Silver Spoon (Hannah's Version)

A revised essay on childhood and shame.

Today’s essay is a gently reworked version of one I wrote and published (behind a paywall) last year. While I do not plan to make a habit of publishing paywalled content for free, I thought it would be nice to send free subscribers an example of that content. If you enjoy this essay, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or telling your friends about moxie! xx Hannah

…

I did not know you were supposed to study for the SAT.

My lack of awareness was, at least partially, my fault. My high school had a mandatory semester-long SAT prep class where we learned a few vocab words and test-taking strategies. We also took practice tests. I could have-should have- figured it out.

I went to private school, though my parents could not afford to send us to private school; the annual tuition for the five of us was about the same as my dad’s pre-tax salary. I do not know what, if any financial aid we received. My grandparents might have paid. We did not talk about money in my family.

But we went to private school, wore Ralph Lauren clothes purchased from the outlet, had our electricity, water, and phones turned off frequently, and lived in a hoarder house with piles of clothes, filled with fleas and dog urine, everywhere. My mother started highlighting my hair after I turned six and my toddler blonde became muddy.

10 year old HD (my old nickname!) with my brother, twin sisters, and baby sister

Appearances meant a lot to my mother. I think that’s why I became a writer and why I write frequently about personal, shameful things. It’s an overcorrection to a childhood spent living one way with tremendous pressure to appear as though things were different, perfect.

When you apply for private elementary and high school- or at least when you applied for private school in the late 90s and early aughts- you take a series of aptitude tests that are intended to indicate your general intelligence and help the schools place you into the appropriate classes. You are not supposed to study for these tests. I assumed the SAT was the same thing.

This is not an essay about the SAT, this is an essay about my parents.

I did well (though not phenomenally) on the SAT, the particulars of my score do not matter. I have always done well on standardized tests. When my results came, I was excited, I wanted to attend NYU and my score was well within the range I needed for admission.

“What did you make on the SAT?” I asked my dad.

“1340” he said. My father grew up in a farming community called Leoti, Kansas (Leoti rhymes with Toyota) where his high school class of 63 people is still the largest in the town’s history. They had, the last time I visited, one restaurant called Dairy King and one grocery store with slim offerings. A large frozen section. For clothing and “real” shopping, you needed to drive an hour to Garden City where they had a Walmart. My dad was a jock, not an academic, he did not study or do particularly well in high school. Given the context and that my dad attended a few semesters of junior college before dropping out to become a traveling ShamWow salesman and swimming teacher, I was extremely impressed with his score.

An hour or so after the SAT conversation, I was in the shower. My dad knocked on the door and then opened it, before I could answer. While the shower ran, with the curtain closed, he said from the doorway, “Hannah, I did not make a 1340 on the SAT, I made an 1120. I don’t know why I lied about that.” I did not answer him, I sat on the prefabbed fiberglass and cried, though I didn’t understand why I was crying.

My dad is not a stupid man. He went back to college and graduated, cum laude, when I was four. I remember going with him to biology labs, where his two college friends, Jorge and Ed, also worked. They did something where mice were bitten by mosquitoes, and something else involving fruit flies. He applied to medical school and was accepted, he did not go because at 31 years old- younger than I am now, as I apply to graduate school- he was too old. My life might have been very different if he had become a doctor but, probably, it would have been largely the same.

Instead he continued in sales, mostly technology, jumping from job to job. He’s a good salesman, charismatic and easygoing. He’s also unreliable.

My mom attended a few colleges, briefly, and then worked various waitressing and retail jobs until I was born, seven and a half months after a very over the top wedding. Once I was around, she mostly stayed home, occasionally selling cakes and pre-cooked dinners out of our hoarder house. The only clean room was the kitchen.

Mostly, she sat in bed playing a computer game called Zuma for eight or ten or fifteen hours a day. “Do you know the most fucked up part of that?” My sister asked me once, “She didn’t even have the top score.” We still laugh about that.

I’ve been thinking about shame recently. Until I was well into my twenties, I assumed everyone grew up in chaos, digging through piles to find clean clothes, not eating until lunch, if their parents remembered to send them lunch, or dinner, if they didn’t. We looked, from my adolescent point of view, like everybody else. I assumed we were living like everybody else, as well. Polished appearance and chaotic substance.

Of course, there is value in appearing normal and put together. But there’s also value, vindication, in honesty. People can only help, even if their only help is empathy, if they know what’s going on. Where is the balance?

A few years ago, I was at a cocktail party in honor of my then boyfriend’s father, an artist. I arrived early, all of the attendees were being shuttled in vans from a museum. I opted to take an Uber for speed. A woman walked into the party and assumed I was an intern, she berated me because the transportation to the cocktail party had been poorly arranged. I smiled at her and apologized. I said I would let whoever I could know.

Later on, she realized I was “with the band” and, embarrassed, began asking me polite questions about my life and interests.

“And what does your father do?”

“He used to work in technology, but he’s dead now.”

I don’t know why I lied about that.

All my love,

Hannah

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