When my mother was a baby, she nearly died of whooping cough.  The doctor who had come out to their farmhouse to attend to her told people back in town, “That Hempstead baby isn’t going to last the night.”  But both of her parents stopped all work on their busy farm to sit with her through her struggle, and last she did.  When she emerged from the illness, she was six months old and had dropped back to her birth weight.

Mother told that story from time to time, always with a catch in her voice, a dampening of her eyes, this stalwart woman who carried in her bones the very English dictum that feelings were never to be expressed.

You might expect an experience such as that—or rather the story of the experience as she wouldn’t, of course, have remembered the illness on her own—to have tipped my mother into hypochondria.  She was one of five siblings, and those days and nights of acute illness were probably the only time she was ever the absolute center of her family’s attention.  It did not.  She was determinedly healthy all her life.  When she developed congestive heart failure at age 90, her diminished energy left her bemused.  Again and again, I’d explain about her heart, but she always refused to believe me.

I think I can, however, guess the way her near death as an infant did impact her.  She became a woman who loved the memory of that baby self, a woman who turned that love into needing a baby of her own.  To my good and ill fortune, I was her second and last child . . . and that baby. 

I slept in a crib until I was seven.  I wore high-topped “baby” shoes and velvet bonnets at least into second grade.  I was kept, at all times, close to my mother’s side.  Day after day, she let me know in the sweetest possible way that growing up was not quite nice.  I still remember with great clarity the moment when I announced to myself, without any particular fanfare, “Mommy liked me better when I was little.”  (It’s one of those memories that comes complete with an image of where I was when the realization hit.)

I was still “little” when that understanding came to me.  Perhaps four or five. 

Throughout my childhood, our family lived in cement mill housing—my father was the mill chemist—on the far edge of a small northern Illinois town.  In that remote place, I had a single playmate, the mill superintendent’s daughter.  She was a year or two younger than I, so the immaturity my mother had so carefully nurtured created no problems. 

When the time came for kindergarten, though, Mother delivered me into a room full of strangers.  Strangers who knew one another.  I don’t remember that year as being unpleasant apart from the trauma of being abandoned on the first day, but I made no friends. The same for first grade.  In second grade, though, I was put in with the more advanced—which, for the most part, meant older—students, though I was always the youngest in my class.  And that was the beginning of being a true outsider.

When I’d entered first grade, my mother had begun teaching kindergarten in a nearby town.  (I recognized even then that she needed to be with children who were younger than I.)  And at the end of my sixth-grade year, she decided that the school system where she taught was better academically than the one in our town and, for that reason, my parents would pay tuition to enroll me there. 

I agreed, but not because I was looking for better academics.  I knew by then everything I had ever done wrong with my peers, and this would be a chance to start over.  I was going to do it all right this time.  I even spent the summer between 6th and 7th grades practicing to be a cheerleader.  (I’d studied dance since I was four years old, so, surely, I was qualified!)

Infiltrating a strange 7th-grade class in a strange school in a strange town would have been difficult even for a girl in possession of a few social skills.  For me, with no skills at all, it was excruciating.  If I had been an outsider in my old school, now I was a pariah.  I arrived this time, not in a velvet bonnet, but in colored anklets to match my dresses.  All the other girls wore fat white bobby socks that my mother thought were ugly.  Amazing what a difference socks can make among twelve-year-olds!

The only girl willing to have anything to do with me had been the class goat before I arrived.  My presence put her up a notch, and from time to time, the other girls beckoned her to their midst to join in making fun of me.

She always went.

(I remember asking myself if our roles had been reversed, would I have gone when those girls called, however brief the inclusion?  I had the brutal self-honesty to acknowledge that I would have.)

The best I can say about those two years was that I survived.

Survived and moved on to the much larger high school that served students from several surrounding towns. There, I spent my freshman year being blessedly invisible.  In my sophomore year, at the recommendation of a kind teacher, I joined the yearbook staff.  And found that, in the right environment, competence justified my existence.  Competence that has been my entre and my shield ever since.

Skip forward a couple of decades to the day I sat down for the first time to attempt to write for children.  Unsurprisingly, I started off with picture-book texts, stories for the happy little girl I had once been.  (None of those early manuscripts were successful because picture books are technical, and despite having read them to my children by the bushel, I didn’t have a clue how they were made.)  It didn’t take long, though, to find my way to contemporary middle-grade novels, something I barely knew existed before I stumbled across them on a library shelf.  And reading those, I remembered the unhappy girl I had once been. 

I realized I had something important to say to that child.

It was the beginning of healing.  Not, of course, that I knew that’s what I was doing.

What I did know, though, is that I was telling the truth about how painful childhood can be.