| He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play, | |
| And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way. | 10 |
| He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward you can see; | |
| I’d think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me! |
Weird how a label can explain so much. Oh, I knew I was terribly shy and, therefore, avoided certain activities. I knew I hated social situations with new people, always feeling stupid and uninteresting and ugly. Case in point: the first boy-girl party I attended in my neighborhood when I was around thirteen. Also in attendance happened to be my childhood tormentor, the brother of a friend who had despised me since his father accused him of having a crush on me when were about five. The now teenage boy refused to play spin the bottle if I was playing, and even though the other kids took up for me, I claimed to have a cold and stayed out of the game and, thereafter, stayed away from boy-girl parties until many years later.
And what to do after high school? College, of course. But I wanted to teach English and nothing else (other than being a published writer, which doesn't require college, necessarily), and I could not imagine standing in front of a classroom and talking, much less being in charge. So, instead, after graduating a year early at sixteen ostensibly to leave for college with my then-boyfriend and future husband, an idea that thankfully didn't materialize because I would've ended up in a Mormon college in Idaho, I worked as a Big Boy waitress as I'd been doing throughout high school. Of course, I almost didn't make it as a newly hired waitress back when I started at 14; the anxiety of every new job has nearly throttled my ability to make money, but the only thing I guess I have that counters the anxiety is some buried understanding that, once I get past the awful stage, I usually do okay.
Always academic and college-bound, I didn't want to go off to a new school alone. And a new school, to me, meant one far away. My eldest brother had gone to Georgia Tech. My sister had gone to Antioch in Ohio, until she dropped out to become a world-traveler for a few years and would later resume her education at University of Maryland, which was practically within walking distance from the house where we grew up.
True, the next brother ended up at Montgomery College, but he'd never been the scholar of the family--though certainly capable, he was far more interested in the golf course than his studies. He did end up a Washington, DC, millionaire, though, so he did okay without a degree, I'd say. As for his scholarly abilities, they clearly existed. He read a high school paper he'd had to write updating a fairy tale. It was the first time I learned about marijuana, and I was sure he was pulling my leg when he told me about the drug and its effects. His paper was a rewrite of Br'er Rabbit, with the rabbit using psychology on the other guy. He wants to hang onto his heroin, so he tells the other guy he doesn't want him to take his marijuana, the "inferior" drug. I thought it was brilliant once I got past the marijuana thing--I was sure he was making fun of "Mary" with this whacky tobaccy thing.
So the idea of attending a college near home never even entered my mind. But going away to school required paperwork I'd missed out on when I skipped my junior year. Besides, I was tired of school. (Ah, all the signs of my undiagnosed ADD when I look back.) What I wanted: to start my grown-up life. Or at least that's what I told myself. I don't remember any particular anxiety about going away to school, leaving home and all my friends--except that I didn't want to leave my boyfriend, who clearly didn't have the funds to go away even as we perused Rick's College brochures together.
Always the non-classist, I chose to love and marry a guy who was the first person on both sides of his family to graduate from high school. Good thing I helped him get through that English class our last year there together--which was the whole reason I'd skipped my junior year, so I could graduate WITH him. My parents probably would've been smarter to force me to stay in school, since they could no doubt see how mismatched John and I were. My mother wrote a beautiful letter about how mature I was, but I had been faking that for a long time. Inside, I was pretty much terrified and confused and full of fear and anxiety. But I don't regret any of it because my marriage gave me my two sons, and they are the boys I was meant to have and that means their dad and I were meant to be together, too. At least that's how I see it.
After ten months of waitressing and trying to figure out what to do, I enrolled in secretarial school, picturing myself in a sort of Mary Tyler Moore Show life with an awesome apartment in downtown DC. No anxiety there, really. School was something I'd always excelled at, and I found I could even type and take shorthand pretty well.
My mother's words did ring in my ears now and then. She was a secretary then for the Department of Agriculture, a job she quit had quit in 1949 when she had her first baby and reacquired when I, the youngest of four, was ten. "I always wanted to go to college," she'd told me many times. "But I was too nervous." Maybe I was, too, but couldn't admit to myself that my mother and I had so much in common.
I took my first secretarial job at the seasoned age of seventeen, and my duties included managing the office, taking shorthand for hours at a time in the red leather chair with brass brads lining its curves in the senior partner's office while he leaned back in his red leather chair (his leaned back; mine didn't), puffed on a cigar, and dictated leases, contracts, and articles of incorporation from his brain, not from any boilerplate. Then I'd type up the hours of dictation, and I was pretty good at that, too--before too long he preferred me over the part-time older woman who'd been his secretary when this seventeen-year-old took the job.
I also had to reconcile the checking accounts. Even though I was, in my humble opinion, pretty good for a seventeen-year-old at most of these duties, I had no idea how to reconcile those accounts, and the anxiety began wearing at me immediately. Why I didn't just ask for more training is beyond me--I'd had one day with the previous secretary to learn everything about the job.
No doubt the anxiety of looking like I wasn't qualified for the job. Surely, one of the attorneys would have shown me how to do it; it would have been no big deal. I knew how to do the math, of course, but I had started out by just checking the amounts of the checks, not the check numbers, and things got worse from there. But I was afraid to admit my ignorance because I'd kept it quiet for a while, hoping it would miraculously balance. Of course, it just steadily got worse, as did my anxiety.
Unable to eat or sleep (except with nightmares about my ruination of the firm), I spent something like a year in misery until, in fact, I ran those accounts nearly down to zero with my haphazard methods and had to face the partners. Oh, I assured them, there was no funny business; I was completely honest; my mother had pounded honesty into my head my entire life; it had just been that I didn't realize you had to match the check numbers of returned checks to the stubs--I just checked off amounts that matched--and things slowly fell apart.
After that revelation, the managing partner asked if I'd done the journal entries. "What are those?" I asked. He sighed and led me to the books. When he pulled them out, I remembered them from that one day of training, but I'd never even heard of journaling accounts, and with all the other new duties that one had, er, slipped my mind. That ADD thing again.
The partners' equinimity (after, I'm sure, some quiet cussing among themselves) after this revelation cured my anxiety for that job. They all coughed up money to get in the red again, and the managing partner sat down with me and made sure I knew what I was doing. From then on, I felt totally comfortable, knowing they valued me. And they all appeared at my wedding not too long afterwards, at barely nineteen. I quit the job when my first son decided to appear two months ahead of schedule, and then I settled into motherhood for a bit until economic necessity put me back to work.
I've experienced similar suffering at the start of every new job move I've made--unless it was a lateral, familiar move. I'd taken the lesson of the law firm's checkbook to heart, and I now readily admitted mistakes or asked for clarification. Over time, I would become comfortable in the role of secretary and received lots of job offers when working as a temp in DC to boost the family coffers after the kids came along.
Years later, when I finally began teaching, having figured at thirty I could maybe get past the anxiety to do what I'd always dreamed of doing, I had my first full-blown panic attack in an English 101 classroom in front of a bunch of none-too-generous eighteen-year-olds. It wasn't pretty.
A few years ago I was examined at the National Institutes of Health for an adrenal disorder. When I read the doctor's report, I'd been rather put off that she had described me as "an anxious woman." Here, I'd thought I'd been so calm and professional about the whole thing. How dare she call me "anxious"? I'd come a long way since my shy childhood, my awkward adolescence, and the "jitters" of earlier jobs and the teaching job I'd then held for six years.
In fact, I thought the doctor had been wrong. I was not an anxious woman. I'd never even considered those collapses in confidence as "anxiety." It took a while before I came to admit that the shadow beside me, or rather within me, was, in fact, anxiety. It's as if I'm a split personality. One half of me is wonderful: I am smart; I can communicate well; I am creative; I get along well with others; I'm not even that bad looking. I had every advantage growing up in a middle-class family. So why the self-doubt? Why, so often, do I feel that the world hates me and thinks I'm stupid?
I have a few theories. Obviously, some genetics were involved. I've already explained that my mother, a beautiful, smart, witty, caring woman, was too nervous to go to college. But another thing happened to me that may sound silly, but over the years I've come to believe was the foundation for a split within me: There is the good Mary, the competent Mary; and there is the bad Mary, the loser Mary.
At eighteen months, the height of a child's separation anxiety, I became severely dehydrated, and I had to be hospitalized for three days. I was put in a quarantined nursery. I have no conscious memory of this, but my mother told me the story more than once. She and my dad were not allowed into the room. A door with a small window allowed them to peek in and wave and smile at me. Apparently, I screamed bloody murder and tried climbing out of my crib when I'd see them. Eventually, a net was put over my crib, and my mother would see the lump of my head bouncing up and down and hear me wailing when they were smiling and waving through the window. I figure this might have been worse than if I just hadn't seen them at all. Maybe I thought they were laughing at my distress. Who knows?
I read an article about the effect of abandonment on children this age. Of course, I wasn't abandoned, but to my eighteen-month mind and body, I must certainly have felt abandoned. This author (I will get a citation for this, as I'd like to read the article again and make it available to my readers) stated that these children go through three stages: first, protest. Well, I demonstrated that very well. Then: resignation. They realize it's not going to change, and the protests decrease. Third: despair. When the bond has been primary, and now is broken, the child's world has collapsed, and all hope is gone.
This is also the age at which children begin to realize they and the mother are not one unit. The "mirror stage," as Lacan put it--when a child sees the mother holding her reflected in a mirror, and the child realizes for the first time that the two of them are separate beings. This is a fragile time for a child's self-discovery.
And so I think my mind split then. I'd never been a "bad" child, but now I must have thought I'd done something terrible, so terrible that my parents had left me in this cage with all these strangers. When my mother and her best friend, Mrs. Schutt, came to pick me up after my release, I refused to go to my mother. Again, the author of the article stated that a child's spurning of the primary caregiver after reconciliation means that the child's fundamental trust has been broken.
Well, no duh. My mother practically cried when she told me this story. I went to Mrs. Schutt and hugged her and ignored my mother. I can't remember how long that lasted--a few hours, at most, but I didn't give in to Mom's trying to woo me back right away. As a mom, I know that must have been torture for her, and her telling me the story was her way of apologizing for something she'd had absolutely no control over, something that no doubt traumatized her as well.
Seems to me an incident like that would plant a fundamental distrust of one's own worth within her psyche that could never entirely be erased. My own choices have, through the years, been very much the "Good Mary Dell" choices and the "Bad Mary Dell" choices.
And, I guess, meeting new people or starting a new job are times when others will decide which of those I am. Being on the chopping block, I suppose, brings back all those insecurities--I might be so bad or so inept that I'll be exposed for what I am and made a laughingstock and an outcast. Only after I've illustrated my competence can I begin to relax and stop worrying about how others view me. Only then can I just be me, the good and the bad Mary, the conscious Mary and the shadow Mary, more healthily integrated within.
Of course, my anxiety may just be chemicals. In fact, at least one of my verified physical conditions, primary aldosteronism, has lately been found to correlate with anxiety disorders. (See http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/50959.php). But, surely, that childhood trauma (from a child's standpoint) didn't help.
I'll discuss anxiety, its causes, and its effects in future episodes. I'm just thankful that hospitals have grown much more humane over the years. When my son had to have neurosurgery at seven and nine months, and then later when he was five years old, his rooms were equipped with a pull-out bed for me to sleep beside him. And a rocking chair sat there so I could rock him after surgery, as I did after the second surgery while he cried through swollen, black-and-blue eyes for two days until, at last, a crack opened in a corner of one eye, and he rolled his little pupil there and could again see. The crying stopped. His world had been restored and, while I have no idea how those early moments affect his psyche today, at least I could be there with him.
But he, too, had severe social anxiety growing up, so maybe it's all genetics. Freud said anatomy is destiny, in a rather different context, but given when I've learned about genetics over the past few years, I think he was onto something.
Just one of the many topics I want to explore on The Mary Dell Show--and hopefully they all won't be so me-focused. I hope you stay tuned!
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