It's a Crying Shame

The deep, secret things we hide away

One of my first childhood friends was a boy I’m going to call Bobby who lived downstairs from me. We were the same age, and our moms became friendly. Before long we were regularly playing together while our moms had coffee. It was a good match, he was a sweet, kind kid and we had a lot of fun. It got to the point where I’d run down the stairs or he’d run up, no formal plan needed to be made. When my parents split up, Bobby’s mom would often have me over for dinner and bedtime, and my mom would come and get me half-asleep in my pajamas when she got home. I didn’t know Bobby’s dad nearly as well as I knew his mom, because he worked a lot. I remember being a little scared of him, but I think it was mostly due to his height, deep voice and feeling like he was a sort of unknown, very tall entity. 

Bobby and I ended up going to the same preschool around the corner from my mom’s house. It was called Red Paint. My mom would walk us over in the morning and Bobby’s mom would get us at the end of the school day. One day, Bobby’s dad picked us up from school to go to the Museum of Natural History. I don’t remember why we were going there with him, I just remember it was very unusual, and we took the public bus to get there even though it was a short walk. The bus was very crowded, so crowded we had to stand and hold onto the pole while Bobby’s dad took a seat so he could be at our level. There were tall bodies all around us and the lurching of the bus made it hard to stay upright. Bobby ended up leaning into a woman standing behind him, and then when the bus started moving again, he was heaved into a man standing next to us. His dad told him to hold on tighter and stop messing around, but since I was fighting the same push-and-pull of gravitational force from a moving bus onto a five-year-old body, I knew he wasn’t doing it on purpose. Then next time it happened, Bobby’s dad became more stern. “Stop messing around, Bobby,” he snarled. His teeth were clenched, his face was red and his eyebrows were doing that thing my mom’s eyebrows did when she got angry. “He isn’t doing it on purpose,” I offered quietly, “It’s happening to me, too, it’s the bus.” Bobby’s dad turned his red face to me. “Oh yeah,” he said, “well you aren’t disturbing anyone, are you?” Just then the bus lurched again, and this time Bobby lost his grip on the pole completely and fell back. He stayed on his feet, but it was only because the grownup bodies around us were holding him up.

"That’s it!” his dad said, and grabbed Bobby, pulling him onto his lap. Bobby looked at me helplessly. I looked back and tried to beam him the idea that it was all going to be okay. His dad reached up and pulled the cord to signal we were getting off the bus. He stood up with one arm wrapped around Bobby who was still facing forward, legs now dangling, and we made our way to the back exit. When the doors opened we went down the big steps. I had to jump off the bottom one onto the sidewalk. I usually asked for help from the grownup I was with, but I wasn’t about to ask Bobby’s dad for help with anything. As soon as we were off the bus, Bobby’s dad yanked his pants and underpants down, sat on the bench, pulled Bobby over his lap and spanked him, hard. The whole bus was watching.

I stood there, frozen. I was shocked Bobby’s dad had pulled his underpants down, there on the street in front of all those people. Bobby’s face was bright red now, and fat tears were streaming from his eyes. He looked at me while it happened. I remember feeling stunned and scared and so, so sorry for him. I’m sure my horror and sadness were all over my face. The bus pulled away, but I could feel all these eyes on us, on Bobby, on his dad, on this terribly awful situation. After a minute that felt like hours, Bobby’s dad put him on his feet and yanked his pants up. “I don’t like doing that to you, Bobby, but you have got to listen to me!”

Bobby was crying, hard. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I tried.” His dad strode off in front of us. I looked at Bobby, but he wouldn’t look at me, he just wiped his face on the sleeve of his down jacket and started walking quickly after his dad, so I walked fast enough to keep up. “Are you okay?” I asked him quietly, so his dad wouldn’t hear, but he still wouldn’t look at me. He kept his gaze forward even though I knew he’d heard me. When we got to the end of the next block and had to stop for the light, I heard Bobby take a shuddering breath. I glanced over and saw his lips tremble. I knew he was trying very hard to calm down, and that he didn’t want to look at me. I reached for his hand without looking at him. He wrapped his hand around mine right away. I don’t remember much from the museum, I just remember that he held onto my hand for the rest of the day, all the way until we were back to our building. 

One day when I was in my eighth grade science class, I walked from my seat in the back of the room to the teacher’s desk to drop off a test we’d just taken. I was wearing a cream-colored, thin corduroy mini-skirt, and as I walked back to my seat, two of my friends were whispering and snickering and pointing at me. Or at least, it looked like they’d been pointing at me, but I thought I must be wrong, because it didn’t seem like the kind of thing friends would do. The boy behind me, a kid named Doug leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “You can see the little flowers on your underpants through your skirt, that’s why they’re laughing.”

I felt a surge of dread and shame flood my body as I remembered that my underpants did, indeed, have little purple flowers on them. The thought that everyone in the room knew that, and that anyone who’d stood behind me all morning knew that, felt like the most mortifying thing that could happen to anyone. I was fourteen. I wanted the world to open up and swallow me. I couldn’t imagine having to stand up at the end of this class and endure the rest of the day this way. “Don’t worry about it,” Doug continued, “it’s hot.” In Doug’s fourteen-year-old mind, I guess that was supposed to make me feel better, but it made everything twenty times worse. I felt my whole body flush. And I felt incredibly hurt that two girls I’d considered friends had taken the opportunity to turn on me this way. I made it to the locker room and tied my sweatshirt around my waist, but that feeling of being seen with my underpants showing is one I still remember.

Years later I was living with a man who was regularly cruel and occasionally kind. He’d pulled a bait-and-switch somewhere along the way, going from the deeply in love, besotted guy he’d been when we were dating, to the casually brutal guy I could never please once he had me. There was the day he told me I didn’t look like a supermodel in my bikini and it bummed him out. The time he stared at a woman coming down the stairs toward us, made eye contact with her, and then turned around on the landing to watch her continued descent, right in front of me. He would tell me maybe I didn’t need that bowl of cereal, or that he still had day dreams of having sex with other people. I felt sick that I wasn’t measuring up, but underneath that, shame that I was tolerating this treatment. Betraying yourself is the deepest betrayal there is.

Photo by Nyana Stoica on Unsplash

There’s the face we show the world, and the deep, secret things we grapple with in the privacy of our own minds. If you’re like me, you probably have at least a couple of choices you wish you could go back and do differently. It’s so easy to get caught up in the outward face, to worry about what another person thinks of us and the situation we’re in. Bobby locking eyes with me in a moment when he’d done nothing wrong except have a dad who didn’t know how to be a good parent. Bobby not being able to look me in the eye when it was over, because I’d been a witness to his powerlessness. Fourteen-year-old me forgetting to check the reflection in the mirror before I walked out the door. Fourteen year old me crying in the locker room because I thought the opinions of those two girls meant more than my opinion of myself. Young-adult me letting a man make me feel worthless and unlovable because somewhere inside myself I believed those things to be true. The problem with shame is that we usually experience it around the things we’d really prefer no one ever knew. The things that make us feel like we really are awful people, because what else could explain that choice we made, that thing we did or didn’t do, that weakness in us that allowed a course of events to unfold. If an inner critic provides the dialogue that makes us feel small and unworthy, shame is the darkness that descends and makes us believe the words are true. Shame is a merciless bedfellow. 

There are three people in the world who know about the two things I grapple with the most. That means there are three people in the world I have trusted enough to share my deepest darkest moments with, which means I’m enormously lucky. Not one of them thinks less of me, loves me less, respects my opinion less. Usually when you expose your soft underbelly to your most trusted people, you strengthen the bond. You also give those same people permission to be fully themselves with you, to know that anything they share is safe with you - that they are safe with you, and that you can all be human, together.

I am pretty sure shame is at the very center of self-doubt, that it’s the fuel that self-limiting beliefs run on, that it’s the awful, scratchy blanket that covers us when we feel the most alone. That doesn’t mean you have to share your worst moments with people in order to be close to them, but I do think it’s important to share those things with at least one person you know you can trust, even if you have to pay them (like a therapist). Otherwise shame keeps you just-one-layer-removed from the world around you. It makes you feel small and powerless and like you aren’t enough, like your underpants or your whole ass is showing for an entire busload to see, when really, the only thing showing is the stuff that makes you vulnerable and deeply human. 

If you’d like to meet me in real time for a talk about shame - how debilitating it can be, and how freeing it is to work through it, I’ll be here Friday 10/6/23 at 11:15am PST or you can wait for the Come As You Are Podcast version. If you’d like to meet me out in the real world, I would love that so much. Here are two upcoming opprtunities!