The Good Girl

The summer between second and third grade, after living in two different towns and going to three different grade schools (a new one opened up the middle of my second grade year), we moved back to the town where I was born. Dad got a job with the state, a job that would at last remain stable, and the idea was that we'd buy a piece of land and build a nice house. For that reason we rented the house I lived in all through third grade -- which was sold out from under us the next summer and we lived with my grandmother for a year while we finished building our house, so add two more grade schools to my list -- and my mother went back to work part-time at first, then full-time, so they could afford the land and the house.

Both of my grandmothers lived in town, so during the summer, while Mom was at work, my brothers and I would spend the days with our grandmothers, each on alternate days.

My Grandma H still drove her own car, and while my brothers went out and picked beans and strawberries to earn money (I was never allowed -- "You're a girl," my parents said, because... I don't know), sometimes Grandma H had to go to the store or to the doctor's office.

While she was at the doctor's, of course I'd sit in the waiting room. I always had a library book with me, and there were plenty of Highlights and National Geographic magazines to keep me occupied, avid bookworm that I was. While sitting there absorbed in my reading material, sometimes I was vaguely aware of being watched.

I never thought much about it. I was just passing the time with my books or magazines. Eventually Grandma came out and off we'd go.

Some time later that summer, Grandma said she'd heard from the receptionist that the other elderly ladies in the waiting room had commented on what a good little girl I was. When they saw me left alone in the waiting area, they'd at first thought the worst: I'd run around, make noise, play with toys, and generally annoy them. But instead I sat very still and read silently until the appointment was over. What a good little girl.

Compliments were few and far between when I was that age. My mother firmly "corrected" any deviancy from her notion of The Perfect Girl, my brothers made sure I was reminded daily of their superiority and my inferiority, and Dad had nearly adult expectations of our behavior. But here, oh! here I had a high compliment about things I was really, really good at! I was quiet, I was well-behaved, I was a good reader. I was a good little girl!

Every time after that when I went places with Grandma or any other adult, I was a Good Little Girl with all my might when I had to wait. I was still, I was silent, and I kept myself occupied. I would show everyone just how good I could be. 

It wouldn't be long, though, before I discovered how poorly my "talent" for being quiet and making myself practically invisible would serve me anywhere other than a doctor's waiting room in the company of older women with old-fashioned notions.

And I'm not the only one who has learned this painful lesson. In an article in Psychology Today, The Trouble With Bright Girls, author Heidi Grant Halvorson notes that by fifth grade, smart girls are quicker to give up on difficult tasks and yield to the boys because girls believe ability is innate and unchanging, while boys believe that ability is achieved with with effort. Why? Because of the "good girl" trope:

How do girls and boys develop these different views? Most likely, it has to do with the kinds of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children. Girls, who develop self-control earlier and are better able to follow instructions, are often praised for their "goodness." When we do well in school, we are told that we are "so smart," "so clever, " or " such a good student." This kind of praise implies that traits like smartness, cleverness, and goodness are qualities you either have or you don't. 

Boys, on the other hand, are a handful. Just trying to get boys to sit still and pay attention is a real challenge for any parent or teacher. As a result, boys are given a lot more feedback that emphasizes effort (e.g., "If you would just pay attention you could learn this," "If you would just try a little harder you could get it right.") The net result: When learning something new is truly difficult, girls take it as sign that they aren't "good" and "smart", and boys take it as a sign to pay attention and try harder.

 In The Confidence Gap, an article from The Atlantic, a similar theme is echoed:

School is where many girls are first rewarded for being good, instead of energetic, rambunctious, or even pushy. But while being a “good girl” may pay off in the classroom, it doesn’t prepare us very well for the real world. As Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychology professor and the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, put it to us: “If life were one long grade school, women would be the undisputed rulers of the world.”

And dozens of scholarly articles find the same thing still happens: girls tend to be praised for being quiet and good, boys get praised for doing things.

Now throw a few more things in the mix. I was a born introvert. I'd already been The New Kid In School several times and would be several more times. We were buying an acreage and my parents' time, attention, and finances would soon become entirely wrapped up in house building and starting a small farm, and my brothers and I were used as free labor every weekend. My mother went back to work, and I wasn't allowed to have any friends over or go to anyone else's house after school when my grandmother was watching us and later when I was a latchkey kid. My social skills stagnated, while my emotional needs were just not on anyone's radar.

I was become more and more isolated, with fewer and fewer friends. And my biggest talent for which I got any praise at all was being "good," quiet, and... invisible.

6th Grade Sex Ed, 70s Style

What they taught us:

The reality:

Pink, Blue, and Infinite Shades of Mauve

Somewhere in one of my mother's family photo albums is a photo of me at age not-quite-three in a cute little cowboy suit, toy pistols and all, that some doting relative got for me. I don't have access to it at the moment, so I'll try to recreate the gist of it from memory. 

I was pretty small when I got it, and I don't know that I wore it all that often. It was a costume for dress up play, so my mother would not have thought it appropriate to wear outside the house. I think I outgrew it fast. And I have vague memories of being a little too yippie-ki-yi-ay when I had it on, so that may have been one reason it was kept in the back of the closet and only brought out on rare occasion when I was "being good."

Even without all the trim and holsters and silver-tone conchos and all in the picture, it's evident why my mother called it a cowGIRL suit. It was pastel pink. It had a short little skirt -- with fringes? Pretty sure it had fringes. 

I knew better, though. It was a cowBOY suit, and I firmly and repeatedly corrected anyone who said otherwise. I didn't grok the cowGIRL thing. It was cowBOY or nothing.

And therein was the opening salvo, a warning shot over the bow of my mother's Good Ship Perfect Daughter, the first strains of the overture in a lifelong tragicomic operetta that might be titled, "I Gotta Be MEEEE." Subtitled, "I'm... I'm a WHAT exactly?"

My mom had some pretty solid ideas of what a girl ought to be. Images like these from a couple of knitting books that she handed down to me are exemplars of what she had in mind when she put in her order for My Perfect Little Girl TM Patent pending, Bettie Page bangs and all: 

Perfect little girls, from what I gathered, were:

• Dainty and delicate.
• Always adorable.
• Well-behaved.
• Clean and perfectly groomed.
• Neat and tidy.
• Mommy's little helper.

Her ideas of what little girls should wear were solidified in the 40s and 50s, so that even in the 60s/70s she resisted any notion that I could wear pants to school, and she sewed me some dresses in a tiny flowered print with puffed sleeves and poofy skirts that were the latest in style when she was of an age to start planning her Perfect Little Girl TM Patent pending. So yeah, in '68 and '69 or so, when the other girls were all hip in flared jeans and mod dresses and mini skirts, I was turned out like something out of a Fun With Dick and Jane reader. 

Meanwhile, after I learned to read at a very young age and was gobbling up every Early Reader in the house and the nearest library, I slurped up my brothers' Henry Huggins and other Beverly Cleary books, science books, mysteries, Indian crafts and lore books, and spent time looking longingly at the pictures in brother K's Cub Scout manual like these:

And these:

And these were illustrations for Arrow Point requirements. Requirements! WOW! Not only did boys get to do exciting things like climb trees and build shacks and make electromagnetic cranes, they got awards for it!

Sign me up! I thought.

Now, I was pretty cognizant about the physical differences between boys and girls. I knew that I had all the physical characteristics of a girl. But... I was nevertheless the kid who insisted I was wearing a cowBOY suit. I frequently wished I'd been born a boy because my brothers and their friends got to do cooler things than I did. I knew from the girl bits in my underpants that I wasn't physically a boy. Nor did I identify as a boy. But... "I'm a girl" never quite rang true for me, either. I had dolls and doll clothes, but I didn't do much with the dolls besides put the clothes on them. I preferred being out in the sandbox with my brothers and their Tonka trucks, but no one got Tonka trucks for me. My brothers got chemistry sets. I asked if I could have one. I got craft kits, which were okay, and tea sets, which I had no idea what to do with.

Mom reminded me over and over that I was her "dainty and delicate" little girl. Sometimes when I got to play with my brothers and things got a little wild, Mom would cry out, "Where's my dainty and delicate little girl?" and if I got snarky and said, "I didn't know I had a sister," that put a swift end to play time then and there and I was sent to my room. My brothers scorned "dumb girl stuff," and wanted nothing to do with the few girlish things I was be interested in. My dad... he seldom had much to say about gender roles and what little girls "ought" to be (beyond the time he saw me reading Captains Courageous and said, "Isn't that a boy's book?), but when it came to choosing family outings, it was Dad who chose and we did the things Dad liked -- fishing, going for a hike, going to the beach, camping, going to the zoo, outdoor stuff like that, and we all participated. It was stuff I liked doing, too. By the time I was six I could bait a hook and clean my own fish. Besides learning to cook, which was a little like chemistry (actually it's a lot like chemistry), and needle crafts, I didn't much like housekeeping and other traditionally feminine pursuits.

So... I had a lot of questions. Questions that never got asked because there wasn't anyone willing to have that conversation and there weren't the answers then that I might have gotten these days.

At that time, you were a girl or a boy, period. The only alternate state, for a girl who liked to do boy things, was "tomboy" (there was no socially acceptable alternate state for boys who liked to do girl things). A tomboy was clearly a girl, identified as a girl, but liked rough-and-tumble play, preferring to run around with the boys instead of staying home and playing with dolls. The tomboy story, though, always seemed to culminate in the day when the former freckle-faced little gamin in braids made her debut at the prom, all long gown and smooth hair and chic poise and all the boys who had been her playmates stood there with their mouths hanging open and then stumbled over one another to ask for a dance.

I wasn't confident and extroverted enough to be the classic tomboy, nor did I harbor any illusions as I got older that I'd blossom into a glamorous sylph. I didn't feel like a chic girl who had it all together. I wasn't going to ever be a boy, either, I knew that.

So what was I?

The only things I could say with certainty about myself at that tender age were:

• I was an avid reader.
• I was a maker of things.
• I was creative.
• I liked the outdoors.
• I was messy.
• I hated pink.
• I liked blue.

I was not what my mother had ordered, something I would feel ever more strongly as I grew older and less and less inclined to follow the path she'd so meticulously planned out, which she seemed to take as a personal affront. But that core "me," whatever it was, however non-traditionally-gendered, was a stubborn Old Soul that refused to budge in the face of societal and motherly pressure. 

I knew, even when the youth of the 60s were hitchhiking across Europe or meditating with gurus to "find themselves," exactly who I was. It was that solid sense of self that would be my saving grace, what would literally keep me alive, in the maelstrom of my young adult years.

Insomnia

I knew I had a problem falling asleep at night. But I didn't realize how much of a problem it was until just a few years ago when I read an article on "sleep hygiene" that said something to the effect of, "if you still aren't asleep after 20 minutes..."

And I thought... 20 minutes? Do real people fall asleep that fast?

Because ever since I can recall, it took me a whole lot longer than 20 minutes to fall asleep. A whole lot longer. I can remember being sent to bed at the same bedtime year-around, regardless of when the sun actually set, lying in bed on a summer's evening in a room that was too light even with the curtains drawn, listening to the TV playing off in the living room where everyone else was watching it, and feeling that a world in which the rest of the family watched TV while I had to be in bed by 7:30 (up until I was in second grade, when my bedtime was moved all the way to 8:00) was truly unfair.

Even in the winter, even when it was dark at bedtime, I would still lie in bed hearing the sounds of the rest of the house, until my brothers were sent to bed, then finally the TV was turned off, and my parents went to bed, and silence settled in the house.

In the meantime my eyes were wide open and my brain was going whirl whirl whirl...

I had my stuffed animals for company. All of them. ALL of them. I didn't want any of them to feel left out or rejected. I had a lot of deep-seated anxiety around rejection, so every soft toy I had was piled up in my crib. It's a wonder there was any room left for me.

There are, of course, kids with sleep problems who bounce back out of bed, play with their toys, lead their parents on a merry chase around the house, and so on. I never did. There was a good deal of strictness in our house, so I suppose I didn't dare.

I had something going for me, though. I had my imagination. The time between getting tucked in and the time I finally did fall asleep was spent spinning stories in my head.

The earliest ones were riffs on the television shows I watched. Mostly they involved Batman, the campy 60s TV version. My stories included a character of my own, a projection of myself into the Batman trope, that I named Flying Boy.

Flying Boy had whatever awesome super power I needed for him to have for whatever tale I created. Flying like Superman was obviously one of them. There might also be characters from other shows. The Monkees might make an appearance. As time went on, various superhero cartoons added to the stories, and they grew longer, more complex, and a whole lot more dramatic.

Falling asleep initially was problematic enough, even with the inner stories going on.

Waking in the middle of the night, though, starting when I was about four... that was a far bigger problem.

I can recall being about three and I couldn't find anyone in the house. For some reason I was inside and everyone else was outside doing yard work. I ran from room to room, looking for them, and exploded into an all out panic attack, afraid to my bones that somehow it was their time to die and I was all alone. Mom heard me crying and came in to see what in the world could be the matter, and chided me about crying for "nothing."

By four I guess I figured out that people didn't just die and vanish, but waking alone at night was still fraught with anxiety.

Lying there, my mind awhirl with wordless thoughts, I needed to know. There were people in the house, right? Everything was okay?

I'd try making up stories, but even my active imagination was no match for the smothering darkness, as cold anxiety seeped in like dank stormwater flooding a leaky basement.

I wanted to call for Mom, but the night was huge and scary, and all that came out at first was a tiny whisper.

Once I squeaked out something audible, I worked up the nerve to add a little volume.

I wasn't even thinking about what I wanted, only concentrating on getting the words out. Eventually, after many tries and much ratcheting up of courage, I cranked the volume up enough to be heard down the hall.

Another call or two, and I heard my parents' bedroom door open. In the backlit glow of the bathroom light streaming in from the hallway,  Mom eventually appeared, her hair up in pink sponge curlers (this was the 60s -- I think all women went to bed wearing pink sponge curlers), looking bleary-eyed. It was, the middle of the night, after all.

At that point -- what could I say? I was four years old. I didn't have the vocabulary or the self-awareness to say, "Mother, I am suffering from free-floating anxiety and existential dread, and I require a few moments of comforting, if you would be so kind. Really, observing that you still exist is a great help."

What came out instead was:

Mom would sigh, give me a brief hug, and tell me to go to sleep. Off she'd shuffle back to her room.

I'd lie back down, pull the blankets over my head, press myself up against my mountain of stuffed animals, and eventually I'd go back to sleep.

This went on for a while. Long enough that it became a problem. Not every night, I think, but often enough that Mom got tired of it. Her youngest child was four now, long past the time when children were supposed to be sleeping through the night. Dad had to be awake early to go to work, and of course she had to be up at the same time to get breakfast, feed us kids, get my brothers off to school, and tackle the day's chores. Having to get up in the night to comfort a wide-awake child just wasn't working for her.

That was when she decided to Do Something About It.

The next time I cried out in the night, she didn't respond.

I went through the whole routine, whispering, then speaking aloud, and finally calling out. Many times. And still no one came.

That may have been the last time I called for Mom in the middle of the night.

As far as my mother was concerned, the problem was solved. Stop rewarding the undesired behavior, and the undesired behavior goes away. Perfectly logical.

Her problem was solved. She got to sleep the night through.

My problem, however... not so much.

I still woke at night, many nights, then and for years and years after that. I still lay awake, swamped with anxiety, my active brain filling in the darkness with whatever monsters it thought must be there, because when the subconscious part of the brain starts cranking out the anxiety chemicals, the logical part says, "There must be something out there to be afraid of," and fills in the blanks.

So I lay awake, night after night, wrapped in my blankets and wishing morning would come.

Lesson learned: After bedtime, when darkness fell... I was entirely on my own.

At four, left to cope with paralyzing anxiety, in the dark, all alone.

Lesson taught vs. lesson learned

The last post, the one on spanking, ended with the contrast between the lesson that was intended (Mommy still loves you even if she spanks you) and the actual lesson taught (You don't get to be in charge of your own body; stand still and take it if adults in charge invade your space and touch you).

It made me think of other unintended lessons that I learned at that age.

Case in point: lying.

Let's say I spilled my milk or broke something but no one was around to see it. Of course I'd be upset. All kids are upset when they spill things or accidentally break things. Kids know when they've messed up and then have to face the music when the adults find out. So faced with a broken glass or spilled milk, what should I, pre-schooler me, do?

According to my mother, I should tell the truth. She was quite adamant about that. Always tell the truth. Lying was bad, bad, bad and must be punished out of a child. Lying was a huge concern of hers. She didn't want her children to be lying little sneaks, because lying about little things could lead to lying about big things, and that led to no end of trouble.

And I knew in my bones that lying was wrong and that we should be truthful. I had no end of favorite picture books and young readers with plots revolving around kids messing up and what happened to the kids who lied versus the kids who bravely told the truth.

But if I told the truth, this is what happened:

If I lied and got caught, or gave myself away, or even if I took back the lie, this is what happened:

And if I lied convincingly enough this is what happened:

Given those three outcomes, what did pre-schooler me choose? In those circumstances, what would you choose?

The lesson Mom thought she as teaching? Don't lie. The lesson actually learned? If you screwed up, the odds are better if you lie about it and lie really well. And boy howdy, did I learn to cover up, sneak around, and lie like a pro.

I didn't want to be a liar. I would have liked to have been honest all the time. I would have liked it very much if my life had been like it was in the picture books: parents frown and briefly scold, then teach the child how to clean up the mess and how to be more careful next time, and the child is proud of learning how to do it right. Behind my lying poker face, my little heart was pounding like a third floor radiator when the steam heat turns on. I knew this was not how things were supposed to be.

But when I was punished equally for getting caught in a lie or telling the truth, I felt the injustice keenly. And, I admit, there was measure of contempt and a whole truckload of "what's the point of even trying?" behind my well-practiced lying.

That's been a hard lesson to un-learn. Well into adulthood I'm still surprised when I screw something up and admit it, and people I admit it to say, "Oh, that's okay. We can fix that." Because that would never have happened when I was a kid. Screwing up was never okay. And there was no fixing mistakes. All mess-ups were interpreted as naughtiness, carelessness, laziness, immaturity -- all things that needed to be punished hard.

And that, at long last, is my truth.

Spanking leaves indelible marks

The American Association of Pediatrics recently came out with a statement on spanking, which can be succinctly summarized as:

I think my favorite comment on this article when it showed up on Le Book Du Face was from a counselor who works with perpetrators of domestic violence who say, without a trace of irony, "I was smacked around a lot when I was a kid and I turned out okay."

Oh, you did, did you? Well. That's an interesting thing to believe.

Yes, I know a case can be made that, in extremis, it's better for a toddler who is about to run out into the street to feel the pain of a swat than the pain of being hit by a car. But spanking, swatting, paddling, or otherwise striking small children gets handed out all too often as the default reaction when a parent is angry. And that can turn dangerous in the blink of an eye.

I think people know this already, deep inside. You know that when people tack on "but I turned out okay" to stories of being spanked, they're already implicitly admitting that spanking can and does cause harm. But we've got a cult of parenthood that says we can't critique our parenting because everyone around us says, "But she's your mooootheeeerrr!" and... you know the rest. So we learn to pretend that it was with our best interests in mind that we were hit, or that it didn't really hurt, or hoo boy it did really hurt and wasn't that just hilarious?

No. It's not.

I was a shy child. I was sensitive in the emotional way that adults mean when they say with annoyance, "Stop being so sensitive!" as well as, I believe, some sensory sensitivities. I didn't need to be hit. I didn't need to be yelled at. A disappointed look, a frown, a raised voice all hurt and could stop me in my tracks, unless I was super over-tired and slap-happy as preschoolers can sometimes be. I was a smart kid. Explaining things to me was effective. Praise worked wonders. But I did get hit and I did get yelled at and I did live with mockery and criticism far, far more than I ever got praised.

My mother, having been raised on such old-fashioned methods herself, often spanked with a wooden spoon or a hairbrush or other such implement that came to hand. Not just one swat but multiple strikes on the backside. She had, I believe, the notion that if children weren't firmly disciplined and controlled then they would, without fail, run wild. Children must obey was her key phrase, because children who did not obey immediately would grow to break their mothers' hearts and end up in prison or on drugs or something. I also believe that when I was a small child there were... things... going on. I remember hearing raised voices and frequent arguments. There was tension in the household. Later we would move -- a lot -- as my dad searched for jobs that paid better and better. My mother, who had neuroses of her own, was probably feeling parts of her life were out of control, and compensated by trying hard to control the household. Including her children.

But I was just a small person who didn't understand. When you're small and the adults in charge of you are large and not entirely in control of themselves, and when they lose control when they're angry, it's terrifying. On one memorable occasion when I was a preschooler, my mother was spanking me repeatedly and angrily with a hairbrush so hard that the handle cracked and broke. I remember clear as day that she looked horrified at the broken implement, then shouted:

That's the sort of spanking that leaves a permanent mark on the soul. She often said later that after that incident she never struck me again with anything but an open hand.

Did that assuage the pain that hung heavy over my heart like black tumor? No, it did not. Hitting is hitting.

Now Mom, to her credit, had an idea that she'd gleaned from some book of parenting or magazine article or something about spanking. According to some expert, when one disciplines a child, one should also hug the child to reassure the child that they're loved and that all is well.

It's a pleasant and innocent sort of notion, and I'm sure my mother pictured it going like this:

However, what sounds like it ought to work in theory turns out to be naive and overly-optimistic in practice. And this, from the pre-schooler's point of view, is what it felt like in practice, and why by the time I was six I didn't like it when my mother touched me -- at all:

Did I just hear a collective gasp from the audience? I think I did. Because you all get this, right? You all get what I as a child was being taught? Large Angry Adult hits Small Upset Child until they cry and want to run away -- and then Large Angry Adult forces a hug on the Small Upset Child, threatening punishment if they don't submit, if they don't do it "right."

Large Angry Adult, with reinforcement from some child-rearing expert that I'd like to hit very hard at this moment, is teaching the Small Upset Child that they're not allowed to say no to forced physical contact.

I... don't even want to think right now about how that played out in my so-called marriage #1. Because... yeah... when being punished for saying "no" is the norm... well, that was the soul-crushing pit that I call so-called marriage #1. The part that most people never heard about, certainly not from him.

And that is what I mean when I say that spanking leaves indelible marks. On the soul. You don't forget these lessons. They try to replay themselves, so deeply burned they are into the subconscious. It takes a lot of practice and conscious thought to live by better rules, while the old rules still live like venomous snakes in the back of the mind, hissing, "Be nice and don't say 'no' or you'll be soooorrryyy..."