Among all the other issues I’ve heard people discussing this week related to Amy Chua’s controversial WSJ essay is her admission that she called her daughter “garbage” to her face when the kid failed to meet her mother’s expectations in some regard.
Like most people who read this, I was taken aback. I mean, calling your daughter “garbage” to her face is really, really harsh, dude. But I wonder if maybe the Chua family’s internal culture doesn’t find the word “garbage” to be as awful as I do. Maybe in their household, calling someone “garbage” is not that big of a deal, and doesn’t carry the emotional wallop that it would for most people.
I mention this possibility because if my mother had ever referred to me as garbage, it probably would have bothered me (she never did, by the way), but I doubt that it would have bothered me as much as the meanest thing I ever remember either of my parents saying to me, in an incident I recall like it was yesterday because it stung so painfully. What was this awful thing that my mom said to me? Well, one time when I was about 11 years old, and I had been caught in an untruth, my mother looked at me disdainfully and said, “you lie like Richard Nixon.”
It was like a kick to the solar plexus to hear that from my liberal Democrat mother, to whom Richard Nixon represented everything she disliked most in the world, both in terms of his politics and his ethics. I honestly would have much preferred being called “garbage” to being compared to Richard Nixon, because in our family’s culture, the Nixon insult was THE WORST.
I seriously doubt that my mother realized how much that comment affected me. It hurt, yes, but it also did give me a kick in the pants the next time I considered lying about something. I didn’t want to be like Richard Nixon, and my mother had really gotten my attention with her comment, mean though it might have been.
And now it’s time for me to confess what I believe to have been the meanest thing I’ve ever said to one of my own children, something I regretted as soon as it came out of my mouth. It happened last year, when 6th grader E and I were meeting with one of his teachers to discuss his lack of effort in her class. We went ’round and ’round with him, trying to get him to take what we were saying seriously, explaining that if he didn’t shape up, he would flunk the class and might flunk the grade. In my opinion, he seemed uninterested in what we were saying, and his responses were not satisfying me. Finally, exasperated, I looked directly at my child and said, “it’s a good thing you’re short because you’ll fit in better with the younger kids when you have to repeat 6th grade next year.”
E’s teacher stared at me, kind of dumbfounded, I think. I started to stammer and backtrack and make my comment into some kind of bad joke – I was really ashamed of what had just popped out of my mouth – but then I realized that I had actually gotten E’s attention. The comment was so mean and unexpected that it got his hackles up, and he finally engaged with the conversation we’d been trying to have with him. He haughtily explained that there was NO WAY he would be repeating sixth grade, and he intended to show me that with improved performance right away.
I apologized profusely to E on the way home. I told him I’d been joking. I felt truly awful. He stayed mad at me all day, and I sometimes wonder whether my nasty comment to him will be his own “Richard Nixon” moment when he looks back on his childhood. Is this what he’ll remember as the worst thing I ever said to him? I know I will remember it that way.
So how about you? What’s the worst thing your parents ever said to you, and how did it affect you? And ‘fess up (remember, you can comment anonymously) and admit what you believe to have been the meanest thing you’ve ever said to one of your kids.