My earliest memory is of water. Learning to swim.
I am four or five. The indoor pool at the Y. The warmth of the water against my skin. The vastness of it—stretching beyond my reach.
I remember floating near the wall, small and weightless.
Then, a moment of panic. I lost my grip.
The deep end swallowed me whole. My arms flailed, my breath caught in my throat. Then, I saw her.
She was close—my instructor, a girl in her late teens or early twenties, afloat in the deep end.
I don’t know what gave me the courage, but I leapt.
I wrapped my arms around her, clinging to her like my life depended on it. She steadied me, her arms firm, unshaken.
My heart pounded against her shoulder, but she didn’t let go.
I was safe.
But something else lingered. Not just relief. Something deeper.
Something I wasn’t meant to have. I wasn’t supposed to know what it felt like to be held. To be protected. To be cared for.
And even at four or five years old, I knew that.
That is the birth of shame.
The First Lessons in Isolation
When I was a toddler, I was terrified of firetruck sirens on the firetruck that my parents bought me. My parents told the story often—laughing as they described my panic. I don’t remember them ever soothing me.
I have no memory of them saying, "It’s okay, you’re safe." I suspect they didn’t.
Now, decades later, I find myself instinctively comforting my own cat when he startles at a loud noise. I kneel down, stroke his fur, whisper, "It’s okay, everything is okay."
Something in me knows what I never received. I give to a pet what was never given to me.
The House of Unspoken Rules and Child Abuse
I don’t remember my parents ever holding me like that.
I was abused, physically. I was assaulted. That didn’t start right away when I was very young.
In my family, affection was something distant, implied rather than given. Love was duty. Gratitude was expected. Respect was mandatory and not earned.
My father, Bruce Sr., was a man of unshakable silence. He believed actions spoke louder than words, but his actions were cold efficiency—he provided, and that was enough. My mother, Kathy, was a storm you learned to anticipate, never knowing when lightning would strike.
But there was a chill in the air, a tension that wrapped around me like a vice. It was the kind of silence that demanded submission, not understanding.
I never looked directly at my father’s face. I kept my gaze down, or slightly averted, as if instinctually avoiding something dangerous. The thought going through my mind was that I should not expect an easy explanation of what I did wrong. I was wrong.
I felt that I was being met with a general sense of disapproval for being.
Later in life, I would become incredibly skilled at reading people’s body language. I had so much to learn because I was purposefully choosing to avoid observing the looks of general disapproval.
Our maternal grandparents were our refuge, our shield.
I remember Grandma standing up for me—her frail voice telling my parents, “Don’t hurt Bruce.”
That small moment, that whisper of resistance, was the only time someone tried to intervene.
Grandpa would worry about me lifting too much when I joined him to take out the garbage once a week and stack the garbage pails in a way that would ensure that dogs couldn’t get into them.
And then they died.
With them went the thin barrier between us and our parents’ unchecked cruelty.
What haunts me more than any specific moment of cruelty is the void—the absence of tenderness.
We went on vacations to Disney World. We had an in-ground pool. Yet, I have no memories of joy with my parents. They did things for us, but never with us.
It was not love. It was obligation. And obligation demanded respect, not warmth.
The First Vow: To Never Be Like Them
With no one left to shield us, the full weight of their anger fell upon me. Each harsh word, each slap, each moment of being made to feel small carved deeper into me.
I made a vow in the quiet of my childhood bedroom:
- I will never become like them.
- I will never lose my temper.
- I will never let anyone feel unsafe because of me.
I would spend my whole life keeping that promise.
The arrival of a protector
Paul and his family moved into the neighborhood in 3rd grade. He and I became friends. And I saw him increasingly as a protector. I had come out of my shell for a while in school during 3rd grade. Laughing and joking.
When Donna said she liked me in 3rd grade and kissed me, I felt like I had to put on a show that I didn’t like girls. Obviously, these rules change later.
By junior high, I didn’t have Paul in my classes but I hung out with him in the neighborhood.
I did have another protector in junior high school. Thomas from the neighborhood where we lived earlier said that the 9th graders might pick on the 7th graders and I should tell him if that happens.
No one really did pick on me. There were a few minor incidents that were handled by Paul. I didn’t have to go to any great effort to convince him to help me.
It might have been a few years later but Paul even sensed my fear when a dog came out to chase us on our bikes as we were going riding and peddling up a hill, moving slowly. I must have appeared frozen with fear. Paul got off his bike and chased the dog across the yard that was the dogs home! This was the dogs territory and yet it was running away in fear.
The Arrival of Family – And A Deeper Shame
In junior high, something changed.
My mother and her estranged sister suddenly reconciled, and a world I had never known opened up: extended family.
I met my first cousins—Linda, Sharon, and Karen. They were adults, but their children, Barbara and Dan, were my age.
I was drawn to Barbara.
I told myself it was because I preferred talking over roughhousing.
Dan played tackle football—a game of brute force. I didn’t want to tackle or dominate or crush someone to win. Winning had never felt good to me.
Even in childhood games of kickball, I remember the uneasy feeling in my stomach when my team won, because it meant another had lost.
The elation of victory never came.
Yet, I wondered: was something wrong with me?
The world told boys to compete, to fight, to dominate. But I wanted connection—not conquest.
And so I gravitated toward Barbara. We talked. We laughed. We hugged.
And then, shame crept in.
It came in the form of my mother’s jealousy.
"Do you think they’re going to let you live with them?" she snapped, her voice dripping with scorn. She was referring to Karen or Sharon who were the only cousins who could have taken me into their home.
I had never thought about it before, but now the thought seemed… wrong.
She planted a seed—a toxic, gnawing thought that I was a burden. That I was wanting too much.
I had already learned that needing comfort was shameful. The pool memory had taught me that.
Now, I learned that even wanting closeness with my own cousins was wrong.
And so I learned to doubt every warm moment, to question every innocent connection, to second-guess every embrace.
Another aspect of the family get togethers that I truly enjoyed was the opportunity to spend time with the kids. Dan and Barbara were the first cousins once removed that were about my age but Tracy, Jaime and Wayne were little kids, relative to my age. I would be available to watch them and spend time with them… somehow I gravitated into this role. If the kids needed or wanted to go outside (maybe go for a walk or go somewhere nearby) and no one else was available to go with them or watch them.
I suppose I was always meant to be a parent. Even while I was just a teenager, a child myself, it was evident.
Had the events of this book not come to pass the way they did, I would have surely found a way to be a parent. This was on my mind later in this story.
An Invisible Shell: The Complete Silence of Selective Mutism
By junior high, my selective mutism was complete.
At school, I couldn’t speak. Who knows what I feared. Perhaps the scared part of me that hid behind my chair in Kindergarten instead of walking up front with the milk money. What was it that I feared?
That part of me that was hidden in my unconscious knew. Later in studying psychology, I would learn ideas like the wounded inner child, ego states, and parts that were frozen in time. Growing up, I just didn’t speak.
The silence was suffocating.
Speaking felt like exposure. Like a spotlight on shame itself. And so I withdrew.
I wandered the woods, hiked Ragged Mountain, disappeared into nature.
I was aware of the yearning for contact when I saw my cousins..
And yet, in the neighborhood, I had a paper route. I could talk to customers. I worked at the Medical Mart for my neighbor, where I had to speak to strangers.
Outside of school, my voice existed.
Inside school, it was buried beneath layers of shame.
As I grew, I became aware of the power I had—the power to hurt. When I fought with my sister, I would raise my hand or my foot to strike her—but something always stopped me.
Then later, I saw her fear. And that changed everything.
I made another vow:
- No one will ever fear me.
In a home where fear was a weapon, I rejected it.
With my mother’s jealously over my desire to prefer my cousins and aunt over my parents, this created a toxic sense of shame in which I had to second guess how things might look.
But it wasn't just physical touch that I craved. I relished in playing with our youngest cousins, dreaming of being the loving parent that I never had.
After my elementary school years with Paul in the same class with me all day, I existed inside an invisible shell. My selective mutism was complete at school. I often retreated into the woods, spending so many hours alone, hiking, enjoying the view from Ragged Mountain, throughout my childhood through age 18.
Despite this, I did gain a degree of limited confidence in the neighborhood.
I had a paper route and had to collect payments from customers in the large and extended neighborhood. I shared this with my friend Paul and my sister Carrie. I developed a confidence that allowed me to do this.
I also got a job working for the Medical Mart - a store owned by my neighbor Jack Donlon - it was a family business. He and his wife lived directly across the street from us.
I did come out of my shell as required for this job. I had to meet with customers and deliver products to them.
I also nurtured a very strong bond with my cousins.
This was the opposite of what my family created for me. I had been coming out of my shell.
I also learned that I didn’t want to be like my parents. I knew that fear of a parent is different from respect.
My mother revealed her jealousy over my preference for my cousins and aunt then my parents. She asked if I thought they were going to let me live with them. Kathy would also say, “they have their own lives” making me feel less valuable or less worthy of being included in the lives of my cousins and aunt.
This would have been occurring in my later teenage years.
The Final Realization
My mother called me a house devil and a street angel.
She meant it as an insult, but she was right. At home, I was silent, tense, wary.
Outside, I was kind. I saved my kindness for those who deserved it.
Because I had wanted parents.
Just not mine.
