SHAMED

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.