Unhappy

continued

picked up, the dishes dried, my brother and sister ready on time. But Donn, twenty-one months younger than I, and Caroline, two years younger still, were unaware of this hierarchy.

"Daddy and I are counting on you," Mother would tell me.

"But they don't listen to me!"

“Then set an example. Show them how it should be done."

Donn and Caroline, however, were not interested in my demonstrations. It's hard to set an example of, say, correct table setting, when your pupils are outdoors throwing sticks for the dog.

Catherine's parents had counted on her too, she pointed out, and her brother and sister hadn't always cooperated either. "Why should that have made you feel bad about yourself?"

Why indeed? Where did it come from in me, this sense of not measuring up to some imaginary standard of perfection? What were these failures that loomed so large in my emotions? Though I wasn't good at team sports, I was a competitive swimmer. I was sure I was ugly, but photographs show a child who would have been pretty if she'd smiled.

My sense of worthlessness must have come from some inner source that even now, after many years of psychiatric probing, I don't fully understand. Once, when she was in her eighties, Mother and I were looking through an old photo album. "We were always so proud of you!" she said. And I thought, Oh, Mother, why didn't you tell me!

She didn't, I'm sure, because in the 1930s praise was supposed to make a child conceited. Today's experts disagree. A child's self-confidence develops, in the words of Erik Erikson, under "the gaze of a delighted other."

Or perhaps my parents' delighted gaze would have made no difference. Perhaps a low self-image is part of the human condition, common to us all till God's unconditional love shows us a beauty in ourselves beyond all imagining.        <<< end