14.

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHERE YOU START

I spent most of my childhood scared of making mistakes. I was teased by my siblings, criticized by my mother, and shamed by my father. I can still hear their reproaches: “You’re stupid,” or “You’re too sensitive,” and “You don’t know that?” It was hard to believe I had anything to offer. Feelings were not talked about in my family, and admitting them was considered a weakness. I couldn’t help showing my feelings. They were the only things I could trust. The constant rebukes convinced me I must be very weak, as well as stupid. Fears escalated, and I developed a block about learning almost anything except how to read emotions. They were proof I was still alive.

Long before I learned how to read words, I read emotions in my mother. I could tell what she was feeling before she entered the room. I heard it in her tired walk or the way she pushed down just a little too hard on the piano keys. I saw it in the slightest twist of her mouth or the warning wave of her foot dangling over the other leg like a tiger’s tail. I learned to dance around her moods and weave in and out of my family’s responses to them, like a kitten chasing a ball of twine. It was safer to stay behind the furniture, beyond the radar, but it did not serve my intellectual growth or self-confidence.

I attended two of New York’s most prestigious schools: Chapin and Brearley. My sister Peggy and I were driven to school in our parents’ chauffeur-driven car and we made sure he let us off two blocks away so we could look like we walked to school, just like the other girls. We were picked up by the same kind Norwegian man, named John Johnson. He taught me songs like “Hans Hagen the Farmer” in Norwegian. I had no trouble learning from him, but school was a different matter. My brain seized up, and my hands perspired constantly from stress. Not wanting others to know, I avoided touching them on their skin, and stopped asking questions after feeling the teacher’s disapproval at my daydreaming. Isolated and alone, I was terrified.

In fourth grade I scored a 10 on a history test when 60 was the passing grade. I concluded that the teacher must hate me. Why else would she put such a low mark in red? My stomach jumped into my throat as the tears spilled onto the little blue test book. I was so mortified I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. I wanted to die.

My mother recognized the feeling and hired a tutor. This felt like the ultimate disgrace until she told me she hadn’t done too well in school, either. She comforted, “Any school who allows a teacher to rub a child’s nose in failure is not the right place for education.” It was one of the few times I really felt her on my side.

I worked hard to catch up. A year later, I had made only marginal improvement. Neither Chapin nor Brearley had been able to help me, and they defended themselves in letters to my parents saying, based on my test scores, I didn’t have the intellectual rigor. To my mother’s credit, she recognized I was test-phobic and that this was not the only way to measure intelligence. Unable to help me at home, she shipped me off for seventh grade to a farm and wilderness boarding school. I was twelve.

North Country School was founded in 1937 by a wise man and his wife who became my surrogate parents. Walter and Leo Clark’s educational philosophy was based on John Dewey’s belief that experience is the best teacher.

The school was situated among the high peaks of Upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Flower and vegetable gardens lined the dirt road stretching between the school and horse barn. In the depths of winter, regardless of temperatures that dropped as low as minus thirty degrees or snowdrifts reaching higher than a fifth grader, we walked the quarter-mile road twice a day to feed the animals. Breakfast and dinner were not served until the animals had eaten: a lesson in caring for those who depend on us. Jobs like helping in the kitchen, cleaning the art room, and growing vegetables let us children know we were an important part of the community.

Though the school remained small, with fewer than seventy-five children, working together on the farm expanded my understanding of education. Decades before health food stores sprouted around the country, Walter Clark used the term organic. Vegetables grown without pesticides were a staple of the daily diet, and sugar was replaced with local honey and homemade maple syrup. Conservation was taken seriously. We recycled paper, turned off water while brushing our teeth, turned out lights unless essential to a task, and turned down the heat at bedtime. The latter resulted in many blankets, flannel pajamas, and a warm hug good night.

I arrived at North Country School in the fall of 1964. My brother Richard had graduated the previous year. We were the only two to go there. Richard had suffered from facial tics and bullying. His academic scores were no better than mine, but four and a half years at North Country School had transformed him from a floundering student to an intellectual force, going on to Choate, Harvard, and eventually Harvard Medical School to become a family doctor.

I admired Richard’s success and hoped for the same myself. I was terrified of leaving home but intrigued by the place that had helped my brother. Like him, I thrived in this environment where animals were part of daily life, math was learned as easily in the garden as in textbooks, art and chemistry were borrowed from the earth’s clay and minerals, and sheep’s wool found patterns in cloth. I became a weaver at North Country School and the school wove into me the discovery that learning can happen anywhere.

Fear receded as small triumphs were celebrated. In October I won my first grand championship at the school horse show. Riding became a passion that I continue to this day. Blue ribbons gave me courage to wear the fierce persona of Captain Hook during the winter term play of Peter Pan. By spring, I gave my first piano recital in front of the whole school. These were not academic successes in the traditional sense, but they were fundamental to gaining self-confidence. In being acknowledged for them, I began to see a different person in the mirror. For the first time I dared to be curious, and in being curious I started to listen. If I did not know something, I could safely ask a question. In not being teased, criticized, or shamed for my ignorance, I grew to love questions as much as answers. I began to start life over again.