I was an independent, athletic, graceful, gangly, sensitive, little girl. I was at my core fearless. Of all the qualities I possessed, this was the one my mother both instilled and loathed.
My mother was at her core a fearful perfectionist. As the oldest of four, my mother grew up with the caretaking responsibility of her younger siblings. They were not perfect. My brother, four years older, was perfect (if not in reality at least in her eyes). I was many things, perfect was not one of them.
For my (her) own good, my mother tried so very hard to make me "perfect".
She critized, yelled, nagged, harangued incessantly, abusively. I was dutiful and caring but only to a point. I cut Kindergarden, I skipped piano lessons (watching from the playground my piano teacher come and go and then claiming I had forgotten). I swung on a rope from the highest point on the school bleachers, I swam in the deep end of the pool. I roamed and wandered through the alleys, empty lots and all the forbidden places of our neighborhood. I talked to strangers.
Our apartment was perfect. The standing joke was that we did not see our living room until we were eighteen. Plastic on the furniture, not a speck of dust, not a thing out of place. The collision was perhaps inevitable.
I was eight, give or take a few years. I was in the back of the house, preparing to do a school project. I was filling an ink pen when suddently, inexplicitly, the ink bottle started to leak. I panicked. My fearless core shattered. I ran from room to room looking for a place to dispose, hide, get rid of the leaking ink bottle. I ran past waste baskets and sinks depositing drops of ink on our brand new wall to wall carpet. I do not remember the bottles final resting place but I do remember my mother's reaction. She screamed and for the only time in my life, she slapped me. The worst had happened. The drops of ink were clearly a visible manifestation of my imperfections. My father, also the target of my mother's wrath to stamp out imperfection, understood and consoled. "She's just a child, it was an accident." With professional cleaners and carpet reweavers, the spots were painstakingly removed one by one. With time, my core regenerated as well.
The ink bottle became a humorous family horror story - told by my relatives - as an object lesson . In hindsight, I have come to appreciate "there are no accidents". I could not in a conscious, rational way, have found a more "perfect" metaphor for retribution and my struggle for self.
Update: Age and experience have tempered (not extinguished) both my fearlessness and independence. My son worries, my friends are at times alarmed. I am more of an "anticipatory worrier" but still don't always see the cliff I am about to fall off of. Bottom line -an old lady far from perfection who has lived a happy imperfect life.