Refusing To Be Made Small: Redux
After writing my most recent blog on toxic shame (Refusing to be Made Small, which ran on July 21, 2021), emotions about my own history of belittlement nagged at me. I’d noted there how common such shame can be for those among whom that singular sense of denigration is repeated over and over, especially during childhood and adolescence; painful and chronic feelings of being inadequate and undeserving of love or attention by the important people in your life often result—the origins of which we have no control.
Those familiar with my online posts know that as a clinical psychologist who writes about issues informed by my previous work and guided by current research, I frequently step out of my professional shadow to place myself squarely in my reader’s sights, as well as my own. I want to connect with you in a way that is vivid, candid and honest. Today’s blog does just that, in an even more substantial, and different, manner than ever before.
Following is an excerpt from my upcoming memoir, Radio Mom: In Pursuit of the Mother I Never Had. This scene depicts my fraught relationship with my emotionally overwhelmed mother and illustrates how—as an anxious and bewildered child—I struggled to cling to a sense of myself as having any value.
By the time I turned seven, I saw that while she still had good days, my mother’s memory of them could vanish in a second under a cloud of resentment. The excitement that the move to our new house had sparked in me—one of belonging and of being wanted—had dimmed little by little. I faced a bigger problem now: words gave me trouble. Especially the ones my mother would string together when she was in a downward-spiraling mood and direct at me. No longer a mother who simply slammed out the door when angry or out of control, now she used her words as weapons with skill. And unlike the old rhyme about sticks and stones, where names supposedly never hurt you, my experience was beginning to tell me otherwise. The impact of my mother’s disparagement was more brutal than being struck with any stick.
Maybe the added burden of working low-paying jobs to help make ends meet had factored into what was her obvious discouragement. Or perhaps my oldest sister’s hospitalization earlier that year for a thyroid problem—along with what seemed like my baby brother’s constant wailing—contributed to Mom’s distress. However, too young to piece together why she seemed so restless, dissatisfied and angry, I treaded around her with care.
Believing that good girls did not become the target of their mothers’ razor-edged put-downs, I wanted desperately to be recognized by Mom as such. But this became ever more tricky. My mother had never been easy to please, and now her behavior became even harder to predict. Often, my mind spun faster than a Tilt-A-Whirl as I tried to determine whether I was a good girl—or a bad girl, and how I might become a better one.
Now, Mom’s ability to maintain the house and keep us younger kids on a schedule also began to falter. Baskets of fresh laundry competed with piles and piles of dirty clothes. She still shopped for groceries almost daily, but food disappeared faster than she could fill the pantry. Floors were mopped, but the sink was never empty. Counter tops remained sticky and cluttered. Mom still cleaned, but nothing had a shine.
Color Polaroids from the Easter holiday that year showed all of us lined up in front of the house. We are holding colorful wicker baskets, wearing outfits from Robert Hall, the clothing store in which Mom worked. Perhaps she was trying to pass us off as the Kennedys. I see these snapshots as evidence that Mom hadn’t yet totally given up trying to create some sense of normalcy in the midst of her discontent. But not long after that photo was taken—by the end of second grade—I worried all the time. The lights in paradise didn’t just flicker. They went out.
When the really dark years hit, “Operation Help Mom” began in earnest. Eventually, Mom left the job at Robert Hall and took a new one. My little brother, six years younger than I, had reached full blown childhood by then. A real challenge, he screamed a lot and threw tantrums.
“Don’t upset him,” Mom would warn in a weary voice. “He’s high strung.”
My little brother heard everything in stereo—louder than did most people. The constant noise in our house made him cover his ears and wail. When not upset, he was sweet and curious. Unfortunately, that curiosity meant he sometimes got into trouble: as a toddler, he drank furniture polish that had been left on a table; later, he sat in front of the gas oven and turned it on when the pilot light wasn’t ignited, then threw lit matches onto the burners and created a boom as loud as a jet breaking the sound barrier. When we all rushed into the kitchen, he was sitting on the floor, stunned.
Structure helped keep him calm. Art projects helped, too. During the years of “Operation Help Mom,” I played school with my sib, mostly as a way to give Mom a much-needed break. Had I been a baby sitter who was paid, I would have been rich.
My efforts, however, weren’t always successful. My brother continued to struggle and Mom’s dark moods showed up with regularity. She’d stare blankly into her coffee cup—a signal one of them was about to start. Anxiety skittered through my mind like a mouse trying to outrun a broom. The urge to do something hit fast. As I tended to my brother’s bad temper, hope flared: there must be some way to avoid Mom’s silence turning from smoke to fire.
Stay alert. Distract her. Don’t get burned.
"Do you want me to make you a piece of toast? You look tired, Mom.”
“Why the hell wouldn’t I be tired?”
Uh-oh. Mom had pulled the match from its box.
“My soul is in Hell! There’s not a one of you that gives a good goddamn how exhausted I am.”
Why hadn’t I picked up on her mood sooner and set out the coffee and toast without even asking if she wanted some? Or been quick enough simply to apologize and then dart from the kitchen, so that I might have saved myself? But I usually froze instead, ensuring that I would have to spend the rest of the day trying to put out the brush fire I’d fanned rather than quenched.
I grew confused often. Wired. Since my younger brother had already cornered the market on being “high-strung,” giving my own anxiety a voice was impossible.
Mom’s cursing came to be the hardest to bear, as she’d use profanity in a way that other mothers never did. I was terrified that she’d swear in front of my friends and this fear became reality. At the words, “get in the goddamned house,” I wanted to disappear.
Being alone with my mother after her rage had spilled out in public felt dangerous, her words like stones to bones.
“You’re out all the time,” she’d scream. “So damn shiftless. I can’t count on a one of you to lift a finger to help around here.”
Mom’s eyes never met mine when she carried on in her rages. I didn’t want her to look at me, petrified as I was. The way she stared past me hit like another kind of punch: I wasn’t even worth noticing.
“Don’t say anything,” was all I could muster to myself. This became a regular internal mantra. In a blur, I would slink out of the room—guilty, confused, and defeated.
— excerpt from Chapter Three, Radio Mom: In Pursuit of the Mother I Never Had
For any of us who have childhood memories of shame, we are wise to remember that despite our pain, shame’s impact can be attenuated. Sometimes, when we let our thoughts linger on a topic that touches us emotionally, we discover that we may need to visit it redux: in literature, redux means that we are called upon to return, to lead back, to bring others—and ourselves—safely home. The past needn’t be a place in which we become mired. Instead, it may just be another way to remind ourselves of how far we’ve come.
Best,
