Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [36]
End of chapter. Fabulous! A dramatic ending, brilliantly told. And then McCarthy adds a postscript. As she was writing the story, she says, “I suddenly remembered that in college I had started writing a play on the subject. Could the idea that Uncle Myers put the butterfly at my place have been suggested to me by my teacher? I can almost hear her voice saying to me, excitedly: ‘Your uncle must have done it!’” McCarthy called her brothers, but none of them recalled her version of events, including Preston, who did not remember either seeing Uncle Myers with the butterfly (he was only seven at the time) or claiming that he had said so the night of the family visit. “The most likely thing, I fear,” McCarthy concludes, “is that I fused two memories”—the tale of the missing butterfly and the teacher’s subsequent explanation of what might have happened. 6 And it made psychological sense: Uncle Myers’s planting of the butterfly under the tablecloth was consonant with McCarthy’s feelings about his overall malevolence and further justified her righteous indignation about being unfairly punished.
When most people write their memoirs or describe their past experiences, however, they don’t do it the way Mary McCarthy did. They do it the way they would tell their stories to a therapist: “Doctor, here’s what happened.” They count on the listener not to say, “Oh, yeah? Are you sure it happened that way? Are you positive your mother hated you? Are you certain your father was such a brute? And while we’re at it, let’s examine those memories you have of your horrible ex. Any chance you have forgotten anything you did that might have been a tad annoying—say, that little affair you justified having with the lawyer from Bug Tussle, Oklahoma?” On the contrary, we tell our stories in the confidence that the listener will not dispute them or ask for contradictory evidence, which means we rarely have an incentive to scrutinize them for accuracy. You have memories about your father that are salient to you and that represent the man he was and the relationship you had with him. What have you forgotten? You remember that time when you were disobedient and he swatted you, and you are still angry that he didn’t explain why he was disciplining you. But could you have been the kind of kid a father couldn’t explain things to, because you were impatient and impulsive and didn’t listen? When we tell a story, we tend to leave ourselves out: My father did thus-and-such because of who he was, not because of the kind of kid I was. That’s the self-justification of memory. And it is why, when we learn that a memory is wrong, we feel stunned, disoriented, as if the ground under us has shifted. In a sense, it has. It has made us rethink our own role in the story.
Every parent has been an unwilling player in the you-can’t-win game. Require your daughter to take piano lessons, and later she will complain that you wrecked her love of the piano. Let your daughter give up lessons because she didn’t want to practice, and later she will complain that you should have forced her to keep going—why, now she can’t play the piano at all. Require your son to go to Hebrew school in the afternoon, and he will blame you for having kept him from becoming another Hank Greenberg. Allow your son to skip Hebrew school, and he will later blame you for his not feeling more connected to his heritage. Betsy Petersen produced a full-bodied whine in her memoir Dancing With Daddy, blaming her parents for only giving her swimming lessons, trampoline