When I was about eleven, I found a letter that hinted at the unknowns percolating in the background of my family life. The composition of the blood that surged through my veins was in question, it turned out. My parents had gone on an errand, and I’d taken the opportunity to snoop around my father’s office. It was a bold move on my part, uncharacteristic of my rule-abiding nature. I glanced nervously out the window to make sure the coast was clear and then opened and closed a few desk drawers before turning to my father’s file cabinet. This imposing piece of furniture was made of shiny lacquered oak, with antique brass handles on each of its four drawers. The cabinet had always seemed mysterious to me, so different from the gray industrial cabinets that lined the halls of my father’s law office in San Francisco’s financial district. Unsure of what I was looking for, I reached over and pulled on the top drawer.
“Bills,” “House,” “Insurance.” The contents were mundane, but a file all the way in the back, at the very end of the alphabet, caught my eye. Its label sported a single name: “Weston.”
Carefully sliding the file out of the cabinet, I sat on the hardwood floor and thumbed through its contents—a few articles about England that didn’t seem particularly important, then a copy of a letter on my father’s stationery. The letter was addressed to someone in England, and it began with a formal salutation: “Dear Sir.”
“We are confident . . .” “The evidence shows . . .” The topic was a property in a place called Shropshire, and I managed to piece together that my father was trying to prove that my mother was somehow entitled to this land. Near the end of the letter was the string of words I found most surprising of all: “even her daughter looks like a Weston.”
I’d always been told that I looked like my mother, a comparison I resented and one that my sister used as a taunt. “You’re just like Mom” was the ultimate insult in our home. My sister and I had never been close; we were separated by four years, and then by geography when she was sent off to boarding school in Arizona as a young teen. We would never live in the same house again, or even in the same city. By the time she returned, I was off at boarding school myself. But my sister’s words were seared into my memory, and I secretly clung to the hope that despite her assertions I was, in fact, nothing like my mother. The physical resemblance, however, was irrefutable. I had the same smooth brown hair, the same pale skin splattered with freckles. We both had large eyes and thick black eyebrows, although her eyes were brown and mine blue-green, like my father’s. And now I looked “like a Weston,” whatever that meant. Despite the sting of confirmation, my wish for individuation faded slightly as I realized my possible role in proving my mother’s noble birthright.
Her claims had never seemed strange or unusual, and I had never questioned her status as a member of the aristocracy. After all, she made her disdain for the poor crystal clear (while reserving her greatest derision for the nouveau riche, calling them the “tackiest of the lot”). Her concern with the social strata was all-consuming, infiltrating every aspect of our home life. In fact a great deal of the misery in our household, at least as it applied to me, centered around my mother’s enduring attempts to turn me into a proper upper-crust British girl—presumably the kind of girl she’d been raised to be.
OUR MORNING ROUTINE began before dawn. My mother would wake me, shaking me gently, breakfast already on the table.
There was no conversation as the car moved silently through the empty streets. My nose pressed up against the window, I’d watch as the moon followed us closely behind, dodging in and out from between passing trees and houses whose windows were still dark.
I was six when we started our early-morning treks to the home of Dr. Haderer, a respected professor of music who had studied in Japan with the renowned Dr. Shinichi Suzuki. At the time, few teachers had been trained in Suzuki’s innovative “mother-tongue” approach, a theory of instruction that uses principles of language acquisition such as listening and repetition in teaching children violin. Dr. Haderer was in high demand, but my mother would settle for nothing but the best, even if that meant taking a six-in-the-morning slot.
After the lessons we would rush to the series of prestigious schools I attended. Always punctual, my mother would be back on the curb when classes let out, silently handing me a thermos full of warm split-pea soup as we headed to the next lesson—ballet, tap, tennis, horseback riding. Weekends or evenings, tutors were ushered into the dining room, where we’d work at the long oak table under the soft light of the vintage gold sconces and large chandelier. My skin pressed uncomfortably against the carvings that wound up the stiff back of my wooden chair as we went over my French, creative writing, and drawing assignments to ensure that no area be neglected.
Among the revolving cast was a private handwriting tutor who taught me how to hold a pen, how much pressure to exert on the paper, and the exact stroke needed to create a perfectly shaped letter. My lessons took place at her home, a cream-colored mansion with a red-tiled roof. Once through the spacious foyer, I would follow her long white hair and free-flowing gray tunic up a spiral staircase to a cozy room in a tower overlooking the forest behind her house. We would sit side by side at an antique desk as she gently pressed her hand on top of mine to guide my writing instrument. The lessons were painless, but they still caused me worry. Handwriting had never been my forte, and my mother was highly critical of my deficiencies, down to the last pen stroke.
She was relentless in her quest to mold me into an accomplished and refined young lady, going so far as to teach me to spell using the Queen’s English. When my teachers at school would correct me—“It’s t-h-e-a-t-e-r, not t-h-e-a-t-r-e”—I’d insist that my version was “real” English. “This is America,” they would sensibly respond, and so I learned to spell one way for my mother, another for my teachers.
Once the tutors had gone and we’d cleared my notebooks off the dinner table, our in-house curriculum began. How to butter bread (break off a bite-sized piece first), which fork to use, and how to get that last drop of soup in the bowl (never tip the bowl toward you).
After dinner, the lessons would turn to diction. “Repeat after me,” she would begin:
Betty had a bit of butter
But the butter was too bitter
So, Betty bought some better butter to make the bitter butter better.
Our routine was repeated night after night. Where my tutors were patient, encouraging, my mother would ridicule. “It’s not bud-d-d-d-der,” she would mock, drawing out the “d,” her face rumpled in disdain. “Say it again, but properly this time.” Yet I could never quite get it right, my tone of voice or accent unrefined, too American.
As early as first grade, teachers started sending me home with notes expressing concern over my habit of worrying, the way an inconsequential error would send me into a chasm of self-doubt and anxiety. The smallest mistake would cause acute physical pain that left me weakened and anguished for days after the inciting event. This was a pattern that would be repeated throughout my life, the slightest criticism sending me into a spiral of defensiveness and shame. Work supervisors admonished me for being “too sensitive” to feedback. Friends and coworkers told me not to worry so much or take it so hard. Their well-intentioned suggestions did little to quiet the critical voices in my head. Sometimes I could prevent myself from spiraling by digging a thumbnail into the palm of my hand to create a dull throbbing, or counting cracks in the sidewalk as I walked to and from meetings—anything to distract myself from my inner thoughts. These efforts weren’t always successful, and occasionally my fears and anxieties would seep out as harsh words directed at colleagues or inopportune tears when I discovered a missed typo. A few times my panic landed me in the emergency room when my symptoms too closely resembled those of a heart attack. I would spend decades on a therapist’s couch, working to overcome the intractable belief that I was a failure, unworthy of love and respect. But no matter how hard I tried to silence the voices in my head, I carried around my list of personal defects like a thousand-pound weight.