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

Note to Readers

For some reason it is very difficult to leave comments on this blog. I don't know why. People tell me they have written long comments, only to have them disappear. I know I have written people back, only to have my comments disappear.

Please copy whatever you write before you hit "publish."  It IS definitely possible to leave a message, but the system is a little quirky.  Please don't give up - I really want to hear from you!

Thanks for stopping by!

- Nellie

Entry #22: GIFTS FROM GAMMA

When I tell people stories about the gifts my mother gave, they believe I'm lying. They think I'm making things up to get attention. Her behavior was so outlandish people simply refuse to accept it. If you have read any of the preceding articles, however, you already know it's all true.

Receiving a gift from my mother was exactly like being Charlie Brown when Lucy would hold the football for him. Every single time, Charlie Brown would persuade himself that THIS time, Lucy was not going to pull the ball away at the last moment before he kicked it. And every single time, Lucy did. And Charlie Brown would fall flat on his back.

My mother liked to build up the excitement around her gifts well in advance. She would tell me, "I found the PERFECT present!", and she would praise the gift so extravagantly that, against all my experience and better judgment, a little ray of hope would enter my heart. Was it possible? Could it be? Would this be the ONE time she actually produced a nice present?

Odds were against it. My mother did not believe in spending money on gifts. Instead, she recycled. Apparently she had never heard the expression "'tis better to give than receive." She was all about receiving. Giving - not so much.

My father bought me the cheapest little black AM/FM transistor radio from Radio Shack for my tenth birthday, and I clearly remember being thrilled for one brief moment. But then I looked up at my mother. She was ENRAGED. My father was an idiot! A fool! Whatever had possessed him to GO TO A STORE? Money was not to be wasted on gifts - certainly not for children! Her fury continued for the rest of the evening and sucked the joy right out of my birthday. I felt confused and guilty.

My father never made that mistake again. To celebrate my thirtieth birthday, he gave me a used metal three-hole paper punch.

Occasionally my mother would ask what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday. This was actually one of her best tricks. She would invariably produce a gift close enough to the request to show she had heard it, but not near enough to be satisfying. The message was, "I decided NOT to buy you what you really want, because I can't be bothered, and you simply aren't worth it." For example, if I asked for  a blue scarf, she would find a hideous pink one and expect me to be grateful. When I was in college, I dared to hope for a collection of all the Beethoven symphonies - something I very much wanted but could not afford. My mother gave me one discounted LP of one symphony. I learned if I really wanted something, I'd have to get it myself.

After my mother inherited her millions, she had three additional houses full of things to give away. She quickly sold anything of value, leaving behind plenty of detritus from which to choose. Who would get the random silver teaspoons this year? The silver tea caddy with someone else's indecipherable initials? The used kitchen towels?

My mother once made a great fuss about giving me an item of china from a pattern she called "Rose Medallion." The piece was clearly missing a lid, and had been cracked and re-assembled at some point. My mother admonished me that it was a precious antique serving dish, and I should be careful with it.

Well, times grew hard, and I had no choice but to try to sell the precious serving dish. We needed more important things. I dropped it off at a high-end consignment shop in New Canaan, CT, where the nouveau riche on the way up could purchase all the trappings of aristocracy from the debutantes on the way down, like me.

The shop called and said they were terribly sorry, but there was no market for a broken china CHAMBER POT. When I think of my mother serving food out of her precious dish, I throw up a little in my mouth.

A really exceptional present from my mother would be something she found at the Dollar Store, or Job Lot, or in the clearance department at BJ's Wholesale Club. For example, a very small scarf of thin fleece made in China, or a black plastic men's wallet.

Ever the nonconformist, my mother preferred to approach holidays in an unpredictable way. One Easter she sent packages to my kids, who were about ages 2 and 6. One present was a large rubber insect that resembled a locust, and the other was a black rubber snake. It was hard to determine which one was more vile. My mother said she assumed the children already had enough chicks and bunnies - because, of course, I was such a overindulgent money-wasting mother. As always, she knew perfectly well what was appropriate. She just refused to play along.

My parents came to visit for Easter the next year, and my mother went on and on about the marvelous Easter Egg Hunt we were going to have. Again, I felt a little ray of hope. Really? Could it be true?

After drinking her lunch, my mother kicked us all out of the playroom and hid the Easter Eggs. We waited with great anticipation. Then she allowed the kids back into the room for the great Hunt. A dozen brightly-colored plastic eggs were in obvious places... and every single one of them was empty.

The kids looked at me quizzically. They knew how to take apart a plastic Easter Egg and look for the treasure inside. But there were no treasures. It was an Easter Egg Hunt for nihilists.

My mother enjoyed giving empty things. For one of my birthdays, she went on ecstatically about my fabulous gift. When the highly anticipated moment arrived, I unwrapped a nice box from a jewelry shop and was pleasantly surprised. When I opened it up, it was empty. Just black velvet inside. Whatever she had purchased for herself she had taken out, giving me the empty box. I am not making this up.

No matter how godawful the present was, my mother would talk about it for days or weeks in advance as if it was the one thing that would make your life complete.  One year she waxed eloquent in repeated phone calls about the PERFECT gift she had mailed to my daughter, who was turning eleven. She even added, "in the store, it would cost fifty dollars!" 

By this time both of my kids knew not to get excited, but human beings are wired to have hope in the grimmest of situations. Even I had a hard time accepting how truly terrible her gifts always were. How could I expect children to understand?

I have no idea how she acquired my daughter's gift, but it was a fake gold, over-sized, costume jewelry owl - perfect for fifth grade.

One year she gave my son a sweatshirt that not only had the tags cut out, but also was clearly dirty. Where the hell did she even find it? Another year she gave him a huge Christmas gift bag with a bright, jolly Santa on the outside. All of us felt a little excited. My son pulled forth a dead animal skin - perhaps an arctic fox? - that my mother had left on the couch in her living room for the previous 25 years. It was filthy, and shedding its dead fur from around its gouged-out eyes. We all shrieked.

With a huge amount of fanfare, she once gave me a black beaded evening purse with tassels. You know, for all those balls I attended. Several times she gave Artiste old sweaters of my father's, each time pretending the gift was new.

And always, ALWAYS, she would expect to be effusively thanked. That was the most important part of the game: giving us some random piece of shit, and then getting us to thank her. She demanded that the children write her Thank You notes, and gave me hell if they didn't. 

Fortunately my mother could not WAIT to stop giving presents altogether. She would grasp at any excuse, from the random declaration that "nobody gives presents any more!", to "the children are too old for gifts, don't you think?", to "I'm BLIND, I could not POSSIBLY buy a present." (She was nowhere near blind - plus she had many personal assistants who would have been glad to help.) Her interest in gift-giving went from punitive to non-existent.

Despite these lessons learned at my mother's knee, I absolutely LOVE giving presents! If I had money I think I would buy a present for someone every day. Think of all the delightful things there are in the world! Wouldn't it be fun to share them with everyone you love?

A friend of my daughter's once asked her in college, "Why does your mother send you so many presents?" Well, DUH. I can't think of anything more fun!

Often I will see something cute and think, "Oh! Who could I give THIS to? Do I know anybody who is having a birthday? Graduating? Expecting a baby?" But really, you don't need a reason to give someone a gift - especially if that someone is a gift to you. 

Living for others makes for a full life.
The more you give away, the richer you are.”
— Lao Tzu

Entry #21: FOOD

I first met Artiste my freshman year at Bennington College, in 1972. My bold friend Betsy was not intimidated by the handsome graduate student, so one evening we went and sat down to eat dinner with him in the dining hall.

As Betsy and I tucked into our spaghetti and meatballs, or whatever it was, we noticed that Artiste was eating salad. He said he was vegetarian. I was genuinely shocked. I had never met a vegetarian before. I believe my first words to the man who would eventually become my husband were, “What do you eat?”

“Beans,” he answered cheerfully. “I cook up a pot of beans on Sunday and eat them all week.” He laughed as if he were joking, but I found out later it was entirely true.

I don’t think I’d ever eaten any beans at that point, other than baked beans out of a can, and frozen lima beans. I’d never seen a lentil, or a black bean, or a white bean – just as I’d never seen Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Indian food. My parents did not believe in multicultural eating. They also refused to eat Italian food (unless you count canned spaghetti) and “Jewish food.”

My mother had no domestic skills whatsoever, and did not wish to acquire them. She served only Food of Hate. As a child I never ate breakfast at all, and at school I always purchased the hot lunches, which I thought were delicious. I have no memory of my mother ever fixing lunch for me, although she must have fed me something when I was very little. I do remember being young enough to sit up front in the grocery cart at the A&P, where she would open up a package of the cheapest hamburger meat and let me eat it while she shopped. She called it “steak tartare,” which it clearly was not. It was ground e. coli. This was another one of her attempts to bend the world to her “nothing is anything” rule, as when she dabbed cooking vanilla behind her ears and called it perfume.

I had an early start on disordered eating. I remember crawling up onto the kitchen counter, reaching into the cupboard, and eating peanut butter by the tablespoonful. I have no idea where my mother was. As soon as I was old enough to open a jar of jellied cooked chicken, I was on my own. I discovered I was able to make mayonnaise sandwiches, with white bread and mayo and sometimes a piece of iceberg lettuce. When I got a little older, I boiled eggs for myself, and as soon as I could open cans, that opened up vast new possibilities that included canned tuna and canned baked beans. I ate a lot of combinations of those foods: tuna and mayo on white bread, tuna and egg and mayo on white bread, baked beans and eggs, baked beans and tuna… you get the idea. I was not in charge of the shopping, so I was not able to expand my horizons into other canned goods.

When I switched schools in seventh grade, the Shipley School sent me the name of a student nearby who would be in my class so we could make friends. This was a very nice idea, but it was like expecting a swan to entertain a donkey. Susan – the swan – politely invited me over to her house.  She was wearing nicely pressed pants and a shirt starched at the cleaners. Later I would go through many cans of spray starch, laboriously ironing my uniform shirts at night, realizing they would never look as crisp as the real thing, but also knowing that my parents would iron my hands before they would pay for starched shirts. For my father, yes. For me, never.

Susan’s house was beautifully furnished and seemed like a museum. I had never seen long drapes before, or a four-poster bed with a pretty coverlet, or a bathroom with hand towels and soap that smelled nice. At lunchtime we went into the kitchen and there was a housekeeper who served us lunch. I was stunned. She gave us tuna sandwiches and glasses of milk. Susan didn’t realize this was anything special, but I had no idea there were human beings who would make lunch for you. It was like a restaurant!

My mother did produce one meal a day: dinner. There was still the expectation that The Husband would work all day at the office, then come home and have a cocktail and eat a meal prepared by The Wife. Since children were to be seen and not heard, they were fed separately ahead of time and then sent to their rooms.

It is difficult to do justice to how truly terrible my mother’s meals were. She would take the A&P hamburger, form it into round blobs, and burn the shit out of them in a frying pan. Generally the burnt hamburgers would be served with a block of frozen sliced green beans that had been boiled until they turned grey, and some “mashed potatoes” made from potato flakes out of a box. My middle brother shot up to a great height in fifth grade and was always starving, so he would cook himself “mashed potatoes” from a box to survive. He was so skinny his knees were knobby.

The cocktail ritual fell by the wayside when my mother started drinking before lunch, and she drank her way through preparing dinner. Often she took the cheapest cuts of chicken, put them in a pan, and smeared them with a mixture of grape jelly and hickory smoked salt. She called this “sweet and sour chicken,” and it tasted like ashes. Sometimes she would put cheap cheese on top of white bread, melt it in the oven, and call it "Welsh Rarebit." Another standby was chipped beef on toast.  She would make a kind of glue out of flour and milk, then add corned beef of uncertain origin that was so salty it was inedible. Then she would put a blob of this mixture on a piece of toast. I would eat the white bread with the white glue but avoid the inedible brown lumps of super-salted beef. Later I found out you can soak corned beef in water to get the salt out first, but that would have taken an additional two minutes.

By the time my brothers were in college, my mother would start her second round of drinks for the day promptly at 5PM. Eventually my father would get home, and the three of us would sit down in silence to some godawful meal. Having eaten many different things since then, mostly what I remember is what we did not have. There was never any salad. My father would take some iceberg lettuce, dip it in the mayonnaise jar, and call that “salad.” There was no fruit, except oranges in winter. There was greasy margarine instead of real butter. Items that never entered the house included: roast chicken, quiche, fresh fish, steak, and any type of pasta. There were no fresh vegetables, ever. There were no grains. And forget about “foreign” foods like pizza (“is that made with eggs and cheese?”) or lasagna or bagels or borscht. Both of my parents were insulted at the idea of eating food from other cultures. I tried to tell them about yogurt, but as usual they thought I was being stupid until someone else came along and said the same thing.

My father and I would choke down some bites of whatever was on the plate, and my mother would immediately start a fight about how hard she had slaved over dinner, and how we should be grateful for the time and effort she had put into this delicious meal. She would complain and complain, then cry, then leave the table in tears and go to bed. Every. Single. Night. I would go up to my room to do homework, and my father would do the dishes. That was the routine for about five years.

So when Artiste came along, I was woefully unprepared to be a vegetarian. At his apartment I saw my first fresh vegetables and actually freaked out. I couldn’t get over how beautiful they were! I had no idea there were vibrant green, red, and yellow peppers. I had never seen an eggplant, with its remarkable purple skin, or a heavy head of green cabbage, or a clove of garlic. The layers of an onion were all new to me, as were the glistening green skins of zucchini, and the undersea ruffles on red lettuce. I had never seen the inside of a cauliflower, or the way broccoli makes little trees. I never realized there were different kinds of potatoes, and that all you had to do to make genuine mashed potatoes was boil one of them. I could not tell the difference between a peach and a nectarine, or an orange and a tangerine, or a Macintosh and a Red Delicious apple. I had never heard of ricotta, or feta, or mozzarella cheese. I couldn’t get over the fact that an unassuming, inexpensive bag of lentils could turn into a whole pot of delicious and healthy soup, and that a little yellow packet of yeast could turn flour into fabulous steaming loaves of home-made whole wheat bread.

When my mother found out that I had become vegetarian, she accused Artiste of  “trying to make me fat so all my other suitors would go away.”  I think we can all agree that is an interesting take on vegetarianism. Also an interesting perspective on my control of my own destiny. She claimed there was a “secret Nellie” inside of me that actually agreed with her. It is very disconcerting to have your own mother tell when you are eighteen that she knows that you have another personality hidden inside of you, and you should let it out. Which train is the crazy train?

Once I got away from home, I realized that there are innumerable types of food to try, and innumerable ingredients to discover. I learned there is such a thing as Food of Love, and that meals are meant to bring people together and to make them closer. There are so many important rituals around food that signal “we are family,” or, “you are a welcome guest in our home.”  Going out to dinner should not be an exercise in finding the cheapest rubber chicken, but a pleasurable learning experience where you eat something new, prepared with pride, in the company of people you enjoy. Every meal is really a window into what and who you love - and Food of Love, however humble, sustains us physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Entry #20: SHAME

My sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Thomson, was old school. She had snow white hair, a harsh face, and a slash of red lipstick. We didn't get along. I did not find her likable, and she felt the same way about me. This may or may not have had something to do with the time that I (a ten-year-old) accused her (a veteran teacher) of being redundant in front of the whole class.

Mrs. Thomson assigned our seats by last name, so - having a surname that started with Z - I had the misfortune of being the last desk, directly in front of hers. I spent the entire year next to the brilliant Rebeccah Ruttenberg, who kept herself amused by writing notes in Hebrew, and in front of Todd Vunderink, who was a nice boy with a round head, a fuzzy buzz cut, and plaid shirts.

One fall morning I realized to my horror that I had completely forgotten my homework assignment: to write a poem about Thanksgiving. I had about ten minutes before I had to get to the bus stop, so I ran upstairs, sat on my bed, thought for a couple of minutes, and scribbled out the following:

I'm thankful for the home I have

The food I have to eat,

The Liberty that I enjoy

That makes the two ends meet.

The bed I have to sleep in

And the clothes I have to wear,

Are just some things I'm thankful for,

Along with health and care.

It didn't stop there. Somehow before I was done I threw in money in the bank, higher education, and the American Dream of one day owning my own home.

About a week later Mrs. Thomson entered the classroom looking like an entirely different person. She was beaming, and her eyes were positively twinkling with excitement. She was holding something behind her back like a big surprise.

It was the local newspaper. My poem was smack in the middle of the front page. There was my name, "a student in Mrs. Thomson's sixth grade class at Radnor Elementary School." She was THRILLED. We bonded over how exciting it was.

I brought the newspaper home and gave it to my mother. Taking my cue from Mrs. Thomson, I thought she would be pleased.

My mother read the poem and scowled. She became FURIOUS. She hated the poem and thought it was inferior doggerel. She also hated Thanksgiving and wanted nothing to do with it, so to her the poem was just propaganda for the masses. She was embarrassed that ALL HER FRIENDS were going to see my inferior poem. Her reputation was RUINED by my display of bad taste.

I was confused. I went from hero to villain in ten seconds.

My father must have heard about the  poem, but as usual he said and did nothing. I was on my own, trying to sort things out. I concluded that I had brought disgrace upon myself and my family, and I was deeply ashamed of my inadequate poem. My mother was angry for days, but she never referred to my crime again. Apparently the incident was to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

Fast forward a couple of years to the summer of 1968. My mother and I were spending the summer alone in the big house in Rhode Island. My father was back in Philadelphia, working. My oldest brother was dead. My other brother had gotten a job as far away as possible - on an oceanographic vessel in the middle of the ocean. My mother was always drunk and depressed, and I was on my own - too young to get a real job, too young to drive, and forbidden to go to summer camp because I had to stay home and look after my mother.

One evening a couple of friends and I found some colored chalk. We took to the street in front of my house and drew silly pictures. One friend wrote in pink, "Pepto Bismol is an interior decorator," and added a stomach for good measure. I thought this was hilarious. We drew flowers and animals and funny faces and put our initials in hearts, knowing everything would soon be worn off by car tires and washed away by the rain.

My mother came outside, saw what we were doing, and brought the wrath of Zeus upon our heads. My friends were sent home. I was banished to my room, grounded, and forbidden to see my best friend - who lived next door - ever again.

My mother was in high dudgeon. You would think I had just been found in the center of town shooting heroin and having sex while pregnant. If she could have killed me, I think she would have done so without hesitation.

"A LADY HAS HER NAME IN PUBLIC ONLY TWICE IN HER LIFE," my mother seethed, her eyes narrowed with rage, "When she MARRIES and when she DIES!"

I was confused again. Apparently I had, in all innocence, made a terrible spectacle of myself again. My mother's white hot rage branded itself into my teenage psyche. I was embarrassed and ashamed.

As I sat upstairs in my room, I could hear my best friend's family next door having a grand old time. They were laughing and hollering and enjoying each other. Nobody was in trouble over there.

My house was silent and vibrating with hostility. My mother went to bed drunk, and I stayed up alone, feeling sick to my stomach.

And that's the way things went for weeks. Being forbidden to see my best friend for half the summer was cruel and unusual punishment. My friend had a brother and sister and two fun parents, and every day they did things together like go to the beach, or go sailing, or drive down to Aunt Carrie's for clam fritters. I would watch them happily coming and going, wearing bathing suits and wrapped in colorful towels. My mother was like a corpse, and my house was like a crypt. I wasn't allowed to do anything or go anywhere, and if I complained, my mother would say, "The INTELLIGENT person is NEVER bored."

Now fast forward to 1985. After working in publishing in New York for four years, I set up shop doing freelance writing and editing from home and had two kids. Since then I've worked with hundreds of authors, doing book proposals, editing manuscripts, and writing collaborations. I create credibility for authors by providing them with a coherent description of what they do. I invent self-help programs out of thin air, fashion steps to success out of unfocused ideas, and match problems with cures. I've published a dozen books with traditional New York publishing houses.

But here's the thing: editors and collaborators are usually invisible. Authors rarely boast about all the help they received from their ghostwriters. They want to look as if they wrote their own books. Sometimes they get delusional and start to believe they really DID write their own books. So I've worked tirelessly behind the scenes, making other people look good and helping them make money. How stupid is that?

A therapist once looked at me and said I was behaving as if I'd been gagged. I was operating under the idea that it was OK to write for others, but not for myself. In other words, God forbid I make a spectacle of myself again. Because a lady's name only appears in public twice.

My parents gave me lots more to feel ashamed about. They let me know that I was stupid, fat, unpleasant, and greedy. Just my presence was annoying. My mother's favorite expression was, "children should be seen and not heard" - and she meant it.

I've learned a lot since those days. I've learned that my parents were wrong about a lot of things. I've also learned that the shame burned into us in childhood does not just go away just because it makes no sense. We have to go downstairs into the basement of our subconscious with a flashlight and expose the scars. Then we can start to heal them.

This blog has given me a chance to heal old scars. But everyone has stories. Everyone has outdated behavior that was expected or necessary in childhood, but makes no sense now. I hope you will share your experiences so we all can help heal each other. 

I'm willing to make a giant spectacle of myself and go first. 

Entry #19: ROAD TRIP

My mother loved to travel. She was not a critical thinker, and had no interests or hobbies other than drinking. No tennis, no gardening, no Bridge Club, no watercolors, no piano, no PTA, no puppies, no sewing or knitting or embroidery - nothing. She watched Dr. Kildare on TV every day, but other than soap operas, traveling was her only source of entertainment because it did not require anything of her. Just by moving from one place to another, she woke up every day to new sights to distract her.

Before my mother inherited all her millions, her trips were less frequent and less expensive. Every year, she and my father would ditch the kids and go to the Caribbean for a week. Sometimes they would put us all in the station wagon for a Family Vacation - a chance to put the Fun in Dysfunctional.

My father, the engineer, was in charge of tying all our suitcases to the top of the car. In all honesty, this is not very difficult. However, he managed to do it in such a way that my child's suitcase fell off the top of the car THREE TIMES. Always mine - not anyone else's. Was this a personal vendetta? I don't know, but it certainly felt like one.

After the first two lost suitcases, I knew to listen for the "kabump" as my little luggage broke free and ricocheted off the roof of the car. The third time, I heard the "kabump," looked out the rear window, and saw my suitcase split open like a clamshell at the side of the road, my clothes scattered brightly all along the edge of the highway.

I hollered and my father reluctantly brought the car to a stop. He did not like interruptions. We hiked back to my suitcase just as a kindly truck driver pulled over his enormous rig and stopped to help. What a nice man. Unfortunately, I was about nine years old and MORTIFIED that his large, unfamiliar trucker hands were picking up my underwear. 

In better news, my Cray Pas coloring crayons were still in their box. And I never, ever let my father put my suitcase on top of the car again. I kept all my precious possessions with me in the "way back," which was my own little jail.

I was ALWAYS violently carsick. (It turns out this is associated with migraine headaches.) It would have helped to let me sit up front, but that was my mother's position. No hope there. My two brothers took the middle seat, and cruelly and repeatedly said I was too gigantic to join them. So I would climb into the back like a dog, my father would open the window just enough to suck in all the car exhaust, and I would be horribly, miserably, desperately carsick within minutes. My father would stop the car long enough for me to puke and then press on, instead of giving me a few moments to walk around, breathe, and feel better.

In about 1964, we visited a ranch in Aspen, Colorado. My parents had the bright idea of taking the family on a cross-country trip, and avoiding hotels by pulling a fold-out trailer behind the car.  The top opened out into two wings that were supposed to be beds, and there was a canopy over the whole thing. There is a reason you NEVER see those things on the road any more.

My parents chose a fairly straight shot west to Colorado, then drove home via a southern route. I remember parts of this vacation very clearly. They just aren't the right parts. Mostly I remember the staggering incompetence of my parents.

My brothers were probably 16 and 17. Before the car even pulled out of the driveway, they were both reading in silence, looking down. I was disappointed. No one to play with. Obviously they were present only under duress. I can't remember speaking to either one of them for the entire three weeks.

Of course the car had no air conditioning - and this was before the days of bottled water. My mother's idea of refreshments was to fill a large, round, dirty Thermos with a gallon of water and then add one small tin of formerly frozen lemonade - just enough to make the water taste "off." This was her signature half-assed approach to pretty much everything she did. Except drinking, which she did wholeheartedly.

We drove hours and hours through the flat heartland of America. I have no idea where we were, but the road was straight as an arrow with puddles of mirage water in the distance. Billboards for the Corn Palace and the Five Foot Six Ton Prairie Dog were placed every hundred miles or so to build up our curiosity.

The camper had a small "refrigerator" where you could stow a bag of ice and some food - and beer, of course. My parents placed the kids' flannel sleeping bags from L. L. Bean on the floor of the camper next to the fridge. Somewhere in the heat of Middle America, a gallon of milk fell out the UNLOCKED door of the refrigerator and soaked into the sleeping bags. My mother refused to accept that the smell of damp, spoiled milk saturating my sleeping bag was a problem.

When we were dying of boredom and heat exhaustion, my mother would produce what she uncharitably called "whining pills." Unfortunately, the whining pills consisted of one pack of DoubleMint gum to be shared by everyone. When you already feel carsick, a stick of gum is NOT what you need. If we were very, very lucky, we might get some Stuckey's Peanut Brittle because my mother loved it.

Treats were rare, so I remember stopping for ice cream in the Badlands. It must have been over 100 degrees. After the warm lemon water and my stick of gum, I scarfed the ice cream in amazement - then threw it all up, becoming more dehydrated than before. 

My parents were intent on MAKING good time, not HAVING a good time. Except for my puking, or the occasional gas station bathroom, we rarely stopped. We never moseyed along side routes, or looked for interesting places or tasty food off the beaten track. The only time we deviated from the course was in the evening, when my mother tried to find free places to set up the camper in order to avoid campground fees. This also meant no running water, showers, or bathrooms for the night.

Somewhere in the mountains she had my father drive up a steep logging road and pull off into the woods. In the middle of the night I had to crawl out of the camper in my pajamas to throw up again, and I couldn't wake up anyone else enough to care. 

In the morning I noticed huge red signs forbidding access to the logging road. Just then a truck loaded with 20 tons of logs came barreling around a blind curve at 80 miles per hour, and I realized it was a miracle we had not been pounded into sawdust.

The other most noticeable aspect of this non-camping-spot was a prison with thick bars in the windows about 100 feet away through the trees. During my midnight puking session I could easily have been grabbed by anyone from this hidden jail, and no one would have noticed. Being that close to prisoners scared me. I was learning not to trust my mother's judgment.

After 2000 miles, my father started driving faster and faster, until the station wagon started rattling and shaking to pieces. He had lost his mind and would NOT slow down. I think he wanted to kill us all. We pleaded with him to stop. Even my brothers stopped reading and started objecting. My mother tried to reason with him. The car rattled so much our teeth were chattering and the trailer was hopping all over the road behind us. Eventually, he stopped and turned over the wheel to my mother.

An hour later there was more yelling and the shaking of maps. We had been close to Aspen, but my mother had driven 50 miles in the wrong direction without noticing she was still going west. My father had to take the wheel again, backtracking all 50 miles and then completing the final leg of the journey. When the game is almost over and you're ahead by 50 points, my mother can still find a way to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.

The ranch in Aspen was great, although I was was humiliated to be assigned a pony with a surly personality named Butterball. We were riding the ski lift up the mountain, watching the leaves of the aspens quivering in the breeze, when the bar across the front of my chairlift suddenly swung wide open. My heart stopped. The chair continued to move along, 50 feet in the air with nothing between me and the rocks below. Somehow I closed the bar without slipping out of my seat. No one noticed. 

The trip home included more heat, discomfort, and KOA campgrounds. We spent one night in an actual hotel.

In New Mexico we went out for cheap Mexican food. My mother got drunk and - against better advice - insisted on eating hot sauce straight out of the serving dish with a spoon. This was due to her "nothing is anything" philosophy; the ultimate nihilism that extended from the afterlife, to birthdays and holidays, down to hot sauces in Mexican restaurants. Nothing matters, nothing makes any difference, everything is the same and equally meaningless. This is the same philosophy that led her to her rub all the wooden furniture with mayonnaise instead of furniture polish, or to wear a nightgown instead of a ballgown, or to combine grape jelly with hickory smoked salt and call it "sweet and sour sauce," or to give newlyweds old tea towels with HER initials monogrammed on them instead of buying a proper wedding gift.

She ended up coughing and choking with tears streaming down her face. The rest of us were delighted.

Proving that details do indeed matter, my father parked the car under a streetlight, and the next morning it was FILLED with shiny hard-backed bugs that crawled out of every crack and from beneath every seat. It was like Bugs on a Plane.

Next my brother became extremely uncomfortable, and it gradually became known that he had a rash on his botto. I can't think of anything worse to happen to anyone on a long, hot road trip. My mother was convinced he had picked up syphilis or gonorrhea from a public toilet. I could hear her stage whisper all the way from my jail.

"DIDN'T YOU TEACH THEM TO PUT TOILET PAPER ON THE SEAT?"

My father did not answer.

"YOU DIDN'T?" Horror and disbelief. "YOU NEVER TAUGHT THEM? YOU HAVE TO PUT TOILET PAPER ON THE SEAT!!!"

My father said nothing.

This lecture continued for hours until they somehow found a doctor en route. My brother was diagnosed with poison ivy from going to the bathroom in the bushes.

By then it was clear we had to get home fast. We zoomed up the Eastern seaboard, back to Philadelphia. I remember nothing between Texas and Pennsylvania.

There would be no more family vacations. But over two decades later, I put my lessons from this journey to good use. After I had children of my own, we did NOT attempt any three-week road trips. When we leased our first car, we got air conditioning. for trips we tucked in the kids with pillows and quilts. I always brought Travel Toys for long rides, and the only rule was that we had to actually be on a highway before opening the first one. And we didn't have "whining pills," we had food, drinks, cookies, muffins, and anything else my son's allergies would allow. We played kid movies on a tiny portable TV, we listened to kid songs on cassettes, we used books on tape, we sang out loud to the radio - and we stopped, often. I did not want my kids to measure their miles of memories by throw-ups and fights, but by discoveries and treats.

Kids in the back seat are not guaranteed to get along. My daughter once softly sang a long recitative from her car seat about killing her brother, and he once went into a rant about throwing her out the car door into traffic. But today, both kids are extremely good travelers. For our last family trip, I tried buying Car Toys one more time... but it ended up being for me more than for them.