You can teach a child anything.

“Rejection teaches you how to reject,” that’s what Jeanette Winterson says. And maybe.

I was a very beautiful child. My mother liked to damage me. I don’t remember things but I remember enough not to think about it. My father liked to damage me in other ways.

I looked like a goldfish and I had no friends. I ignored my friends until they went away. I didn’t want to bother them. I didn’t want them to pity me. I didn’t want to tell them I was in too much pain to participate in their reindeer games. I didn’t want to tell them why.

Nobody ever said I was too fat, exactly. I wore a size large sweater once in fourth grade and the sticker size was still on. I don’t know if people were laughing at my tit size or my size-size. I never really have. It’s always just the same thing.

The sexuality of a Jewess is a seduction and a joke, both at the same time. Just ask Monica Lewinsky.

Self-respect, they say, is very important. This culture hates me but I am supposed to love myself. I am supposed to be strong and I am but not in the ways you might think. I carried the heavy stuff in my family, from the time I was a child. I did not have Lisa Frank stickers. The butterflies on my shirt made men stare at me and so I pulled them off. My favorite dress was full of jewels but one day I realized they were only plastic and I threw the dress away.

People insist that parental abuse is just as bad when it is emotional as when it is physical. Maybe they’re right but no child…