PE was the hardest class for me all the way through public school. Girls were not much encouraged to play sports in the 50s and 60s, of course. Outside the school day, I rode my bike everywhere, climbed trees and a rope all the way to the top of the gym, nearly drowned in Echo Lake, and later learned to swim but not the kick-turn or water skiing (failed both). During the school day I was teased and bullied and sexually assaulted before I was ten. Ellen and I were always chosen last for playground softball. I learned shame and fear in grade school. Junior high was not much better. I was told I had ugly hands, still couldn’t throw, and the play on my name Priddy still led to many chants of “Janice Ugly.” High school was better because I liked the uneven parallel bars and a bio-feedback unit that taught us how to fully relax our body and focus/unfocus our minds. I imagine what I learned then—the only useful thing I ever learned in school PE classes—might be called mindfulness today.

It took me from “Think how the other person must feel” to “Be mindful of how you feel.”

I am about to write about detail from my real life. I ramble. I wade into shallow waters. Be warned.

I had my tonsils out as a teenager and the hospital, under reconstruction at the time, didn’t bring me meds or feed me for four of the five days I was there. I was in too much “discomfort” to care. I lost seven pounds that stayed off for five years. My mother was delighted because my weight was important to her. I should be thinner and blonder and wear more make-up. At least put on some lipstick. In college I gained five pounds. This was not a problem by then because Mom wasn’t around all the time trying to get me to pay more attention to my appearance and I was walking miles each day. You need better clothes and do something with your hair. During the years she was dying she guessed correctly that I put on lipstick when I visited her. You put on lipstick just for me! [I put it on in the driveway or parking lot because otherwise she would launch into instructions. I was fifty years old and my mother was still telling how to dress my face. It didn’t feel like a compromise of principles to put color on my lips for my mom, I loved her and it made her happy. When she caught me out, we both laughed about it.]

How do I see myself and how do others see me? What will I do to please the people I love or hope to love? How I live with what others think I should be doing? Are any of us free from these conflicts? What do we learn that sticks?

I recognized the relaxation techniques I was taught in a PE class when I was taking pre-childbirth classes at the local hospital ten years after high school. Our PE teacher inflicted team sports on me and also taught me to turn my entire attention inward in what she might have called biofeedback. The familiar breathing and so forth I was asked to do in preparation for labor directed my attention outward, a reversal of what I’d learned in PE. The course correction seemed simple enough to me when I was pregnant. The nurse teaching the class noted my Braxton Hicks contractions that I could not feel at all. I’ll skip details about my unnecessarily prolonged four and a half days of back-labor. I sang a Joni Mitchel song for days to send my mind soaring.

[The second delivery was painful enough that I thought: It could not possibly have hurt this much last time or I would never have done it again. That plays to the cliché about forgetting pain.]

After both births my babies were taken away to another room. I am grateful that this is no longer the norm. Medicine crawls toward better care.

Without modern surgery, both Gary and I would have died from burst appendixes, Gary as a teenager and me in my 60s. I still attribute my failing appendix to colonoscopy prep which I foolishly followed exactly and which likely killed the useful bacteria in my gut. So I might have lived on without modern medicine. On the other hand, the constant throat infections and pneumonia might have killed me young.

Measles got me as a child, twice, and mumps, many colds and flus that kept me at home for days or weeks at a time. I probably have had untreated pneumonia according to the radiologist who took the time to discuss my scarred lungs with me when I was 16. Or the damage may have resulted from exposure to my father’s smoking.

I failed to improve on many aspects of my parents’ childrearing: I did not give our oldest the horseback riding lessons he wanted for the same reason I didn’t have them as a child myself. And I failed to teach either of them how to sew or bake bread. [I gave our youngest a great book about bread baking for Christmas this year. I could see he was puzzled, but I failed to explain.] I was at home with them when they were little, but I lost my temper with each of them, and they were good boys. I worked too hard and was distracted once they were in school themselves. I could say I did the best I could, but it doesn’t alter the fact that I wish I’d done better as a mother and as a teacher.

These days I still dream about teaching, not the old nightmares of teaching something I know nothing about. Did everyone have that childhood dream of not studying for the test? That evolved into the nightmare about failing to attend a class in college and then to teaching Physics or Chemistry or the Boer War. As a substitute teacher, for most of eleven years I actually did teach all those subjects and kindergartners and high school Band. That’s not the way my teaching dream goes now, but dwells on the greater fear I had as a teacher, that I would fail to teach them in a way that was useful.

In the recent nightmare I struggled to explain some complex process. The specifics entirely left me once I woke. I recall the struggle, not its cause. Maybe it’s because I am considering what I want to do in this elderly stage of life. I plan for my future in such dreams. What is useful to me as I flounder through this stage of existence? It’s not enough to travel or eat out or visit with people.

A series of opinions about whether Poor Things is a feminist film mostly concluded it was not, that it had other business. I have not seen the film, but since I judged The Favorite to be on the furthest edge of what I can tolerate from a man’s viewpoint about the female experience (she will be beautiful and entitled and white and have ugly sex that exploits others and is unconcerned with love), I may add it to the informal never-see list along with Rocky movies and the Godfather movies and The Sound of Music. [Violent “sport,” criminals, too many children and Nazi sympathizers.] I recently sampled several streaming films that were too violent or sexually cruel for me. I don’t need to watch that. Ordinary sorrow is enough.

Just because it’s powerful and beautiful doesn’t mean I have to like it or even see it. [I will add that I am waiting to see a coming-of-age male character’s experiences promoted as primarily sexual the way girls’ always seem to be. But no, I wouldn’t watch that one either.] Though some might argue that sex is the key issue in adolescent minds, there is more to human beings than sex, at least there was more to my childhood. I was interested in sex as a child and adolescent and had my first orgasm at age ten (climbing that rope to the top of the gym did the trick), but I was more in love with horses than sex. More in love with drawing and architecture and books and travel. I did try climbing that rope a second time, but then it seemed much of a bother when I was ten so I went back to imagining Knossos and Antoni Gaudí, Arabian horses and gardens.

I read about ethics. I went to many churches and to temple with friends from school. I tried prayer and ritual. I read the Bible and philosophy and studied ethical systems and the distinction between moral and ethical behaviors. I did what I could to live a moral, ethical life. When consciousness-raising was a thing, I did that. I did all this because I was curious and it seemed the right thing to do and not out of fear of punishment if I didn’t. As a student of behaviorism, I know I am motivated more by carrot than stick. Everyone is.

Is sex the most critical form of liberation? Somehow I doubt it, or do I even care?

I fear I will hear from people urging me to see Poor Things the way my deeply offended grandchild kept telling me I was wrong not to see Barbie. I think I don’t need to be awakened to feminism. I’ve recognized the justice due to all people for as long as I’ve considered myself a person. I have identified as feminist for as long as that term has existed. I’ve believed in my humanity my entire life, not as a second class citizen but as a human being who deserves respect and a fair place in my sexist society.

Genetically female, I am visually female, my hormones are likely female-typical, and I am not “ugly” as I was told so often in grade school. [Bad teeth, big nose, ugly hands, unsettled hair, and too hairy in the wrong places.] I was raised by parents who were themselves both raised by their divorced mothers and so I had strong support and models as a female person during my growing up. Maybe that’s why I like being female while also recognizing that this gender-identity makes me a second class citizen pretty much everywhere on Earth. I experienced sexual assault and abuse, discrimination in education and employment, was routinely paid less and overlooked, my opinions discounted, and my health care undermined because I am female. [Vanishingly few of us get everything we want and most of us are abused in various ways throughout our lives.] I was given a Barbie as a child and many other dolls I never played with. I never wished I was a boy as some women of my generation confess as adults that they once did. I dreamt not of the perfect housewife split level and 2.3 children but of designing houses and flying to Arabia—I am the wrong religion to be allowed into a country owned by one family. Yes, I knew that too. I continued to secretly yearn for things I understood I would never have.

It is not that I welcomed or accepted victimization. The real world is rarely fair to anyone’s aspirations. I pursued reasonable goals and did what I could control. I tried to be good because in some ways that mattered most of all. I wanted to be the hero of my own story, not the villain in others’.

I prefer being the underdog to the top dog, the oppressed rather than the oppressor, the do-gooder rather than the abuser. I want to do the right thing, the moral thing, the good thing. When my mother told me, “Think how the other person must feel,” over and over as a young child, I did that. I thought about how others feel, their dreams and disappointments, their goals and fears. It is a habit of mind she instilled in me. There are times when I have no certain answer about what the other person feels or what is the right thing to do. I am not always kind or nice or compassionate or even polite. I try to be good, and I recognize that when I am not those things—compassionate and kind, patient and polite—I have failed to be mindful of others.

Imperfect as any human being, I try to think how the other feels.

Thank you, Mom.