Marsha Jacobson's Blog

Discovering Wisdom in a Pot of Bones

One day, a young man I know told me he’d been born into the wrong family. I knew exactly what he meant, because so was I. My parents saw me as worthless, someone who couldn’t handle things, who wouldn’t amount to anything. Not having their love, nurturing, and guidance, I didn’t develop self-confidence or a sense of worth. I longed for attention and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I fell under the spell of a secretive and controlling man.

Something No One Else Had Looked For

I thought he saw something in me that no one else did, but what he actually saw was something no one else had looked for: my vulnerability. When he asked me to marry him, my stomach clenched and I saw a vivid image of myself lying in a coffin. I knew I should tell him no, but my mother’s refrain—”You’re not someone who can be choosy”—echoed in my ears. I agreed to marry him and move to Japan because I felt I had no other options.

In Japan, a chance encounter got me a job at Mattel Toys Southeast Asia, where I discovered I had talents. As I became more successful, my self-confidence started to grow and my marriage started to unravel.

Babes in the Woods

Five years later, we moved back to America, technically international travelers but actually babes in the woods who’d come home just in time to face a recession. My two-year-old, who’d been born in Japan, clung to me as she struggled to adjust to her disrupted world. My little one, a newborn, woke me every two hours, like clockwork. My husband, supposedly looking for a job that would support us, cancelled job interviews and disappeared for hours, refusing to tell me where he’d been.

There would come a time when I’d leave him and have a successful career and happy second marriage, but that time was still in the future. Now, worried about money, sleep deprived, with a babe at my breast, a toddler on my knee, and an erratic husband out and about in parts unknown, I was physically and emotionally drained. I felt trapped, with no hope for a better life.

Then one day the phone rang. It was my grandmother Minnie, calling to say she was coming for a visit the next day! Somehow, she knew I needed her. Just knowing she was on her way made me feel stronger.

Though Grandma Minnie was in her eighties and losing her eyesight, she helped magically with the children, brought much-needed routine to the household, and took over the cooking so I could catch some naps. And how she cooked for us! Cooked and cooked and cooked, even stocking the freezer with meals for us to have after she left.

Boiling the Bones!

She’d always cooked with gas, and my electric stove was new to her. Because her vision was too weak for her to see the little icons on the knobs, she’d learn from experience how to use this newfangled appliance.

That experience came from a potful of bones. After simmering them for hours to make broth for a soup, she turned off the burner and joined me in the living room. A little while later, we heard burbling noises coming from the kitchen. The bones were boiling! Instead of turning the burner off, she’d turned it to medium.

Well, who hasn’t done that?

She went to turn them off again and, again, they were soon bubbling away at a full boil. Laughing at herself, she went back to the kitchen to turn them off. This time, she turned them to high. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Every time those bones boiled, we laughed our heads off. When our laughter started to fade, one of us would shout, “Boiling the Bones!” and we’d start laughing again.

The Children Sensed It

In retrospect, I wonder whether she really did all those boilings by accident. The more I laughed, the calmer I felt—and the children sensed it. My little one slept peacefully in my arms for longer stretches than usual. My two-year-old slid off my lap and contentedly played by herself with a toy. The three of us were more relaxed than we’d been in months.

That was decades ago, but even today, when things get rough, I think (and sometimes even shout out loud), “Boiling the bones!” It always lightens me up. Though some might see this as a perfect example of laughter being the best medicine, I think it’s so much more than that.

The Good News

Growing up without a loving and supportive family can leave us feeling insecure and inadequate, but these feelings don’t have to last a lifetime. We all have within us the ability to overcome our past and build a fulfilling future. This innate resilience needs to be actively nurtured, however, and the good news is that if our parents don’t nurture it from the beginning, others can help us find and grow our resilience, even years later.

I was lucky. I had Grandma Minnie. She recognized from my earliest childhood that my homelife wasn’t nurturant and stepped in to fill the void whenever she could. Later, others to do the same.

When we lack supportive people like Minnie in our lives, there are ways we can find them. I know this is true. I’ve done it.

Once our resilience starts growing, our self-confidence grows too. Little by little, we become our best selves. People who show up for us, who support us even when we don’t realize we need it, who help us overcome hurdles we can’t clear on our own—having people like these in our life is truly the “Best Medicine.”

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Published on December 27, 2024 06:00

Me? Traumatized?

How had I not realized I was traumatized? In my professional life, I had a talent for identifying the source of problems. Yet, in my personal life, I couldn’t recognize that I often had self-defeating responses to the world and that they derived from a past that was clearly traumatizing.

My parents neglecting and undermining me? That, I told myself, was “unfortunate.” My husband refusing to help me when I got stuck in quicksand? This, I told myself, was his “quirkiness.” As for his throwing furniture when he was angry, his kidnapping our daughters, my own nearly fatal health emergency . . . these I walled off from myself and never thought about.

A Stroke of Luck

Raised to believe I was a no-account, I agreed to marry a secretive, controlling man and move to Japan with him because I saw no way out. In Tokyo, I unexpectedly got a job at Mattel Toys Southeast Asia and realized—for the first time—that I had some talents. As my confidence grew, my husband became so abusive that when we returned to the US, I had to grab our two toddlers and escape from him in a police chase. Only a last-minute stroke of luck kept me out of jail.

While building a successful career, raising my girls, and fending off their vengeful father, I was constantly on guard, sensing him out there, ready to attack at any moment.

Let Me Count the Ways

I married again, and this marriage was wonderful—until memories my second husband buried in childhood revealed themselves: he’d been terribly abused by both his parents. When he had flashbacks, he became aggressive. When he shared with me what had been done to him, his traumatic memories became mine as well. His PTSD shattered our marriage and me. Traumatized? Let me count the ways.

After my second divorce, I started writing personal essays. One of those pieces got me accepted into a writing group led by the author Joyce Johnson. By then, I’d decided I wanted to publish my essays as a collection, but Joyce felt strongly that I should instead turn my work into a memoir. I argued strenuously, but fortunately she persisted, and finally I agreed. The theme seemed obvious: my evolution from insecure to self-assured, resulting from two broken marriages.

A Tangle of Interconnected Themes

As I worked on my memoir, The Wrong Calamity, many of my essays landed on the cutting room floor. A two-pager about a hat became a few lines. A short piece about my losing eighty pounds became a full chapter. An 800-word piece about quicksand became a few paragraphs—with all the humor removed because I now understood that the incident wasn’t funny at all but was an example of the bullying I’d let myself endure.

My book grew, and I discovered connections between what I’d thought were unrelated pieces. I couldn’t include the hat without connecting it to grief. Writing about my first marriage made me grapple with the issue of self-esteem. Far from being just about the impact of two broken marriages, my story was a tangle of interconnected themes that included neglect, eating disorders, single-parenthood, domestic violence, vicarious PTSD, triumph, and the sources of my resilience.

“Now I have hope.”

About six years ago, I did a reading of an excerpt from my still in-process memoir. Afterward, a woman in the audience approached me. “All the details were different,” she said, “but you were telling my story. Now I have hope that I’ll make it through okay.”

Hearing someone say my words inspired her made me feel morally obligated to be more open. I realized I’d made my own story look too easy. I’d omitted some things that reflected badly on myself, and I hadn’t been clear about how incapacitating my trauma had been and how long I’d lived with its profound effects. What followed was more than a year of hard thinking and rewriting. During that time, I came to see ways I’d undermined myself.

Blaming Myself

I’d accepted my parents’ gospel that I was someone who couldn’t handle things, someone who was always wrong. When I messed up, I felt that was the real me. When I did something well, I told myself it was the exception that proved the rule.

Instead of focusing on my own dysfunctional behavior, I spent years blaming my young self for things I didn’t like about myself. I was obese, I told myself, because “she’d” eaten uncontrollably. I married an abusive man in my first marriage because “she’d” said yes when he proposed. When my second husband recovered his terrible childhood memories, I went too far in protecting his privacy and consigned myself to a secretive life.

Finding myself

Finding and trusting my strong self took about twenty-five years. At the heart of this evolution was overcoming the demoralizing, debilitating, and exhausting effects of low self-esteem. Ending my binge eating and losing eighty pounds coincided with my growing sure-footedness. Thought my eating disorder isn’t gone, it’s usually in remission. I still overeat in especially difficult times but I get on top of it pretty quickly. Now I realize it’s a sign that something’s triggering me, and I focus on figuring out what that is.

Though my parents neglected me, to my great fortune others supported me. My grandmothers were most significant, but there were also teachers, friends, employers, a doctor, a lawyer, and others who saw more in me than I did. They helped keep me moving forward. One gift of writing The Wrong Calamity is that it spurred me to reach out to those people and let them know how much they’d mattered.

Baby Steps

As I developed self-esteem, I was empowered by the realization that even if I couldn’t change others’ behavior, I could change my own. I could do more than just wait for the next bad thing. I realized I could leave my abusive husband. It would be frightening and hard, but staying with him would be worse. This insight came in baby steps, at first venturing one tiny experiment and gradually moving on to bigger ones. Even the tiny ones were daunting, but the discovery that I often prevailed kept me motivated.

In The Wrong Calamity I describe one of the early tiny experiments, when my first husband wanted me to cut off relationships with friends he disapproved of.

“‘I told you . . . ’ Peter started, but I cut him off. ‘She’s my friend,’ I said quietly. ‘And I am having lunch with her. We can talk more about this at home, but not here. If you make a fuss, I won’t be a part of it.’ He stormed out onto the street, a tornado of a man. ‘Men!’ I said, back with my friend. ‘Can’t live with ’em. Can’t live without ’em.’ But my hands were trembling on the table.”

A Word about Writing and Therapy

When my book came out, many people asked if writing it had been “cathartic.” Even more said some version of, “Writing’s like therapy, only cheaper.” I disagree. I’ve done writing. I’ve done therapy. They’re not equivalent. Writing my book helped me get my story straight. It made me remember incidents I’d walled off and helped me realize their importance.

I’d previously been in and out of therapy, but it hadn’t been effective and I’d given up on it. Once I had a clearer sense of my story and more awareness that many of my self-defeating actions were connected to my past, I started again, this time successfully. I don’t know if I would have gone back to therapy if I hadn’t written my memoir, but I do know that writing it gave me important insights and opened me to new ones, even very difficult ones. In short, it made me want to keep growing.

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Published on November 05, 2024 12:46

Cookies by My Face

There’s a photo of me in fourth grade, sweetly plump and clearly feeling pretty, holding my skirt out like I’m about to twirl. By sixth grade, my new height hasn’t kept up with my new weight. By eighth grade I’m undeniably fat. In high school, only one of the 1200 kids in Jefferson High School is obese. I’m that kid.

I Was Walrus

You know those children’s worksheets? Apple, pear, banana, walrus. . . which one doesn’t belong? I was walrus. Back then, girls wore belted shirtwaists or pencil skirts with tucked in blouses, but in all of Lafayette, Indiana, there were none of those in my size. All I had was a local store’s “Women’s Department,” really just an unattended rack back by the fire stairs, with dresses like refrigerator boxes.

Jefferson High had a tradition of “senior cords”—bright yellow corduroy pants for the boys and pencil skirts for the girls, a status symbol second only to a car. Every August, those cords filled the stores, but not in my size. On the first day of school, every senior—every single one except me!—would be wearing them.

“Well, what did you expect?” said my mother.

Not a Prom-Queen Kind of Daughter

My grandmother Julia immediately sized up the situation. She tracked down the right yellow corduroy and had a dressmaker make me a skirt that perfectly matched the ready-mades. Wearing it, I felt like all the other girls, not seeing the reality of my size-twenty ass in tight, bright yellow.

My mother, however, was clear eyed. She was a knockout, slim and shapely, and it made her crazy that I wasn’t a prom-queen kind of daughter. I watched helplessly as she scouted new diets to put me on. The buttermilk diet, Special K diet, grapefruit diet, and, most hateful, the Metrecal diet: no food, just four daily cans of chalky liquid, 225 calories each, for a total of 900 calories a day.

A Six-Month Sentence

According to Metrecal, I’d lose around three pounds a week on this regimen, which I calculated meant a six-month sentence. To speed things up, I decided to drink only two cans a day instead of four, and I hid the extras with the out-of-season clothes in the storage closet. After three days of this, I was frantically hungry, so hungry that I bought two eclairs on my way home from school and ate them both before reaching the next corner.

At dinner that night, I pushed away the Metrecal, got a plate, and served myself the potato-chip tuna casserole everyone else was eating. My mother screamed, “I hope you have a daughter just like you, so you’ll know what you put me through!” and took to her room. In the flush of triumph, I forgot about the cans I’d hidden, which, of course, she discovered when winter came. Emphatically, righteously, I insisted I had no idea how they got there, and I stuck to my story.

It was a hollow victory. I was still fat. Still prey to the dinner hosts who announced, “There’s no sugar in these” when I hadn’t asked. Still the target of those who incessantly asked, “How’s the diet going?” How was the diet going? I’d started college at 200 pounds and weighed 235 when I left, that’s how.

I couldn’t win. I never lost. I only gained.

One morning, about a year out of college, I woke up with a new thought: that only I could solve my weight problem and I’d better get to it. There’d been no final straw, no health scare or split seam. Just the clear understanding that this was on me. I’d learned early on that there were people in this world who felt a calling to watch everything I ate. They took note, intoned food facts, and were almost energized by my diet failures. I wanted these weight-kibitzers gone but didn’t know how to tell them. I wanted to lose weight but had never before succeeded and couldn’t face another public failure. I saw only one possibility: a secret diet.

Obsessed with Secrecy

At first, I spread food around my plate to hide the fact that I was leaving some over. Soon, though, I discovered that almost everyone left some over. In all my years of see-a-pretzel-eat-a-pretzel, I hadn’t noticed. I was a teacher by then, in an elementary school where colleagues regularly brought in cookies for the staff lounge. If I didn’t take one, I knew I’d hear “Watching your waistline?” So I’d grab one, break it in two, put half down on my napkin, and hold the other half up near my face when I spoke. No one realized it never reached my mouth.

As I started losing weight for the first time, I became obsessed with secrecy and convinced that if anyone caught on, the magic spell would break and the pounds rush back in and reinflate me. I kept wearing my same clothes, camouflaging with bulky sweaters as they got loose. I skipped a reunion dinner with college friends by inventing a houseguest and a cousin’s graduation by pretending to be sick.

I was about forty pounds down, when a group of construction workers sitting on the sidewalk whistled and catcalled as I walked past, an iconic indignity that women suffer all the time. For me, it was the first time, and I’m ashamed to admit I loved it. I might have smiled at them. I think I swung my hips a little.

I Feared “Showing”

Through a jaw-dropping policy, my school system required teachers to notify their principals and resign the day they knew they were pregnant. Many held off confessing as long as they could get away with it, and I felt I understood their anxiety. Like them, I feared “showing.”

Of course, the subterfuge stopped working. One lunchtime, Brenda, a colleague and avid collector of other people’s dramas, jumped up from her seat when I walked into the faculty lounge, pointed both hands at me like pistols, and shrieked, “You shrank!” Everyone turned and looked at me, and the room filled with “You look terrific!” and “How did we miss it!”

I panicked, expecting my body to inflate, my feet to run for the cookies. But nothing like that happened. Suddenly, I was laughing and enjoying the pats on my back, completely finished with wizardry.

I lost six sizes, four that year and two the next. Of course, it wasn’t magic. It was me. Yes, that belief in magic was odd, but I’m not embarrassed by it. Perhaps I needed more shoring up than most, but magical thinking kept me going while my fledgling self-agency developed, and then, like the weight, it exited when its time was up.

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Published on July 25, 2024 01:13

How The Wrong Calamity Almost Didn’t Get Written

When I moved to New York, the last thing on my mind was writing a book. After living 40 years in Boston and 5 in Tokyo, I wanted to have a larger life, full of new friends and new things to do. But most of all, I wanted to move beyond a shattering personal loss that had unmoored me for five years.

This Is So New Yorky

In my very first week in Manhattan, I found myself applying for a play-writing workshop. “This is so New Yorky!” I thought. Life in my new city was off to a great start—until I came to the part of the application where I had to write on the topic “Tell Us About Yourself” in 100 words max.

Keep my story to 100 words?
Impossible, I thought. My life was too complicated. Back when I was young and painfully insecure, I’d married a secretive, controlling man and moved to Japan with him. A chance encounter led to my getting a job at Mattel Toys Southeast Asia, and as success made me more confident, my husband became more abusive. When we got back to the US, I had to escape from him by running from the police with our two toddlers. Eventually, I attended Harvard Business School and launched a career, all while raising my daughters and fending off their vengeful father.

Forty drafts? . . . Fifty? . . . Seriously, I might have written as many as sixty 100-word drafts of “Tell Us About Yourself.” All of them were lousy, and none of them got to the rest of my story: Years into a glorious second marriage, a terrible secret in my husband’s past revealed itself, and his PTSD shattered both our marriage and me. I was still grieving when I moved to Manhattan, and this felt more important to me than anything else.

The Heart of Who You Are

My daughters are excellent writers, so I sent them lots of 100-word drafts for feedback. One draft, about getting my MBA despite a serious injury, seemed promising but was too hard to condense. In the end, I cut it from the piece I finally submitted. “I see why it had to go,” one daughter said, “but it’s a shame. That story’s at the heart of who you are.”

I was rejected for the workshop and moved on. But I kept thinking about my daughter’s comment. To me, the business school thing was significant but not the heart of who I was. I decided that since my daughter, who knows me so well, thought it was, I’d write a personal essay about that year of school to set the record straight.

I discovered I liked writing personal essays, and soon I had a whole sheaf of them. Though I’d never before considered myself an author, I set my sights on publishing a collection of essays that would cover a range of unconnected but interesting, maybe whimsical, episodes in my life.

Someone told me that Joyce Johnson, the much-awarded author, ran a small workshopping group for writers. I sent her one of my essays and was thrilled when she accepted me into the group. After just a few weeks of reading my work, she said, “Forget about essays. This should be a memoir.”

My Inner Four-Year-Old

I was reluctant. Actually, I was adamant. My inner four-year-old practically stamped her feet. I would not write a memoir and would not change my mind. But Joyce kept at me for weeks, until, finally, I decided to prove to her once and for all that essays were my genre, not memoirs.

Over the weekend, I copied and pasted a bunch of essays into a single document and started writing connective tissue between them, intent on showing her it just didn’t work. How wrong I was. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Joyce was right. I needed to write a memoir.

As I worked on stitching together the essays, many landed on the cutting room floor. Others became flashbacks or flashforwards. A long essay about a hat became just a few lines in the book. A short, funny essay about my losing eighty pounds by invoking a magic spell became a whole chapter and no longer turned myself into a joke. Eventually, almost nothing in the book could be traced back to an essay.

Occasionally tears rolled down my face as I wrote. Sometimes I cried because I was reliving an old sadness. More often, it was because I was realizing for the first time how much love and support had come my way in those long-ago hard times. Back then, I’d been so overwhelmed just trying to make it through each day, I hadn’t fully appreciated the people who’d stepped in to help me over hurdles I couldn’t manage on my own. Though over the years I’d lost touch with many of these extraordinary people, I tracked down a lot of them and was able to let them know how much they’d mattered to me.

A Tangle of Interconnected Threads

When I started writing The Wrong Calamity, I thought my story was “simply” about an insecure woman who became sure-footed over the course of two broken marriages. But as the book developed, more themes emerged. I couldn’t include the hat without connecting it to grief. I couldn’t write about my first marriage without grappling with self-esteem. Far from a straightforward arc about an insecure woman with two broken marriages, my story was a tangle of interconnected threads that included neglect, eating disorders, single-parenthood, domestic violence, PTSD, the sources of resilience, and, ultimately, triumph. I felt a profound obligation to future readers to untangle these threads; to be unflinchingly honest; to offer a way for readers in similar circumstances to relate to my story and find hope and inspiration.

Not too long ago, I gave a reading from The Wrong Calamity. Afterward, a woman in the audience came up to me and said, “All the details were different, but you were telling my story. Now I have hope I’ll make it through okay.” I spent seven years writing this book, and that moment alone made every moment of those years worthwhile.

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Published on July 08, 2024 11:14

How The Wrong Calamity Almost Didn’t Get Written

When I moved to New York, the last thing on my mind was writing a book. After living 40 years in Boston and 5 in Tokyo, I wanted to have a larger life, full of new friends and new things to do. But most of all, I wanted to move beyond a shattering personal loss that had unmoored me for five years.

In my very first week in Manhattan, I found myself applying for a play-writing workshop. “This is so New Yorky!” I thought. Life in my new city was off to a great start—until I came to the part of the application where I had to write on the topic “Tell Us About Yourself” in 100 words max.

Keep my story to 100 words? Impossible, I thought. My life was too complicated. Back when I was young and painfully insecure, I’d married a secretive, controlling man and moved to Japan with him. A chance encounter led to my getting a job at Mattel Toys Southeast Asia, and as success made me more confident, my husband became more abusive. When we got back to the US, I had to escape from him by running from the police with our two toddlers. Eventually, I attended Harvard Business School and launched a career, all while raising my daughters and fending off their vengeful father.