Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but

Mommy Said She Loved Me, but A Memoir

PREFACE Apartness. From the word apart. A precise description of how I have always felt. Since the day I was born.

My family included two parents and three siblings. I was the middle child, who gradually became the invisible sibling, hemmed in between an agreeable older sister and the much longed for brother/son.

Almost a lifetime later, Ive learned to accept the reasons why I lived such a complex and troubled life. It began as it usually does, with my parents. They were bewildering for me to understand and impossible for me to please. Instinctively, I felt that I was nearly always annoying and irritating to them, but most especially to my mother.

Conventional wisdom used to be that babies were empty vessels who did not remember or feel anything before birth. Not true. We do. We did. Especially those of us who did survive the nine months of unhappy gestation inside a mother who simply did.not.want.us. We may not have been aware of

Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but what it was we knew exactly at birth, but after we were born, we grew up with what I finally cataloged as a basic set of boot camp survival techniques: paranoia, insecurity, mistrust, suspicion and fear. If you add to that list the strong possibility that the mother of this baby also ignored her - especially during the first years of her life you have a child that slips away from her indifferent caretaker in order to find another way to survive.

My ability to catalogue boot camp survival techniques and to understand my innate inability to trust anyone is the result of years of therapy. Therapy that helped me identify and understand the rage I carried with me, and sometimes learned to let go, often unwillingly, through a variety of different psychological treatments such as Cognitive Behavior or Talking Therapy, Rage Reduction, Reflexology, Shiatsu Massage, Rolfing and EMDR Therapy. The insight I gained by working my way through these different therapies only strengthened my belief that something had damaged me before I was born. Endless, seemingly never-ending physical battles with allergies, asthma, eczema, psoriasis, breast cancer, obesity, arthritis, acid reflux disease, vertigo, sleep apnea etc., which were laminated over a thin veneer of chronic clinical depression, seemed to me to be the consequence of surviving that toxic brew of stress-induced chemicals my mother manufactured and passed along to me in utero. Since I dont have any credentials as a licensed anyone or anything, I did not share my feelings or beliefs along the way.

Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but Then in 2008, I read a research report about maternal stress on Reuters online. It was an article suggesting that maternal stress during pregnancy could change a childs developing immune system, and predispose that baby to allergies and asthma.1 Attention began to be paid.

The October 4th 2010 issue of Time magazine (Volume 176 No. 14) had this blurb on its front

cover: How the First Nine Months Shape the Rest of your Life...The new science of fetal origins by Annie Murphy Paul from her book, Origins. It was an outline of the emergence of a scientific study on the question of what happens to the fetus in pregnancies under stress.

My memoir is about surviving in the face of my mothers chilly tolerance, what it cost me in terms of not ever being quite sure of who I am, together with still not being able to trust anyone or anything completely.

It is about the hollow space at the center of my being. Even though I understand the space intellectually, I cant seem to fill it emotionally. Chocolate in any shape or form and vodka martinis are my current fillers of choice.

My parents were healthy all their lives until my father was diagnosed with Parkinsons and died several years later at age 84. After his death, mother was moved into an assisted care facility by her beloved son, geographically isolated from that son and her loving daughter, and where she lived on until she died at age 94. As long as she lived, I desperately wanted her to love me. But she never
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Julie Steenhuysen. Stress in pregnancy raises risks for baby: study, Thomson Reuters http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/36478 (5/18/2008)

Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but did. The best I could hope for was that chilly tolerance.

My memoir is also about growing up in mid-century America in an affluent family, as a misfit, who could not seem to find her place anywhere even in a land of private schools, yachts, luxury vacations and big stone houses.

FORWARD Conceived by mistake, but too pigheaded to die in utero, unwanted, unloved, and mothers cross to bear. I didnt understand why my mother felt this way until, one afternoon in my early teens, in the midst of a turbulent argument with me, she angrily spit it out: you were a mistake. Your father drove all the way to Chicago to get some ergotrate (sic) to get rid of you, but it didnt work.

Its been more than sixty years since she said it. But she only verified out loud what I always felt, from the day I was born. Possibly even before. But to know that you really were unwanted, to know that your sister and brother were the preferred siblings only because of birth order and sex, is a still a crushing blow with ripples and undercurrents that ebb and flow to this day.

Today there is a new field of science known as fetal origins. The pioneers in this field contend that the nine months before birth are the most far-reaching period of our lives. Before the idea of fetal origins arrived on the scene with 4

Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but its seminal theories, the conventional wisdom was that we are the way we are because of our genes. That we turn out the way we do because of how we were treated and what we absorbed, especially during the first three years of our lives.

Not so, according to this new science which asserts that the nine months of gestation are the most formative part of our lives, influencing the wiring of the brain and the functioning of organs like the heart, liver and pancreas. The belief now is that the conditions we encounter before we are born shape our metabolism, appetite, intelligence, temperament and susceptibility to illness. But the most interesting part of all this, for me, is the proposal by Catherine Monk, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, that a pregnant womans mental state can influence her offsprings psyche. Research indicates that even before birth, mothers moods may affect child development, Monk says. 2 The quote from Monk was on page 155 of the book Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of our Lives, by Annie Murphy Paul.

I am writing this memoir because I did a cursory search on the Internet and
2

Catherine Monk, The Putative Role of Cortisol in the Transmission of Maternal Stress/Anxiety/Depression," presentation given at the International Perinatal Brain and Behavior Network Symposium, November 12, 2008

Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but was surprised to discover that I wasnt alone in my pain. But I also didnt find much in the way of narrative, although there were pages and pages of psychological text and blogs from daughters who were struggling with the harm done to them that they endured. Mothers who hate their daughters isnt a general topic for discussion, but based on the discoveries found through fetal origins, the topic should finally come out of the shadows that have hidden away this unspoken, almost forbidden

taboo that risks saying out loud that all children arent equally loved. That some arent loved at all. For whatever reason, we who know this to be true from surviving our own life, need to be able to understand that it was never our fault.

CHAPTER ONE The Cows Tail

My birthday finally arrived on December 20th in Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia, two weeks later than predicted by mothers obstetrician. New mothers, postpartum, were kept on bed rest in the hospital for two weeks to recover from the rigors of giving birth. By arriving two weeks late, I spoiled Christmas for my mother, father and 18-month-old sister. Not a good way to join a family whose parents were not excited, to say the least, about having two infant daughters just l8 months apart.

Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but Years later mother said to me You just didnt want to be born and then, all of a sudden, you decided to arrive. The delivery room was on another floor, and I was on the elevator when it felt as if you were coming out. The nurse told me to put my legs together and not to push until we got to the delivery room. So she didnt. From the day I was conceived until the day she died, everything about me seemed to rub her the wrong way or just simply annoy her in some way.

To add insult to the injury of my tardy arrival, I was supposed to be a boy that mother and daddy had already chosen a name for: Robert Leonard. Disappointed, but probably unwilling to bother rethinking their chosen name, I was christened Roberta Lillian. Adding an a to the original Robert, my name became female, and if you bear in mind how happy they were about having me, giving mothers first name as my middle name still feels mildly perverse to me, though Im sure they didnt feel that way when they did it. Linguistically, the two names are an awkward

combination that never was pleasing to my ear, and my feelings about my name have always been the same. I didnt like it. As soon as I could rework Roberta I became Bobbie first, then Robbie. It didnt occur to me until years later that I was trying to be something I wasnt and couldnt be.

Mother showed her unspoken annoyance with me in a variety of ways: I overheard her tell a friend that once when I was a toddler she spanked me so hard that it left an imprint of her hand on my backside. She said she stopped spanking me after that.

Then there was her endless commentary about my sloppiness and general lack of girlishness.

Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but One day while she was shopping for school clothes with my sister and me, I remember her sighing with exasperation at my invariably rumpled, haphazard appearance and saying to me that it would be so much easier to dress you in burlap.

Comparing me to my sister, who did not tear her clothes or return home dripping wet from the woods, covered in mud, because she was a lady who rarely climbed trees or stretched out bellydown on the banks of a creek to catch tadpoles, or behaved like the little hoyden who caused mother so much aggravation, was useless. It wasnt going to change me.

My father seemed vaguely aware of how I felt about my belated birth date. He assured me that my birthday and Christmas were separate events even though when all was said and done and the wrappings littered the table, it was easy to see that my birthday presents werent quite as pricey

as were the ones for my sister and brother who had the sense to be born in June and February. But I could ask for the traditional dinner of my favorite foods and a cake. Eventually I even learned to tolerate the familys jokey nickname; the cows tail in honor of my belated arrival.

CHAPTER TWO Grandmother Davis

You might be wondering how I managed to survive and grow up in what felt, to me, like an inhospitable environment most of the time. So let me tell you about my maternal grandmother Davis, who was one of the most important people in my life when I was very young. She was a second-generation American who, according to my mother, came from a family that had roots in

Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but the German nobility. Im not sure about the accuracy of her claim, but I remember it because it was one of the few maternal family stories I ever heard. Mother did not talk to me about her mother and father, brother or herself.

Grandma was medium in height, big boned and round, like most grandmothers of that era in the early forties. She appeared to be a stern unsmiling woman in her photographs, but for me she was a warm presence, with silvery white hair pulled into a loose bun on her neck that always had several strands of unruly hair curling around her ears. She had bright blue eyes that seldom missed anything important. But sometimes she also seemed, to my very young eyes, as puzzled or pained with my mothers remote and often frosty behavior toward me. She sensed that things did not go well for me within the family, but as far as I knew she never questioned her awareness to anyone within my earshot. It wasnt her place to interfere. She did what she seemed to think was better by spending more time with me. When she was visiting or babysitting, a blue wing chair in the corner of the living room was my special place to come and curl up in her lap and be cuddled, however briefly.

Grandfather Davis was tall and slender to the point of looking gaunt, with thick steel-gray hair. He was a calm, quiet man who worked on the Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia. I was never really aware of what he did, all I knew was it had to do with the railroad trains. He was home every night for supper. He puttered around the house on the weekends and took their German Shepherd, Tippy, for daily constitutionals around the neighborhood. He was an unassuming man who appeared seemed content to live his unpretentious, uncomplicated life.

Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but When summer vacation arrived, my sister and I went to church socials with Grandma Davis. My favorite one was the Strawberry Festival. We were allowed to wander among the booths and tables while the church ladies kept an eye on us, and I accidentally overheard some of them gossiping about my mother having been married outside her religion. Evidently, it made her marriage to my father the subject of some gentle speculation and discussion. Another mystery. I think she converted from Methodist to Presbyterian. Not as shocking perhaps as if she had become Catholic or Jewish. But still worth gossiping about while keeping tabs on the cornucopia of treats and sundry items sold to raise money for Grandmas church.

The Strawberry Festival was usually held on one of those sweltering summer days when the ladies were dressed in their Sunday best, with flowery summer hats and dresses, when it didnt much matter that the heat and humidity could be close to unbearable. Grandma was deeply involved with her church and with the women who ran the Strawberry Festival. Because we were her grandchildren, we were especially well treated at the ice cream tables and the lemonade booths.

The familys summer vacations shifted and changed dramatically as World War II was winding down into peacetime, and daddy came home one day with the news that he bought a fifty-foot yacht. He and mother renamed her the Rob-O-Lyn after me and my brother and sister. The RobO-Lyn was moored in North East, Maryland at the top of the Chesapeake Bay in the summertime. Getting to North East required a fifty-mile road trip in Daddys car so that we could spend weekends aboard her.

Then when the autumn leaves fell and the weather turned brisk and raw on the Chesapeake, mother

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Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but and daddy took long working vacations to Florida during the years they owned the Rob-O-Lyn and her successor, The Luneta. They weighed anchor from the soon-to-be wintry waters of the Chesapeake and sailed south to the warm waters in Florida. After they arrived, the yacht became the floating entertainment center daddy used for wining and dining company customers and friends.

In the meantime, while mother and daddy were off in the warm, sunny climes of Florida, Grandma and Grandpa Davis moved into our house and stayed with us. Grandma made sure we got up and off to school on time and returned home safely. She was also responsible for seeing that Florence and Joseph, the live-in couple who lived upstairs over the kitchen, did their jobs. She also supervised the other domestic help who came in weekly, and kept the household running on schedule while mother was gone for extended periods of time.

During the weeks they were babysitting us, Florence and Joseph had Thursdays and every other Sunday off and Grandma took over the kitchen. One of my favorite memories of Grandma was centered on the ingredients she transformed into the mouthwatering aroma of a home-baked lemon meringue pie. I never strayed far from the kitchen when she was baking pies. Im sure that my lifelong love of baking and making desserts came from those days in the kitchen, when I climbed up on the step stool beside her and watched as she measured the makings for the piecrust into a big glass bowl.

She cut the butter into the flour and mixed it with her hands until it became the consistency of cornmeal. Next, she stirred in enough ice water to gather the dry ingredients together into a sticky

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Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but ball that she floured and rolled out on a cloth on the counter until it fitted into the pie pan, all the while explaining to me what she was doing. Then the raw dough went into the oven while she turned her attention to the lemon filling.

In a medium-size saucepan she measured sugar, cornstarch & salt, adding water until the mixture was smooth. She stirred it over the heat until it boiled, waited another minute, then beat two egg yolks and gradually added a quarter of the hot filling into the yolks and showed me how to add it into the eggs without curdling them. Then she combined the rest of the mixture and the eggs, put the pan back over low heat, and stirred constantly until it boiled again and mentally she added an extra minute. Off the stove, she incorporated the butter, lemon peel and lemon juice into the pan and let it cool slightly. In between all the mixing and stirring, she pulled the pie crust out of the oven and set it on a rack to cool. Once the filling was cooked and spooned into the pie crust, she turned to the egg whites that had been warming in a bowl. My reward was licking what was left in the sauce pan of lemon filling.

She beat the egg whites by hand, added vanilla and cream of tartar and then gradually added sugar until stiff glossy peaks formed, and the sugar was dissolved into the meringue that she carefully spooned over the lemon filling, spreading it to the edges and sealing it so it didnt shrink away from the crust as it baked. Then back into the oven at 350 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes until the meringue was golden brown. She didnt use a recipe, but her measurements were precise and accurate.

Out of the oven, the finished pie had to cool for about an hour and then be refrigerated until the

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Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but filling was set, another three hours. To satisfy our by-then over stimulated taste buds, grandma would roll out the leftover pie crust in a lopsided circle, spread the raw dough with soft butter, sugar and cinnamon then put it back on a cookie sheet to bake until everything melted together to become a crispy cinnamon-flavored topping . It came out of the oven hot and flakey, smelling like a cinnamon/sugar pie. Once it cooled, we broke off pieces of it and it was gone in a flash.

CHAPTER THREE The Cannon family

I didnt care much for my paternal grandparents, and if I had to describe them again I would still use the same adjectives: Tightlipped, humorless, aloof, reserved, formal. There were few overt displays of warmth or particular affection for their grandchildren. It was their considered view that children should be seen and not heard, with the exception of our brother, the firstborn grandson, the Prince who could do no wrong, ever.

Grandmother Cannon, born Stella Mae, was a five-foot three-inch bundle of kinetic energy, a smaller, rounder, plumper, pinker version of grandma Davis also with blue eyes and gray-brown flyaway hair usually in need of a comb and brush. She wore pale colored, flowered cotton dresses and an oversized apron that covered her ample girth and bosom, top to bottom, when she cooked and served family meals.

She looked to be kindly, caring, a picture-perfect Norman Rockwell grandmother. She wasnt. She could be a nasty, unpleasant, disagreeable woman who, for instance, after finding out that daddy and mother had eloped, saw nothing offensive about asking the newlywed couple if mother was 13

Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but pregnant and they had to get married.

Grandfather Cannon, Oliver Branch, was six feet tall with almost-white hair he combed up and back away from his face, in a sort of a pompadour that was held in place with some sort of

pomade. His hair was smooth, shiny and thin enough to see through to the pale pink skin on his skull and to a gray shadow on his forehead under that pink skin. One reason for their cool behavior and his odd, often standoffish personality was wrapped inside a bit of family history I overheard as a child. One fateful day, while he worked on a painting job, he fell, cracked open his skull and had to have it pieced back together with a silver plate. After the accident, he was plagued with recurrent headaches and mood swings for the rest of his life.

Grandmother and grandfather had three children; Thomas, Arthur and Olive. When their oldest child, Thomas, contracted polio in the early 1900s, little was known about this dread disease, other than the prognosis; your child either lived or died. Thankfully, Thomas did survive, but in the aftermath of the illness, the only treatment for the residual weakness of his legs was to have his mother constantly massage and stretch them. Thanks to her care and dedication, he grew up able to walk with only a slight limp. When their youngest, Olive, was born with a slight heart murmur, grandmother decided she had to be constantly watched and catered to, so Arthur the healthy middle child, became the family protector away from the safety of their house.

Years later, long after both grandparents were dead, one of my cousins who was visiting me, told me another family story that he heard from his father, my uncle Tom. It seemed that grandmother

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Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but Cannon was so overwhelmed by the care she had to give to her two sick children that she sent my father, her only healthy child, to live with a neighbor for more than a year. When he was 16, daddy joined the Merchant Marines.

Mandatory visits to the Cannons meant we, the grandchildren, spent the visiting hours in their living room, sitting in rocking chairs. When we were big enough we graduated to the hardback wing chairs, listening, silent, to the grown-ups talk. No slumping, talking or questions allowed.

Holidays were another configuration of the same formal, no-nonsense approach for the visiting grandchildren. Thanksgiving dinner was always formally served in the late afternoon at the Cannons until grandmother died. On Christmas morning the five of us climbed into daddys car, drove to the houses of both sets of grandparents to give and receive presents, and then drove back home to play with our presents until the rest of family arrived at our house for a traditional Christmas dinner.

The Christmas Celebration at our house was also a formal, stylized ritual. The Christmas tree was carried into the living room on Christmas Eve. After daddy ceremoniously hung the first ornament on the tree, we children were allowed to finish decorating it under mothers watchful eye. Necessary because we didnt always behave properly with the good manners we were expected to display.

After we moved to the house in St. Davids, on Christmas morning, the french doors to the living room were pulled nearly closed and then loosely tied shut with a piece of Christmas ribbon. The

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Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but opening was large enough so we could see the presents under the tree but we couldnt touch them until mother and daddy came downstairs and opened the doors. Only then could we poke around the pile of presents, but we didnt open them until after we had breakfast.

The next part of the Christmas ritual was sitting in a circle on living room chairs and opening presents one at the time so that they could be admired by all, and mother could make a list of who had given what to who. Christmas night was spent writing thank you notes. The Christmas tree was promptly removed on New Years Day.

There was a compelling reason for the boring visits with grandfather Cannon. Grandfather had been satisfied with his business of painting schoolrooms, but now it was 1931 and daddy was summoned back home from Boston after less than a year at MIT. The country was in the grip of The Great Depression when he took over, and revived, his fathers small, nearly bankrupt painting company.

When daddy was forced to return home after years of happily being on his own, it triggered a previously hidden, untapped, unknown talent in him. He took over his fathers company and built it into the foundation for the family business; the largest industrial painting contractor in the country. The companys modest beginnings at his fathers kitchen table, then known as Oliver B. Cannon, painter, ultimately became Oliver B. Cannon & Son, Painting Contractors.

When daddy won his first big contract for the newly restored company, he shared the news with his father as soon as it was possible,. Ever afterwards he kept his father updated on the business

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Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but and used the knowledge and experience his father had gathered through the years until the day

grandfather died. I also think it was his way of proving himself to his father after all the years he had spent on his own away from the family. After all, the companys name was Oliver B. Cannon & Son, and daddys name was nowhere to be seen.

Grandmother Cannon died of breast cancer that was never mentioned out loud. In addition to cancer being an embarrassment for the family, it was not discussed openly and the diagnosis was usually a killer. Before she died, grandmother instructed her children in the roles she saw for them after she was gone. Since daddy had already proven his ability to run the family business, he was given the role of moneymaker to support the family. Older brother Tom, was the Presbyterian minister she was so proud of, and his sister Olive, was to be the unmarried daughter became grandfathers caretaker. Grandmother had steadily discouraged any young man who showed a genuine interest in Olive by mentioning, only in passing, her weakened heart.

After grandmother died, grandfather and aunt Olive moved from their spacious three-story home in Drexel Hill to a smaller, split-level house closer to my parents. Over the years, Olive held a variety of jobs, some volunteer if she was interested and some salaried if she wasnt. She understood her obligation to care for her father until he died. As the years slipped away she became the prototypical maiden aunt, sharply critical of anything outside her immediate understanding and quick to be offended when she didnt. After grandfather finally died, like the proverbial butterfly liberated from its cocoon, she metamorphosed into a world traveler, often taking mother along for

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Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but company.

Unfortunately, as she aged, she became even more eccentric. The year mother and daddy celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, their children, spouses and grandchildren gathered for a sit-down dinner at Helen Siegels, a favored local restaurant. Sometime during the evening, someone in the family got up from the table between courses, and came back to report that Aunt Olive was sitting in the bar by herself. She had not been invited to the dinner because my parents had tired of her persistent nagging and her bizarre outbursts. The notion that she wanted to be sure they knew that she knew about the dinner amazed them.

When daddy died, mother was left to care for Olive, who began an even more rapid downward spiral. But shortly after daddys death, as she slipped deeper into dementia, a fragment of clarity returned briefly and she realized that her last living relative, her brother Arthur, was gone. She died shortly thereafter, in a locked ward. Alone.

CHAPTER FOUR
Eggs

The egg and I are uneasy friends. We have had a troubled relationship since I was a child.

The troubled area has to do with me not having any relationship at all with the fried over easy, soft boiled or poached portions of the egg family. Naked, gooey, slippery eggs are not my thing. I reluctantly learned to eat scrambled eggs, uncommonly dry, preferably with cheese. Barely.

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Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but Certain of my relatives describe my feelings about fried, poached & soft boiled eggs as an antipathy they do not understand. However, I prefer not to classify my feelings as anything stronger than troubled because that implies too much emotional investment in a food group. Especially since its never been the eggs fault.

Let me be clear here. I have no problem cracking and dropping eggs into a cake batter or any other recipe. I can even drink a tasty concoction I grew up with called ice cream milk whose ingredients are a raw egg, cold milk, vanilla and sugar all whipped together. Delicious!

My trouble with eggs began many years ago on a long-forgotten school day, when I came downstairs for breakfast, and my stomach felt queasy. I told my mother I didnt feel well. She studied me briefly, then turned back to her conversation with my sister, without comment. Almost immediately, the cook brought in a plate of buttery fried eggs surrounded with bacon and toast and set it down in front of me. The house rule was that we ate what was put in front of us. So I picked up my fork, ate a couple of bites of good home cooking before my queasy stomach rebelled and I raced to the bathroom to throw up. Since that day, I have never been able to get near a fried egg of any kind. Even a whiff of an egg, once cooked, conjures up what seems to be a permanently embedded amygdala memory of that last morning I ate part of a fried egg and flew from the breakfast table to the downstairs bathroom green around the gills.

Despite a multitude of attempts on my part to undo this bizarre inability to allow any part of a beautifully prepared fried egg over easy to make that trip from my fork to my lips, I cant.

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Crouse Mommy Said She Loved Me, but But not for lack of trying. Over the years, I questioned my steadfast resistance to this all-American breakfast food. I did not believe that one miserable experience could turn into a lifelong aversion. Alone in the privacy of my kitchen I have cooked one buttery fried egg half a dozen times, put it on a plate and cut into the first corner of the lacy egg white. I never got beyond one whiff. After years of torturing myself, I finally stopped trying. Sadly, my stomach had the same churning sensation when I approached, with trepidation, poached and soft-boiled eggs.

Years later, my mother admitted out loud that "any child who was willing to make herself sick in order not to eat fried eggs probably shouldnt be forced to." I doubt that she remembered I didnt make myself sick just to avoid eating a fried egg that particular morning. I had eaten them quite happily until then.

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