Rescinding Opportunity

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Kathy

There’s a new GED (high-school equivalency) in town, promoting itself as “a new comprehensive program.” The old GED test, phasing out next month, consisted of readings and multiple choice questions, often very challenging, in the areas of science, reading, and social studies (as well as writing and math). The new test appears on a computer and includes more writing and short-answer responses.

This new program, according to the website, “ensures that an adult’s high school equivalency credential signifies he or she has the skills and knowledge necessary to take the next critical steps in their life. We need to give these adults and their families a fighting chance. Their futures’ depend on it.”

In case you’re wondering, I cannot explain the apostrophe on “futures’,” nor the reason why “he or she,” referring correctly back to the singular “adult,” is followed by “their” in the next line.

Anyway, the new program offers sample questions to help educators like me help my students. Here’s one from the science portion.

Stimulus Material A farmer purchased 30 acres of farmland. The farmer calculated that the average topsoil thickness on the farmland is about 20 centimeters.

The farmer wants to maintain the thickness of the soil on this farmland by reducing erosion. The farmer plans to test the effectiveness of two different farming methods for reducing soil erosion.

Method 1: No-till (planting crops without plowing the soil)

Method 2: Winter cover crop (growing plants during the winter that are plowed into the soil in spring)

The farmer hypothesizes that using either method will reduce erosion compared to using traditional farming methods (plowing and no cover crop).

Prompt

Design a controlled experiment that the farmer can use to test this hypothesis. Include descriptions of data collection and how the farmer will determine whether his hypothesis is correct.

Type your response in the box. This task may require approximately 10 minutes to complete.

A few thoughts:

Most of the students I teach have never seen or been to a farm. They may be marginally aware of the meaning of “plowing.” It’s unlikely they’ve encountered “topsoil” before.

They have never worked in a lab or conducted an experiment, even if they made it through part of 12th grade, because many high schools in Cleveland do not have labs. Our students should encounter the word “hypothesis” in their GED preparation, but few of them know or routinely use that word.

My students live in a neighborhood where the rate of functional illiteracy is over 80%. You read right.

Most of them do not have computers at home and have never learned to type.

Phrases like “descriptions of data collection” are meaningless to them.

The website goes on to describe, from highest to lowest, 3-point responses, 2-point responses, and 1-point responses. (Also 0-point, in which the student has blown it completely.)

3- point Response

Response contains

ï‚· A well-formulated, complete controlled experimental design

ï‚· A well-formulated data collection method

ï‚· A well-formulated, complete explanation of the criteria for evaluating the hypothesis

2-Point Response

Response contains

ï‚· A logical controlled experimental design

ï‚· A logical data collection method

ï‚· A logical explanation of the criteria for evaluating the hypothesis

 1-Point Response

Response contains

ï‚· A minimal experimental design

ï‚· A minimal or poorly-formulated data collection method

ï‚· A minimal or poorly-formulated explanation of the criteria for evaluating the hypothesis

Here is a sample 3-point response listed on the website:

The farmer would have to set up 3 experiments. The first would be a years worth of traditional farming methods (plowing and no cover crop) on 5 x 5 acres of land. He would have to measure the top soil in every month throughout the year and record It In a lab table. For the second experiment the farmer would have to farm a plot of land 5×5 acres using a no-till plan. He would have to measure the top soil every month for a year and record it in a data table. Finally the farmer would farm a 5×5 acres of land with winter cover crop and measure the top soil every month and record It In a lab table. At the end of the year the farmer would have to compare the 2 methos agaisnt the traditional methid and determine ifhe is correct

The errors in spelling and punctuation indicate, I guess, the test graders’ generosity in overlooking proofreading errors.

I have a couple of scientist friends with Ph.D.’s who would write such an answer, or an even better one. I cannot imagine most of my friends, however–virtually all college graduates working in challenging careers–writing this response. I can see now why three experiments are necessary, but I wouldn’t have thought of it when taking the test.

With the old GED test, my students had a chance, barely, to earn a high-school diploma and qualify for a low-paying job and an opportunity to enroll in a community college or other training program. Under the new regime, as far as I can tell, very, very few will now have that chance.

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An Irksome Question

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Kathy

There are three weeks left in this semester, and after class today a student asked me one of my least favorite questions. “Will the final cover the whole semester,” she wondered, “or just since the midterm?”

This question might make sense in a literature class or history class. Maybe you didn’t read Moby Dick and therefore screwed up the midterm, but now you can read The Scarlet Letter so thoroughly that you do a stellar job on the final. Maybe you missed all your history prof’s lectures on the New Deal, but you started coming to class during the Truman administration. Your professors will not like to hear you dismissing the first half of the semester, but you do have a good chance of bringing up your grade.

But I teach Latin. What is a language student thinking by asking me that question, especially this late in the game? How could I even make up a test which doesn’t include material from the beginning? I feel a great temptation to answer sarcastically. “Of course,” I might say, “you can forget the verb ‘to love’ now and all its forms. That word came way back in August! Who can be expected to remember it? Same with ‘girl,’ ‘boy,’ ‘father,’ and ‘mother,’ and all those pesky verb endings. I promise never to use them again in any context.”

I suppress my sarcasm, however. I just say that learning a language is cumulative, like math. When you learn multiplication, I say, you still have to remember how to add, right?

My student smiles wanly and turns away. This is not the answer she was hoping for.

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Movies of Interest

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Kathy

Fellini + Lubitsch

An interesting event at the Cinematheque tomorrow night inaugurates a great weekend of films. Father Don Cozzens, a noted author and teacher, leads a discussion after La Strada, Federico Fellini’s 1954 Oscar winner (7:00 pm). Pope Francis has cited this as his favorite movie, and Fr. Cozzens will try to figure out why, along with the audience. I haven’t seen La Strada for years but remember liking this compassionate, poignant, and sometimes funny film very much. Special price of $10 for this event.

Robert Frank

Friday brings another special event with a very different film–a rare showing of photographer Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues, a 1972 documentary about the Rolling Stones. It’s the movie the Stones never wanted you to see, revealing their drug use and sexual antics (as though we didn’t know). This film, showing Friday at 9:15, has another special price of $15.

 If that’s not enough, this weekend provides another great comedy by Ernst Lubitsch (Sat. 5:15; Sun. 4:00).  Trouble in Paradise (1932) has been called a perfect film and among his very excellent films is regarded as the best. How can you pass that up? I’ve never seen it, but so enjoyed To Be or Not to Be and Ninotchka the past couple weeks that I’m looking forward to this one. Lubitsch’s movies are pure enjoyment–beautifully written, shot, and acted.

 

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Chatty Kathy

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Kathy

I was thinking this morning how much better I am at talking to people than I used to be. This might be a common experience: as we get older, we’re more comfortable with ourselves and acquire better social skills. Along the same lines, I’ve been noticing how rarely young people ask me a question about myself. They may be gregarious and poised, but they usually prefer talking about themselves. That’s true of almost everyone, including me, but it’s noteworthy among the young. I have long conversations with students and other youthful sorts, with awkward pauses aplenty, during which they never break the silence by asking me something. My initiative—asking them a question—breaks the silence.

As I look back, I realize I was the same way. I was exceedingly shy when talking to adults, or even other young people. It never occurred to me to ask the other person a question. I wouldn’t have known what to ask and had no idea what information to volunteer. I was so self-conscious and inward-directed that I couldn’t think of things to say. If I was having a bad hair day or worried about my ugly shoes (or whatever), it was even worse.

Add to this self-consciousness an unfortunate tilt toward intensity. My husband reminds me I was intense in high school, way too intense. If I had thought of questions for adults, they would have been things like, “How does it feel to be so close to death?” which I fortunately had enough sense not to ask.

This reminds me of a Mary Grimm short story I was rereading over the weekend. In “Interview with My Mother,” a middle-aged woman is thinking of all the questions she would like to ask her mother and aunts, serious questions about love and mortality which the older women would probably shrug off. These are the kinds of questions I might have asked,  if I thought of asking at all.

The light-hearted comment, i.e., “small talk,” is a better way to go, at least to grease the conversational wheels. I wish I had known how much easier this would get. “Nice shoes.” “So windy today!” “TGIF!” Banal and boring, but also friendly and door-opening.

This morning I have chatted with the people on the elevator (one recited to me the inevitable “amo, amas, amat,” when he saw my Latin text), the custodian waiting for the elevator, a student who suffers from chronic back pain, a former student whom I haven’t seen for a long time, and other faculty members. Well into my twenties, and even further, probably none of those conversations would have happened. It would never have occurred to me to initiate them, or if it did, I would have agonized over what to say and even how to say it. Then by the time I figured something out, the opportunity would have been lost. The person would get off the elevator on another floor and disappear.

Do you find this true in your life? It’s easier to talk to people the older you get?

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Big Thumbs Up

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Kathy

Ernst Lubitsch

I should have told you to see To Be or Not to Be at the Cleveland Cinematheque last weekend. There was a big crowd there, anyway, because the Plain Dealer wrote a nice story about the film and the Ernst Lubitsch series it’s a part of.  Lubitsch’s films are the best kind: they’re classic works of art and also highly entertaining. As the spouse of a hardcore film buff, I can tell you those two things do not always go together.

Next in the series on the 9th and 10th (5:15 pm and 4:00 pm, respectively) is Ninotchka, in which, famously, “Garbo laughs.” Greta Garbo plays a Soviet agent who happens to fall in love with a playboy played by Melvyn Douglas. Bela Lugosi’s in it, too, but not as Dracula, and it was co-written by Billy Wilder of Sunset Boulevard fame. 1939 was an extraordinary year for films. Besides this one, there’s The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, Wuthering Heights, and many others.

If you’ve never seen a film with Greta Garbo, you should see this one. If you’ve never seen a film by Ernst Lubitsch, come to this one; you may be hooked for the rest of the series.

Lubitsch was a Jewish German émigré who arrived in the U.S. in 1922 to direct a film starring Mary Pickford. He never left. Here’s what John wrote in the Cinematheque flyer about Lubitsch:

“Lubitsch’s films. . . were often cynical, amoral, and risqué, so to skirt the censors’ scissors, he had to be discreet in his depiction of taboo subjects. He managed to do this via a virtuosic, often elliptical visual style that used objects (e.g., closed doors) as metaphors, thus slyly suggesting illicit activities rather than showing them explicitly. This ability came to be celebrated as the ‘Lubitsch touch.'”

And, I might add, his movies are very funny.

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A Bureaucratic Odyssey

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Kathy

Here’s a circuitous tale.

It concerns a certain GED student in the program where I volunteer.  I’ll call him Joe. I could write a book about Joe, but suffice it to say he’s a very deserving guy, someone who has worked hard, changed his life, and deserves some good luck. However, this story isn’t actually about Joe. It’s about the system, and I’ll probably abridge the story, because it’s distressingly complicated and very, very long.

A few months ago, Joe recalled that in the past he’d had a learning disability diagnosis and an IEP, that is, an Individualized Education Plan—educationese for a program designed to address the needs of students with disabilities. Since the GED testing service touts its accommodations for such students, he began looking into whether he qualified. He’s close to passing the GED, and the “accommodation”–an extra half hour of time–could put him over the top

I don’t know the details of Joe’s search but am quite sure his story bears many similarities to mine. Unlike me, though, he actually traveled—via buses and on foot, taking time off from work—from office to office, toting his various forms and records and showing them in vain to people behind desks. He even possessed a letter signed by his doctor explicitly attesting that Joe needed extra time to complete his test, but no matter how many offices he visited and what forms he acquired, he never had the right forms or the right signatures.

During our tutoring session one day, Joe briefly described this frustrating process. He had given up, but I figured that since he already had a diagnosis and an IEP, there was still hope. Naively, I figured that a few calls from some educated people with degrees to other educated people with degrees would do the trick.

I contacted lawyer friends of mine. One of them took up the task of researching online what Joe needed. She diligently made calls to folks in education, as well. She determined, after hours of googling and copying and calling, that Joe’s testing and diagnosis, from about seven years ago, were invalid. Joe would have to be retested.

Undeterred, I sent an email far and wide. Did anyone know a person qualified to test an adult for learning disabilities? Soon I received a promising response: someone knew a retired school psychologist who specialized in such testing. I phoned this man, “Phil,” who was very nice and seemed highly qualified. Unfortunately, he charged $650 for this service, an amount that neither Joe nor our GED program could afford. Phil explained that he spent anywhere from 6 to 11 hours per student, over and above the actual testing, in completing the required paperwork.

Phil gave us hope, however, by referring us to a state program that offered such testing for free! I contacted this program and was told that our GED classes needed a particular source of funding in order to qualify, which (I bet you’re already guessing), we didn’t have. We didn’t have the right kind of funding to qualify for free testing for Joe, who already has a learning disability diagnosis, in order to (perhaps) get Joe an extra half hour for his GED test. Investigating all this took me about a week.

On the free testing program’s website, however, I found some names of psychologists who could provide this testing. I contacted all of them. One generously offered to do the testing for only the amount that Medicaid would cover. I had to find out from Joe, then, what his Medicaid would cover. Contacting Joe, who would then have to navigate the byzantine bureaucracy of Medicaid, seemed daunting. The other psychologists listed on the website worked only with children or had stopped doing this testing.

In the meantime, I received another promising response to my email plea, offering the services of a school psychologist with particular learning disability expertise who would provide the testing pro bono. He and I exchanged numerous phone calls and emails before we finally made actual contact. Days passed.

Besides the testing hurdle, we faced a time crunch. Joe needs to complete the test and pass it before the end of the year, because in January a new, harder test kicks in. In addition, the passing scores that Joe has already earned on sections of the test will be thrown out in 2014, and he’ll have to start from scratch. When I finally made contact with our new tester, “Ed,” he understood these obstacles. Though scheduling Joe’s tests would be difficult for him, he’d try to fit it in. For free.

He posed one question, however. What particular tests did Joe need to take?

You can imagine the sick feeling in my stomach. Wouldn’t you know what tests to administer? I asked. Ed responded that were lots of tests, and he would need to know which tests the GED people regard as suitable.

It was getting to be mid-October at this point. Joe’s GED test is scheduled for mid-November. How do we test him and fill out all the right forms and submit them in time? Remember that Joe started this process, himself, with time to spare–in March, in fact. He, in my opinion, is above reproach.

So, I called Phil, the $650 guy, back. Which tests, exactly, would our new, pro-bono guy have to administer? Phil said he didn’t know. How could this be? I wondered. Phil, a little flustered, responded that there are lots of tests, and we’d have to determine what Joe’s problems are in order to choose the appropriate tests.

In other words, as my lawyer friend pointed out, we have to know what Joe’s learning disability is before we test him for a learning disability. Nowhere in his high-school IEP is an actual diagnosis listed. His diagnosis is still filed in the Cleveland Municipal School District, but everyone tells me that there’s absolutely no hope of acquiring this information from the Cleveland Municipal School District. I admit I didn’t try, but time is short, and everyone said there’s no hope. This is one more strike against Joe: he attended school in a district where his records are inaccessible.

I turned to the many Xeroxed documents from my lawyer friend. They list seven “accommodation request forms” I may or may not need, depending on which test Joe would take and what disability he suffers from. Then you have to accumulate a complete packet of documentation that may run to twenty or thirty or more pages and submit it to your “chief examiner,” who in turn submits it to the GED Administrator, who may, in turn, forward it to the GED Testing Service for “expert review.” It’s wise, according to these documents, to leave enough time to appeal an accommodations decision in case it doesn’t go your way, in which case you’ll submit additional documentation. Thankfully, however, “disability experts review all appeal requests.”

Today, at last, I turned to the GED website to see if I could find a clearer indication of specific tests that Joe needed to take. There I found this notice: Accommodation requests for testing appointments in 2013 must be received and approved by November 1st, 2013. Any application submitted after this time will be considered for testing in 2014 only.

As I write this post, only about fifteen minutes remain before November 1st, and I don’t think we’re going to get it done. First, I’d have to figure out which tests Joe needs to take.

Why do people drop out of school? They get pregnant, they do drugs, they break the law. They goof off and get in trouble. These stereotypes hold true some of the time. Most often, however, we find that our students fell behind at some critical point. They couldn’t read well, they couldn’t pass the Ohio Graduation Test, or they couldn’t add or subtract fractions. A whole lot of these students, in other words, suffer from a learning disability. Their peers in the suburbs are much more likely to have these disabilities diagnosed and addressed early. Because our students didn’t get the help they needed, they got discouraged and dropped out of school.

They’re the precise population who would need some accommodation to take a long, difficult test like the GED. (If you think the GED is easy, try the sample questions here. Have some aspirin on hand.) For this population, many of whom probably suffer from a disability that caused them to drop of school, we make accommodations for learning disabilities exceedingly difficult to get.

We can only hope that Joe passes the test when he retakes it this month, in November. If you’re the praying sort, please include him in your prayers. Whatever happens, I expect to be writing more about Joe.

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Green Shoes

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Kathy

Brandon Marshall

Celebrities such a football players are too often in the news for bad reasons, but both my kids have, at various times, alerted me to Brandon Marshall, a Chicago Bears receiver, who’s outed himself as suffering from borderline personality disorder. They know about my interest because they know about my book, Missing: Coming to Terms with a Borderline Mother, in which I describe my mom’s undiagnosed BPD.

At Thursday night’s game with the Giants, Marshall’s bright green shoes attracted attention amidst a sea of pink, which other players wore for breast-cancer awareness. Marshall expected to be fined $5000 by the NFL  for wearing the wrong color, and then planned to donate an additional $5000 to a breast cancer group.

He wore the wrong shoes in honor of Mental Illness Awareness Week, which just ended yesterday. He began the Brandon Marshall Foundation to address mental health issues and credits Dr. Marsha Linehan, who developed dialectical behavior therapy, as an inspiration. Dr. Linehan came out with her own struggles with BPD at about the same time as Marshall.

These people are very brave.

So, who’s inspiring you these days?

 

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Gilmour, Eh

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Kathy

Through that chain of connections we call the internet, I happened upon a Canadian controversy. It seems that one David Gilmour, a part-time English professor at the University of Toronto, has outraged a bunch of people by declaring that he’s not interested in teaching books by women. “Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer,” he says in an interview on Hazlitt, a Random House website, “so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. . .What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.”

Gilmour, unfortunately, had even more to say, including, “I teach only the best.”

While I was clicking on links, a link suddenly clicked in my own head: I had reviewed a book by this guy! I recalled a distinct sexist leaning in that book, a memoir about homeschooling his teenage son. A movie buff, Gilmour decided that his troubled son should drop out of school so that they could watch movies together. A former homeschooler myself, I didn’t object to Gilmour’s unconventional educational philosophy, but his tone and attitude set my teeth on edge. Here’s what I wrote in 2009:

“One of Gilmour’s blind spots is a dismissive, distorted attitude toward women. Throughout the book, he devotes lots of space to actors such as Brando, Nicholson, Walken, and Hopper. But only one woman, Audrey Hepburn, merits even a paragraph. He offers his son the raunchy Basic Instinct as ‘dessert’ after Francois Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows and gives him macho advice regarding girlfriends. And this might be the time to point out that Gilmour never consulted his ex-wife, Jesse’s mom, about the homeschooling idea.”

I go on to describe Gilmour as a gasbag regarding movies; his son is a captive audience, and Gilmour relishes telling him exactly what to think about them. My major objection to The Film Club is that as a narrator, as a persona in the book, Gilmour lacks self-awareness. If he joked about his limitations or biases, if he were more self-critical, the tone wouldn’t be so off-putting. In his cluelessness, he comes across as a jerk.

The poor guy does no better in his frantic (Save my job, save the sales of my new book, save my possible Giller Prize!!) apologies. It’s pretty much a rule that someone who says, “I don’t have a sexist bone in my body,” harbors a little macho in his metatarsals. Men who admit they’re works in progress are much more convincing. And likeable.

Funnily enough, in some earlier reading this evening (The New Yorker, September 23rd), I encountered a great word, mansplaining, defined in the Urban Dictionary as “explain in a patronizing manner, assuming total ignorance on the part of those listening. The mansplainer is often shocked and hurt when their mansplanation is not taken as absolute fact, criticized, or even rejected altogether.”

David Gilmour is shocked that he could be so misunderstood! He takes no responsibility but rather blames his interviewer, to whom he consistently refers as “this young woman,” as in, “And this is a young woman who kind of wanted to make a little name for herself.” (Uh-huh. He actually says “little name” in his apology.) In short, he’s sorry she transcribed his actual words, as the transcript shows.  “And so I’ve apologized,” he mansplains. “I said I’m sorry for hurting your sensibilities.”

 

 

 

 

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Abundance

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Kathy

William Maxwell

I have too many books to read right now. This is my usual condition, but it’s particularly acute right now since my visits to the library this afternoon. I say visits because I had requested books from two different libraries. This abundance of reading material is pleasing rather than disheartening. I couldn’t wait to get home with my stash. Here’s what I’ve been dipping into.

My book group chose So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell for this month’s discussion, at my recommendation. I reread this lovely novella a couple of days ago, having checked it out from the Cleveland State library, but now I’m on a quest to read more Maxwell and more about him. The Book That Changed My Life, edited by Roxanne J. Cody and Joy Johannessen, offers essays by “71 remarkable writers” who “celebrate the books that matter most to them.” Steward O’Nan selected So Long, and I’ve already read his brief essay. Maxwell is generally revered by writers, for his conciseness, his compassion, and his creative approach to narration.  I’m looking forward to reading more of the essays in the collection: poet Billy Collins on Lolita and The Yearling, Elizabeth Berg on The Catcher in the Rye, Frank McCourt on Henry VIII, and so on. This will be fun to dip into.

The second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, at 573 pages, will require more plunging than dipping. This weirdly mesmerizing memoir may not get finished, especially since other people are breathing down my neck, hoping to tackle this Norwegian themselves. Karl will either fascinate you or annoy you. Check out the first volume to see which group you belong to.

I may not finish & Sons by David Gilbert, for the same reasons: it’s long (434 pages) and, because other people are waiting for it, I won’t be allowed to renew it. I requested this novel because my niece, a good reader and reliable recommender, suggested I read it. Its excellent first sentence, “Once upon a time, the moon had a moon,” is calling to me.

I picked up Framing Innocence: A Mother’s Photographs, a Prosecutor’s Zeal, and a Small Town’s Response because its Oberlin author, Lynn Powell, is in my writing group. This 2010 work reports on a case you may remember, about a mom who got in trouble for photographing her daughter in the nude. It looks to be a thorough and compassionate account.

Like lots of my friends, I hear about intriguing books on NPR. A fan of Linda Ronstadt, I heard her interviewed on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, where she talked about her new memoir Simple Dreams. It’s full of good photos, and a quick perusal offered a tantalizing sample of interesting anecdotes.

Let’s end where we began, with the redoubtable William Maxwell. Barbara Burkhardt’s William Maxwell: a Literary Life promises to slake my curiosity about this quiet and compassionate writer.

I haven’t even mentioned the books I should be reading for school. But enough about my to-do list. What are you reading, and, more important, how is it?

 

 

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Hurt Like I Do

Posted on September 15, 2013 by Kathy

Randy Newman

I get on a Randy Newman kick now and then. Today, playing a Newman cd while I was baking, I was struck by the song “Marie.” Lushly orchestrated, this version features a warm, romantic background, like so many Newman songs, belying the barbed lyrics.

“Marie” sounds like a love song, but it’s a love song sung by a jerk. The personae of Newman songs are complicated; “Marie’s” is drunk and prone to cliche and heedless of Marie’s feelings most of the time. And yet, he manages to sing a moving love song. Newman packs the complexity of an Alice Munro short story into the three-minute length of a pop song, or perhaps I should say “pop song.”

Anyway, there was no stopping me then. I looked up a YouTube video of “Marie,” and then checked out other Newman favorites, like “Jolly Coppers on Parade” and “Feels Like Home” from his Faust collection.

Finally I landed on “I Want You To Hurt Like I Do.” In this video, Newman’s introduction is imbued with his familiar blend of scalding sarcasm and good-humored self-deprecation. It’s a Randy Newman “We Are the World,” he says. Imagine, he says, good celebrities–Bruce, Sting, Kenny Rogers, and other Kenny’s–singing in chorus, swaying to the melody. (So I once again checked out, of course, “We Are the World,” which I still like.)  

But instead of the charitable sentiments of Michael Jackson’s anthem, Newman’s begins “I ran out on my children” and then repeats the refrain “I just want you to hurt like I do.” It’s about wanting others to feel your pain. It’s not about love and light and doing good. It’s about the dark human tendency to hurt when you’ve been hurt. 

I relied on this song when writing about my mom and the hurtful lashing out that’s characteristic of borderline personality disorder. Newman doesn’t let us off the hook—we all do it. But, if mental illness is an exaggeration of the normal, then people with people with BPD, because they hurt more, sometimes do it a little more than the rest of us. Here’s what I wrote in Missing:                    

           A typical exchange would go like this. We’re sitting in the kitchen, in tense silence. My mother has just told me that I’m breaking her heart by dating a divorced guy. She can’t sleep. She can’t understand what’s happened  to her perfect daughter. Why do I not care about her? She shakes her head, and cries, and looks more enraged at every response I offer. She’s glad, she says at last, that my father isn’t there to see my behavior. He was a puritan, she tells me. He was conservative about morals and marriage and divorce. He would be ashamed, she says, to know I was dating a divorced man.

I’m 21, and lost my dad only two years before. I still feel sad and guilty about my silence during his illness and write in my journal and pray and cry frequently about failing him. I miss him all the time and find my mother even more difficult to deal with, without him there as a buffer. Hearing that my dad would be ashamed of me is the harshest thing my mother could say to me.  

So, I try again with my mother. I explain how painful this particular argument is. I tell her, “I hear what you’re saying, and there’s no way I’m going to forget it. But you should understand how much it hurts me for you to say that Dad would be ashamed of me. I’ve heard you and will think about what you’ve said. Just never say that particular thing again.” 

A fleeting and enigmatic expression crosses her face. I can’t parse my mother’s discomfiting expression. She doesn’t look indignant or offended, still less compassionate and understanding. To say she looks pleased would be going too far, but perhaps I see a split second of satisfaction.

In any event, my plea has no effect. She repeats the remark about my dad often. Though I know her well, this always surprises me. Why would she not explain her concerns calmly and counsel me? Why does she deliberately say the most wounding thing she can?

Decades later, after a lot more  life experience, with soul searching and a little wisdom, I gain some insight. A suffering friend told me, “I don’t believe anyone can understand how I’m hurting unless they’re hurting, too.” It was as though my mother had returned to explain herself to me.

My sisters and I often remark that my mother believed she was powerless. She thought we didn’t listen. She had no idea how deeply her words wounded us. She thought she had to lash out just to have any effect at all.

But now, my friend had explained why. My mother was in pain. She was always in pain and was hurting even more because she feared I was abandoning her. No one could know how much she hurt. But if she passed on a little pain, if she struck out, if she flailed around and made a few barbs stick, maybe someone would share a tiny bit of the hurt and she wouldn’t feel so alone.

In Alice Sebold’s novel The Almost Moon, a frustrated adult daughter smothers her recalcitrant, critical mother in a moment of rage. “It was my mother’s disappointments that were enumerated in our household,” Sebold writes, “and that I saw before me every day as if they were posted on our fridge–a static list that my presence could not assuage.” I recognize the mother, and I recognize the rage.

 

 

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