How I Started Apologizing for Being Me.

A Memoir and Essay

Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

I grew up apologizing ….for everything – for my thoughts, my preferences, my emotion, my essence.  Perhaps like a lot of little girls raised in before the 80’s, I remember feeling like I was too gregarious, too loud, too inappropriate in my laughter and exclamations and interruptions.  I suppose I had a case of enthusiastic ADHD, like the entire world was this wonderful distraction, and I could not keep me eyes from darting too and fro from all the music and the laughter and the bumble bees and the melted cheese. 

I’ve been told that I’m a 7 on the Enneagram, “The Enthusiast,” and it lands insofar as my propensity for enthusiasm.  Apparently, I came out of the womb that way.  My mother always tells the story of my brother being hospitalized for whooping cough, and how I kept trying to upstage him by being silly and demanding that his nurses cut my fingernails, and trying to eat his hospital jello – and all kinds of other embarrassing things I did as a 6-year old that I have continued to keep apologizing for to this day. 

I can’t remember any certain thing I did wrong, but I do remember being reprimanded, a lot, for talking out of turn and trying to dominate and being too loud.  I had a felt sense, perhaps like most girls, that I was supposed to be polite, demure, reflective, and content.  Which is funny because my mother was NEVER that way.  She was passionate, loud, given to impulsivity, demanding, and could lose her temper at the drop of a hat.  Honestly, we loved my mother, but we were also terrified of her. 

On the one hand, my mother loved to sing and broke out her violin frequently so we could gather around the piano to harmonize.  I learn to sing solos at church at the age of four and my mother, sister, and I would sing 3-part harmony at church for the Christmas services.  It never occurred to me that people couldn’t naturally pick out the alto line or create a descant to a melody.  I had been doing that since preschool.  My mother was imaginative-  inviting her friends over to dress up for all sorts of parties – wearing costumes for their favorite nursery rhyme character, their favorite superhero, their favorite movie heroine.  She would do these elaborate theme parties for us kids, decorating cakes or cupcakes like aliens or Strawberry shortcake dolls or Care Bears.  She could do the frosting just so, better than they did at the Supervalu. 

My friends LOVED coming to my birthday parties because they were such orchestrated extravaganzas, with games and costumes and theatrics that always fit the theme.  And of course, I loved creating musicals, so we would always put on skits, plays, or some sort of drama as part of the party.  My mom was always picking out colorful morsels from Goodwill, so we could dress up in purple beads and orange muumuus and feather boas and hats with nets.  Our basement was a stage, and there was always a play in rehearsal, with the accompanying set and programs and refreshment stand, with popcorn. 

I have these wonderful memories of my mother as my Brownie and Girl Scout leader – of her creativity and drive and ambition to get those badges done.  I was SO proud of how full my Brownie sash was and later my green Girl Scout sash.  I had like every square inch covered in badges.  I almost had to get a second one.  My mother was in constant pursuit of opportunities to get badges, so every camping trip also became an exercise in learning to build fires or lean-tos or to tie knots or fashion “sit-upons.”  My mother knew every girl scout song.  She brought her guitar and could get us all singing any time we kids got squirrely or too loud. 

But that was the thing.  We were always too loud.  Looking back, my mother, had a very reactive nervous system, and she was constantly screaming at us.  She would jump like a cricket every time there was a noise and get frustrated if two people were talking at the same time.  And she always wanted everything organized and structured and timed and neat.  She liked creativity, as long as SHE was the one to instigate it and things would NOT get messy.  I remember giving up on playdough when I was very little because she would literally lose her shit if we mixed the colors or got any playdough on the floor.  Playdough wasn’t fun – the way she’d make us clean all the supplies and keep It was like it was brand new.  School was never “out,” and if we weren’t hiding in the basement, my brother and I were just too messy and too loud.  We knew not to make mother mad, and the only place we could keep her from being mad was by staying in the basement or going to friend’s houses- which, as we got older, we did most of the time. 

I learned to apologize, because I was a constant disruption.  It wasn’t just that I was loud, but my mom couldn’t handle any loud or unruly emotions.   If I got angry, she would get angrier for me being angry and would shut me down.  If I cried, my mother would start crying with more passion and vehemence.  Any so called “negative” emotion sparked so much reactivity in her that we would generally forget we were having an emotion all together and would shift our energy to soothing her anger or comforting her sadness. 

Now that I’m a licensed therapist, I am recognizing that there was just no emotional differentiation between my mother and me.  Differentiation is the ability to maintain emotional boundaries – to “hold onto self” when someone is having their own emotions.  It is knowing where you end and the other person starts.  I learned, early on, not to express my emotions.  If I was too enthusiastic, I was being too loud.  If I was angry or sad, I was being too ungrateful or too sassy or too dramatic.  If I had any emotion beyond the generally placid and cerebral emotional range of my father, my mother would scream, cry, and become dysregulated. 

I learned to apologize for feeling things – anything really, beyond calm and contemplative contentment.  I couldn’t stand the storm I triggered if my emotions got too loud.  My intellectual father seemed to get it right – just be quiet or escape into the garage.  And of course, the more my father and us kids escaped, I’m guessing the lonelier my mother became, and the more she pursued and raged and cried and demanded space. 

As I got older, I stopped hiding in the basement as much, but I also learned to stay silent, to let my mother’s emotions take up most of the space.  I learned to constantly soothe her, to talk her down from the ledge, to prepare her in advance for any possible disruptions.  And to apologize for having a need, or for feeling sad.  I got rid of anger all together.  Only her anger was allowed in our home. And thus, I was constantly apologizing to my father, to my mother, to my teachers, to my friends.  I developed this latent belief that the ideal person had zero emotional lability, and I stop expressing any emotion at all. 

But of course, I am a human being, so I have always had emotions.  I just felt guilty for having them – like they were some extravagant indulgence for immature and unruly children.  I also learned to stop expressing preferences and needs, because if my mom didn’t get her choice, she pouted like a child.   I feel funny calling my mom a narcissist, because she’s such an emotionally sensitive person, but it was always about her emotions and preferences, not ours. 

It does not surprise me that I went on to marry a man who also is a narcissist and had a similarly reactive nervous system.  I had been trained for twenty-five years to suppress and ignore my emotions, so I could always be there for others.  I married someone with a similarly reactive nervous system, prone to anger and disassociated fits of rage. I married someone who expressed his preferences and never asked for mine.  I married someone who always needed the house quiet and would get angry if dinner wasn’t ready or I was frustrated with my writing or if I invited someone over for a drink.  Once again, I was too loud.  Once again, my emotions were intolerable.  It worked though, for the most part, because I had stopped expressing my emotions twenty years earlier. 

My career choice of being a therapist was a continuation of this childhood strategy of soothing, placating, encouraging and prioritizing other people’s emotions above my own.  In some ways, I borrowed the emotional expression of my clients, as if by attuning to their tears, I didn’t have to express my own sadness.  As if by helping them express their anger, I could forego expressing mine.

Unfortunately, I am still paying the price.