Bring It

At Dennis’s Place, 1993

I spent my life not speaking up for myself. More regrettably, the last 25 years have included way too many instances of me not speaking up for my six children.

I learned this reticence from my parents.

My mother's life got derailed when she was pulled away from the one she was building on the coast of Maine, about an hour's drive from Millinocket, where she grew up in the Little Italy neighborhood with her immigrant parents and six siblings. Mom was smack dab in the middle, with two older sisters and a brother, and two younger brothers and a sister. She had graduated from beauty school in Bangor, was working as a hairdresser (living with other graduates, I assume), and dating a young man she was in love with when she was called home to care for her mother, who would spend the rest of her short life in a wheelchair because of “polio”—not a real disease, just a catch-all term for paralysis likely caused by pesticide toxicity (although other poisons encountered in other ways can be the culprit); if you want to argue with me on this, you'll have to read the books I've read first—or a stroke (the details were never made clear to me).

What I do know is that Mom never made it back to her life on the coast (or her boyfriend, who used the distance between them as an excuse for ending the relationship). In fact, she never moved out of Millinocket (except for a few winters spent in Colorado with my sister and my family and I), but ironically, she managed to die in Atlanta, Georgia, at my brother's house. Anyway, once my grandmother died (between the ages of 50 and 55, I think), Mom had to stick around and raise her 14-year-old sister, until she was old enough to fly the coop and move to Boston, where she met a wonderful man with whom she built a wonderful life. Perhaps another chance for my mom came then, but before she could snatch it, another sister was demanding Mom's services, then an aged uncle, a brother, and a father.

My own father, who Mom married when she was 38, had been born in Nova Scotia, but he ended up in Maine when the Great Depression wiped out his father's lucrative fishing business. Tom Doyle picked up the pieces of his life, his wife, and whichever of their seven children were in existence at that point (one of them died young; once again the details are fuzzy: did he fall from a second- or third-story window or a hayloft and sustain a brain injury, or had he been developmentally disabled before he fell and died?), moved to the States, and went to work for the railroad. By the time Mom started dating Dad, he was a naturalized citizen and had already been drafted and fought in Korea.

After the war, Dad went back to the paper mill in Millinocket, staying there for 35 years total. At the height of his career, he was foreman of Machine No. 11, working day shifts, evening shifts, and night shifts. It must have been hell on the body of a Type-1 diabetic before the days of regular blood sugar monitoring, 24-hour basal insulin, and fast-acting insulin taken whenever necessary. Dad took one shot of insulin a day, mixing regular and NPH types made from pigs. There were many times when Dad worked double shifts or nearly double shifts because No. 11 had gone down, and he seemed to be the only employee capable of getting it running again. I remember that Aunt Mabel, Dad's oldest sister, who spent much of life working as a surgical nurse, used to say that Dad was one of the smartest men she had ever met. “He could have been a doctor,” she'd declare. And that was all that needed to be said.

But just because Auntie Mamie recognized Dad's worth, it didn't mean that everyone else did, certainly not his boss, who always failed to let his supervisors know that it was Bert Doyle, and not himself, who had gotten things running again. I lived through the toll it took on a man who could see no way to speak up and get the credit he was due. But, hey, when he retired, he got enough to live on and six drinking glasses with his name on them.

I have come to realize that the primal battle in this world is between individuals and societal institutions, and institutions have resources and reserves that most people think they cannot live without. In some cases, they truly can't.

My daughter Bridget used to like the statement, “Don't meet your honey where you make your money.” It can be good advice, but I might expand it to include friends, not just partners.

Ronda, the assistant manager who hired me to work at Barnes & Noble in Aurora, Colorado, had an exuberance and love of life that could be infectious, but it was offset by an easily bruised ego. She kept that pretty well under wraps as I was getting to know her and developing a close friendship with her.

Within weeks of getting hired, I was made a supervisor, an hourly employee who did just about everything a salaried assistant manager did. I opened and closed the store, made daily schedules, prepared bank deposits, dealt with unhappy customers, and sometimes unhappy employees. Probably about a year after I started at the bookstore, Ronda needed surgery to remove a uterine fibroid and would be out of work for three months, so I was asked to step in and do her job. I willingly accepted and all went well: work, the surgery, and the friendship (I regularly talked to Ronda and visited whenever I could). About a week before she was slated to return to the store, the manager called me into the office and confided that he was nervous about her coming back. I found that amusing and, after work, I called my friend to tell her the story.

The next day, the manager pulled me aside and said, “Don't tell Ronda what I said. Okay?”

Gulp.

I managed to somehow say yes without letting him know that it was too late for that. But as soon as I could, I called Ronda and told her to not let the cat out of the bag. She assured me that the secret was safe. Two days later, however, the manager called me into his office and lit into me for betraying him. He had been excoriated the day before by a nearly hysterical Ronda, who was convinced that he was planning to push her out as soon as he could finagle it. What could I do, sitting across the desk from my boss, shame burning on my face, other than apologize profusely to him and explain that, when he had asked me to keep his secret, it had already been too late?

But get this: that most uncomfortable encounter happened on December 31, 1993, a few hours before Ronda and her husband would be arriving at my fiancé Dennis's apartment to join the two of us for a New Year's Eve dinner. When they arrived, Ronda threw her arms around me and apologized for blowing things out of proportion and throwing me under the bus. (Deep breath.) With all the grace at my disposal, I said something like, “It's okay. I forgive you,” and the rest of the evening was a theater piece carefully directed to ensure that no uncomfortable emotions got loose. I then managed to avoid any dust-ups with her in the four weeks leading my wedding, which was important, since Ronda played a significant role in the event and its preparations.

We all made it through the wedding unscathed, and my friendship with Ronda survived for just about another decade, in which she and I both became mothers to two children. When Henry, my third, was due, however, I worked up the nerve to tell Ronda that Dennis and I had chosen another couple to be the baby's godparents. That turned out to be too much for her fragile ego, and I never heard from her again.

Sam (child number four) was racing around the house on his chubby little baby legs when the phone rang and, picking it up, I was surprised to hear the voice of Joe, Ronda's husband, on the other end. He said he was calling to tell me that his wife had recently died of cancer and he thought I should know. That was a tough conversation, but I got through it, prayed for the repose of Ronda's soul (for years), but felt few regrets. If she had wanted me back in her life, she could have asked her husband for my number. Obviously, he was capable of finding it.

So, here we are, just about 20 years later. Times have changed and so have I. Could I have predicted the turns my life has taken? Not even close, not even a year ago, when I started down a path to figure out how emotions were affecting my eating patterns and digestive disorders. How was I to know that healing this stuff would involve learning to respect myself enough to say (to whoever needs to hear it): “No. You will not manipulate me. I will not play your games of make-believe. I will not smile, laugh at my own expense, say, 'That's okay,' or change the subject when you insult me, throw me under the bus, or openly mock me in front of my husband or children”?

Even more importantly, I will do whatever my children need me to do for them to overcome the mistakes I made in parenting them, so that they will not stand silently by as someone tries to emotionally, verbally, or even physically abuse them or someone they love.

I have failed to speak up for myself and my children in the past. It will not happen again.