A few months ago, my ability to recall words became almost as pitiful as my ability to remember algebraic equations. When I drafted emails to colleagues, I left out random words. This was especially problematic when the word I left out was “not.” I couldn’t spell familiar words (Sucess? Sucsess? Success?), and I stayed out of conversations for fear of using the wrong word. (What the heck grows in a womb — a fetus? a femur?)
I was convinced I was demented, but when I asked my doctor to confirm my self-diagnosis, he refused. “Your memory problems are normal for a woman your age, Kate,” he said, “and there is no history of dementia in your family.” Apparently, he had forgotten that my great-aunt Fanny used to wander around Upper Manhattan in her slip.
But soon, I began to have difficulty remembering the names of mundane objects, like whatever it is you put on the stove to heat water for a cup of tea. I couldn’t remember the code to unlock our back door, which was especially disturbing given that it’s the year I was born. Then came the afternoon when I scrambled for a coin in our loose change jar and couldn’t tell whether what I picked up was a quarter or a nickel.
My doctor submitted an order for neuropsychological testing the next day.
He suggested that in addition to standard testing for dementia, I have a comprehensive assessment to see whether past or current trauma or stress was affecting my memory. I agreed easily. I didn’t know of any early trauma, but I knew for certain I was stressed. My teeth were always clenched, I had blistering migraines, and every morning drifts of my hair clogged the bathroom sink.
In my memory, the happiest years of my life were when I lived in Cambridge between the ages of four and eight. I had the best mother, the best father, and the best best friend, Sarah.
My mother thought I was perfect. She didn’t care if I undressed all my baby dolls and left them to languish, naked and ignored, on the laundry room shelves. When my mother found a half-opened can of tuna rotting in the pantry — which I’d hidden a few days earlier when I discovered she’d already made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch — all she said was, “You should have told me you wanted tuna,” and let the matter drop. She brushed aside my father’s chiding (“You’re spoiling the girl.”) and let me get a new flavor after I spat out the deceptively enticing three-color spumoni ice cream I’d insisted on ordering. She told me I was mature for my age and complimented me for not crying when she picked me up from school long after classes had ended.
My mother adored me and I worshipped her. When she read to me, she adopted the voices and cadences of the characters. When we sat on the couch, she read A.A. Milne’s poem, “Disobedience,” to me, which tells the tale of three-year-old James James, who took good care of his mother. He cautioned her not to go down to the end of town without him, but she ignored his wise counsel and recklessly toddled off on her own. My mother lowered her voice to a dark whisper when she relayed the sad news that despite the forty-shilling reward offered by the king, James James’s mother was never seen again.
My father was my golden 6’4” hero. I never worried when my best friend Sarah made the ultimate threat, “I’m going to tell my father on you,” because I knew my father could topple hers with a single push. I wasn’t scared when my dad and I became separated in a store because I could always spot the top of his head gliding above the shelves.
My father gave me and my older sister baths and told us silly stories, like a spooky one that began, “It’s floating, it’s floating!” Dana and I thought the story would end with a body floating in a canal, but it was really about Ivory Soap floating on top of bathwater. When my father tucked me into bed, he towered over me and put his hands together, pretending he was going to fall on top of me. He said, “Bumph!” and separated his hands at the last second so that they landed by my sides.
When I fell out of a treehouse, he carried me home, cradling me like a baby. When we tobogganed down steep hills, he wrapped his arms around me, protecting me from disappearing in the bottomless snow. When I left my security blanket in a restaurant on our drive home from a vacation, he doubled back to retrieve it, lengthening our trip by an hour.
I worried about my father when he traveled to Europe twice a year for six-week business trips. His promises to return with Spanish dolls and French lollipops did not keep me from carrying Blanky to breakfast, dinner, and the Stop and Shop. I knew he wasn’t coming home. He would never give me another bath or walk me to school again. My mother’s assurances that he was fine meant nothing. Receiving a letter from him only meant he’d been alive the day he sent it. I was smart enough to know that by now he could be lying in the gutter with a knife sticking out of his gut.
On summer Sundays, my family hopped into our red Dodge Dart for the hour-long drive to Crane’s Beach. Everyone was happy and my mother stretched her arm across the front seat and played with the hair on the back of my father’s neck. After we had laid down our towels, Dana and I raced my father to the water, erasing my mother in a cloud of sand. We jumped in the waves, falling over and stumbling to regain our footing. We laughed when waves knocked us over because we knew our father would rescue us from the seaweed-blackened water.
When we left the beach, everyone was tired and sunburned. The traffic heading back to Boston slowed the car to a crawl and my father muttered, “God damn it,” under his breath. I looked out the window and wondered if the car was going slowly enough for me to jump out and run into the woods lining the road. I would run so fast and so far no one would ever find me.
The absolute best times I had in Cambridge were when I was with Sarah. Her house on a nearby street was so close that even when I was five, my mother didn’t have to walk me from our busy street to hers.
I spent as much time as I could at Sarah’s house. It was calm and clean and her mother floated in the background like a serene fairy godmother. She kept our fingers from being burned when we baked cupcakes under the 100-watt bulb of Sarah’s Betty Crocker Easy Bake Oven and she refereed our fights over whose turn it was to play with Barbie’s Dream House. She made us grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for lunch every day. I hated them both, but I would have eaten chicken feed if it meant I could be with Sarah’s mother.
In the summer, Sarah’s family invited me to escape to their house on the Rhode Island shore where Sarah and I spent our days on the beach getting our noses burned to a bright, peeling pink while her mother lay nearby seeking a flawless tan.
One night when Sarah’s mother was tucking us into bed, I leaned up to kiss her good night. I fell back on the bed, stricken, hoping she hadn’t noticed. I was terrified that Sarah’s mother might think I wished that she were my own.
While I was waiting for the results of my neuropsych evaluation, my sister Dana visited me. We sat down with cups of coffee and after I described the testing to her, we drifted into a well-worn discussion about our younger years. After we finished laughing about the time a boy tricked me into eating dog food, I leaned back in my chair and said our years in Cambridge had been the happiest of my life.
Dana’s head jerked back. “What? I hated living in Cambridge. I have nightmares about our house that wake me up screaming every night. Ghosts chase me through the big empty rooms and float right through me. I can’t escape and I can’t find Mom and Dad. It’s terrifying.” She took a shuddering breath.
I was shocked that Dana and I saw those years so differently. I loved living in Cambridge and in our large Victorian house on Brattle Street. Rather than finding it scary, I enjoyed its creaky hideaways and our third-floor bedrooms shaped by steep eaves and deep shadows. I couldn’t understand why Dana was so badly traumatized.
“That was my favorite house in the world,” I said. “What frightened you so much?”
“Well, it wasn’t just the house.” Dana said. Setting down her coffee cup, she described the times we snuck out of bed to eavesdrop on our parents’ fights. How we’d lean over the second-floor banister, waiting to see whether that night’s fight would be one where my mother threw the nearest item at my father’s head. What would it be this time? A glass ashtray? A hard-covered book? Or would this be the night she went for heavy artillery and threw a lamp?
Dana told me how our mother leaned out of the living room windows and screamed, “Get the fuck away from my house,” at passing strangers. How she lashed out at salespeople, berated pimply cashiers, and dragged household help into the backyard shouting racial epithets loudly enough to draw neighbors onto their back porches.
Children were soft targets. When we celebrated Dana’s birthday with a hayride, my mother lit a cigarette and blew out soft smoke rings as she settled against a hay bale. One girl hesitantly asked, “Mrs. Poverman, is it safe for you to smoke?” My mother flicked an ash from her cigarette. “Shut up, you little brat.” The girl’s face crumpled and she cried as we bumped past clusters of goats and pigs.
Dana spoke of the times our mother spent days in bed, refusing to see us no matter how much we begged. At some point, two men would come, strap her to a gurney, and wheel her out of the house while Dana and I stood in the front hall, uncomprehending. Dana said we never knew how long she would be gone. All we knew was that she needed to be someplace where we couldn’t bother her.
I did not remember any of these events, but the lurch in my stomach as Dana spoke told me they were true.
When it finally came time to sit down with the neuropsychologist, I challenged her conclusion that I was not demented. “These results prove that I am losing it,” I insisted, sitting forward in my chair. “I have always scored very highly on tests. I have never scored in the 50th percentile of anything, let alone the 7th percentile.”
From behind her wide desk, the doctor explained that the variation in my scores reflected the psychological and emotional factors impacting both my short-term and long-term memory. Tossing out words like abuse, abandonment, and neglect, she explained that my current problem remembering words isn’t caused by rapid onset dementia, but by a traumatic childhood that had left me chronically stressed. This stress had put me constantly on edge and hypervigilant to any potential threats or criticism. So, if I am worried about looking like a nitwit when discussing abortion rights, it’s understandable that I will panic trying to remember whether the entity growing in a womb is a fetus or a femur.
“Stressors have accumulated throughout your life,” she said. “Marriage, work, and kids have piled on pressure, and your stress has now risen to a level that makes your memory lapses more noticeable.
“This looks like memory loss,” she continued, “but it isn’t. Stress is competing in your brain for your attention, and this impacts your ability to form memories. Your eyes and ears are receiving information, but stress and tension make it difficult for you to receive this information and form it into coherent memories. Once you work through some of your old childhood trauma, your brain will have the bandwidth to integrate old memories and retain new ones.”
The doctor explained how traumatic incidents from my childhood affected my ability to create clear memories. To cope with difficult experiences, my mind selectively retained memories, sanitizing some and tainting others. Events that were too frightening to accept were diverted, discarded, or buried.
Young children, she said, need to believe they live in a safe environment with loving and dependable parents. I did not live in such an environment. To convince myself I was safe, my mind edited my memories, creating a world where I received steady love and support. It retained memories of the perfect mother who made tuna fish sandwiches. It tossed out memories of the mother who terrorized teenage cashiers. It held on to memories of the mother who read books on the couch. It cast aside memories of the mother taken away on a stretcher. My mind transformed a childhood of conflict and stress into one filled with silly bathtime stories and sledding on bright snowy days.
The doctor smiled at me sympathetically. “The strategies you developed to survive your traumatic childhood helped you at one point, Kate, but they’re getting in your way now. To relieve the stress you are experiencing now, you must work through that early trauma.”
I sat back in my chair. “You’re saying I need more therapy,”
“Oh my god, yes,” she said, with what I thought was a little too much enthusiasm.
It was overcast and drizzling when I left the doctor’s office. I turned on the wipers, but the windshield stayed hazy. I was reminded of the foggy weekend I’d spent at Sarah’s summer house when she had come down with the measles. I’d already had the measles, so I wasn’t in danger of becoming sick, but with Sarah confined to her room, I was in serious danger of being bored out of my mind. I spent a while playing the first eight notes of “Born Free” over and over on the piano, but the monotonous melody drove me deeper into boredom. I picked up a book and tried to force myself to be entertained. When that didn’t work, I dropped it on a table and wandered outside. I walked down the house’s long driveway and leaned against the brick standpost at the end, waving the thick mist away from my face. A forgotten memory of my mother buying me a trinket at the corner store’s check-out counter came to mind, making me smile. I closed my eyes and tried to pull up more memories, without success. Fascinated, I thought, “Huh. If you forget something, it’s like it never happened.”
Kate Poverman is a writer whose work has appeared in The McNeese Review, The Smart Set, and the Chicago Story Press Literary Journal. She practiced law for 30 years, which primarily consisted of securities law enforcement work, but also included pro bono work for prisoners and AIDS clients. She is currently involved in local town government in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she lives.