Her Mother's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

would not see my hot face, my anguish at slandering poor Rhoda Moore, and deceiving my mother, and even worse, concealing my own true nature. For the moment she said it, I knew it was true. I was conceited, I did think I was better than the others. I ran upstairs to my room and threw myself on my bed. I could feel my pulse throbbing in my head, as if I had a fever. I felt utterly alone, without virtue. I wished I could disappear, just die there on the spot, just blow away, like some crinkled dried-up brown leaf.
    I was conceited, I did think I was better than the others. But I was better than the others. I was clean and they mostly were not; I was smarter than any of them, in all subjects. They were ignorant and ill-spoken and their manners were bad and they were loud. I felt they were another order of being from me, another species even. And this was true: this was objectively true, I felt: that I was better in these ways, and that my superiority was recognized by the teachers, even the principal. Why else had they skipped me so often? Why did the principal come into the room and always stand behind me, gazing down on my work? Why did the teachers so often send me to his office with a drawing or a poem I had made? They thought it was good that I was superior. My mother did too. But it was conceited to be superior, and to be conceited was bad. I lay there in an anguish that was to become familiar to me over the years. What I was was good, and made some people like me but others hate me. I did not enjoy my isolation from other children, but I did not want to stop being superior either. Doing things—the things I could do—doing them well was practically my only source of pleasure.
    I don’t know what words I used to think about this. I do know it ramified far beyond itself, into something so complicated and interrelated with other things that it felt overwhelming. There was no solution to it that I could see except to not-be, to stop being what I was, in short, to die. I half-believed that if I could lie still as if dead for long enough, death would eventually creep through my body. But I never could do it. My body would always assert itself. An arm would fall asleep, a leg would absolutely demand to be moved, and would poke its demand into the oblivion into which I felt my mind fading. And so, heavy and sad, I would sit up and return to the life I had already recognized was a dead end, a double bind. There was no way to be oneself and to be good and to be loved. Whatever one chose, one sacrificed the rest. “For matter is never lacking privation….” It was too hard for me.
    Of course I went on, as one does, and even managed sometimes to forget this old insight. But I continued to suspect words. So when a woman said to me that my mother was strong, when others said “Your mother is a lovely woman,” I’d simply smile and nod. If you question such statements, people look at you as if they have suddenly discovered you are retarded. Years ago, I would go off by myself and ruminate on such statements: Is she strong? What does that mean? How does it show? Is she lovely?
    I took such judgments as authoritative, and believed they were based on profound perception. I did not then understand that people were in the habit of running around in the world making judgments on all sides without really thinking about what they were saying. I was a very serious child, and believed the state of adulthood was blessed with knowledge and awareness from which I was cut off. I saw adulthood as a special state, people sitting in a brilliantly lit room laughing and talking and nodding their heads, while I stand in the shadows just outside the room unable to understand why they are talking so animatedly about the weather or the traffic, knowing from their vitality and amusement that beneath their ordinary words was a world of hidden meaning, that language was a code known only to the initiate—adults. Oh, in time