If You Had Controlling Parents by Dan Neuharth

spanked.”
    In grade school her mother tried to force left-handed Shari to write with her right hand so she would be more “normal.” When Shari asked “Why?” her mother taped her mouth shut .
    Over time, Shari’s straight-A average fell. At seventeen, she dropped out of high school and got a high school equivalency diploma so shecould work. “I don’t remember getting any sort of positive direction from my mother. She never told me what to do with my life. She just told me what not to do .”
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    Shari was raised by a Depriving, Abusing, single mother. Now herself a single mother, she recognizes that much of her mother’s control came from the demands of that daunting role. In addition, Shari, an African American, believes that some of her mother’s harsh control had cultural and historical roots: “Black children grow up under a microscope. I think it goes way back to the slave days, when a black child could have been killed for acting too rambunctious around white people. I think black parents from my mother’s generation and earlier felt a need to control their children so they wouldn’t get negative attention.”
    Regardless of what Shari the adult can see in retrospect, Shari the child felt unwanted. At nine, Shari was so upset she decided to drown herself in the bathtub. When her mother left for work, Shari wrote a will giving her toys to friends. She left the will on the kitchen table, filled the tub, and stuck her head in. “Of course my attempt didn’t work,” Shari says, smiling. “I kept coming up for air. Finally I just went to bed and fell asleep.” When her mother came home and discovered the will in the kitchen, “She didn’t seem concerned, just sort of sarcastic. My mother wasn’t really there emotionally even when she was there physically.”
    Shari’s relationship with her mother has improved since Shari became a parent. But she still wonders what she might have become had her mother encouraged her: “I feel as if I have spent so much of my life just trying to heal from my childhood. Who knows what I could have been? I had the grades and the intelligence for even medical school, if only I’d had more support.”
    Emptiness
    Most parents of today’s baby boomers grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Others, particularly recent immigrants, faced poverty equal to or worse than that of the Depression. These experiences often saddled them with a deprivation mentality they never seemed able to shake. As a result, some raised their children with a pervasive sense of emptiness.
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    Fifty-seven-year-old homemaker Roberta is thinking of sixth-grader Roberta walking slowly around the block of the Philadelphianeighborhood shoe store for the sixth time—embarrassed to return a pair of patent-leather shoes .
    Earlier that day, her mother had sent her to the store with ten dollars to get new shoes. Roberta was captivated by a $9.49 patent-leather pair, yet, seeing them, her mother began screaming that they cost too much. Roberta meekly replied that her mother hadn’t told her how much she should spend, but her mother angrily ordered Roberta to return them. After seven circuits around the block, Roberta mustered up her courage and drifted inside, telling the clerk, “I can’t keep these. My mother says they cost too much .”
    Despite her family’s relative financial security, every aspect of domestic life dwelled in the shadow of scarcity and regimentation: “We ate at six, eleven, and five and never deviated. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings we had cereal, milk, and half a glass of orange juice. Tuesdays and Thursdays we had a poached egg. Saturday was scrambled eggs. Sunday Dad made pancakes.” Every week. Every year. No exceptions. Snacking was not allowed between meals. Roberta wasn’t even allowed to look in the refrigerator .
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    With no