Two years ago on May 1st, I wrote the following blog:

Yesterday was my birthday.

At noon, I decided to treat the day like any other Monday and go swimming at the Plunge, where my mom used to swim as a child. One day several years ago I drove all the way to Point Richmond, a tiny town built on a steep hill, to see the pool while it was being renovated.

The building had stood empty for years, according to a gal I met there recently. When her friend, actor Robin Williams, asked why it wasn’t in use and found out the city didn’t have the funds to renovate it, he made a considerable contribution.

The Plunge still has a huge neon sign on the roof that lights up at night—Municipal Natatorium—and stands between two old tunnels: one for the trains that still wind—quaintly—right through the middle of town. The other for cars headed to Miller-Knox Park that has a little lake with an island in the middle of it—and is a hangout for Canadian geese, egrets, and a great blue heron.

As you can see in the photo, the entire the far wall of the pool is a mural of the park, great blue heron and all, painted by the husband of an acquaintance of mine from the pool—Susie. She’s a retired art teacher and liberated redhead, who wears all the colors we carrot tops aren’t suppose to, like magenta and purple.

On the first Wednesday of the New Year, when I went there to swim, two black gals were hanging out, chatting, in the water-walking lane. Though they were strangers, one of them asked cheerfully how I was, as I descended the ladder. Impulsively—I’m trying to be more visible, as I’ve said—I told her the truth. “My mom just died.” Immediately their faces filled with concern. “Come into the water,” said Z’ma, whose name I didn’t know at the time. “This is your mother—it’s her womb.” And she stretched out her arms to me. Gratefully, I hugged them both. As I wrote in my journal:

I can’t say how comforted I was by their warmth. But it was only later that I made the following connection: When my family moved to New Haven for a year so my dad could get his Ph.D. at Yale, my parents put me in an all-day preschool run by three black teachers. I came to love Ms. Green and felt she loved me too; even after we moved back to Minnesota, she wrote me a few times.

Though I don’t remember much about my kindergarten year back in St. Paul, I do remember the emptiness I used to feel going up the stairs at bedtime in the big old two-story house on Dudley Street that we rented for a couple of years. It was loneliness, maybe even depression, I’ve come to believe, and I’ve always thought it was because I was missing Miss Green.

Now it strikes me that I’ve come full-circle, as I have at so many other times in my life. When I missed my parents—the days felt so long at the preschool at first—there was Miss Green to welcome me into her arms. And now that I’ve lost my mom, there were these two black strangers at the pool, doing the same thing.

Yesterday Z’ma was just coming out of the shower after swimming while I was changing into my suit. We gave each other a hug, and when she asked how I was, I said, “It’s my birthday!” The next thing I knew, she had all the other women in the changing room—most of them strangers—singing Happy Birthday to me.

I went back to Minnesota the summer after eighth grade with the secret resolve that I was going to stay. I didn’t tell my mother, of course, or she would never have let me leave. I didn’t even tell my brother, though he might have wanted to be included in the plan.

But when my father met us at the bus station, the first thing he told us was how sick he was and how disabled he’d become. That night, in the tiny back bedroom of his latest apartment, I cried myself to sleep, feeling my last hope blasted.

My father complained of a fiery pain throughout his body whenever he exerted himself—his doctors had diagnosed arthritis. He was now an invalid—bedridden except for the few hours he still taught at the university; he’d had to cut back on his classes and relied heavily on his TA’s.

When I think of that summer, I don’t remember any real contact with him at all—he sequestered himself in his bedroom, as distant as my mother had been in the two years after the divorce—but even colder. It was as though he’d walled himself off from my brother and me so he could never be hurt again. (Years later he would tell me that the day we’d left for California was the bitterest day of his life.)

I remember trying to engage him in intellectual conversation, asking on one occasion if time could exist without movement, but he dismissed my question, saying a discussion of time would be beyond my comprehension.

Another time I told him about a program I’d seen on mountain lions. “When they’re cubs—even when they’re nearly full-grown—the animals that will become their prey aren’t afraid and will play with them,” I said. “But when they start hunting for themselves, the same animals flee, knowing that they’re dangerous now.” At which point my father laughed scornfully at me. “Your statement is absurd,” he said. “You don’t have the slightest idea of the philosophical complexities of the word ‘know.’ To claim that animals can ‘know’ anything is preposterous.” That’s when I began to feel there were hidden booby traps in language and that I had to be careful of every word I spoke.

In the meantime, my brother and I were left to fend for ourselves; we bought the groceries, cooked the meals, cleaned house—I wound up doing the lion’s share—and played with our cousins, who lived a few blocks away. Sometimes we took the bus to St. Anthony Park to see our old friends. But to me, there was even a sadness about that—they’d gone on with their lives, I felt, and left me far behind.

At the end of the summer, I decided to go back to California, after all. I wouldn’t have been able to go to Murray High with my friends, anyway, since my father now lived in another part of the Twin Cities. I’d fantasized that he would be willing to move back to St. Anthony Park, but now I realized he wouldn’t. I suppose I was proof of the tenet that children will choose negative attention over no attention at all.

Years later I wrote:

“By the end of eighth grade, three years after my parents’ divorce, I felt I’d lost everything: St. Anthony Park, which would always be home to me, as well as all the people I loved—first Wolfy through distance and circumstance, then Kathy, who rejected me, my father, who withdrew emotionally, and my mother, who turned on me. I lost my belief in myself—in my own goodness, intelligence, talent, and ability to cope, as well as a childish belief in my own indestructibility. And I lost my faith in people—their goodness, constancy, and their ability to triumph over adversity. I lost my belief in love itself.”

In California, my mother became someone I didn’t recognize. She was alternately hysterical and wrathful, haranguing and disparaging and blaming both Doug and me, though most of what she accused us of, I eventually came to realize, were things she mistakenly thought we’d done or imagined we were going to do.

In Minnesota, my father had always been the disciplinarian in the family, and I can honestly say I don’t remember, in all the years before the move, my mother ever even scolding me. In the first place, I was a well-behaved child who naively believed that it was possible for a person to be perfect—and that’s what we all should aspire to be.

On the rare occasions my dad “disciplined” me when I was younger—for what, I no longer remember—he stripped me, put me in our old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub, and using a hose, showered me with cold water. Years later, when I heard about how Estelle had stripped his brother Ray and put him in the bathtub, where she beat him with an iron cord, it occurred to me that my father was repeating what he’d seen as a child, but since he wasn’t beating me, he imagined there was nothing abusive about what he was doing. Actually, I think there was—because I came to associate nakedness with shame. And I think for a father to strip a female child to punish her is a violation that borders on the incestuous. (My brother he spanked with a belt.)

But if my dad had shamed me physically, it was my mom who resorted to shaming me verbally. I was thirteen years old and, never having been treated this way before, I knew that I didn’t deserve her vitriol, and I felt outraged by it. She verbally abused my brother too, calling us both “selfish,” “manipulative,” and “exploitative.”

What’s more, she flew into violent rages and would chase one or the other of us up the stairs of our little apartment, so frenzied that she could only make grunting noises like a wild animal, and try to claw at us with fingers like talons. Fortunately, we were old enough to outrun her and would lock ourselves in the bathroom until she calmed down. Later she would weep and apologize.

The last time I saw my father, he told me he’d seen this rage in my mother once during their marriage and never felt the same way about her again. But I’d never so much as glimpsed this side of my mom before. If I had, as miserable as I’d become in Minnesota, I would never have agreed to move to California. In fact, it wasn’t long before I’d made up my mind that when my brother and I went to visit my dad the following summer, I would stay on and live with him permanently. I kept this resolve a secret, even from my brother, for fear he would let the cat out of the bag. Even a father who intimidated me was better than a mom who used her children as scapegoats.

And perhaps I should mention before I go any further that in California my mom had become a marriage and family therapist.