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By Root 536 0

spent time looking for love and happiness in the wrong places. But then a great change occurred, and she gave up her old ways of living and changed her name to Calm Sunset. Here is an excerpt describing her tenderness toward her grandson, who had just been bullied: “My sweet Willie Juan, the way you were treated today is not a new thing.… People often think … they can be mean to you because no one will step forward to protect you.” Calm Sunset was very much based on my grandmother. Calm Sunset stepped forward for Willie Juan, as my grandmother did for me. My mother was right—you don’t always get what you ask for. But early on I questioned whether she was only half right. I sorta believed sometimes you get so much more.

In the darkest days of the Great Depression people talked of the “big bad wolf” and “the wolf always being at the door.” That image reflected the pervasive fear felt in all our lives in such hard times. In fact the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” became an anthem of those days, an attempt to encourage everyone to hold our chins up. But another image back then trumped the wolf for me, what I’ve since heard described as the “invisible dragon.” This monster wasn’t at the door and big and bad; it was inside, subtle and devouring. Shame.

As I think back on my childhood, the word shame serves as an umbrella. It is the sense of being completely insufficient as a person, the nagging feeling that for some reason you’re defective and unworthy. That’s how I felt all the time. And just as there is only one word to describe it, one experience in my memory has a similar kind of all-encompassing sweep, a moment in time that gave shape to my entire world. I hinted about this experience in my book Abba’s Child, but I want to give it a deeper telling here. Why? Well, now I’m not so afraid of dragons.

The memory came back to me one day while I was on a long retreat in the Colorado Rockies, a much-needed stint of therapy and solitude. I spent my mornings under the caring hand of a psychologist who helped me revisit memories of my childhood. One crisp morning as I talked with the psychologist, I became startled by the realization that there was an absolute void of feeling in my life. It was like I could not access anything emotionally. I realized that I hadn’t felt anything for a long, long time, since I was about eight years old. In working with the psychologist, I remembered something that happened back then, something sinister that had irreparably darkened my life.

My mother had come home one afternoon from a shift of nursing. For some reason I greeted her harshly, saying, “You love Robert more than me, don’t you? You’ve always loved him more! I hate you!”

My mother looked stunned, but I didn’t relent. I continued to accuse her. “The truth is Robert’s always been your favorite. You’ve always been kind to him and mean to me!”

She grew angry. “Stop that! Stop saying that. You stop that now!”

My mother then stormed toward me and began punching me, over and over, to the point where I fell on the floor. She straddled me and continued to punch me, screaming, “Shut up! Shut up!”

My grandmother then entered the room, and her calm voice halted things. “Amy, you better stop. You’re going to hurt him.” This is what I meant about disarming: She didn’t come in shouting at my mother, as one would imagine she would do. She was calm and somehow knew that her gentle approach would make my mother stop.

Whether it was immediate or gradual, I don’t remember. All I know is that the punching stopped. There had been occasions before that moment when I questioned my value as a person, but that experience, when I was eight years old, confirmed my unworthiness. I felt like I would disappear into a pile of ashes.

Shame—what happened when my mother, the dragon, huffed and puffed and blew my self down.

Under my psychologist’s care, I realized that after that event, I had placed a muzzle on my emotional self. I had no feeling, no nothing. I had vowed it.

For days, I sat with that memory in the beauty of Colorado, trying to refeel