There Was a Little Girl, Who Had a Little Curl, Right in the Middle of Her Forehead

My mother and father were young when I was born and, as they will be the first to tell you, relatively clueless about parenting. I was their first child, and I was a handful. I had colic, and I cried nonstop. It was the era of Dr. Spock, whose advice to mothers and fathers was received like Holy Scripture. If your baby cries, he counseled, leave her be; soon enough she’ll cry herself to sleep.

My overwhelmed parents listened to Dr. Spock and left me in my crib to wail for hours, while they worried in the next room. By the time I was a year old I was soothing myself by rocking the crib, back and forth, for hours every night. There are many toddlers who do this. I did it until I was eight years old. It was the only way I knew to make myself feel better.

When I was four my father, who was a captain in the U.S. Army, received orders to move to Okinawa. It was in the middle of the huge troop buildup in the Vietnam War, nearly two thousand miles from my dad’s new post. The base was crowded, and there were no houses available. Rather than leave my mother; my three-year-old brother, Chris; and me behind in the States, my dad looked for a home off base, “on the economy,” as those in the military call it. That way, we could all stay together. We packed our bags and got our vaccines and boarded the long flight for Japan.

We arrived in November 1966 to an unseasonable chill and a steady rain. My dad scraped together $2,500 to buy a brand-new concrete and cinderblock house on a small street. That house turned out to be a catalogue of terrors and phobias for a young child. The concrete had not set when we moved in: it was cold and damp. My mother covered the floors of our closets and lined our drawers with tinfoil to keep the mildew out of our clothes and shoes. The steady, relentless rain turned the alleys around our house into streams and the fields into marshes. Our sodden little house didn’t stand a chance. Water poured in everywhere. Our ceilings began dripping in dozens of places. We scattered all of our pots and pans around on the floor to catch the rainwater, plinking and plonking all over the house, a symphony of waterworks.

We didn’t have a telephone, so we went to our neighbor’s to call the Japanese man who had built the house.

“It’s raining in the house!” my mother wailed.

That proved to be too long a sentence for the builder’s few words of English.

“Rain, yes,” he said, in a tone that implied that it was unremarkable for there to be rain. Clearly the idea that water was coming into the house had not made it across the language barrier.

After a lot of back and forth and a number of calls from my mother, the builder decided he ought to come and see the distraught American woman. He entered our house, spotted the pots and the leaks and finally understood, “Ah, oka-san,” he said, using the polite term the Japanese reserve for addressing the lady of the house. “It’s raining IN the house.”

Score one for international communication, but as I recall, things didn’t improve much afterward. The house remained cold, dank, and dreary. But that was just the start of the troubles that plagued our house and contributed to my fearful state. There were lots of lizards—geckos. Some kids love lizards—but they are usually pets in a glass tank, not running around wild in the house like ours were. On Okinawa, a gecko creeping up the bedroom wall was considered a good thing—because they ate the bugs. And there were a lot of bugs. Really big ones. The worst were the cockroaches. Not the everyday thumbnail-sized cockroach that you might find in your kitchen. The huge ones, big enough to fly. The island—and our house—was infested with them. They were everywhere: in the furniture, in the shower, in the corners, on the ceiling. You never knew when you opened a drawer or a closet what would come flying or skittering out. I developed a lifelong terror of bugs. That first year there was also a shrew—a nasty sharp-toothed creature—hanging out one night in the bedroom Chris and I shared. My father donned his combat boots and chased after it with one of my brother’s plastic toy golf clubs, which he wielded like a Game of Thrones broadsword.

But the most terrifying of the local wildlife was the venomous habu, a viper native only to Okinawa that seeks its prey in darkness. All the military families were warned about the habu as part of the orientation to Okinawa. Parents were instructed to have their kids play in the street (even with traffic!). It was safer dodging cars, they said, than going in the fields, because that’s where the habus often live. We were also told never to go out at night without a flashlight. The snakes were nocturnal, and would freeze in the beam of light. There were stories around the army base, repeated like ghost tales, of families’ encounters with the habu. There was the family who found one living in their air conditioner. Another who found one on their back stoop. One night, when my mother opened the door, her flashlight revealed a fat five-foot habu, stippled with brown, yellow, and olive-green blotches. It fled the light and slithered into a hole in the stone wall around our house. Within an hour, there were police outside our house shining spotlights on the wall out front, searching for the deadly snake. They never found it. We spent the rest of the year warily scurrying past the spot where it had disappeared, eyes peeled for any movement in the rocks.

My new friends on Okinawa warned me of something else: quicksand. There was one field in particular that all the kids ominously pointed out and said we should never walk into. I would pass it every day on my way to school… gingerly testing the ground in front of me, terrified that at any step, it would suck me in and swallow me whole, never to be seen again.

When you are anxious in the way that I was, fears begin to feed on themselves. The feeling is so unpleasant that you start to notice everything, wondering if it is going to make you want to jump, wondering if you should run. I was poised at all times, it seems, to flee the bugs, the snakes, or a patch of marshy soil that looked like it might melt into quicksand. Even little things that normally don’t bother people can send an anxious person up a wall. My brother was exposed to the same terrors as I was, but to me at least, he seemed to glide through, unperturbed.

Even my own body could frighten me. I remember having the hiccups one night, and I panicked. “Make it stop,” I begged my parents. I could not understand it; why was this happening? “Beth, it’s just hiccups,” my parents tried to reassure me. They all called me Beth when I was growing up. “It will go away soon.”

But I felt ambushed, as if something inside my body was actually taking over. Vomiting was even worse. Nobody likes it, but for me it wasn’t just unpleasant but profoundly terrifying. It made me feel that I had lost complete control of my body, that it had been hijacked, and this triggered deep anxiety and a phobia about throwing up that I carry to this day. They were things I didn’t understand, and at that age, children are often afraid of things they can’t understand. We all carry our childhood selves with us as we go through life, and the little girl that still lives inside me needs, at the very least, to feel that she is in control of herself. I have since learned, through lots of therapy, that when fear is your default state of mind, you try very hard to control everything. It is a futile battle that can leave you exhausted, and desperate for relief.

We settled into our new lives on Okinawa. After six months, a home on base opened up, and we happily bade farewell to our little concrete house. By then I was in kindergarten, and we got our first beloved dog and named her Heidi. We grew up without watching television, so my parents read to us. I remember my mother reciting a nursery rhyme to me. “There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very very good. And when she was bad, she was horrid.”

I had curls. Was this little girl me? Was I good? Was I horrid? I spent a lot of time thinking about that rhyme. Was it even possible to be both good and horrid?

It was during that second year in Okinawa that I first learned about death. I came home from school one day, and Heidi was not at the screen door as she usually was, jumping and yelping in happiness to see me. As I walked in the living room, it was quiet, and the air in the house felt heavy.

“Where’s Heidi?” I asked my mom. I looked around for my brother, but I couldn’t see him.

“Oh, Beth, I am so sorry,” my mother said, sitting me down. “Heidi is dead.” I struggled to comprehend. My eyes filled with tears as my mother gently explained what happened.

Heidi had run out of the house that day, when no one was looking, and was hit by a car. It was my brother who found her. My mother had discovered her four-year-old son sitting on the curb, crying, cradling Heidi’s lifeless body. Chris was inconsolable. I looked around me, taking in the stillness and the emptiness. It was the first time I realized how fragile life was. Someone could be there one moment, and gone forever the next.

The world remembers 1969 as the year Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. It certainly was a memorable event in our house: my mother woke Chris and me in the middle of the night and sat us down in front of our television to watch history being made in grainy black-and-white images. I remember looking out the window before crawling back into bed, staring at the moon. That astronaut is up there, I thought, floating around this very moment.

That year, 1969, was far more momentous for me because that was the year my father was sent to Vietnam. By that time, I was six, and I knew even then it was dangerous there, and that bad things were happening. Fathers, brothers, and uncles died in wars. The only constants in my life at that point were my parents and my brother. There were no aunts or uncles or cousins living with us on Okinawa, no visits to our grandparents on holidays or just for Sunday dinner. We were nomads, our companions fleeting—other military families, who came and went as the army saw fit. We were in a country of people who spoke a different language and had a different culture.

The day in January when my father left for Saigon, we all went with him to the airport to say goodbye. My father held me close, and told me to be brave. My mother was now pregnant with my little sister, and I can only imagine how terribly frightening it must have been for her to see him get on that plane and leave her alone with two small children and a baby on the way. My father was so distraught, he was physically sick once he boarded the flight.

My mom took Chris and me to the officers’ club on base to have dinner after my dad left. We sat there at the table, eating our fried rice while she sobbed, telling us it will be okay. I think she was trying to convince herself.

But I was definitely not okay. I responded to his departure with daily, full-blown panic attacks, a tsunami of anxiety, so intense that I felt I was about to die. There was absolutely nothing I could do to control it. The panic would envelop me, drown me. I was defenseless in the face of it. My heart would race; the blood pounded in my ears; my stomach churned.

Clearly something was not right inside me. My brother didn’t have panic attacks. None of the other kids in the neighborhood appeared to have them… just me. My mother was forced to go to work that year—it was the only way we could stay on Okinawa, closer to my dad, who might be allowed to leave the war for a few days when my sister was born. Every single day, when my mother went to work, leaving my brother and me with our Japanese housekeeper, I panicked. If my father could disappear from my life, just like that, how did I know my mother would return?

Each morning, I would completely lose it: chasing after her, clinging to her legs, grasping at her skirt, sobbing, pleading, begging her not to go. I would dig in my heels, trying to stop her, forcing her to drag me along, my bare feet skidding across the stone walk to the car in the driveway. Every day it was the same. She’d barely manage to peel my fingers off her legs and get in the car and drive off, leaving me sobbing in the front yard.

Many years later, when I was in rehab, one of the counselors asked me, “What did your mother do to comfort you?”

“I can’t remember,” I said, “but I’m sure she did. Of course she did.”

But when my mother came to visit me in rehab, I asked her about it. “How did you comfort me, Mom, when I had those panic attacks the year Dad was in Vietnam?”

“I didn’t,” she told me. “I felt so helpless. I didn’t know how to help you.”

My mother was just 28 that year, pregnant, with a husband at war. There was nowhere for her to turn for help. The army psychologists had their hands full with tens of thousands of Vietnam vets. The army wasn’t even treating them for PTSD at the time. No one was thinking about the traumatized children.

Four months after my dad left, my mother gave birth to Aimie. It was nighttime. My brother was already asleep when my mom asked a neighbor to watch us while she went to the hospital. From the top bunk of the bunk bed I shared with Chris, I stared through the window, watching her walk toward the car, leaning over slightly, one hand on her stomach, the other clutching a small bag. As she opened the car door, it hit me: a wave of panic. I jumped out of bed, a high-pitched cry filled my ears, and I realized it was me. I ran toward the front door to try to stop her. It didn’t matter that she needed to go to the hospital, that the baby was coming. I needed her, and I could not control myself. The neighbor stopped me before I could make it outside.

“Hey, hey, where are you going?” She stopped and looked closely at me. “What’s the matter with you? Go to bed now. Stop making a scene.”

It was at that moment that I realized that anxiety and panic were things I had to hide. Something in the way that neighbor looked at me made me feel ashamed of my galloping fear, my inability to hide or control it. On the night my sister Aimie was born, I learned a terrible and ultimately destructive lesson. No matter how huge the anxiety, no matter how powerful the panic, I must never, ever show it. No one can ever know. It was something weak and shameful, and it had to be hidden at all costs.

I still panicked in the mornings when my mom left, but I tried never to let anyone else see it. And I never, ever talked about my panic to anyone. I never confided in my brother. I did not tell my friends. I did not tell my first grade teacher, in whose class I arrived every day that last part of the school year, weary from my panic attack that morning. That teacher told my parents I was a delightful child, that I was bright and worked hard, and that I was one of her favorite students. By the summer of 1969, six months after my father went to war, I was different. My teachers in second grade and for many years after described me as quiet, withdrawn, with “a chip on her shoulder.” Something within me was lost in Okinawa, never to be reclaimed.