Entry #26: THE WEDDING GIFT

I can’t believe I got married so young. In hindsight, it seems insane. I finished up my last year of college in May and got married in June. But, as occurs in so many relationships, we had reached that point of: “What are we doing?” Women don’t have an unlimited amount of time to ponder. If things are NOT going to work out, it’s better to realize it sooner rather than later. In our case, we decided to go for it.

It was kindof a miracle my wedding came together at all. I knew nothing whatsoever about weddings. I hadn’t been to any, and didn’t know anyone my age who’d had a regular wedding before me. (Elopements were not going to help.) I was far too busy finishing up college to read “Brides” magazine. And this was before the Internet, which today ensures everything you need to know to plan your Big Day is at your fingertips is in less than one second.

I received no advice whatsoever, except from the minister who married us. I envisioned a lovely garden wedding with summer breezes and butterflies, but Jack Lewis convinced us to marry in his beautiful little church. “Years later,” he said, “It’s nice to drive by an actual building and say, ‘That’s where we got married!’”

He was absolutely right. Also, there was a rip-roaring nor’easter the night before our wedding. The next morning it was still raining and the streets were covered with broken tree limbs and shredded leaves. My imagined summer ceremony would have been a complete, sodden loss. Instead, our guests squeezed into the quaint country church for a cozy ceremony among friends.

I received no advice and no money from my parents, but they did agree to host the reception at their home. Luckily, a cheery yellow-and-white tent with a dance floor had been set up on their lawn two days ahead.

To keep things cheap, we bartered an oil portrait by Artiste for a home-made wedding dress. This was a mistake. I recommend that all brides take the time to try on pretty dresses rather than have their wedding dress assembled by someone who wears military grade perfume and has a crush on their fiancé.

I thought it was my responsibility to pay for bridesmaid dresses (it wasn’t), so I just didn’t have any bridesmaids. That was another mistake. Weddings are more fun when you share the experience.

My friend Tildy served as the Matron of Honor. Her father flew her to a tiny airstrip in Rhode Island in his own tiny plane. It was a blustery day, and he had a hard time landing. It took several passes. I could see Tildy’s face in the window each time the plane came in for a landing, was buffeted from side to side, and sped up again into the sky. By the time they landed successfully, Tildy was thoroughly sick. She also was pregnant.

My mother arranged the food and booze, which was, yes, another mistake. She planned for a little of the former, but plenty of the latter.

No one suggested that we find someplace nice to stay the night of the wedding – another mistake. We ended up in a cheap motel five miles from home with questionable neighbors on the other side of the motel room wall.

No one mentioned a honeymoon, so we never took one. That was – you guessed it – another mistake.

I felt guilty registering for any gifts, because it seemed greedy to me. I just wanted our friends to have fun. This was – well, a mistake. People WANT to give presents, and they need some guidance. I did not understand that part at all, and of course no one explained it to me.

Most of these mistakes could have been prevented, but a few things simply could not have been predicted.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my aunt drank too much and stabbed my wedding cake repeatedly with a long knife.

A friend of a friend had just gotten divorced and spent the entire day weeping in the house. Every time I passed through the downstairs on what was supposed to be the happiest day of my life I saw her agonized, red, tear-stained face.

One guest was selling marijuana from his pockets behind the house.

One of my very best friends over-indulged a bit in champagne, fell down the stairs, and later disappeared with the photographer.

But all in all it was a grand reception because I knew there was one thing I positively wanted, and that was a square dance. No fuddy-duddy old people music! No one sitting in chairs watching! We had a great bluegrass band and a caller who got everyone up on their feet and swinging around in do-si-do’s.

The most bizarre event of all occurred a couple of days before the wedding. We received from a distant relative a book of Aubrey Beardsley drawings. Why on earth he thought this was appropriate I’ll never know. According to Wikipedia, “Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and grotesque erotica.” Beardsley himself was thought to be gay, but also may have had an incestuous affair with his sister. In all honesty, I would have preferred a cut glass pickle dish to this slim volume of black-and-white drawings.

My mother was absolutely FASCINATED by this wedding gift. It was rather incomprehensible to me, but definitely pornographic in its intent. Artiste and I scanned through the book, laughed very hard, and left it with the other gifts when we went out to run some errands.

When we came back, my mother had already drunk her lunch and was wandering about the house. We thought we would take another look at our peculiar wedding gift, but it was nowhere to be found. My mother finally confessed that, AFTER reading the whole thing from cover to cover, she had burned it in the fireplace. Sure enough, there was a pile of smoking ashes in the living room fireplace.

Today I am just full of information for brides-to-be. Buy a dress! Order plenty of food! Plan a honeymoon! And don’t let your alcoholic mother get into your presents.

Entry #25: THE WRONG CHILD

When I was little, I was the last child of three, and the only girl. I was cute. I liked to sing. I adored both my parents because they were all I knew. After a long day at work, my father would come home in his suit and tie, a mechanical pencil and slide rule in his shirt pocket, and I would be happy to see him.

My mother hated having me around all day. She once showed me a cartoon of a mother vacuuming, and a toddler following her, dropping crumbs while eating a cookie. “See THAT?” she said, jabbing her finger against the page. “That’s YOU.”

I was confused. I didn’t really understand the cartoon, but her resentment was ferocious. I got that part.

While I was little, my oldest brother, Richard, was the Wrong Child. He was creative and funny, with an uncanny ability to mimic people. He read science fiction, and drew very skillful drawings of space creatures and other oddities of his imagination. He wrote strange stories. He bought comics and monster magazines and taped monster pictures to his bedroom wall. As he got older, he liked beer, and girls. He stayed out too late and wasn’t sorry. He was handsome, he was cool, and he had exactly the right flip in his hair for 1963.

As far as my parents were concerned, he was the worst son on Earth. They wanted a son who would go to Yale and become a lawyer – even though neither of my parents had managed to accomplish this. He was subjected to constant abuse, emotional and physical. He was sent away to camp. He was left home alone while the rest of us summered in Rhode Island. Eventually he just removed himself from the planet, where the criticism of my parents could no longer reach him.

My other brother, one year younger than Richard, was extremely bright and academic. He did not make trouble. A well-rounded and stellar student, he always provided my mother with something to boast about. After Richard died, my other brother decided to play things very, very safe. He saw what happened to creative people.

So then it became my turn to become the Wrong Child. Although I was the only student who took five subjects at the Shipley School, that wasn’t good enough. Although I got a 740 on my SAT, that wasn’t good enough. (My mother consoled me by saying, “That’s OK – you can’t always get 800s.”) Although I was working New York by age 23, that wasn’t good enough. I was supposed to grow up and marry a lawyer from Yale, and I did not come through. My mother told me I had “broken her dreams.”

I've already mentioned in earlier entries that my mother used to tell me there was a "secret Nellie" living inside me - a different personality who agreed with everything she said, but for some reason would not reveal herself. I found this idea disconcerting the first time my mother said it, but I realized it was just another way of indicating she did not like me the way I was.

I am certainly not the only person with this problem. After all, look at “Mommy Dearest”! In my case, there were no wire coat hangers, but there was constant emotional sabotage. My mother would use other people as examples of the kind of daughter she wished she had. No matter how hard I tried to please her, there was always someone FAR better. This game continued for decades. In fact, it never ended.

Who were these Better Daughters?  Mostly they were - in my mother's mind - perfect examples of financial success and filial piety. They had acceptable husbands. They had money. And they were endlessly devoted to their mothers.

"Who are these people you think are so wonderful?" I once challenged my mother, when she complained yet again that I was an inattentive burden and disappointment.

"Lisa," she answered immediately.

Lisa sold weed as a teenager and eventually became a heroin addict. She moved back home with her aged parents because she had lost everything and had nowhere else to go. My mother, with her usual acuity, saw this as an act of loyalty and adoration, and felt I should be more like her.

"She's a drug addict!" I cried.

An addict herself, my mother could not have cared less about details like heroin. She saw what she wanted to see. It was truly grating that my mother held a heroin addict in higher regard than me. I hung up the phone in disbelief. This was clearly a battle I was not going to win. The rules were made up by a crazy person.

On another occasion my mother mentioned a friend of hers who’d had a stroke and, luckily for her, had a Superior Daughter. She said Leah came EVERY DAY to sort out her mother’s medications and read to her. At the time I was living in another state and was hardly in a position to visit my mother every day. I could not compete with a visiting angel like Leah.

My mother repeatedly compared me unfavorably to the mythical Leah. Later on, I found out that Leah did not live anywhere near her mother. It was just a story my mother had made up. She may have convinced herself it was true, but this Perfect Daughter with whom I was thrown into competition did not even exist. Another battle I could never win.

Another favored child was Philip, a man my age with an impeccable pedigree who, according to my mother, had made a fortune in the stock market and was building a large, wonderful home nearby. She went on at length about how successful he was, and asked why I couldn’t be more successful like him. My career in publishing was virtually meaningless to her. She had nothing fantastic to tell her friends about me. I might as well have worked in the bathroom at Grand Central Station.

A few months later she mentioned Philip again, forgetting her first story. Dementia was beginning to make it hard for her to keep her lies straight. This time she said he was using all of his elderly parents’ money to build an enormous house, and that he had not included any space in it for the old folks. So now Philip was on the Naughty List. It was a hollow victory, and short-lived, but still satisfying.

Another favorite was Heather, a woman roughly my age who always agreed with everything my mother said, thoroughly ingratiating herself with her. This annoyed me no end, because most of the things my mother said were simply not true. She loved people who would agree with her, no matter how outlandish her remarks were.

I would disagree with my mother often - telling her she should not refer to her caregivers as “The Africans,” noting that she could not possibly be as blind as she pretended to be, and reminding her that barely 1% of the elderly population could afford to live at home with several full-time caregivers as she did. “Oh ALL my friends live this way!” she exclaimed. No, they did not.

Heather would never make waves by arguing with my mother. She also had money – VERY important to my mother – as well as two sons who apparently were perfect in every way. Because Heather did not need them, my mother gave her gifts from the house. My mother particularly enjoyed giving away things I would have liked to receive myself – not just the valuable things, but items I remembered from my childhood. No gifts for me.

While I was living in Massachusetts, an older woman, Faith, took a keen interest in my parents in their old age, and claimed that she enjoyed them greatly because her own parents were dead. This was highly suspect, because NO ONE enjoyed my parents that much.

Faith intruded into every area of my parents’ lives. When they moved to the retirement place, she went through all their furniture. According to my mother, Faith was helping them decide what to bring with them. I wondered what the hell Faith was up to, but my mother thought she was marvelous and SO supportive, unlike me. In fact, Faith was so nice she once drove all the way from her home to the retirement place, picked up my mother, brought her back to the old Victorian house that was still filled to the rafters with antiques, silver, and china, and then suggested to my mother that she go through all her valuables. No one else was present. To thank her for this thoughtful gesture, my mother gave Faith the most valuable painting and the most valuable sculpture left in the house.

When I heard about this I pointed out it was quite remarkable that Faith was willing to walk off with the most valuable items in the house without even consulting my brother or myself to see if we cared. My mother responded imperiously that she WANTED Faith to have those things because, of course, she was a Better Daughter. No artwork for me.

Obviously I would never be the Right Child. It frustrated me no end that on some level I could not get past the desire to be loved and accepted by my mother. I knew perfectly well that this was like wishing for water to flow uphill, or for summer to follow fall, or for us to light candles with our fingertips, or put stars in our pockets.

But there is one way to win at this hopeless game, and that is by paying it forward – that is, by giving my own children all the unconditional love in the world. I am blessed with two kids, and the minute I saw them I knew I would crawl across broken glass for them if I had to. Certainly they get mad at me. Certainly parenting can be exasperating. But they know I would never change anything about them, and that I would go to the ends of the Earth to help them. I know I’ve made plenty of mistakes as a mother, but lack of love is not one of them. It is my privilege and my honor to adore my kids wholeheartedly, every day.

Entry #24: SICKNESS

If you happened to have read Entry #9: The Heiress, you will recall that both of my mother's parents were doctors. This was pretty unusual for the time. Her father was a renowned psychiatrist, and her mother graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1911. She practiced for ten years before becoming pregnant with my mother. In 1923 she had a caesarean delivery, and two days later she was dead. One life given, another taken away. It was not an equal exchange.

So it seems strange that my mother never had any respect for psychiatrists OR physicians. She believed that "people like us" did not need psychiatrists (how VERY wrong she was!). She called all doctors "quacks," no matter how esteemed they were. She went out of her way to be demeaning about quacks and never valued anything doctors told her. This may have been related to the inability of doctors to save her mother, but it also is typical of her world view about everyone.

My mother often filled prescriptions but then refused to take them, believing each doctor's advice to be ignorant. But it was hardly as if she knew better than they did!

My mother showed no interest in even basic medical concepts, and did not use the correct vocabulary for anything. She would call me daily with her medical concerns, so I was used to this, but even I had to ask what she meant by "my tail wiggled."

My mother had three children. When I was in my 20s, she asked me what a placenta was. I realize times were different in the 50s, but wouldn't most women know this, after three kids?

The alcohol made things worse because my mother could not remember much of anything, from our birthdays to what childhood diseases we'd had. I was the last child, and she remembered the least about me. The effect was a little like being adopted and losing my entire medical history.

My mother had an unerring way of consulting the WORST doctors on the planet, which only fueled her disdain for quacks. I don't know how she found them. She certainly did not check their credentials. When it came to her own medical care, she would shop around until she found a doctor who told her what she wanted to hear. It took her several tries before she found a general practitioner who told her she could keep drinking at her customary level. All of a sudden, THIS doctor's advice was valuable. She called me to report joyfully, "Dr. Bottomofherclass says my liver is perfectly FINE!" I was furious.

Later in life, going to doctors became my mother's preferred form of entertainment. She was careful not to tell the doctors about each other, or to notify one doctor what prescriptions she had received from another. She enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger, hide-and-seek aspect of withholding this information. The doctors would prescribe medications at cross purposes with each other, depending upon which story she told which doctor.

Despite drinking inordinate quantities of alcohol, my mother enjoyed perfect health. She usually had several doctor appointments a week just for fun. She developed macular degeneration, and went to innumerable eye doctors in many different cities in an attempt to find one who would tell her that her eyes were FINE. They were not - but they weren't as bad as she pretended, either.

Her only other complaint - and boy did she complain! - was the need to wake up at night to pee. Other people may be trapped in iron lungs or crippled by degenerative diseases, but she wanted the world to be reminded several times a day that waking up to pee was  a MUCH worse affliction than anything suffered by anyone else.

My mother got a really amazing amount of mileage out of her complaints about peeing at night. She consulted dozens of quacks. She was prescribed many different medications that were not supposed to be used simultaneously, from hormones to pills for incontinence. She finally found a doctor who recommended that she have a complete hysterectomy (at age 87). She really liked that idea - it would mean lots of attention!

It turns out my mother was secretly drinking a full can of Ensure every night before bed (a dietary aid for my father, not her). Naturally, the liquid had to go somewhere. The last thing she needed was a hysterectomy! All she needed to do was stop filling up on liquids at bedtime.

It figures that my mother was COMPLETELY unprepared to take care of a sick or injured child. Her attempts at playing nurse invariably made things worse instead of better.

When I was little, my brothers were horsing around and somehow I got thrown onto my bed. I landed directly on a sharp pencil. The pencil lead broke off in my botto and I had a bloody hole where it went in.

To me it seems like the obvious thing to do would be to get some tweezers and pull the thing out. It was black and visible. Instead, my mother put me in the bathtub. I have NO IDEA why she did this - she probably thought it would "soak out" the pencil - but the effect was terrible. The blood turned the water bright red and I was terrified, sitting in a bloodbath like The Death of Marat. The pencil lead (actually graphite, fortunately) stayed where it was until I finally had it removed in my thirties.

Once when I had a fever my mother drenched my pillow with perfume. This seems like the kind of idea one might pick up from a romantic Victorian novel in which the heroine dies of consumption. It was not a refreshing spritz of citrus in the air; my pillow was soaked with full-strength perfume right under my head. It was like a fever dream I could not escape.

I got tonsillitis routinely as a child. I remember many hours spent alone in bed, bored out of my mind, looking at the blue sky outside my bedroom windows, and listening to airplanes fly overhead. I was supposed to take huge penicillin pills, but my throat was practically swollen shut. So my mother would crush the pills between two spoons and add GRAPE JELLY. Just pause for a moment to think about a mouthful of grape jelly with bitter penicillin grit. There were many other possible solutions, starting with getting a liquid preparation of penicillin at the pharmacy and moving on down to the application of something more appetizing - say, chocolate pudding. But with her usual lack of interest, my mother never pursued any better alternatives. The only other option was plain water. It was torture!

The doctor recommended that I have my tonsils removed. My mother automatically dismissed this idea. Clearly the quack just wanted to make money. Eventually, when I was 22, I made my own arrangements to have a tonsillectomy, and it was the best thing I ever did.

When I was 18, I developed an odd rash on my arm. It got worse, and my mother finally took me to a quack. He prescribed two medications, which I took religiously. But the rash got worse.

Finally it got so bad my mother was forced to take me to a skin doctor. I was getting smarter by then, so I brought the bottles of pills with me.

The skin doctor read the labels on the prescriptions and immediately threw both of them in the trash. She was disgusted. It turns out the first was a medication for ringworm, which I did not have. The second was an appetite suppressant, because my mother thought I was too fat, and figured secretly putting me on speed was a good idea.

I had a fairly common teenage skin problem called pityriasis rosea. It was awful! It started out as small bumps like ostrich leather all over my front and back. Eventually every single little bump became large and red and painful. Nobody knows what causes this affliction. It takes about three months to run its course, and all you can do is treat the symptoms.

If MY child had this, I would avoid letting their skin dry out (hot showers and soap make the condition worse). I'd administer an antihistamine for the itching, and use Tylenol and cold compresses for the burning. Moisturizer, calamine lotion, cortisone cream, and oatmeal are all soothing. Of course, I had none of those things. I don't know what the doctor told my mother, but it made no difference because she would not have listened to the quack anyway.

One night the pain was so terrible I thought I was going to lose my mind. I was in tears in the dark and had no idea what to do. Even though I was a teenager, I went and woke up my parents.

My father was furious. He rolled over angrily and went back to sleep.

My mother went down to the kitchen and came back with a little poultice she had made. I remember being so relieved that someone was finally going to help me!

She dabbed the white mixture on my stomach, and within seconds it felt like my skin was in flames. The pain was EXCRUCIATING. She had mixed together baking soda - that is, SODIUM bicarbonate - and water. She was quite literally rubbing salt into my wounds. I have no idea why she thought that would be beneficial. I went from begging her for help to screaming at her to leave me alone. Did she WANT to hurt me? Maybe, on some unconscious level. Did she think to  run a bath cool water and add some oatmeal? Of course not.

Now, I am well aware that most parents have not been to medical school, and that kids don't come with an owner's manual. When I had my first child, I had never held a baby before. I was as woefully ignorant as a new mother could be. The first time I changed her diaper, I put it on backwards, and I imagined the nurses shaking their heads when they took her back to weigh her.

But I did try to inform myself. I bought books. Big ones, like the Physicians' Desk Reference, the American Medical Association Family Medical Guide, the Merck Manual, Symptoms, and so on. Ironically, I am the one who inherited my grandparents' interest in medicine. The other bookshelves were filled with books about raising children, books about child development, books about communication, you name it.

Whenever one of my children got sick, I hit the books. After awhile they were onto me. "Not the books! Not the books!" they would cry, knowing I was stumped about something - and by God I was going to find the answer.

I looked for the best quacks available - and was very lucky to live outside New York, where there were some excellent ones. And we needed them.

Occasionally I went by the seat of my pants and just trusted my "mother's intuition." On one occasion my son developed big red spots. I took him to three different doctors and rejected ALL their ideas. I was terrified to disobey these brilliant, highly-educated professionals, but I just knew my son did not have scabies, or need an "antibiotic cocktail," or need half the blood in his body tested.

The spirit of my grandmother must have been with me. I treated his spots one by one - and there were a lot! - with ordinary Bactroban and cortisone cream, and they subsided. As he grew older, it became clear that he was allergic to nearly everything. We made friends with spots. They told us when there was a problem.

Maybe I was lucky to have such an incompetent mother. When I became a parent, I just did the opposite of what she did. It did not release me from her shadow - but it made me a better mother.

Entry #23: TRUTH

George Washington and I have something in common: I cannot tell a lie. I don't even try. I've learned how to keep my mouth shut when the truth would be hurtful, but basically I abhor any kind of deceit. My motto is: Always Go with the Truth - or Play Dumb If Absolutely Necessary.

I do NOT mean to suggest I am any kind of super-virtuous person. Not at all. Really I'm just a simpleton. Little George is held up as a role model for kiddies across America, and he went on to accomplish extraordinary things. I'm just a product of my upbringing, and it's a miracle I ever did anything.

I was raised in a steaming swamp of lies, half-truths, and manipulated information - and I had NO IDEA I was being mislead about virtually everything because it began when I was born. I never knew anything else. I was like a lamb to the slaughter - and it didn't become clear to me until I was a teenager.  I'll tell you exactly when I realized I had a big problem.

My mother was addicted to alcohol, and addicts lie. To everyone. All the time. They lie for no reason. They lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth. They will lie about anything, from the mundane (what time it is) to the important (what the doctor said).  Maybe they lie to themselves so much about their addiction that the truth doesn't matter to them any more. Maybe they are so high all the time that they can't tell the difference between what they imagine to be true and what is actually true. Or maybe they just enjoy wreaking havoc by deliberately confusing everyone around them. Whatever the reason, never trust addicts about anything. No matter how sincere they appear, they're lying.

My mother was not bright, but she was a Machiavellian genius. She knew instinctively that as long as she was the only person who knew all the pieces of a puzzle, everyone in the family would have to keep returning to her to try to figure out what the hell was going on. She told different bits of each story to different people, and ALWAYS presented an incomplete picture of the truth. She would deliberately omit important pieces of information from each person she talked to. She was phenomenally squirrelly and used indirect answers, lies of omission, and purposely misleading statements to keep us all off guard and not fully informed.

My mother’s modus operandi was Divide and Conquer. She pitted my siblings and me against each other. We didn't realize we were being told different stories because she deliberately kept us apart, and we didn’t even catch on. 

When my oldest brother was being rebellious, we were forbidden to speak to him. At the time she said this was “doctor’s orders,” but today I highly doubt it. She told my other brother for years and years that I was stupid and a terrible financial burden. He believed it. She told me for years and years that he was a perpetual student dithering over his Ph.D. and always asking for money. I believed her. Keeping us at odds with each other secured her position of power in the family. No one really wanted anything to do with my mother, but we had to keep returning to her because she was the only one who had access to all the information about our lives. Knowledge is power.

To complicate things further, my mother wanted her only daughter – me – to be a mini-me. She gave me her own full name at birth. She wanted to create someone who would adore her, who would see things exactly as she did, and who would back her up and agree with all her machinations. She went out of her way to create a little person who would be her sidekick forever and ever. It was sick, it was evil, and it worked for a long time.

My mother used to drive around a lot with me in the car. She would tell me things and then admonish me not to tell another soul. She would complain about my father's miserable salary, tell me exactly how much it was, and then tell me never to reveal this information to anyone. She would tell me inappropriate things about the neighbors and swear me to secrecy. And she would put her own unique spin on current events: the Russians were wonderful, Walt Disney was the evil empire, the songs on the radio were ALL about sex, pop music was for perverted mental midgets, etc. The more popular and “normal” something was, the more she demonized it, and vice versa. After awhile I was afraid to say anything to anybody, plus I was terrified of my father, the neighbors, the President of the United States, Bambi, pop music, and every other aspect of modern culture. My only trusted source of information was… my mother.

My mother was the original Luddite, with some very skewed geopolitical ideas thrown in for good measure. Technology – anything electronic, and certainly anything with a screen – was completely unacceptable. The more amazing a technological development was, the less interested she was. When my father expressed interest in buying a desktop computer, she was OUTRAGED. “Oh come on,” she said snidely. “You already have a shortwave radio!”

At the time I thought this was hilarious, but it turns out she was serious. She was so un-interested that she never figured out what a computer was, or what computers did. Ever.

It's hard to believe, but I made it as far as high school before I became aware that everything I had learned from this extremely closed-minded person was false. Everything. Without realizing it, I'd been a chump all my life.

The class was discussing Modern European History, and I raised my hand and passed along some of my mother's "the Russians are perfectly lovely" nonsense. Today I realize that she actually knew nothing whatsoever about Russia or Russian history, and probably based her pro-Russian bias on some Russian novels she'd read as a girl. She also often talked about having studied the language, but as I never heard her speak a syllable of Russian, this was probably a lie, also. Or maybe she just flunked the class.

My teacher - the wonderful Mrs. Ralph, whom I adored - stopped the history class and looked at me curiously. "Who told you that?" she asked. Class ground to a halt and everyone looked at me.

I mumbled "my mother," and slid down in my chair. I was mortified. As I listened to the facts about the First World War, I realized all of my mother's anti-establishment views about Mother Russia were seriously delusional. She was not being deeply insightful or leading a counter-cultural revolution. She was nuts.

People outside the family may have suspected my mother was a little wacky, but no one knew how bad things really were. When Artiste met my mother, she played the innocent little-old-lady-in-tennis-shoes role to the hilt, and won him over right away. "Why are you so angry with your mother?" he would ask. "All she said was...." This, of course, drove me wild. In time he realized every word that came out of her mouth, no matter how innocent, was calculated to confuse or offend on a deeper level. When she was among family she would drop her pretenses and say things that were jaw-droppingly rude or cruel, but with most people she used an exaggerated kind of politeness that masked her total contempt for the rest of the world.

If you can, try to imagine that everything your mother ever told you was a lie. I felt the ground falling away beneath my feet. I could not be certain about ANYTHING IN MY BRAIN. I had the same feeling I got when I was little and tried to imagine the size of the universe and all the stars within it. That was the enormity of my problem.

What was I supposed to do? Learn everything all over again? How do you do that? How do you separate fact from fiction when you’re already in high school? How do you un-learn lies you were taught before you could talk? I imagine children raised in a cult have a similar problem if they try to leave. How do they ever get rid of all the programming they received from birth?

It turns out that, independently, my surviving brother had a similar revelation. We both came to the realization that my mother was a lying liar, and that we were going to have to re-learn everything. Unbeknownst to each other, we both developed exaggerated habits of verifying every piece of information that entered our brains.

My ex-sister-in-law tells a story about driving along in the passenger seat beside my brother. “STOP!” she screamed, seeing a child on a tricycle. My brother kept driving. “Why?” he asked. “THAT CHILD!” she yelled. My brother kept driving. “Where?” he asked. He was NOT going to stop that car until he personally had verified that yes, there was a good reason to do so. Because other people cannot be trusted, and all incoming data must be verified. My brother is an absolutely brilliant analytical thinker, and will examine every piece of information from 237 perspectives before moving on the next step. You have to have extreme patience with this, but you know whatever he tells you is correct, and his employers value him for that.

My way of dealing with my sudden cognitive vacuum was to start asking questions – lots and LOTS of questions. I ALWAYS have questions. People laugh at me for asking so many questions. People get tired of discussing things with me. But I have to know what is True, and I will chase down a topic to the ends of the earth until I have satisfied myself that I know the Truth, to the extent knowing the Truth possible. I narrowly missed ending up a fact-checker, probably because I am more interested in big ideas than whether Volkswagen introduced round tail-lights in 1972 or 1973.

An unexpected result of having had to build a brand-new brain in high school is that I developed an instinct for the fault lines in other people’s arguments. When something did not add up, I would ask questions. Often people didn’t like it. Often they treated me like I was stupid. But after decades of asking questions, I know in my gut when I’m right, and I won’t back down. This is not an endearing quality, but I truly can’t help it.

An unexpected bonus of emancipating myself from my mother’s lies is that I became an independent thinker. I have no use for authority figures unless they are smarter than I am. And I taught my children to be the same way. They HATED it when I made them research the most difficult paper or pick the most obscure individual to study. But today they are the smartest people I know, and they have reached their own conclusions about what they believe, who they are, and what they will do with their lives. I could not be more proud.

I ask my friends for their forgiveness for those times when I am being obdurate, or when I get stuck on verifying something that seems unimportant. To my psyche, it’s matter of life or death. If I had kept going along as my mother’s mini-me, I would have ended up a stunted, deluded, miserable person with an early intellectual death. Instead, I chose life and jumped the track. Even though my mother swears there is a “secret Nellie” inside me who agrees with her every word, that Nellie is dead. The Nellie you know may be a pain in the ass, but she will always be loyal and true.

"Re-examine all you have been told

at school or church or in any book,

dismiss whatever insults your own soul."

- Walt Whitman