the last time I let him bribe me. With great reluctance, I walked from the living room where I had been doing homework and into the short foyer.
When I kissed him on the cheek, I smelled the cold air he brought in. It was winter.
I suddenly realized that I did not need any money from him, as I was babysitting.
I have no memory of telling him that. I have no memory of exactly what happened the first time I did not kiss him, although I do remember his yelling.
I knew that somehow I was free, even though I had to live in his house and eat the food he provided.
Once married, I still wanted to earn my own money. I was uncomfortable when raising children made that difficult. I found time to write magazine articles and work for a local paper.
Scars have their own strength.
I was born full of potential, but landed on unfertile ground. Unfertile, Dr. S said, and dangerous.
Agency
It’s not a “card you pull out of your pocket and lay on the table,” NY Times columnist David Brooks writes. “Agency is learned, not bred. And one of the things that undermines agency most powerfully is past sexual harm.
“The abuse of intimacy erodes all the building blocks of agency: self-worth, resiliency and self-efficacy, the belief that you can control a situation.”
Brooks’ words offer hope to victims of childhood sexual abuse. “Agency is learned.”
Finding this hope has been difficult for me. Self-worth, resiliency and self-efficacy are more easily learned in a loving home.
Denied affirmation by my parents, I shut down. Later, positive feelings engendered by nurturing friendships, academic achievements and professional success remained external only.
Eventually, I allowed them in.
“You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself,” (Coudert 131).
Because of
Let’s not dismiss what you have become, my therapist said.
You are you because of pain in the past.
You are uniquely compassionate.
You have a certain strength because you survived.
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