The Woman Who Can't Forget (10 page)

Although the philosophy at Westlake was to try to build self-esteem and there were lots of great extracurricular activities, the academic pressure was fierce. I watched friends in the seventh grade have anxiety attacks about where they would be going to college. One girl fell on the floor crying once because she got an A minus. I found it a harsh place, and though it was in fact a very fine school, it was horrible for me.

My English teacher the first year, Miss Taylor, was an ex-nun who was obsessed with grammar, and especially sentence diagramming. I had never even heard of sentence diagramming and had no idea how to do it. Meanwhile, all the other kids had done it in the previous grades. After two weeks, I was so lost I couldn't complete her assignments, but I was so anxious about it that I found myself unable to tell anyone. I should have said to my parents, “I can't do this,” and I know they would have helped me out, but I was paralyzed. Then came our first diagramming test. When Miss Taylor handed me my test back, she gave me a withering disappointed look and put the test facedown on my desk, which made it obvious to everyone that I had failed. That was my first F, and I was humiliated. I had never been a great student, and some teachers had thought I was lazy because I was so often distracted, but before Westlake, I never got below a C. Failing a course was something I couldn't imagine.

I was rubbed raw from the stress and feelings of failure. Though I wanted to ask my parents to switch me to a different school, I thought that they were keen on me going there and didn't want to disappoint them. At the end of that first year at Westlake when I was studying for a science test with my mom, I first became aware of my detailed memory. It was 1978, and I was twelve years old, suffering through the last weeks of seventh grade. As I started chaining back through the days of the much happier year before at St. Michael's, I startled myself by realizing that I could remember what I'd done on the exact same day the year before, and then all the days before that for about a month.
A year ago today I was getting ready for

the class picnic; the next day was the school play; the day after

that I went swimming at the beach with my friends…
I'm sure if I had asked my parents to transfer me to a different school they would have, but at that age, I was terrified that I would disappoint them.

I'm still acutely sensitive that childhood is a time when we have little control over our lives. Our parents are in charge of all the biggest factors: where we live, where we go to school, what income bracket we're in. I know I shouldn't feel this way anymore, but I can't help it. I still get upset when I think about how I was forced to leave New Jersey and contend with all the pressures I felt of a new life in LA.

All parents desperately try to understand what's going on in their kids' minds, to make sense out of the often strange logic of a child's reasoning, but no matter how hard an adult tries, a child lives in a childhood world that adults left behind long ago. My memory has made me acutely aware of that disconnect. Parents may have a few memories of those early years that help them relate to the intense emotions their children are going through, but they can't really get inside their kids' heads.

My parents certainly couldn't get inside mine, and I was no easy child to raise. I'm still not an easy child for them, because that tempestuous childhood Jill is still so much a part of me. They've been remarkably loving parents, and as I look back through all the years of turmoil in our lives, I am in awe of their steady support of me. We've had our issues, though, and one of those that has been particularly difficult for me to cope with began to plague me during these same years.

Like so many mothers and daughters, my mom and I developed a complex, intensely close relationship, but one fraught with difficulties. At the core of the tensions between us was the way that, from when I was seven on, she would admonish me about my weight. What seemed like almost constant comments seared into my brain with all of the intensity that I felt about them the moment they were spoken, and they still drive me crazy and color my self-image. My mother and I have fought over this issue my whole life, and if I have particularly self-defining memories, then surely those of my mother saying to me, “Don't eat that, you'll get fat,” and “Boys don't like to date fat girls,” are crucial among them. To her mind, she was just trying to help me make my way in the world and doing her motherly duty.

When she danced for June Taylor, she had been told to watch her weight; Taylor was a tough taskmaster and insisted that her dancers be remarkably slim. I think because my mom had never taken those reprimands personally—she was a professional performer and that just came with the territory—and also because she had no idea I had such an unusual memory, she didn't understand the effect her comments had, and would continue to have, on me.

In combination with the stress I was feeling about the academic pressure of school, her comments about watching what I was eating started to undermine my self-confidence further, making me feel that I wasn't pretty enough and was unworthy of affection. The great irony is that I wasn't overweight. I wasn't incredibly skinny, but I was thin.

I think my mother's obsession about my weight was inspired by a pediatrician I went to when I was seven. He commented to my mother about my “baby fat,” and from then on, she was on the case, putting me on a diet and watching my weight like a hawk. When we got to California, the pediatrician there picked up the mission, and I hated my visits to his office. I felt like they were ganging up on me, and meanwhile I wasn't even at all heavy.

Though I took my mother's comments very much to heart, my way of dealing with her admonitions was to rebel. She wouldn't let me eat any of the snack foods that my friends did, and dessert was totally out of the question. To defy her, I'd go to a neighbor's house and raid the cabinet filled with junk food. Over the years, my rebellions resulted in some horrible incidents, among my most dreaded memories.

One of the worst is from June 16, 1979, when I went on a day trip to Universal Studios with my friends Gregg and Alex. My dad was working at Universal as a producer and had gotten us tickets. We had a wonderful day—three kids enjoying the tour—and I bought myself an ice cream cone. When we came back to my house, we went swimming, and when Alex mentioned to my mom that'd we'd had some ice cream, my mom pulled me out of the pool and screamed at me and hit me in front of everyone. Alex and Gregg were stunned. I was mortified.

Another particularly traumatic memory about these weight battles is from when I was graduating from sixth grade. My family was taking a summer trip to New York, and my mother and the doctor put me on a diet to lose five pounds or I wasn't going to be allowed to go. The doctor weighed me every week. When I gained three ounces, I was so distraught that I wasn't going to be able to go to New York that I had a meltdown in his office.

One of the ways in which my mom would try to induce me not to eat prohibited foods was by saying, like a mantra,
If you eat anything bad, I'm going to die.
For a while, she would say that to me every morning when I left for school. The first time I remember her saying it was in early October 1977, when I was eleven. I was stung by a bee, and because I'm allergic, my hand blew up and itched for days. On October 22, my family and me and my friend Lori were going to a picnic that day, held annually by Carl Reiner at Rancho Park, right across from 20th Century Fox. Later I was going to be staying over at Lori's house, and after the picnic, we went back to my house so I could pack an overnight bag.

Right before I left, my mom said to me,
If you eat

anything bad, I'm going to die.
Lori's mom was serving pizza for dinner, a definite “bad food.” Looking back on this it's amazing to me that I was so upset, but it's a great example of how irrational kids' minds are. I was seriously worried that if I ate the pizza, my mom might die. I did know that believing that didn't make sense, and I was too embarrassed to tell Lori and her parents, so I went ahead and ate the pizza.

By 10:00 that night my anxieties about whether my mother was going to be okay were so bad that I said I had to go home, making up the excuse that the bee sting was bothering me. When I got home, our family friends Beverly and Danny, who have been so close to my family that I call them my aunt and uncle, were there, and I got into my nightgown and all of us danced in the dining room to oldies records. Beverly and my mom kept saying to me,

Aren't you glad you came home?
Glad? Sure I was glad. I was glad everybody was alive.

The effect of all of my mother's harping on me about my weight, in combination with doing poorly in school, was crushing by the time I got to ninth grade. The stress and emotional trauma from the feelings of failure and self-doubt that coursed through me got more and more intense. Finally, on December 8, 1979, a Saturday morning, I couldn't get out of bed for the first time in my life. I was thirteen years old and overwhelmed. My uncle Norman was visiting from San Diego, and my mom kept asking me to get up and get dressed and come out. I couldn't.

For the next six months, I was in a deep depression. I rarely played with my friends. I couldn't make plans, and I hardly left my room, even on the weekends. I was tormented by a persistent recitation in my mind of my failures and inadequacies. There's a powerful line in a song by country western singer Garth Brooks: “It's four in the morning; I'm lying in bed, a tape of my failures playing inside of my head.” It was at this time that I fell into a lifelong practice of what I refer to as “Y diagramming” in my mind: if I hadn't done this, then that wouldn't have happened; if I hadn't said this, then…, blaming myself for being a failure. This is one of the most debilitating ways in which my memory has affected my life. It has instilled in me an acute, persistent regret over so many of the decisions and events of my life.

I read an interesting article recently about what are referred to as “lost possible selves,” again by
New York Times
reporter Benedict Carey. He wrote, “It is partly from studies of lost selves that psychologists have come to a more complete understanding of how regret molds personality.” The concept is that as we grow up, we may begin to develop the notion that there is a truer self that we might have been or were meant to be. Carey eloquently describes the mental prison these thoughts may trap people in as “that lonely echo chamber of what should and could be.”

The rehearsing of thoughts about failures—wrong paths taken, opportunities missed, bad choices made, how we should have known better—has been found to have a profoundly negative effect on people's well-being. This rehearsing is normally one of a process of rumination. For me, though, it's a matter of how my memory operates. Those failures haunted me at the time, repeating themselves in my mind, and because my memory is so complete, they kept doing so through my adolescence straight through my twenties and thirties. They still do.

By the end of ninth grade, my parents couldn't stand to see me in such pain anymore and decided to send me to our local public high school. Suddenly life changed for me again; the academic pressure was lifted, and for the first time in years, I felt relatively at peace. For whatever reason, though, my memory kept getting stronger and stronger and filling my mind up more and more.

Although I'd become more and more aware that I had a much better memory than most other people by this point, I didn't understand that not everyone had the swirl of memories whirling in their brains that I did. I found it increasingly hard to understand how my friends or family could forget the names of people they met, or who started the argument at dinner, or the exact day the episode of their favorite TV show aired; getting the facts right about some family event, or what my parents had told me became increasingly important to me. No one likes a know-it-all, and my insistence on making corrections became a source of quite a bit of friction with my parents. They had no way of understanding what was happening inside my head, and I had no way to describe it. I did start to shock people with the accuracy of my recall, but the true nature of the difference in my memory wasn't at all clear.

I can't know for sure how the unusual richness and completeness of my autobiographical memories has shaped my sense of self, and how my self-image might have developed if I'd forgotten more. I do know that the process that usually begins in late adolescence and continues in our twenties of culling our memories and crafting them into a coherent and largely self-enhancing life story seems not to have worked in my mind, or at least not at all well. I've never been able to cull bad memories out, and I don't seem to have had the processing mechanism for rewriting them in my mind either and coming to see them in a new, positive way as life lessons. For me, they are what they were. I recall them as documentary-like facts of my life. I feel that surely one of the results for me has been that I retained such a haunting sense of self-doubt and lack of self-worth in place of the positive life story I should have been shaping.

All of the awkward moments at school, all of the frustrations about math, my mother's nagging comments to watch my weight and about how boys didn't want to go out with fat girls, have come to dominate my life, investing me with an intense feeling of being a failure that I struggle with every day. Perhaps the only redeeming aspect of the haunting completeness of my memory for childhood is that I have such a deep empathy for the children I work with and the emotional intensity of their lives.