12/6/2015

“What I used to have to do,” my mother told me, “was that I dumbed myself down.”

I stared at her. “Dumb yourself down?” I imagined removing one’s head as simply as taking off a fitted cap and taking a peanut-sized hunk of grey matter out. Even though I knew what she meant, the image was briefly amusing and I had a vivid imagination.

“I had a large vocabulary, just like you,” she told me as she drove me home from the exclusive college prep school I was attending. I had hated it there. So many kids looked at me strangely based on public postings of academic essays. I could always draw an audience, but especially in creative writing, I would more often than not leave them shuddering.

“I wrote, too,” Mom said. This I knew.

She sighed and spit some of her regurgitated Sierra Mist into a Styrofoam cup. She always did this with the most peculiar grace. It had been heavily implied and would later be confirmed by my sister that my mother has always struggled with bulimia even before the lap band surgery. What my mother didn’t know yet was that I had already been practicing the one-finger upchuck; I so desperately wanted to look like the slim girls with the delicate crepe skin. She placed the Styrofoam cup with the lime green bile back into the dusty cup holder.

“People will always be intimidated by your writing, there’s no stopping that,” Mom told me.

Someone else had called me an “old soul,” but I knew that it wasn’t my mother. She had become so entranced at a party once at the apparent sighting of what she, starry-eyed, deemed an “indigo baby.” She would later take a birthday announcement sent by the grandmother of the baby and post it prominently on the fridge, pinned by a magnet depicting a hunk from a soap opera. I looked up what “indigo child” meant, and saw it in plain words. My mother never had as much of an interest in me as she did that baby with the big blue eyes.

My mother never thought that I was special — here she was saying I was special, and that I had to stuff down what made me special — stuff it down under valley girl giggles and bubble gum talk. The last few times she read my work, she gave scathing reviews. I would leave to make a sandwich and come back with her, document open, having read and formulated a cutting critique. Later, she would laugh at my dreams of becoming a professional writer. Here she was telling me my words were intimidating.

I wasn’t like the rest of the family I’ve gotten to know since I’ve been in Kentucky. I didn’t have multiple siblings or multiple parent substitutes. I relied heavily on how my parents saw me. More often than not, they were wrapped up too much in each other to give me a second thought. At 19, I burst open from both cylinders, myself kneeling on the ground in front of my parents, the gods of my existence for so long, their eyes furrowed at me like I was dirt on the bottom of their shoe. I told them how much their approval meant to me, and how much I actually really did need familial support when my father was in rehab, when my mother was on psychiatric hold. My mother peered at me, her brow quite furrowed and her lower lip completely disengaged, incredulous: “You are very selfish, you know that?”

The reason I had cried and howled and gesticulated in emotional pain for so long was because I had dumbed myself down. What was left was shock. I was trained to disguise my emotions (too smiley and you’re manic, too frowny and you’re depressed, neutral is good) to placate my parents, to disguise my intelligence to avoid being the geeky girl to placate my friends. There’s only so long you can perform under the guise of

“I’m fine.”