The Waves

By Jill Jepson

Sunday mornings without fail, my parents packed us into the car and drove us to mass. Sacred Heart Church was just three blocks from our house, but still we drove, to make sure we arrived fresh and perfect, we girls in our prettiest dresses, little hats, short white gloves, and Sunday shoes—white between Easter and Labor Day, brown or black the rest of the year. Even at the ages of four and six, the rules of fashion etiquette were sacred in our dusty California farm town. For an hour every Sunday, we sat in obedient silence for the mysterious ritual in an ancient language that sounded like an incantation or conjuring. 

Sacred Heart was a dowdy little church, but I’d never been in a cathedral or even one of the elegant churches I would one day visit in larger cities, and I thought it was beautiful. Jesus looked loving and sad hanging on his polished wooden cross, although it embarrassed me that he was almost completely naked, except for a large, fortunately placed feather. The walls all around were attractively adorned with the Stations of the Cross, decorative depictions of torture and death. The silky altar cloth, the flowers, and the tall windows all added a stylish and spiritually uplifting flair. On one side of the church, before the chancel, stood a statue of Mary, draped in blue and white, her eyes downcast, looking profoundly sad and way too young to have a son in his 30s. I sometimes lit a candle by that statue and kneeled in front of it to pray, wishing Mary were my mother instead of the one I had.  

On one of those Sundays, I walked into church in an itchy blue dress with shoes that pinched my toes painfully but were, at least, cute, and a little handbag that was completely empty because I had nothing to carry. My mother ushered us into the church, in the way she had of pushing us forward, palms open, as if we were recalcitrant sheep. My father walked beside her, wearing his one and only tie. While Mom scooted my younger sisters into the pew and my brother headed off to his altar boy duties, I left to join the Catechism kids in the front few rows. 

All of the pews were full, except for one, where two girls from my class sat. Yvonne and Janet were cousins who played the accordion and sometimes put on little shows at Catechism. Yvonne was a friendly girl, a little plump, with dark hair and beautiful pale skin. Janet was slender, not-quite-pretty, medium smart, and a snoot. They weren’t friends of mine, but I had no friends in Catechism anyway, and the only place to sit was next to them, so I genuflected, entered the pew, and began to scoot down to where the two girls sat. 

That is when I saw Janet glance at me, then lean over to whisper something to her cousin.  Her expression was one of unreserved repugnance. Her lips were easy to read. Oh, no. 

Oh no, here comes that Jill. Oh no, why does SHE have to sit HERE with US? Oh no, now we’ll have to endure her presence for a whole hour. Oh no.  

It didn’t matter that Janet was a known mean girl, or that she may have had good reason for not liking me. I wasn’t a very likable child in some ways, my social skills sketchy at best. But her disgust at my very presence, the absolute loathing written on her face stunned me. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t very well turn around then and there to go sit somewhere else. Confronting her was a nonstarter. So I kneeled on the kneeler next to the accordion cousins and pretended to pray, my throat aching with the effort to keep from crying. When I couldn’t keep the tears back, I got up, my chest exploding, and went back to my mother.

Who else should I go but my Mom? The mom who sat for hours next to my bed when I had the mumps, who took me to school to confront a teacher who’d scolded me unfairly, who insisted that the only reason girls were mean to me at school was because they were jealous of my looks. Mom took all us girls shopping and played pretend games with us. We spent long afternoons baking cookies with her, and at Christmas, we would awaken to dozens of gorgeously wrapped presents under a lovingly decorated tree. We were, Mom told us, the smartest and prettiest girls in the world. 

My mother’s kindness, her generosity, her empathy for anyone in pain were oceanic. Except for the times they weren’t. Sometimes, all of her goodness simply shut off, as if a valve in her heart had been closed. Then, she turned cold and hard. She rebuked us for the sin of having our feelings hurt. She humiliated us in front of each other. She criticized us. She laughed at us. 

You never knew who you were going to get, my sister Jan would say a few months before she died at the age of 51. It was the perfect description, a description I had been searching for my entire life. 

One of my earliest memories is of a three-year-old me playing a little game with my mommy. I had a handkerchief or napkin, and I would take a small object from the kitchen drawer—a screw, a button, an eraser—wrap it in the handkerchief and bring it to Mom, who was watching TV in the living room. 

“I have a present,” I would say.

“Ooooh!” Mom said, pretending to be excited. Then she’d unwrap the “gift” and proclaim it wonderful, making me laugh with glee. 

Again and again I came to her with my little presents. Until I made the mistake of wrapping up a tiny dab of mashed potatoes I found in the refrigerator.

“Oooh! A present,” Mom said as she untied the packet. Then she saw the potatoes and let out a cry that might have been appropriate if it had exploded in flame. 

“Get it out of here! Get it out!” she cried “My nice rug is going to get stained. Take it away. Get it out!”

I was devastated. I took my gift, went back into the kitchen, and sat on the floor, my arms wrapped around my knees, a wound opening in my heart.  

This was not a rare occurrence. The warmth Mom showed us at times was so encompassing, so sheltering, that we would go to her longing for it, aching with the need for that lavish love. When it was given, it was a refuge of joy and solace. But when, instead, we were rebuked or upbraided, the shock and pain were too horrible to bear. We lived in constant yearning for the love she showered on us, and in constant fear of her cruelty. Mom got angry at times, like all moms, but that we could deal with. It was not her fury we feared, but her stunning ability to demean. 

I often wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier if she’d been consistently cruel. Then maybe we would have just avoided her, kept our heads down. We wouldn’t have gone to her expecting warmth, so the cold wouldn’t have shocked so much. 

 That day at Sunday mass, Mom was not in the mood for compassion. Not in church. Not where people could see me. That one of her children would cry in public was an abomination. She looked around in horror at the faces of the congregation waiting for the mass to start, and growled in my ear, Stop crying. For god’s sake stop! I reeled, gasping at the sharpness of her tone. 

“Mom,” I said. “Mommy.”

She ordered me to the car.

I walked out of the church alone, in a daze, climbed into the back seat of the car, and sat rocking myself, fighting nausea as sky and earth went topsy-turvy. The inside of my chest felt hollow. I thought if I knocked hard on my ribcage, I would hear an echo. I slumped against the seatback in front of me and stayed there motionless. I thought of walking home, of running away. I thought of killing myself.  

When I sat up at last, I took a deep breath, trying to identify the unfamiliar feelings in my body. A hollowing out in my belly. A hardening in my chest, as if a crust were forming around my heart. After a while, I got out of the car and walked back into the church. I felt like a statue, my face frozen, my body stone. 

I sat in the pew next to my mother, knowing with a sick dread that I had not heard the end of the humiliation I had brought her. She would bring it up at home, not once, but again and again, for weeks. How I had embarrassed her by crying in church. 

That night was the first time I felt the Waves, what I came to call the powerful emotions that would wash over me. I pictured those emotions as viscous yellow-gray swells, crests of rage followed by troughs of self-loathing, rising and sinking. Again, again, again.

From that day on, I felt them often. They were worse at night, when the world was quiet and my brain free to torment me, but they could come at any time. In class when I was reading aloud. At the dinner table. Watching Father Knows Best or The Real McCoys with my family in the living room. The Waves made me flinch at times, grasp my belly as if I’d been stabbed, even moan or call out. I was embarrassed by these physical reactions, which were uncontrollable and often occurred in front of others, adding another layer of mortification.  

I blamed myself for the Waves. If I were a better girl, I thought, I wouldn’t do such stupid things, and there would be no reason to feel bad. If I’d been smarter or stronger, I’d be able to control the Waves, to stop them through sheer force. Many times I told myself I was not going to feel them any longer, positive that if I tried hard enough, I could simply will them away. When I couldn’t, I felt I’d failed. It was another sign of how broken I was. 

I understood the crests of the Waves. They were made of anger, pure and simple. Anger at having my feelings negated. Anger at my invisibility. Anger at my mother’s cruelty, of her ridicule.   

But the troughs were far worse, deeper and more sinister, and I didn’t know what to call them. They filled me with a despairing sense not of worthlessness as much as wrongness. It was clear that something about me wasn’t right. I wasn’t the way I was supposed to be. I was damaged, I thought, like a doll with an arm missing or a bike with bent spokes. 

It would be many years later, when I was a woman in my 50s, that a therapist would give me a word for the troughs, a word that encompassed the anguish and perversity of them and shed a light on them for the first time. A word that would help me understand how those troughs of despair had followed me throughout my years, shaping my life, limiting my choices, hindering my ability to achieve, to work. To love. 

That word was shame. 

Jill Jepson is the author of Writing as a Sacred Path and the editor of No Walls of Stone: An Anthology of Literature by Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Writers. Her work has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, A Woman’s Path: Women’s Best Spiritual Travel Writing, and numerous literary journals. She holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and lives in Ravenna, Italy.