The Yellow Wallpaper

I went to Catholic school as a kid, and I was one of those neurotic kids who hated to leave the house. I must have made life difficult for my parents because I was always feeling sick in the morning. When my mother would make my lunch she’d write a little poem on a piece of paper and put it into my lunchbox to cheer me up. The first time she did this I was embarrassed and told my friends that it was a grocery list. But I now wish I had saved some of those lunchbox poems.

I look back and realize how much I owe to both my parents. They were good people in general, but they were also perfect parents for me: their extremely sensitive oldest daughter. I worried about everything–whether it was going on class retreat or going to hell. Even as a child I examined the implications of everything–there are snapshots of me with my brow furrowed as early as age 5, considering, no doubt, the anguish of having eventually to leave home.

My parents were a God-given corrective to the strict Catholic world of the nuns who taught at my school. I now see that this was the worldview of the 1950’s–a frightening combination of Cold War and Roman Catholic strictures. I was in the 5th grade during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the nuns used that opportunity to try to scare us–a class of 10-year-olds–into the possibility of being martyred for our faith. (Another example of the grip that dependence has on a child’s mind–being afraid that the Soviet army would march right up the Eastern Seaboard, past Washington, past New York, right into Centredale, Rhode Island, to the 5th grade at St. Lawrence School to line us up against the gym wall and challenge our faith.) My father sat up with me on several occasions after that when I couldn’t sleep, reassuring me that this was extremely unlikely to happen.

My mother was an elementary school teacher, and so she knew how to make special occasions for me out of ordinary days. She kept a stash of coloring books in her closet for the days when I was home sick. She’d crumble up the stale bread and put it out in the yard for the birds, and we’d watch them eat from the kitchen window. On other days, my mother would crumple up a big piece of paper, tie a string around it, and give it to me to tempt Puddy–our neighbor’s big tabby–with. Puddy liked to hide in the bushes, and I’d see one impatient paw dart out of the leaves when I dragged it along; then, overcome with desire, Puddy would jump out and chase the paper.

I’ve always considered myself to be more like my father: someone who likes to be alone at home with her books and music and family. But now I’m hoping a little of my mother’s caretaking nature has rubbed off on me, so I can return some of her love in kind.

This is going to be a bizarre post, but it has to do with a memory of mine and its connection to my mother’s situation. I think I was channel-surfing one night and remarking to myself on the over-excess of television programming that’s now available. Of course this lead me to remember what TV programs I cut my teeth on, many years ago. There was Lassie (I now am owned by two collies), Captain Kangaroo, Miss Frances’ Ding-dong School (unfortunate connotation there), Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and, last but so not least–the Three Stooges. I loved the Three Stooges so much that I gave them up for Lent one year–I am not making this up. My theory is that the Stooges provided a much-needed relief from my daily Catholic school regimen of martyred saints’ stories (the more gruesome, the better)–at least when Moe crushed Curly’s head in a vise Curly always lived to moan about it.

And there was another program that was an important part of my life: Howdy Doody. I now look back at it and can understand why a little marionette amid the life-sized Buffalo Bob, Clarabelle the Clown, and Princess Summerspring (or whatever) would appeal to a child who probably felt dwarfed and controlled by the adults around him. Plus, there is something fascinating about a puppet or a doll–any creation that mimics a human being. Especially to a child, who hasn’t figured out yet that it isn’t really alive. I remember that Buffalo Bob used to tell the kids watching that not only could they see him and Howdy, but he and Howdy could see them, too.

This made me apprehensive because I suspected it was true. I couldn’t do anything weird because Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody (who may or may not have been alive) could see what I was doing, right in my own home. On top of that, Howdy bore a striking resemblance to a boy in my class named Tommy Cassidy (I’ve changed the name because I don’t know whether he ever knew he looked like HD, and he probably wouldn’t want to know now). In my very young mind, Tommy Cassidy and Howdy Doody were almost the same being (of course I knew that Tommy was’t suspended by strings but he had red hair and lots of freckles) and this fuzzy amalgamation of the two could peek into my living room every week.

I didn’t stay awake thinking about this–it didn’t bother me that much.  It was one of those childhood beliefs that is the result of both naivete and vulnerability, and when I recall such beliefs I find myself amazed at how resourceful children must be to get along without all the psychological armor of adulthood.  I don’t think I told anyone that a puppet who looked remarkably like a boy in my class could see me through my TV set–it was one of those burdens of life that children must carry in silence.

So what on earth does this have to do with my mother?  In David Shenk’s book The Forgetting he mentions a concept called “retrogenesis”–whereby in some, but not all, ways the Alzheimer’s sufferer loses abilities in an order inverse to the order babies and children acquire them.  A human being can’t be neatly undone, but certain pivotal capabilities–speech, toilet-training, walking–that are turning points in a child’s development are also turning points–in reverse order–in the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease.  Shenk theorizes that there is an accompanying emotional trajectory that roughly corresponds inversely to a child’s developing a sense of her self as separate from her surroundings, as an independent and distinct being.

So in remembering my inability at age five or six to understand perfectly that the puppet on my TV was NOT Tommy Cassidy, and, moreover, could NOT look out from the set and see me sitting in my living room, I wondered: could episodes of my mother’s confusion have their roots in a similar immature intellectual viewpoint?  Could this be what it feels like to her?  Of course, a six-year-old is only six years old and has never experienced an adult perspective.  My mother, at one time, was an independent, mature adult–so of course the experience won’t be exactly like a child’s.  But the dreamy “logic” of childhood–where you have to invent what you are not able to know, and where all the rules are not yet known–might be the closest I can come to understanding what she’s going through.