Parental Malpractice, The Sorrows of Childhood, The Compensations Of Privilege

The third plague comes to Park Avenue

As an eighth grader in 1975, while I was at home reading a book and running my fingers forward through my hair, a small, grey, flat-backed insect suddenly appeared, conspicuous on the white page of my book. Troubled, I flicked it away and kept reading, kept finger-combing my hair. Another creature appeared and then another.

I had lice. I felt self-disgust and I felt shame.

I walked out of my bedroom down the hall to my younger brother Samuel’s room. He was seven and had just emerged from a bath. He looked clean and smelled clean in his pajamas and bathrobe. I felt monstrous in his presence and wondered if my two younger brothers, whose affection was a key ingredient of my self-esteem, would shun me if they knew I was growing a nest of lice in my hair.

It never occurred to me to tell my parents I had lice. I feared that my mother would let loose her temper on me. ¹ Throughout my childhood, she yelled at me whenever my fingernails were dirty (especially when we were visiting her parents.) I couldn’t risk her reaction to my brining lice into her home.

I began a long and relentless campaign against the lice. I bought special shampoos and combs from a pharmacy––not from Clyde’s or Zitomer’s on Madison where I thought my mother was known–– but from a pharmacy somewhere on Lexington, surreptitiously, as if I was asking for a condom.

The shampoos helped with the adult creatures but not with their offspring, the little eggs that they would attach to my hair. I’d wash and then towel my hair vigorously each night. Lice would drown in the bathtub or be caught in the furrows of our thick towels. I would detach them from the towels one by one and destroy them.

Occasionally, I’d overlook a louse buried deeply in a towel’s crevice. When that happened, the housekeeper in charge of our laundry would send the towel back to my bathroom with a minuscule hole cut out. She was my silent co-conspirator.

But the lice kept hatching from the little white eggs, called “nits.” They could easily be mistaken for dandruff. My father took me to an Islanders hockey game, and the two men in the seats behind us said with malice that they didn’t realize it had been snowing. It hadn’t. I knew they were talking about my hair dotted with nits.

I persevered in hiding my infestation until the summer when we moved to our house on the Jersey Shore. As soon as the housekeeper at that house saw a louse on a towel, she told my mother. My mother yelled at me for keeping it a secret.

I didn’t have the words to explain either to her or to myself why I hadn’t told her. I was afraid to tell my mother that I was afraid of her. Or even admit it to myself. I cried for my shame and for my relief at finally unburdening myself of my disgusting secret. The walls in our country house were thin, and the housekeeper, hearing me cry, said to another servant ² that I shouldn’t be punished for having lice.

My mother went into action. She replaced all the sheets and towels in both households. She personally administered a special shampoo and used a special lice comb on my hair until she was satisfied that I was lice-free. I hadn’t infected anyone else in the household. But I remember my brother Samuel flinched when I came near him until I told him I was safe.

Alice Carriere’s memoir Everything/Nothing/Someone

My lice memory was triggered by reading Alice Carriere’s memoir of her severely troubled younger years. In Alice’s book, there is a notable appearance of a worm wriggling out of Alice, so it could well have been her vivid description of that worm that provoked the memory of my own vermin.

I read Alice’s book over the course of a day and a half. That tells you how compelling I found it.

I had the opportunity to host Alice in our apartment this week for a book discussion. ³ We spoke about the privilege of Alice’s upbringing–her mother was the famous and highly successful artist, Jennifer Bartlett. ⁴

Alice’s mother made plenty of money from her art, and her father was a successful actor. So along with Alice’s severe problems–– she self-harmed through cutting, was in and out of clinics and hospitals, and had great difficulty distinguishing her own identity as separate from her wildly eccentric, celebrity parents––Alice always had a material safety net. And if money periodically ran out from her mother’s extravagance, the famous artist knew people to call who would help.

Alice was raised with an excess of ease. Servants did everything in her home, itself a character in the book––a  17,000 square foot building in downtown Manhattan designed to serve her mother’s art. Alice was so cossetted by her mother’s staff that when she broke a Christmas ornament, she simply stared at the pieces on the floor wondering who or what would come to clean it up. It never occurred to her that she should or could.

Although I did not have Alice’s self-harm addictions or her mental illnesses, our childhoods had some things in common. We were both intensely afraid of our mothers, and we grew up in large homes with servants who did much to ease our lives. Especially our governesses who gave us unconditional love.

My Mother’s Childhood

After I finished Alice’s book, it occurred to me that it’s possible for a child to endure a lot of ruin if money is plentiful.⁵ And that thought led me back around to my mother who also had a difficult and privileged childhood. As far as I can tell, my mother’s childhood was worse than unhappy but not consistently traumatic. Somewhere, perhaps, in the range of troubled or miserable.

My mother’s mother was a lifelong alcoholic and was at a loss to deal with her intemperate daughter who insisted on controlling everything. When my mother was a teenager, to protest being forced to attend a school she disliked, she took an overdose of pills, which landed her first in the hospital, but then back at the school she preferred.

Her parents were hands-off to an excess. For sleepaway camp (Tripp Lake in Maine) she and her younger sister were dropped off and picked up by servants at the train station. My mother didn’t like the camp so she stole from other campers and was sent home.

As an adult, my mother became addicted to laxatives. Her abuse of them over a long period of time led to serious health issues including near starvation body weight, a twisted and spasmodic colon, and extremely fragile bones. 

As a result of her laxative abuse, my mother battled physical pain from 1990 until her death in 2020. She received varying doses of fentanyl delivered through patches, under the supervision of a pain management doctor. She would often try to wean herself off the fentanyl so her mind could be clearer.

Later in life, after she had found her purpose in medical philanthropy, my mother told me that she wouldn’t have changed a thing about her childhood. Because she was glad that she turned out to be the person she was, even if she had been formed by parents who, while compelling people in certain aspects, were bad at parenting. My mother attributed her resilience and her ability to function through her pain to having survived the difficulties of her youth.

That was her personal myth. Meaning that it was true to her and that was what really mattered. Like all personal myths.

If we could change our upbringing

At the book group this week, I told Alice Carriere a bit about my mother’s privileged but troubled childhood and how my mother wouldn’t want to have changed anything. I asked Alice whether she felt the same way about her upbringing. Would she change it if she could? Alice smiled, said no, and called my mother a “wise woman.”

Today I would give the same answer as Alice and my mother. But all three of us would leave our upbringing unchanged, only after we had reached a place of self-acceptance and self-esteem.

And really when we say “change our upbringing,” what we’re really saying is “change our parents.” And I suspect that among people who fall somewhere on the spectrum of an abnormally challenged childhood, anywhere from unhappy to miserable to traumatic, those of us who grew up with the advantages of wealth are more likely to find merit in or forgive our parents who, for whatever their flaws, had the virtue of being wealthy and making us well-off or wealthy too.

Question for the comments: Are highly privileged parents more prone to be neglectful and are highly privileged children more likely to endure that neglect? Or is it all completely random?

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When I was a child, I loved reading the book Harriet the Spy. The part where Harriet’s governess Golly leaves her always made me deeply sad. This scene from the movie captures so well the love between a governess and her charge.

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1. I wrote about my fear of my mother in last week’s post, My Mother’s Snobbery Wrecked My Relationship

2. The word servant has become politically incorrect. But it would seem anachronistic to call them employees or domestic workers.

3. BOOKTHEWRITER is a wonderful initiative by novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. She arranges salons in private homes where readers get to talk in small groups with authors. If you’re interested in being on Jean’s mailing list to receive her lineup for the fall and spring, you can do that here.  Given the quality of the writers Jean attracts, the events are usually sold out quickly.

There is something irreplaceable about real life, three dimensional gatherings to discuss literature. (There’s also a zoom option).

4. Wikipedia page for Jennifer Bartlett

5. Privileged children brought up in chaos might be more likely than the non-privileged to get through to the other side and find themselves in a safe place. Kids from wealthy families have greater access to medical care, live in safer neighborhoods, have a home to live in, food to eat, their education paid for, and may have a nanny/governess who will show them compensatory love.

Of course being wealthy is no guarantee against youthful tragic outcomes, whatever parental behavior may be.

And while children who grow up with both material deprivation and parental malpractice are not automatically doomed, the odds are stacked against them. Numerous studies, for example, show markedly worse life outcomes on average for children in foster care. We celebrate those who defy the odds and end up thriving, precisely because those outcomes are so rare.