We all have baggage. For most of us, at least some of that baggage is residue from childhood. Here’s mine.
As much as we hate to admit it, childhood experiences affect us throughout our lives. Some of us, even unwittingly so, repeat the sins of our parents. Others rebel against them. I did a bit of both.
I used to think my childhood was extra dysfunctional. It is, but not so remarkable by the yardstick of other alcoholics and addicts. Every family has stuff. My ex-husband came from a proper South Carolinian family that pretended all was well and shoved problems under the table. My family had issues for all to see. I still am not sure which is healthier.
Perhaps we are all recovering from our childhoods. At least I don’t know anyone who emerged unscathed.
And everyone has desire to fit in, especially during adolescence. I wanted to, desperately. I was a product of a biracial couple, who was forbidden by law to marry in our home state of Maryland.1 My white father was an alcoholic who was arrested at our home, in front of the neighbors, for beating my mother. I did not know anyone else who had been arrested, especially a parent. I was humiliated and afraid.
My brother and I were also the only children of color in my all white suburban D.C. neighborhood, and two of the few children of a divorced couple in my parochial school. Since the Catholic Church at that time excommunicated divorcees, our father dropped off my brother and me at church every Sunday to attend mass alone, amid the large Irish Catholic families that surrounded us. There were girls from school who were forbidden to come to my house because my parents were divorced.
My paternal grandparents moved in with us after my mother left. I am unsure even today if my father kicked her out or she left because my father beat her. Somehow, my father had custody of my brother and me during weekdays. He probably was able to depict my mother as unstable; she once ran away with my brother and me for fear of losing us, and she had been seeking solace from her abusive husband in the arms of others. At least that’s what I was told. I think racism played a role in my white father gaining custody of us. My father threatened to have my Filipina mother deported after their divorce. She swiftly got a job at an embassy to thwart his plan.
The Catholicism of my youth felt punitive. Fire and brimstone. But I have learned, post-50, to take what feeds me spiritually and disregard what I believe to be man-made mistakes. Maybe being a cafeteria Catholic is hypocritical to some, but it works for me.
Kids can be cruel to one another. I felt like a freak. I still remember an incident in third grade—ridiculous, I know—in which the pack leader of our class started the “freckle club” and I was the only one who had none. Denial of membership still smarts when I think about fragile eight-year-old Maria. Another vivid and hurtful memory is when a classmate told me I had “nigger lips.” That derisive sentiment did not stop him from attempting shortly thereafter to jam his tongue in my mouth at the eighth-grade graduation party, much to my horror. I did not even know, at that point in my life, that anyone kissed like that.
I spent a great deal of my early life trying to assimilate. My mother was an immigrant from the Philippines. The “No Colored” signs on D.C. restaurant doors when she came here to pursue her master’s degree in finance during the 1960s sometimes applied to her and sometimes did not. The prejudice in this country seems to have been directed more harshly at African Americans than other minorities, and her initial years in this country must have been confusing. She chose not to teach me her native language and most of her customs. She wanted me to be “American.”
When my mother came to the United States, she planned never to return to the Philippines. As was common with many immigrants from lesser developed countries, she believed America was the land of opportunity. She believed the streets here were paved with gold.
My white father and brown mother married after a short courtship, and had me soon thereafter. My grandmother sent a series of nannies from the Philippines to care for me. My brother was born a year after me, and my Filipina grandmother came to stay for good.
My “Nana” was the strongest woman I have ever known. She also was a skilled entrepreneur. She birthed my mother in Manila during World War II. According to her account, hours after giving birth, she evacuated the hospital with her newborn to avoid a Japanese bombing assault. She went to her grave with a hatred for the Japanese because of the atrocities she witnessed during the war.
While on the island to which she and her small family were evacuated, she assessed that the food supply would not suffice, so she quickly gathered and purchased all the coconuts she could find. When food became scarce, she sold the coconuts at a large profit. I like to think that I inherited my resourceful nature from her.
Although I loved my Nana dearly, I was embarrassed by her carrying a parasol to shield her relatively light skin. During summer months, I did not mind tanning. As teens, my friends and I would try to tan, slicking our bodies with baby oil, unaware then of the sun’s deleterious effect. My mother frequently would say to me, “Why are you letting yourself get so dark? You look like a farmhand!” I did not understand the colorism of her culture. Being lighter skinned was widely regarded by Asians to be of higher stature and closer to the ideal in beauty standards. I later learned that colorism was not uncommon among people of color.
My mother and grandmother had heavy accents. I laugh now, remembering funny things my mom would say, like “Stop driving so erratically,” which came out sounding like, “Stop driving so erotically!” Or, “I am going to marry Mr. Beach, so you will have to call me Mrs. Beach,” the surname being pronounced by her as “Bitch.” But as a child, I cringed.
My mother married another white man, who had five children. The mother of those children walked away, so my mother helped my stepfather raise them. My family felt so much more complicated than other people’s families. It got further complicated when my father married a much younger woman and together they had my half brother. All of this contributed to my feeling different from my peers.
Like most kids, I just wanted to fit in. In 1970s suburban Maryland, I wore Levi jeans and wished for my feet to grow faster so I could wear Chucks sneakers. I wore my hair for a while like Olympic medalist Dorothy Hamill. I became a teen and tortured my pin-straight hair into a semblance of the then-popular Farrah Fawcett hairdo. But I couldn’t lighten my dark skin color.
One kid in my neighborhood taunted me with rice paddy jokes and slurs. I wanted to be tall, blond, thin, and white. Farrah Fawcett and Cheryl Tiegs were the most admired pinup gals of that era, which seemed to translate into the tall blondes being the most popular in my neighborhood as well. Sadly, it was not until my 20s that I began to embrace my cultural heritage and uniqueness.
Abuse is part of my story, as is rape. I was sexually abused when I was a child. I thought I was a freak and did not tell anyone about it until I was about to get married and worried about protecting my future children. I learned later, in therapy, that one in four girls will be sexually abused before they turn 18 years old.2
I coped by pretending these things never happened. But the wounds began leaking and eventually burst open. I entered a deep depression and was almost catatonic. Through therapy and medication, I got through it. I allowed other women to bear witness to my pain. We helped each other become not only survivors, but thrivers.
With no older siblings, and having parents who were fighting their own struggles, I tried to fit in. First it was through sports. Later, it was through drinking.
I spent a long time running away from my childhood. I sought refuge in books. I once read Emily Post’s Guide to Etiquette cover to cover because I knew my family was different and wanted to know how to do things the “right” way.
I was a straight A student, which gave me something of which to be proud. At least getting good grades kept my mother off my back. And my maternal grandmother gave me money for every A on my report cards. My Filipina mother wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer, which seemed to be the most respected occupations in her culture. Since I fainted at the sight of blood, I chose the law. I became a lawyer not because I loved the law; I wanted to please my mother and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.
By-products of my particular childhood experiences included resourcefulness and the ability to compartmentalize, pretending certain dark things never happened. The former served me well in life; the latter caused a breakdown. I had a chameleon-like personality that allowed me to assimilate fairly easily. But the fear of being discovered to be a fraud haunted me, as did the double consciousness of moving through a white-dominated culture as a dark-skinned person.3
There are, of course, certain things from childhood all of us would benefit from retaining. The most important one may be the childlike sense of wonder about the world. The Toltec shaman and bestselling author don Miguel Ruiz reminds us of how free we were before the world changed us:
The real you is still a little child who never grew up. Sometimes that little child comes out when you are having fun or playing, when you feel happy, when you are painting, or writing poetry, or playing the piano, or expressing yourself in some way. These are the happiest moments of your life—when the real you comes out, when you don’t care about the past and you don’t worry about the future. You are childlike.4
This ability to recapture that sense of presence and wonder may lead you to your 50 new things. My concerted effort to do so certainly led to some of mine.