The Mortifications of Beverly Cleary | Hacker News Reader

The Mortifications of Beverly Cleary

theatlantic.com

26 pointsfortran7713 comments

Humans depend on each other to survive. Therefore fear of social rejection is the fear of death. Remember this when you feel foolish for how strongly you feel about rejection, no matter how slight, but also when you see others on the outside.

I still remember being angry for Ramona in the owl-crushing scene. She did nothing wrong.

> The childhood memories we retain most searingly tend to involve shame.

When I was in kindergarten it was cold one day, but I didn't have a coat. The teacher pulled a pink sweater out of the lost and found and made me wear it. Even though I think it is hilarious now, I can still remember my extreme mortification at having to wear a "girl" color. That is probably my second earliest memory (the only earlier memory I have is watching squirrels outside my bedroom window while standing in my crib).

My earliest memory involves a near-death experience. We were visiting my grandparents at their old farmhouse in the country in SC. I was 18 months and managed to disappear from everyone, wandering outside and falling into an old washtub half full of water and leaves. No one ever mentioned to me that this had happened, but when I was a teenager I began having vivid dreams about drowning, talking about the bright colors I could see floating above me and how hard I was trying to climb out of something. I told my Mom about these and the look on her face was remarkable, and she told me about the event, how the family had never talked about it because they were all ashamed at having lost sight of me, and how my lips had turned blue when they finally found me.

That sounds like trauma. A lot of us carry trauma that we're not aware of or know about it but don't realize how badly it dawns upon us until it does. I don't think I had a near death experience but I was really afraid of water when I was a kid, only the smell of swimming pool or chlorine would send me into a panic mode. My father taught my sister to swim quite early and when he tried on me he inadvertently gave me the feeling of drowning when holding me on the water. The sensation of being with the head close to water is similar to waterboarding and this thing I only realized way late in my 30s why it was so. Other trauma I had was fear of hospitals and that was similar to the water one. Of course it eventually subsided but later on I found out that when I was very little an unexperienced nurse pinched me several times on each of my arms because she could not find the veins and the trauma stayed there. These are not huge traumas by any means but the mechanism manifests quite the same. When one reexperiences trauma it feels like an irrational fear without being able to pinpoint where it is coming from.

I don't know if it was near death and I don't recall the incident directly, but at roughly the same age (~18 months) I was staying with my grandparents for a weekend and at some point managed to get out of the house without my grandfather noticing. After a while he noticed that I wasn't in the house and started frantically searching. He found me somewhere out in a nearby empty field holding onto a largish snake. It's weird, I don't have any memory of this incident, however I can swear I've seen a black & white photo of me holding said snake - no such photo exists. Not sure if it was venomous or not. I was apparently holding it in the right place, just below the head so as to avoid being bit (lucky). My grandfather actually told the story often with a sort of pride. At the time he was a Pentecostal Church of God pastor and he kind of liked idea of snake handling, I guess.

Sometimes we make memories up. We hear stories about an event enough and our brain just fills in the blanks until it becomes solid seeming.

> The childhood memories we retain most searingly tend to involve shame.

I too have vivid images from a shameful episode in kindergarten. One of them was peeing on myself because I did not know how to ask for the bathroom in German, it was a German oriented kindergarten and it was in my first days. My mom withdrew me from there after the incident because they let me wet for a whole day, though I don't think it was their fault but mine. I still vividly remember that when I think about kindergarten. My son is now about to go to kindergarten and I had a funny flashback the other day.

It's probably normal to feel shame about that because of our human wiring, but they were certainly at fault. Just in case you needed to hear that. Expect more of other people for your child's sake!

It’s funny how a few wearily memories can stick with you. In my case they are a couple of discrete momentS: I have two (which must have been seconds apart in time) from age 2 or 3 when I had my tonsils out. I remember walking down a huge corridor and I remember lying on my back when two giants with white caps spoke to each other and tied my arms to the rungs of the cot. (That’s how they did things in 1960s Australia).

I also remember, perhaps I was 3 or 4, standing in a driveway looking at somebody’s house and thinking, “hmm I feel funny, but I’ve felt this way before; hope I can remember and do it again”. I think it must have been a glimmer of consciousness.

Apart from that I have a handful of even more fragmentary memories from that era. I don’t have any “real” (episodic, continuous, contextual) memories predating age 6, which is developmentally right on the nose.

That reminds me of my own earliest memory which is being 3 years old, sitting on the toilet looking at my hands and thinking "I am Me" over and over.

It's funny how early that stuff starts. We have a child and one day when he was three he came home from daycare crying because he couldn't wear nail-varnish.

There was a long conversation where he said "The girls have coloured nails, I want coloured nails but boys can't". I told him that men can paint their nails if they wanted to, and we could do his.

He told me "But you don't .." so I had to spend a few weeks wearing different coloured nailvarnish myself before he'd accept it was both possible and permitted.

After a while he lost interest, but he went through a similar phase where he'd previously liked all his clothes, but then later decided that he didn't want to wear any pink because that was a colour for girls.

Now he's four and he'll wear pink again, but it took some persuasion to get him to start again.

Her two memoirs, Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet are absolutely wonderful.

Forgiveness and praise which gives unjust literary humiliation its reward isn't found in our reality. The knowledge that we "are not so alone," as the author claims, only proves that there is no escape.

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