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Book: The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs by Chrisann Brennan
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Authors: Chrisann Brennan
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everything, exhibiting a callous and distinctly ungenerous attitude.
At our house, there were never discussions about what the rest of us thought about things; my mother concentrated on her own thoughts and judgments. It was the time of feminism and she dove into her own search for meaning and identity. As a result there were big holes in my upbringing. I never had a desk for homework or a drafting table, much less an easel and art supplies. On the contrary, in areas where I showed talent and interest, my mother would either ignore or ridicule me. My mother wasn’t tuned in to her three younger daughters. She made meals and supervised us while we cleaned the house and mowed the lawn on Saturdays, but after that she clocked out to attend to her own world. She often worked to play all four of us against each other, comparing our talents and IQ scores. In truth, my mother nurtured only my oldest sister’s education, providing her with special foods, years of violin lessons, and long conversations about literature. She detested my father by the time we had moved to California, and chose my older sister Kathy as her intellectual partner. The rest of us were left to fend for ourselves. Considering her state, this kind of benign neglect wasn’t such a bad thing.
* * *
Like a crosscurrent, it was when the first of her four daughters hit adolescence that my mother’s mental illness would surface without retreat. After that, one by one, as we all came of age, she fell further into abusive behaviors toward us. My mother had experienced a terrible shattering of her childhood, and I imagine that our burgeoning sexuality with its promise of womanhood triggered a great panic and a sense of loss in her. She had protected us from it until she couldn’t anymore. Then her pain moved up through the seams of our homes, starting in Colorado, and began covering everything with dark layers of unspeakable outrage and sadness.
My mother was checked out. I think the newly evolving feminist movement spoke volumes to her and provided an escape route to abandon her family. My mother exchanged her family wholesale for an inspired identity as a feminist intellectual. Aloft and deluded, she went to college, eventually earning a degree with a double major in psychology and literature. She would retreat to her bedroom for hours to write papers at a big white desk that she’d painted and antiqued for herself. She put a bumper sticker on her car that said “Another Student for Peace,” choosing it over one that said, “Another Mother for Peace.” While she didn’t value herself as a mother, she also never challenged herself outside of school by developing a professional life. The line between her mental illness and what seemed like bad character wasn’t clear to me. As a teen, I just saw her as fraudulent.
My mother had such a deeply confusing combination of traits for me to understand; I felt bad about myself around her. She hated my creativity, my blooming sexuality, my friends, and my budding philosophies. She talked about adolescence in the most derisive tone, as if I should be embarrassed and even shamed by the fact that I was going through it. Every tender thing that was good about that age brought her ridicule and hatred into sharper focus. All of this took place in the midst of cooking wonderful, well-rounded dinners that she planned for and made every day, giving us a better life than she herself had ever known.
I had experienced the cozy safety and wonder of early childhood in a strong family context, but my teen years were a war zone. In my early twenties, when I was struggling with so much, Cindy, my best friend from the sixth grade, laid it on the line because she had been around our family enough to have seen everything. “I am really sorry to tell you but your mother had it out for you.” I wasn’t sentimental about a mother’s love; obviously I knew even more than she did about how awful my own mother had been. Yet
At our house, there were never discussions about what the rest of us thought about things; my mother concentrated on her own thoughts and judgments. It was the time of feminism and she dove into her own search for meaning and identity. As a result there were big holes in my upbringing. I never had a desk for homework or a drafting table, much less an easel and art supplies. On the contrary, in areas where I showed talent and interest, my mother would either ignore or ridicule me. My mother wasn’t tuned in to her three younger daughters. She made meals and supervised us while we cleaned the house and mowed the lawn on Saturdays, but after that she clocked out to attend to her own world. She often worked to play all four of us against each other, comparing our talents and IQ scores. In truth, my mother nurtured only my oldest sister’s education, providing her with special foods, years of violin lessons, and long conversations about literature. She detested my father by the time we had moved to California, and chose my older sister Kathy as her intellectual partner. The rest of us were left to fend for ourselves. Considering her state, this kind of benign neglect wasn’t such a bad thing.
* * *
Like a crosscurrent, it was when the first of her four daughters hit adolescence that my mother’s mental illness would surface without retreat. After that, one by one, as we all came of age, she fell further into abusive behaviors toward us. My mother had experienced a terrible shattering of her childhood, and I imagine that our burgeoning sexuality with its promise of womanhood triggered a great panic and a sense of loss in her. She had protected us from it until she couldn’t anymore. Then her pain moved up through the seams of our homes, starting in Colorado, and began covering everything with dark layers of unspeakable outrage and sadness.
My mother was checked out. I think the newly evolving feminist movement spoke volumes to her and provided an escape route to abandon her family. My mother exchanged her family wholesale for an inspired identity as a feminist intellectual. Aloft and deluded, she went to college, eventually earning a degree with a double major in psychology and literature. She would retreat to her bedroom for hours to write papers at a big white desk that she’d painted and antiqued for herself. She put a bumper sticker on her car that said “Another Student for Peace,” choosing it over one that said, “Another Mother for Peace.” While she didn’t value herself as a mother, she also never challenged herself outside of school by developing a professional life. The line between her mental illness and what seemed like bad character wasn’t clear to me. As a teen, I just saw her as fraudulent.
My mother had such a deeply confusing combination of traits for me to understand; I felt bad about myself around her. She hated my creativity, my blooming sexuality, my friends, and my budding philosophies. She talked about adolescence in the most derisive tone, as if I should be embarrassed and even shamed by the fact that I was going through it. Every tender thing that was good about that age brought her ridicule and hatred into sharper focus. All of this took place in the midst of cooking wonderful, well-rounded dinners that she planned for and made every day, giving us a better life than she herself had ever known.
I had experienced the cozy safety and wonder of early childhood in a strong family context, but my teen years were a war zone. In my early twenties, when I was struggling with so much, Cindy, my best friend from the sixth grade, laid it on the line because she had been around our family enough to have seen everything. “I am really sorry to tell you but your mother had it out for you.” I wasn’t sentimental about a mother’s love; obviously I knew even more than she did about how awful my own mother had been. Yet
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