A few years ago I read Joan Brady’s autobiography, The Unmaking of a Dancer—her account of how her mother destroyed her dream of becoming a ballerina. I identified with her so much, I considered calling one of my vignettes “The Unmaking of a Singer,” though it occurred to me that the more global “The Unmaking of a Daughter“ might be even more apt. I got so much negative reinforcement from my mother after our move to California that whatever good feelings I’d ever had about myself faded from memory.

Looking back, I realize that she couldn’t control me through intimidation the way my father had—I wasn’t as afraid of her as I was of him. So she used shaming instead. When she berated me, I didn’t take it lying down. I fought back, trying to defend myself. But while arguing may have felt necessary at the time, in the long run it eroded my self-esteem still further, I felt so bad about the angry person I was becoming.

When I went to my mother for support, she used to tell me that after a day of ministering to her clients’ needs, she had nothing left to give. If I asked her advice about a problem I was having, she found a way to make me feel I’d brought it on myself. If someone had hurt me, she was liable to take their part, saying if I hadn’t done such and such… A curious aspect of what she conveyed to me by always making me the culpable one was that the world was correspondingly benign. I was so deeply conditioned to perceive things this way that I still have a hard time recognizing potential danger—either psychic or physical—from a person or situation.

When I was younger, my mother had told me children were too self-centered to love, as I’ve said. During my teenage years, however, the picture my mother presented of adult life was so bleak that I became afraid to grow up.

In high school, when I belatedly found out my homeroom teacher was married, I felt desolated. I’d entertained the fantasy that maybe, when I was older, he would marry me, and the thing that so powerfully attracted me to him was his playfulness. He was the one grownup in my life who gave me hope that adulthood wasn’t necessarily unrelieved toil and travail.

When I think of the complexities of my relationship with my mother, the image that comes to mind is a maze with no exit. I’ve tried, as an adult, to tell her how unhappy I was during those years, but she has dismissed my suffering, saying everyone is miserable as an adolescent.

As for her rages, she denies she ever had them, despite the fact that my brother remembers them as well as I do. The first time I brought up the subject as an adult, she became so infuriated, she stomped up the stairs, screaming that I was trying to destroy her. The second time, she yelled that I wasn’t welcome in her house if I was going to dredge up the past, though a year later she called me to reconcile. She said then, with a stoical sigh, that she’d realized I had a need to believe what I did.

There had been one bright spot in my life in California:

My very first day of eighth grade at Garfield Junior High—now Martin Luther King Middle School—my homeroom teacher asked the girl two desks in front of me to help me find my classes and show me around the school. Her name was Linda, a carrot-top like me, and though we couldn’t have looked more different, because of our hair strangers would ask if we were sisters. But hers was bright, while mine was pale; her eyes were hazel, while mine were blue; her skin was creamy, while mine was freckled; her nose was straight and bold, while mine was crooked and nondescript. At lunchtime she introduced me to two of her friends, Daryl and Nikki—all three of them children of divorce, though Linda was the only one who lived with her father. (In St. Anthony Park, I hadn’t known any kids whose parents were divorced.)

It was Daryl I was drawn to from the beginning, both for her gentle manner and her sense of humor, which jibed with mine in a way I’d never experienced with anyone before. She began asking me over for dinner on Fridays, and her home became a haven for me. She lived with her writer mother, Nancy, who walked with a limp, and who, like Daryl, had a gentle way about her. Their house was in the Berkeley Hills. From their picture window, in the evening, you could see a panoramic view of the bay, a sea of twinkling lights in the foreground, the San Francisco skyline and Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. A typical dinner was steak—which my family couldn’t afford—and red leaf lettuce salad, which seemed very elegant to me because all I’d ever eaten was iceberg lettuce. They had a tiered yard and garden in back, and their living room was spacious enough for us to do modern dance in. Nancy even hired a dance teacher to give us lessons. In Minnesota, I’d started going to the Unitarian Church in Minneapolis in seventh grade with my friend Mary and her family, as I’ve mentioned. In Berkeley, Daryl and I started going to the Unitarian Church in Kensington, a modern gray stone structure with an atrium, rubber trees, and an even more spectacular view of the Bay Area cities because it was on the very highest ridge of the East Bay hills.

From my mom, who got to know Nancy, I learned that Daryl’s father was a musician and that Nancy’s lameness had been an issue in their marriage. Though it would be years before I knew I was meant to be a writer, I felt a comfort and affinity with Nancy. What I didn’t know was that, unlike my own mother, she recognized who I was and understood that my life was likely to be a difficult one. Only as an adult would I learn that my mother had always viewed me as so talented that I “would never want for anything,” including—apparently—attention, understanding, empathy, and encouragement. Nancy, on the other hand, had expressed to my mom the opinion that I was an artist and would suffer. “Talents aren’t assets that lift you above want or need,” I would tell my mother as an adult. “They’re hungers—and if they’re not fed, you’re likely to become as emotionally blighted as a starved child is physically blighted.”

What I couldn’t foresee, as I headed back to California from Minnesota at the end of my summer with my father, was that my safe harbor with Daryl and Nancy had only been a temporary one.

In ninth grade, Linda’s father decided to send her to a home for delinquent girls in Oakland. He’d recently remarried—a woman with two daughters—and believed that Linda was trying to sabotage his relationship with his new wife and stepdaughters. So beginning in ninth grade, Daryl invited Linda to live with her—and I don’t remember ever visiting her home again. I also know from my mom that Nancy found Linda difficult and was deeply distressed about her staying with them, but Daryl remained staunchly loyal to our mutual friend, and she and I were never close again.

It’s been a little over a year since I wrote in my journal:

Today I made a decision as I was driving back from the Plunge after me swim: that when my website—Eager Reader Press—goes up next month, I’m going to use it not just to sell the children’s books I’ve written and illustrated, but, at least occasionally, as a platform to talk about child abuse and the impact it has had on my life.

The catalyst for this decision was an insight I had the other morning when I woke up from a recurring abandonment dream. Throughout my adult life I’ve made two types of Freudian slips—not in speech, but in writing:

One is to unwittingly write “a” instead of “I,” as though I were an indefinite article rather than a definite one—an error I make whether I’m writing in longhand or typing. I also write “my” instead of “me,” again as though I were a collection of attributes but lacked a cohesive sense of self. On the infrequent occasions I’m feeling a buoyant confidence, however, I’m apt to make the opposite mistake and write “I” for “a” and “me” for “my,” which I see that I did in my first sentence—a promising sign.

The second mistake I’m liable to make is to omit “not” or the contraction “n’t” in a sentence. Why do I try to write a negative statement and find, when I re-read it, that I’ve written a positive one? I’ve wondered for years. After my dream, I think I finally understand: What I commit to the page represents the overt—the public—side of myself, the face I show to the world. I omit “not” and “n’t because they represent the negative side of myself that I try to keep hidden—the anxiety, anger, and shame that are a legacy of my childhood. And so it remains hidden on the page—an unconscious reminder of all that I’m leaving unexpressed.

My mother, brother, and I moved from the cavernous old house on Doswell, surrounded by lilac bushes, into a brand new—but tiny—apartment in Berkeley. Mom gave the two small bedrooms upstairs to Doug and me and slept downstairs on the sofa. At last she had the modern apartment she’d always wanted. She decorated it with dispatch, choosing modern furniture with walnut veneers from Montgomery Ward. The carpet was pragmatically speckled black and white and didn’t show the dirt. My main memory of that carpet is of my brother taking a golf swing that tore loose a patch of it that flew across the room. Luckily Mom wasn’t home. I sewed it back on, and she was never the wiser.

There was a balcony over the carport that we never used, except for a little tree my mom bought to be our Christmas tree in the years to come. But the needles were so sharp you could hardly decorate it.

My bedroom was pale green, and this time I chose my own furniture. I got a white corner desk with matching chests of drawers on either side, also sheer curtains that flowed from light blue to moss green over a long slatted window that started just above the floor. My main memory of that window is of my brother murmuring, in a high falsetto, “I love you, Karl,” through the open slats when Karl, the teenage boy who lived in apartment one, was sweeping the sidewalk below. I’d hidden my diary in a box tacked to the back of a drawer, and somehow Doug had found it and discovered my secret crush.

The staircase to the second floor was slatted as well, a construction that always seemed flimsy and unsafe to me. Sometime during that first year in California my mom began to have recurrent nightmares—about a sinister intruder who would break into the apartment in the dead of night and creep up on her, intent on killing her in her bed. From my own bad dreams, I’d hear a thin, eerie, high-pitched wail for help—and start awake, terrified, myself, until I remembered what it was. The first few times it happened, I called, “Mom?” and she woke up. But soon my calling stopped working because she incorporated it into her dream. So I started going to the head of the stairs and snapping on the hall light, which lighted the downstairs too, since the steps were slatted. And that would wake her up. Eventually, however, she integrated the light into her dream too, and the only way I could wake her from her nightmare was to go downstairs and shake her.

As for me, I was having difficult nights of my own:

“I dreamed Mom had a baby that was so heavy I had trouble cradling it. I accidentally allowed its head to drop to one side, and after that it held its head crookedly, as though it were injured. Worried, I told her I wondered if it had broken something, but she seemed unconcerned. When blood started dripping from the baby’s nose, I became distraught. A moment later it died in my arms. My mother turned away, unperturbed, while I began to keen with despair.”

A block away lived my mom’s younger brother Bill, his wife Audrey, and their son Billy, a year older than my brother. Bill and Aud had married at ages eighteen and sixteen respectively, and at twenty-one Bill had contracted polio. (For the rest of his life he walked with a brace on one leg.) In the years that followed, Mom would spend much of her free time over at their place, forging a life-long friendship with Audrey, while Doug would find a companion in Billy, as well as our other male cousin, Nick. But I would never experience, with any of my California relatives, the emotional connection I’d hoped for. As for a stepfather, as far as I know, when the only man Mom ever dated after the move turned out to be married, she swore off men definitively.