My mother always knew I would be in the spotlight one day. As she told it, the moment I was born, I opened my eyes wide, checked out the people looking at me, and instantly turned my face toward the light. It’s unusual for a newborn to arrive with open eyes and to keep them open. It was so rare that the delivery doctor and nurses summoned other medical staff to come into the birthing room and see this baby with a bunch of attitude.
I liked hearing that as a kid. Of course, I don’t remember the actual event, but it seems I came up with a mission statement while floating around in the amniotic fluid. From the time my memory kicked in around age three or four, I knew I wanted to act.
Before I ever stepped on any actual stage, I had some “acting” training I did myself. I had to convince the teaching nuns at St. Columba, my Catholic elementary school, that I could read. Reading seemed to come easy to other kids in my class, but when I looked at the words on the page, the letters were all flipped around and jittery and didn’t make sense. They didn’t stay in an order my brain could process. So, I memorized what other kids in my class read out loud. I locked it in my brain and then acted like I was reading it off the page. Because my last name was Johnson, there were at least six or seven kids ahead of me in the alphabet who read out loud before my turn, which gave me time to memorize what I was supposed to be reading.
Nobody in the 1960s was talking about dyslexia. I never even knew there was a diagnosis for what my brain did to the alphabet. I only knew I had to make it look like I didn’t have a problem.
At first, my mom, who loved books and read whenever she could, was unconvinced. When I told her I wasn’t exactly figuring out this reading thing, she said, “Well, do your best.”
After a while, she realized that I really was trying hard and that I was telling her the truth. I had no idea how the other kids were reading the mess I saw in our schoolbooks. My mom never made me feel bad about it. She would simply tell me that I learned differently from other children and that was okay. At night, she would read to me before bed, and I’d learn through listening. She’d read Grimms’ Fairy Tales or other classic stories.
Years later, I would hear from other people with dyslexia how they were told they were lazy or not smart or made to feel like something was really wrong with them. My mother did the opposite. She always encouraged me to search for ways to learn and to look into anything I found interesting. She never told me that I was limited in any way.
She would remind me, “Listen, you can do anything you want to do. It’s going to take you a little bit longer. You’ll have to figure a couple of things out. But you can do that.”
Top on her list was that she wanted me to figure out if I was going to be okay with being an individual, no matter what.
“You know, there’s nothing wrong with going with the pack,” she would tell me. “But if you insist on being an individual, it could possibly be a lot harder for you. Not everybody’s going to get who you are. They’re not all going to even want it around. And some folks won’t want you to do what you want to do. But, if you’re okay with that, then you’ll be fine. That’s all that matters.”
When I was little, there were acting companies like Joseph Papp’s ensemble that did street theater. They would pull up to the curb along the avenue in a box truck that carried the stage set, and then a VW van would arrive with the actors. They’d set up the stage and some chairs for people to sit in, get into their costumes and makeup, and put on shows for the neighborhood. It was usually an expanded scene or a one-act play with kid-friendly content. I would be captivated by these shows and couldn’t wait until I saw that box truck pull into place on the street for another one.
The Hudson Guild had a theater space nearby in a community center and did productions by adults and some children’s theater. My mom encouraged me to go audition. Being able to play a character, to become someone or something else, was what I loved doing most. I was hooked.
My mom understood my honest struggle with school, but she was not at all impressed by another early-on acting job I tried to pull off. The Hudson Guild was sometimes given free tickets to various performances around town to share with students or people involved in theater production. One November, they gave some of us tickets to see The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center. I was about eleven, which was old enough to take the bus on my own.
That morning my mother told me, “Listen. Make sure you clean your room before you leave for The Nutcracker.”
My room was a mess. I had stuff out everywhere. It never bothered me. I’d only grudgingly clean it because she constantly reminded me to get it picked up.
I told her, “Okay, Ma.”
She went out to do whatever she had scheduled to do that day. I knew it was something that would last for five or six hours.
Suddenly, I felt like I had a split personality: a good Caryn and a bad Caryn, one sitting on my right shoulder, the other on my left.
The good Caryn, who always did the right thing, reminded me, “Let’s get going and clean the room up.”
Then a really convincing bad Caryn popped up on my left shoulder, saying, “Fuck that. You’ll be back an hour before she comes home. You can do it then. Forget her. Go catch the bus.”
The bad Caryn gave the ol’ one-two to the good Caryn, knocking her off the right shoulder, and I pulled on my jacket, locked the door, and headed down the stairs.
The performance was great, and I floated home with the bad Caryn grinning and saying, “See? I told you we’d have time before your mother got home.”
I was triumphant about my choice until I reached into my jacket pocket for the house key. It was gone. I checked every pocket. Nothing. I tried to figure out why the door was locked if I never took my key. I must have locked it. The key must have fallen out. I didn’t have time to get back to Lincoln Center to see if it was under my seat. My heart started to race.
My brother was not around anywhere, and I didn’t know where to find him. The office of the housing authority was shut up for the day.
The clock was running out, and my mind was saying over and over, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”
I was standing in the hallway with no way to get inside. I thought maybe if I could climb out of the window at the end of the hall and crawl across window ledges over to our apartment at the front of the building, I could push our window open and get in. As I looked out the hallway window to check out the possibility, I spotted my mother rounding the corner and heading for the front door. I’m pretty sure she looked up and saw me. In my imagination it was like those eyes on a cartoon character that telescope out of their head to hyperfocus on what they’re going after. I was in full panic mode.
Before I could think of what to do next, the elevator dinged, stopping on our floor. The doors opened, and my mom stepped into the hallway, cool and collected.
“Hello, Caryn.”
“Hi, Ma.”
I couldn’t breathe.
I hatched a desperate plan in my mind. As soon as she opened the door, I’d squeeze around her, get in my room, and shovel stuff under my bed really fast while she took her coat off.
My mother found her keys and slowly unlocked the door while asking me, “How was The Nutcracker?”
My heart was beating wildly.
“It was great, Ma.”
She slowly opened the front door, only enough for her to step in. Suddenly my very petite mother became the size of New York Giants defense player Rosey Grier. I couldn’t get around her, under her, or over her.
Before I could get all the way in the front door, my mother swung open the coat closet door, cutting off my way to my room.
She was still talking to me, “Well, tell me all about The Nutcracker.”
“It was wonderful. Really great.”
“You look a little jumpy, Caryn.”
I upped my bad acting job. “No, I’m not jumpy at all. Not jumpy.”
As she slowly took off her coat, she asked me the dreaded question, “Did you clean your room?”
There’s a Bible story about the disciple Peter swearing his forever loyalty to Jesus. Jesus pretty much smirks and says, “Before the day is over, you’re gonna deny me three times.” A couple hours later, soldiers cuff Jesus and take him to the high priest to be sentenced. When different folks question Peter about hanging with Jesus, good ol’ Pete lies about it three times in a row, saying he never met the guy.
I went down that Peter path with my mother, already knowing it wasn’t going to have a happy ending. I knew I should shake my head side to side in a “no” at my mother’s question, but I ended up nodding “yes.” I meant to say, “No, Ma, I didn’t.” Instead, I said, “Sure I did.”
Without looking at me, she said, “Oh, good. I thought you would because that was part of our bargain, you know. You had to clean your room before going to the show.”
And I said, “Yeah. Right. Yeah.”
She took forever to close the closet door, so I tried to inch around her.
“Why are you trying to get past me?” she asked. “Just relax.”
By now I could sense that she absolutely knew what really happened.
“No, I’m relaxed. I’m relaxed.”
She waited a long ten seconds, then asked, “Was it hard to do?”
“What? Was what hard to do?”
“Clean your room.”
At that moment the smartest thing to do would be to admit, “I didn’t clean my room.” But like Peter, I kept it all going.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you cleaned your room, didn’t you?”
Here was chance number two to fess up, but I didn’t take it.
I said, “Yes, I did.”
She said, “I’m so glad.”
As she lingered another thirty seconds to hang up her coat, she moved a hanger out of the way. There, on a hook, was my brother’s braided leather belt that he had made himself during a craft time in the park the previous summer.
I could see my mother’s eyes on that leather belt, too, when she said to me for the third and last time, “So you cleaned your room?”
I still didn’t fall on my sword. I went all in.
“Yes, I did.”
And she said, “I’m so glad because I’m going to go look now.”
She walked into my room and came back out right away. “It doesn’t look like you cleaned your room.”
But I still tried to act my way out of it. I started in with a “What-Happened-Was” story, but she was not hearing it.
She said, “No. It’s too late. I’m going to do something that I really don’t like doing. But the lies that you told were so obvious that you could get yourself hurt badly lying like that. So I’m going to beat your behind so that you never do that again.”
She took the belt off the hook and made it memorable. It was the first time she had ever physically punished me, and it was the last time. I know it made her feel much worse than me.
Then she told me, “And if you ever decide to lie again, it better be a doozy. You better make it big and entertaining. You really need to think about this because if you get caught in a lie, there are people who won’t just kick your ass, they might really want to hurt you. If your life depends on it, you better not tell lies that are that easy to disprove.”
When Clyde got home later, I said, “Why did you make that belt? Asshole!”
He shrugged, “I needed a belt.”
I shouted, “You must have known what was going to happen.”
He said, “If you had cleaned your room, it never would have.”
“Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. You’re Mr. Big Adult now,” I said, pissed that he didn’t sympathize. “You don’t understand.”
Later, when I thought about it, I realized he probably understood really well. Ma had probably beat his behind all over the house with that belt at some point as well, and I’ve got to say, Clyde was a dutiful son to our mother. Always.
I’m sure I made her mad many times. The consequences were always a low-toned verbal whooping. But this one was a lifelong lesson for me. I make a living pretending to be somebody else. When I lie in real life, and we all do sometimes, I at least make it amusing enough to be forgiven. To all you parents who think giving your kid a beating was a terrible thing, and YOU would never do such a thing, live well in your perfection. In my day that’s what most parents did—if you got out of line, you were inviting a rod or a belt or a hand to visit your behind.
The next big life lesson from my mom happened about a year later when I was more interested in impressing my friends than worried about what my mom might think or do. She never forced a choice on me. She always made me choose for myself and live with the good or bad consequences.
One winter day, I was home, and my mother was out for the day. My friends all came over to my house for the afternoon. My mother had left a pack of Kool cigarettes on the kitchen counter, and we thought it would be fun to smoke cigarettes and listen to music. I didn’t think about all the windows being closed because the heat was on. Seven cigarettes were lit.
Suddenly, we heard a key turning in the front door. Every one of my friends stubbed out their smokes and beat it out the front door while my mom came in, saying, “Hi, Mrs. Johnson. Bye, Mrs. Johnson.”
I squinted at my mother through the haze of smoke and didn’t even think about lying when she said, “Were you all smoking in here?”
I said, “Yes, Ma.”
She stood quiet for a minute. I was sweating it a bit.
Then, she said, “I want you to look around you so you understand what just happened.”
I looked around the now empty room, at the empty cigarette pack and the full ashtray. No doubt it was a dumb thing to do, pretty clear to me now.
She said, “When you do stuff like this with other people, they are undoubtedly going to leave you in the lurch. You’ll be the one left to answer for it. When you make choices, you have to be ready to deal with it all alone.”
I apologized.
Then, she turned and said, “If you’re going to do something like smoke in here, at least go in the back bedroom and open the window so it’s not the first thing I smell and see in here. Be smart. Pay attention, Caryn.”
There was only one lie that she never caught me at.
After the hospital, she started baking again, probably because recipes made sense to her. She was a big fan of German chocolate cake, which has a gooey frosting with coconut and chopped-up pecans. She loved it. Clyde and I hated it, but we didn’t have the heart to tell her. To us the frosting looked like someone had barfed and left it to dry. I could barely look at it. So when my mother wasn’t looking, Clyde and I would cut off three or four pieces and throw them down the incinerator chute in the hallway. Then when we’d come home from school a week later, there would be another whole German chocolate cake she had baked.
Years and years later, I asked my mom, “Why did you always make German chocolate?”
She said, “The two of you ate so much of it I wanted you to have more of what you loved.”
Only then did I admit that the cakes went, piece by piece, into the incinerator.
She was floored. She had never found that out.
Ma was much more direct with me about what she liked and didn’t like. When I was a kid, she used to love a candy called Mary Jane, a rectangle of molasses-and-peanut-butter taffy, individually wrapped. It was penny candy that became hard to find in the ’90s and 2000s.
Somehow, years later, I tracked down where you could still buy them in New York, and I sent my mom some whenever I could. I thought she’d love it.
One day we were talking on the phone, and she told me, “Stop sending me Mary Janes. I don’t like them anymore. I’m not going to eat them.”
All right, then. Order canceled.
My mother had an idea of what she thought I needed to learn and when I needed it most, even in those years when she was trying to make sense of everything herself without letting anyone know that she was lost. When I stop and think about it, she was a damn good actor herself.
Like most preteens, I was sometimes too cool to wear boots and a warm coat and hat during wintertime. My mother would see me heading to the door, ready to go, in just a hooded sweatshirt and sneakers. She never forced me to put on a coat and boots. She’d say, “When you get really cold, don’t blame me. I don’t want to hear about it. You won’t have time to come back home, so once we’re out there, that’s it. And if you get sick from making this choice, then you’ll have to be okay with those consequences.”
And let me tell you, I didn’t like being cold or sick or both. It came down to this: Why wouldn’t she want me to be warm and snug? Was she telling me something bad for me? The answer was no, and yet I still didn’t get it. She used to call that “hard head, soft ass.” I wish I could say I learned after I froze my butt off the first time. I didn’t until the third time when I did that BS of “No, I am fine” and almost froze my toes off my foot. My mom looked at me as if to say, “You are being a dumbass,” and shook her head. That head shake made it clear to me that she was right. I was a dumbass to keep doing stupid things that only harmed me. I was over it.
She really wanted me to understand that I had to be able to count on myself. And do for myself. That generation of women was sold the myth that if you’re pretty and feminine, you can marry a man who would take care of you. She let me know there was no guarantee, no matter what. She would tell me quite often that it was important to make my own money and that I couldn’t count on somebody else to take care of me. In lieu of, you know, waking up married to a very, very rich man, I would have to get a job and support myself.
I would listen to other women talking about money together in the hallways or outside. Usually, the conversation would sound something like this:
“I don’t have to discuss with my man what I spent my money on. I earn that money myself. And he always wants half.”
The other woman might reply, “Why do you have to give him half? You earn that money. You know, you pay for the groceries and the kids’ shoes and all of that. What the hell does he buy?”
Even though these women could be quite dickish, they were smart enough to keep their own coin. I heard that loud and clear.
One afternoon, my mother was talking to a group of women. I was nearby and heard one of the ladies say, “You know, Caryn’s no beauty. She’s gonna have to find a job and work.”
I think it probably hurt my mother more than it hurt me because she grew up not being the shiniest bulb in the chandelier. She looked just like me. Her cousin Arlene always got all the attention for her beauty.
Ma responded to it in a completely even and calm tone.
“Caryn knows that. She knows she doesn’t look like other girls. Caryn looks like herself. Whatever she decides she wants to do, she already knows she needs to be able to support herself and get by.”
I appreciate that my mother told me the truth. I still made my share of choices that didn’t work out early on. But I never got in a position where I couldn’t change my life because I was dependent on another person to support me. I knew I’d be able to figure it out.