I grew up in a big rambling wooden house perched on top of a
hill surrounded by woods and streams in McLean, Virginia, the
second of four children of assimilated, wealthy, German-Jewish
parents. Our household also included, at any given time, two or
three dogs, any number of guinea pigs, assorted hamsters, a canary,
various au pairs, and our loving, African-American, Baptist housekeeper,
Mae Carter. There was also, for a time at least, a horse named
Massy, whom my older sister, Barbara, rode to school for Earth
Day in 1972, while my mother, with the three other kids, drove
behind in the Chevy wagon.
I had piano lessons, guitar lessons, painting lessons, dance
lessons, diving lessons (I pictured myself doing triple back flips
off the high dive and landing on the Olympic diving team) and
-- for that brief ugly period when people were hanging brightly
colored glass birds and flowers in their windows -- glass-cutting
lessons. In other words, I was hardly neglected. But I was a miserable,
anxious, dark and moody child nonetheless, prone to anxiety, depression
and debilitating stomach aches.
I was a lousy student -- which in my family (which prized brains
in a big way) was very bad and, to the bewilderment of my mother
who had been a jock all her life, an utter and complete dud on
the sports fields. I attended a fancy, WASPy private school where
athletics were important. But, as far as I was concerned, the
best thing to do if a ball was heading in your direction was to
duck for cover. That attitude didn't get me far in the adolescent
popularity sweepstakes.
Though my father, who'd grown up Orthodox in Baltimore, made
a big deal out of just about all things Jewish (from the Jewish
holidays on the one hand, to the State of Israel on the other),
I didn't feel at home in my Jewish skin and would have done anything
to have long straight hair and a small nose like my best friend,
Nina Chapin. I was, moreover, terrified of Nazis (of whom, in
point of fact, there weren't too many in McLean, Virginia, in
the 1960s) and was certain that the entire world would soon be
incinerated by a nuclear bomb. I preferred the company of my stuffed
bunny rabbit, Bumby, to that of most girls and boys my age, and
at the age of 12 I developed an ulcer. Unfortunately, my father
didn't believe in sickness, so it was awhile before my mother
hauled me off to the pediatrician, who sent me home with a lifetime
supply of Maalox and instructions to avoid fatty foods.
I now live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and have children of my
own -- Sam is 13 and my twins, Rose and Jonathan, are 9 -- and,
like every other parent in America, I am determined to raise happy,
healthy, self-confident children who, as a bonus, don't suffer
from migraines, ulcers or general self-hatred; children who don't
take drugs, abuse alcohol, sleep around, pierce their tongues
or their belly-buttons, or drive too fast; children who, in other
words, are filled and buoyed all their lives by feelings of happiness,
self-worth, confidence and optimism; children who understand that
their very existence on earth is an incalculable blessing that
demands, in return, a lifetime of saying thanks; children who
have the inner freedom to become the people they were meant to
become and pursue the dreams and talents they were endowed with
at birth.
To this end, I pretty much leave them alone, except on occasion
to yell at them because they are so loud that they are driving
me clear around the bend and if they don't quiet down pronto I
will end up in the loony hatch. To be fair to myself, I also cheer
them on in their strengths, browbeat them into learning manners,
make them write thank-you cards, break up their fights, drag them
to synagogue and all the rest of it.
A few years ago, when my mother was visiting, she and I got
into an argument on the subject of how best to instill self-confidence
in kids. We were sitting in the jungle that is my backyard in
Baton Rouge, watching the kids play. I told Mom that Sam, my eldest,
was bright and a good student but sloppy and careless when he
wasn't interested. She said, "Well, you encourage him don't you?
You tell him he's doing an excellent job and that you're proud
of him, don't you? You want him to have good self-esteem, don't
you?"
I thought about it for a second, took a deep breath and then
went on to lecture my mother, in the self-righteous voice that
I've mastered ever since I realized that Mom still feels guilty
about my girlhood ulcer, that never, not in a million years, not
if every child-development expert in the country told me I was
wrong, would I heap false praise on Sam. Self-esteem, I said,
came from the mastery of skills (in school, on the playing fields,
at the dining room table and so forth) and from general parental
love and acceptance, and not from unearned pats on the head. As
if I knew.
Actually, and despite the self-esteem deficit that I continue
to struggle with, I think the whole slippery subject of self-esteem
is overinflated. One thing that strikes me is that self-esteem
seems to have replaced God as an ultimate goal -- a dogma, its
precepts spread by Oprah and her minions, providing countless
pop psychologists with enough material to write enough books on
the subject to fill up a thousand Books-A-Million stores. Without
it, we're told, we'll become, at the very least, neurotic, self-defeating
wimps; with it, we'll lead successful, fulfilled lives. But my
hunch is that neither Hitler nor Stalin, not to mention Bin Laden
or your friendly neighborhood drug kingpin, suffers much from
a lack of self-esteem. The prophet Moses, on the other hand, is
depicted as a guy with plenty of tsuris. (A Yiddish word
that means woes, troubles or suffering.) And yet who, given the
choice, wouldn't gulp down a big fat portion of self-esteem with
every meal? Who wouldn't ask for seconds? It's just one of those
good things -- like love, or health or really good, thick, manageable
hair -- that only the biggest schlemiel (loser) would
refuse.
On the whole, my life has been lived on easy street, surrounded
by loving friends and, as I've finally come to learn, relatives.
I've long since grown into my Jewish skin, such that Judaism has
become for me, as it is for my father, both a central, creative
impulse and a source of comfort. In addition, I've also been helped
by a whole army of talented psychiatrists, starting with the ancient,
paternalistic Freudian to whom my mother took me when I was a
senior in high school and coming apart at the seams, and ending
with a German Catholic transactionalist (whom I began to see when
my husband, a professor of law at Louisiana State University,
spent a semester away from me and the kids as a "visiting professor"
in Arizona--a career move that excited all kinds of fears of abandonment
that I hadn't previously known I'd had. After all, I was hardly
an abandoned child).
I still don't really know why I tend to fall into the misery
pit, where I can wallow for weeks on end, eating far too many
potato chips and daydreaming about attaining such huge professional
success that I'll somehow be catapulted into the realm of the
angels, never to be touched by feelings of mediocrity, insecurity
or raw, ugly, naked unhappiness again. Although I do know that
most of it is mixed up with the usual culprits of childhood misapprehensions
-- the boo-boos my parents made out of a combination of inexperience
and simple human imperfection in that sweet hazy time before anyone
other than a handful of New York intellectuals consulted professionals
in the field of mental health.
Even though my dad, Judaism and I have been on excellent terms
for years (so much so that, at the age of 41, I wore his tallith,
or prayer shawl, on the occasion of my much-delayed bat
mitzvah), some of my lingering anxiety doubtless comes from
the way religion was practiced in our home in McLean when I was
a child. By nature I was spiritually inclined. Long before anyone
taught me to pray, I chatted away with God as if he and I were
old pals, relying on him to protect me and my family from everything
from earthquake (an unlikely event in Virginia) to volcanoes (equally
unlikely, but what did I know?) to infestations of locusts. But
in our house there was really only one Jew -- my father who, on
top of having been raised in the cloistered, Orthodox world of
pre-and post-war Baltimore, was the only male of his generation
and hence the person slated by his parents, grandparents, and
many aunts and uncles to carry on the 4,000-year-old Jewish tradition.
My mother wasn't religiously inclined at all. She'd been raised
by parents who basically didn't believe in God and who also, as
adherents of the Reform strain of American Judaism, had long since
chucked such central Jewish practices as keeping the kosher (dietary)
laws, praying on the Sabbath and mastering Hebrew. Mom did her
best to make a Jewish home along the lines of the one my father
had grown up in, but it was mighty hard to think about keeping
the Jewish dietary laws when we were just about the only Jews
in all of northern Virginia and my father couldn't so much as
find his way to the kitchen, let alone explain the niceties of
setting up a traditional Jewish home. My mother wouldn't have
kept a kosher home anyway; she'd been raised eating her mother's
marvelous, Southern-style honey-glazed hams and thought the whole
idea of limiting one's diet and complicating one's cooking based
on three statements in Exodus and Deuteronomy was dumb.
As for me, I was torn between the two of them, yearning to find
some path both to God and to the Jewish tradition but also pledged,
as if at birth, to defend my mother's rights and integrity against
my father's increasingly insistent high-handedness on all matters
pertaining to religion. Also there was the fact of my gender.
I was a girl, who, on top of being a girl, resembled my mother
and her entire line of not-very-Jewish Jews to such a high degree
that it was as if I'd been cloned. It was my brother, David, one
year my junior and sporting my father's green eyes and athletic
build, who seemed to be the focus of our father's hopes and dreams.
As for me, I think I simply slipped off Dad's radar screen.
As I sat sobbing one day during an unusually emotional (even
for me) therapy session a few weeks after my husband had gone
to teach in Arizona, my German Catholic therapist asked me if
I'd feel comfortable asking God to let me feel his divine love.
I knew what she was getting at -- if I had suffered deprivation
in the paternal-love-and-approval department when I was a child,
wouldn't it be good for my wounded little psyche to get a dose
of the heavenly variety? I thought about it for a second and then
agreed to give it a try. But even though God is depicted in both
the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish prayer service in the roles of
both loving Father ("Abba," which means "Daddy") and all-forgiving
lover, divine love wasn't a concept that I was at home with. Even
as I told my therapist that I'd give it a go, I felt goofy, like
a big fat fake.
"See what happens," she said.
So that night I got down on my knees and bent my head to the
floor and asked God to let me feel his love, and the very next
day my real father sent me a book on the subject of Jewish theology,
in which he'd written in Hebrew on the inside cover, "To my second
daughter, with love from your Abba."
And perhaps someone with even a shred of rationality would see
the arrival of this particular book signed in this particular
way as no more than a coincidence -- after all, my father regularly
sends me books, I read them, and then we get into heated e-mail
discussions on their merits -- but I couldn't help but view both
the book and the inscription within it as a little love-bomb from
heaven itself.
A few months ago, after a particularly trying time in my life,
I hopped in the minivan and drove to the other side of town to
fetch my son, Jonathan, from his friend Luke's house. Luke is
black and lives with his wonderful mother, a fourth-grade teacher,
in a tiny house in a fairly crummy black neighborhood in North
Baton Rouge around the corner from his maternal grandparents.
I don't know quite how she does it on her ridiculously low teacher's
salary, but somehow or another, Luke's mother, Ginnie, manages
to send Luke to the same private, Episcopal, rich-kids' school
that Jonathan attends -- a place where I myself have often felt
like the odd-woman-out among the mainly Episcopal, mainly white,
mainly Republican and mainly well-dressed former LSU and Ole Miss
sorority sisters who make up the bulk of the school moms.
How, I sometimes thought, could Ginnie stand the place?
What does she think when, for instance, the other moms start chattering
on about new chintz curtains for the "keeping room," or taking
the kids to ClubMed? Just for starters, she doesn't have a husband.
Then, too, the school is hardly around the corner from Ginnie's
neighborhood -- an area of town that I would guess is all but
terra incognito for most of Luke's (and Jonathan's) classmates.
I was dying to ask her how she dealt with the gap between her
home and work life, and her only son's school environment, but
I never had. After all, what business of it was mine?
But as we watched our two boys playing football in Ginnie's
front yard, and the cicadas set up their chirping choir, I asked
her, point-blank, how she managed. "I know it must cost you,"
I said.
"You got that right, baby," Ginnie said -- and we both knew
that she wasn't referring to finances alone. "But you know," she
said, "I've got a lot of help. I've got my mother and my father,
and let me tell you, the two of them have always been there for
me. From the time I was a baby girl, I can't remember anything
but love. My daddy is just wonderful with Luke, too, and you know
that a boy needs a man in his life." She paused, then said, "That
boy is going to get a good education, because he deserves it,
see? But you're right. It isn't always easy. But when things get
really tough I know I can bow my head and ask for help. And you
know it always comes. He's always been there for me,
and he always will be."
In a single well duh moment I understood that, despite
whatever financial hardships or racial prejudice Ginnie might
encounter, she had something I'd never been able to count on:
faith in a loving, protective and sheltering God, courtesy --
at least in part -- of a loving, protective and sheltering father.
The two daddies went hand in hand. Ginnie walked between them,
buoyed by feelings of love and acceptance that were as much a
part of her childhood home as the food on the table and the family
photographs on the dresser. That Ginnie had so readily and warmly
opened up to me, allowing me to get a tiny glimpse of her soul,
was a gift that made me feel as if I too might be able to dip
into this marvelous, life-sustaining, sweet warm sea.
In 60-second psychoanalysis terms, Ginnie, the recipient of
her father's love and acceptance, was able to transfer good feelings
of self-worth right to the heavenly realm, whereas I, with my
absent-even-when-present father, had spent my childhood feeling
unlovable and inadequate. But it was more than that. How different
were the paths that Ginnie and I had walked, and yet as we stood
together watching our boys play, I knew we were growing together,
both of us reaching up toward the light. Self-esteem is too paltry
a word to convey what Ginnie was describing, and yet it is the
word we turn to, again and again, as we try our best to teach
our children well, setting them on the paths of happiness and
peace.
I felt so good after talking to Ginnie that I went home humming
the Aleynu ("Our Father") to myself, while in the back
seat Jonathan told me about all the fun things he and Luke had
done. The sprawl of midcity Baton Rouge looked glorious to me
in the dim light of early evening, and then I realized that it
was Friday night -- the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath -- and
all my worries, at least for the moment, were gone.
