My mother's capacity for denial

I have found copies of the letters my mother wrote to her mother from the time I was four on!

Just after my sixth birthday she writes, "Poor Jessica had a little mishap Monday night while she was visiting Jemi Abbott. (Jemi's brother) Peter started to bring her home on his bike and she got her foot caught in the spokes of the wheel. They rushed her over to the clinic and phoned us and we got there almost as soon as she did. She was incredibly brave--not a whimper out of her though the skin was badly scraped over the ankle bone and the whole foot was swollen. . . They had to give her a shot of anti-tetanus. . ."

She edits out the fact they also had to chloroform me and do surgery. (I remember her describing to me later in life how the doctor had me count from ten to one and that before I was halfway through he started operating. When she expressed alarm--I was still counting--he told her it was fine, I was completely out.)

In her next letter to my grandmother three days later, she enclosed one I dictated to her: "I can walk on my foot now and I've got a new bandage. It makes me sad to look at my foot because part of my ankle's gone." Mum wrote in parentheses after this, "(Exaggeration!)"

But now, so many years later, I look at my foot and still see one ankle sheared off.

She denied how bad the accident really was--but she did say nice things about me, so I'll give her partial credit.  :o)

Sacrificial lamb

I was the lamb sacrificed to my mother's writing career. And my children were the lambs sacrificed to mine.