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Sunday, January 07, 2001
A reporter at the Post-Gazette, a young woman whom I like, stopped by my desk recently to ask about the orphanage where I grew up. She had been reading old columns of mine and had come across one in which I mentioned the Home.
She thought the experience must have branded me in some way, and she is right, but at the time she asked, I couldn't face giving an explanation.
"I'm all right," I said, but when she just stood there, looking skeptical, I tried to reassure her with a mention of my sister, who had been in the Home, too, and is "also all right."
But we aren't, and saying we were made me feel I'd betrayed her concern.
Our childhood ruined us.
"It didn't ruin you," said my daughter, who loves me and whom I love, when I told her of the question and how I'd brushed it off.
But we were ruined. Made unfit. Spooked. I was with my sister in Chicago recently, and when we dropped into chairs opposite one another across a restaurant table, all the anger that she feels and all the anxiety that I do cuts us off from everything but the past. She cries out, and I become increasingly tense. I'm afraid of her. She has right on her side. I'm the older and the one who is more to blame. We are a pair of grievance collectors, but what we are confirms the validity of an experience that was crippling to us both.
We've been doctored for our ills. We've both spent plenty of time in therapy, and, in my mind, I don't like to imagine where we'd be if we hadn't.
What's curious is that the orphanage wasn't so bad, except that it was an institution where love was replaced by duty and where duty couldn't stretch to serve the need for love. On our private time-line, life before and after the orphanage was more debilitating. What the word "orphanage" became was a label for our past, a symbol of our rejection, not the reality of it. The nuns were decent women with their own agenda. The place was clean and warm. The food was good. Discipline was mostly by humiliation.
My sister and I hardly saw one another in the Home. She spent her five years on the third floor, where her tantrums made her reputation. I spent mine on the second, until age 12, when I was required to move on. Visions of the foster home that came next still make me shake my head in despair.
At the Home, we were marched to the public school in the neighborhood, marched back and forth at lunch time, returned at the end of the day. There was no possibility of forming outside relationships, which would have been a complication for everyone, anyway. The other kids looked at us as oddities. God knows what they heard about orphans from their families -- which, strictly speaking, my sister and I were not. We had a mother. We had a father, too, who picked up and left, never -- except once, in an outrageous act of meanness -- to be heard from again.
We did not distinguish ourselves at school, where the teaching wasn't inspired, nor, later on, moving a lot, at any other of the six public schools we attended, some of them quite good. It was only in college, where I went as an adult, that I showed any ability. The reason might have been that I was happy there.
Recently, in connection with my work at the Post-Gazette, an e-mail relating to a Stanford University study of 4-year-olds appeared in my computer. I saw myself in the following narrative.
Assembled 4-year-olds were offered an option: They could take the marshmallow offered them by the researcher or they could wait until the researcher returned from what he promised was a very brief errand, when they would be given two marshmallows.
I knew I would have taken the one. I learned early that promises were more like wishes. While offered persuasively, they didn't come true. My father was certain to come back, but, then, he didn't come back. Things have to get better, my mother would say -- but, then, they didn't get better. We'll always be together, she promised. Not so. These contradictions made me jumpy.
When the subjects of the Stanford study were interviewed 14 years later, it was discovered that those who chose to wait for two marshmallows were more stable emotionally, less stressed, better liked, motivated to do well, and scored higher on their SATs. But of course.
With the past continually ringing in our ears, my sister and I have gone on to live out our lives. Eventually, in the way of the fates, we passed through a time barrier, and our luck changed. Most helpful has been having children to love.
Still, don't get too near us. We bruise easily.