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MY PARENTS WERE SOCIALLY MINDED
intellectuals who regarded religion as a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. At the bottom of the ladder were one-celled amoebas, then came dinosaurs, then superstitious cave people, then superstitious religious people, then came the Renaissance and Galileo and the birth of science, and everything else smart and forward-thinking came after that. That was history as taught to us by our mother, who had a particularly bitter taste in her mouth from the religion of her youth. She hailed from a devout Christian Science family that held closely to the scriptures, especially those about the body being an illusion and illness being a sign of what the church called “mental error.” According to Christian Science doctrine, if you prayed diligently, you would be healed of all sickness and even death. Therefore, giving credence to the aches and pains of your body or going to a doctor, God forbid, amounted to desertion of the faith. My grandparents withheld medical care even when my mother and her brothers were seriously ill, even if other members of the church died from a similar illness. When my mother showed any weakness—physical or emotional—she was told to “know the truth,” code in Christian Science to snap out of it.

My mother renounced her religion in her twenties, but she never got over the shame of having a body and the trepidation of caring for it. While she didn't overtly preach Christian Science doctrine
to her daughters, she did repeat some well-worn phrases from time to time, especially when we were sick. “Mind governs” was one of her favorites—a quote from
Science and Health
, the most revered Christian Science text. We had no idea what “Mind governs” really meant, but we absorbed my mother's interpretation: your body is a figment of your mind's imagination, so if you complain of pain or illness, you're a hypochondriac.

My grandfather remained a practicing Christian Scientist until the day he died in his late nineties. He was a strong presence in my childhood. In my memory, he is always sitting in the same wingback chair in our living room. His pipe rests in an ashtray on a little table, and he's reading
Science and Health
for what must be the seven thousandth time. I still have his copy of the book. Almost every sentence is highlighted or underlined, and there are comments in the margins on every page. My mother mocked my grandfather's piety, but I recognized him as a fellow seeker, although as a child I didn't have the words to engage with him, to ask him some obvious questions. It wasn't until I was in college, a few years before he died, that I began to talk to my grandfather about spiritual issues. This is why I have his tattered copy of
Science and Health
. He gave it to me after I got up the courage to talk to him about a nagging contradiction I noticed in his philosophy.

“If the body is an illusion,” I asked him, “then why do you eat?”

His answer was the book. He handed it to me with a half-smile. I have come to recognize that smile from conversations I have had with other religious people who take scripture literally. It's a smile both condescending and worried. It says, “All questions will be answered in this book, dear child.” But it's also a plea: “Don't scratch the surface too deeply. Don't unravel the threads or the whole thing might fall apart.”

My father came from an equally devout Jewish family. He was forced into attending services, eating kosher, learning the prayers. But the faith never stuck. He put down his foot after his bar mitzvah, and by high school was freed from his religious duties. He never set foot in a synagogue again. I didn't experience him as Jewish; I didn't experience my mother as Christian. Rather, both my parents were as zealously unreligious as their parents had been pious.

If my parents adhered to any sacred text, it was the
New Yorker
magazine, and if they worshipped anything, it was the trinity of the great outdoors, social justice, and literature. My mother was an English teacher. She read us Greek myths and American poetry and cared deeply about grammar. My father was a nature-lover and, incongruously, a Madison Avenue ad man. Every morning, he took the train from the still-wooded north shore of Long Island into New York City, where he wrote ad copy and jingles. Every night he'd come back home and test his work on his family as we sat around the dinner table.

Meanwhile, I was born with a spiritual ache in my bones. As early as I can remember—maybe four or five—I would lie awake at night, my heart pounding to the deafening beat of the big questions: Where did I come from? What's the point of all this? Where do we go when we die? My mother's remedies to my existential worries were to offer dire insights from Jean-Paul Sartre and Virginia Woolf. Or she would quote Charles Darwin or Dr. King as a way of pointing me in a different direction—away from self-examination and toward science or social action.

My father had nothing but impatience for anything that smacked of soul-searching. His answer to whatever ailed anyone was to go outside and tramp around in the woods. Even though he was born
in Brooklyn, and we lived on Long Island, and he worked in Manhattan, his heart was set on returning to his soul's homeland, his Jerusalem: the state of Vermont.

When I think of the time and the place of my childhood—the 1950s and '60s in suburban America—and then I think of my parents, I have to laugh. Whereas most adults were trying to be Ward and June Cleaver, my father and mother were aiming for Henry David Thoreau and Rosa Parks. They may not have been the warmest and fuzziest of parents, but I was proud to be their child, even though I felt there was something insufficient in their overarching worldview. I didn't know exactly what was missing, but I was determined to find out. I was a mystical little kid adrift in a family of cynics—a seeker in a boat with no oars. I tagged along with neighbors to Catholic Mass and bought gospel records on the down low. After President Kennedy and Dr. King were shot, I hung their photos on my bedroom wall and prayed to them in the cover of night.

Whenever I would pray, I would put my hand over my heart and breathe into a spot that felt like a gaping hole. If I could stay with it long enough, the hole would fill slowly, like water rising in a well, and I would feel a temporary sense of peace, a quelling of the questions, and a slightly embarrassing emotion: the rising water felt almost romantic. I had no words for this feeling, and I had no one to ask about it since sentimentality was nearly criminal in my household.

I remember the first time I heard the phrase “God is love.” I was still in grade school. My mother was performing her nightly ritual of cooking dinner while listening to the news on the radio. My sisters and I were sitting at the kitchen table, doing our homework. An item came on the news—it was the anniversary of a legendary
Easter Sunday performance by the opera singer Marian Anderson. My mother listened with rapt attention. Then she turned off the radio and told us the story of Marian Anderson with the same reverential tone that followers use to tell the parables of their faith. “Do you girls understand the real meaning of Easter?” my mother asked us, knowing full well we didn't since we had no religious training of any kind. “The real meaning,” she continued, “has nothing to do with eggs or bunnies. The real meaning is that God is love.” And then she told us how the Daughters of the American Revolution—the reviled DAR—declined to book Marian Anderson into Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, because she was black. That caused First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—the Godhead of my mother's nonreligion—to resign from the DAR and arrange for the concert to be held on Easter Sunday, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

“The sun was shining,” my mother said. “And seventy-five thousand people of all races came together to hear one of the world's greatest artists sing ‘America.' That's what Easter is all about—the resurrection of love. If you want to know what they mean by ‘God is love,' well, that's what they mean.”

“God is love?” I asked my mother. “That's what I think too!” My sisters rolled their eyes.

“Well, that's what they say,” my mother snorted.

“Who? Who says that God is love?” I asked. I suddenly recognized in those words the feeling I had when I prayed.

“People who go to church say that. But it's just something they mouth. They're parrots,” my mother said. “They don't walk their talk.”

“But maybe they feel it when they pray,” I said. My mother gave me a quizzical look and turned the radio back on, indicating
the topic deserved no more attention. But it was too late. I was intrigued. It appeared I wasn't alone in my heart-pounding, well-filling, love-feeling prayers. Others had felt the same thing and probably were talking about it somewhere.

As I entered adolescence, I fantasized about belonging to a church more than I dreamed about going on a date. I continued going to Mass with my best friend. I weaseled my way into the confession booth; I knelt at the altar; I tasted the body and blood of Christ, which seemed swooningly amorous to me. When I came home one Wednesday afternoon with a smudge of ash on my forehead, my mother was appalled. My sisters fell on the floor laughing.

After the famous Ash Wednesday incident, my mother made a point of showing me the April issue of
Time
magazine. It was 1966. I was thirteen. The cover was black and featured three huge words in screaming red ink: “IS GOD DEAD?”

“See?” my mother said.

I was concerned but not deterred. I made trips to the library and took out books by authors like Thomas Merton, a Catholic monk, whose autobiography,
The Seven Storey Mountain
, filled me with hope. Merton was raised without religion, and he was now a monk! When I went off to college, I was excited to be going to the same school that Merton had attended several decades previously—Columbia University in New York City. I was at Barnard College, the women's school across the street from Columbia. It was also my mother's alma mater, and a hotbed of political activity. While I got involved with antiwar and civil rights causes, I also took the subway to churches mentioned by Merton in
The Seven Storey Mountain
. Like him, I would enter a church and sit alone in the cool and the dark, full of angst, praying for direction.

From the moment I pushed off the shore of childhood, I began rowing toward the land my mother and father had deliberately sailed away from. I dropped out of Barnard at the end of my sophomore year and went to California, searching for a guru. It was the 1970s and Eastern meditation teachers were washing up on the shores of America. I wanted one. I was nineteen. Most young people in my generation were leaving the ethos of the '60s behind, looking to start a family or a career. But that didn't interest me; I was looking for God. It was like walking in the opposite direction of a stream of people on a crowded sidewalk. I pushed past the norm of my upbringing and the culture at large, with an intensity I did not understand. I felt the intensity most when I went home, not only in the presence of my parents but also with my sisters. And especially with my younger sister Maggie.

MAGGIE AND I WERE BOTH
born in August, two years and eight days apart. Overwhelmed by four kids, my mother killed two birds with one party, and year after year Maggie and I celebrated our birthdays on the same summer day. This was not either of our choices. In my mother's picture albums, you can see the roles we assumed in the family system—me the dissenter, and Maggie the peacemaker. In one photo, when I was eight and she was six, I scowl at the camera as little Maggie dutifully blows out the candles on the cake.

Little Maggie. She was a tiny, adorable creature. My first memories of being her sister are of wanting to protect her. She seemed too small and scraggly to be able to make it in the world of school buses and gym class and neighborhood games where the big boys bullied the little kids. But Maggie never wanted anyone's help. She compensated for her tiny stature with a tough and stubborn stance. She'd have none of it when grown-ups called her cute, or her friends tried to carry her around like a doll. She developed a dirty mouth at a young age, and a desire to stand up for the underdog as she grew older. She valued self-reliance in herself and other people, but was also the consummate caregiver. She worried about everyone else's feelings, as she kept her own needs and fantasies in a secret place. This made her alluring and inaccessible.

I, on the other hand, was an open book, an oversharer, con
frontational and deep—often too deep for my own good. I wanted contact and meaningful conversation. Even as children, I overwhelmed Maggie and she withheld herself from me. She was too little and I was too much. We danced this dance all through childhood; it took different forms at different ages. Sometimes we met in the middle and were friends, but more often we kept to our own corners—corners of the house, the Monopoly board, the neighborhood, the schoolyard. My bigness scared her, especially when I stood up to my parents. Her smallness aggravated me: Why couldn't she say what she meant, ask for what she wanted, share her secrets? By the time we got to high school, we had made our own worlds. I couldn't figure her out, so I ignored her. She couldn't quiet me down, so she avoided me.

For many years, Maggie and I orbited each other in ever widening circles. Months after I graduated from high school, our house was broken into and the intruder tried to violate my youngest sister. My mother quit her job; they sold the house and left Long Island and moved “back to the land”—to a tumbledown farm in a tiny town in Vermont. Maggie and my youngest sister were still in high school. They went back to the land too. This was the direction we all were supposed to take; the direction the whole world should take, according to my father. Lord knows if my mother wanted the life of a rural homesteader—there's a chance none of us ever knew what my mother really wanted. But she professed to want it. In fact, not wanting it—not wanting to leave the sordid, so-called civilized world and head north to the woods—was tantamount to treason. If you were a good person, a moral person, you would counter the ills of our consumer society by never again driving on a freeway or owning a television or showing your face in a shopping mall.

Maggie and I absorbed the family philosophy in different ways. As I was protesting the Vietnam War in the streets of New York City, she was studying botany at Antioch College in Ohio. While I was hitchhiking to California, in search of a guru, she was in Wyoming with my older sister, hiking and skiing the big peaks. When I joined a spiritual commune, she went to nursing school. And then—surprising us all—Maggie moved back to our parents' tiny town to marry her high school boyfriend. She one-upped my parents. It was like getting a green card, marrying into a Vermont family. Her husband's New England roots connected her to generations of Vermonters. My parents would always be “flatlanders,” refugees from New York, slightly suspect outsiders forever branded by their cosmopolitan past. But Maggie had leapfrogged her dodgy heritage; now she belonged. Under her husband's tutelage, she learned the skills of farming, slaughtering and butchering animals, logging, building, maple sugaring, and living off the land and off the grid. She created the life for herself that my father had always wanted. Thus proving she was the good girl—the one who followed the tide back to shore—and I was the defector, the one who went her own way, which was not the correct way.

By the time we were all grown women, with families of our own, I was the only sister who didn't live in Vermont, who didn't split and stack her own wood, who watched television and, on occasion, purchased unnecessary plastic objects for her kids at the mall. Coming home for holidays was often an exercise in losing myself. Everything from my clothes to my car, from where I lived to where I worked, felt wrong. My life was too big, too connected to the outside world on the one hand, and to the weird inner spiritual world on the other. Maggie's life fit the family picture better.
She and her husband had built a log cabin on the banks of the Saxtons River, down the road from my parents, in a classic little town, in the pristine homeland of Vermont. It was a rugged and real existence. In comparison, mine felt soft and wimpy. I wasn't chopping the heads off chickens or jumping in an icy swimming hole after a wood-fired sauna on a star-studded night. No one ever accused me of being a wuss to my face, but that's what I felt like when I would watch Maggie wielding a hammer or scraping honey from the frames as bees swarmed around her head. It all seemed heroic to me.

Back in my own life, it wasn't as if I was a slacker. I was leading a large organization; I was writing books; I was being a single parent. I was making grown-up decisions about difficult things. Some of those difficult things were so difficult that I went into therapy—which also took courage, but not the kind valued in the family. Psychotherapy was most assuredly not part of my parents' code. It flew in the face of everything they held sacred: grit, emotional restraint, and self-sufficiency. Carl Rogers, one of the founding fathers of American psychology, wrote about “conditions of worth”—the standards of behavior children believe they must follow to receive love and avoid criticism. Children internalize conditions of worth and then use them as instructions for living. Once on the shores of adulthood, you spend your life either blindly living out those conditions of worth or, if you're lucky, sifting through them and choosing which fit you and which you've outgrown.

Conditions of worth aren't necessarily bad things—families and societies need some agreed-upon standards. When a child bites another kid and the parent expresses displeasure, the child begins to
understand that he'd better not bite other children if he wants to be an acceptable member of the clan. We may long to give and receive unconditional love, but it's almost impossible to pull off—unless you're a saint, or a hermit who never has to test the theory on real people. What
is
possible is to be mindful of when we impose excessive conditions of worth, or when those conditions are just our own unexamined opinions and habits that don't necessarily jibe with another person's inner compass. Conditions of worth can be part of a healthy value system, but they also can squelch the uniqueness right out of a kid. They can hobble dreams and compress the soul.

My parents' conditions of worth ran the gamut from the wise to the ridiculous. Both my mother and father had high standards when it came to social justice. They expected their daughters to be informed, to care, to do something of value for the world. It wasn't enough for us to merely go to school, play with our friends, help around the house. Even as kids we got the message that our lives were not just our own—that when we confronted suffering or prejudice, we had a duty to do something. This was one of my parents' conditions of worth that I cherish. In trying to live up to their expectations, my sisters and I gained the courage to take a stand for the things we believe in.

But even the wisest conditions of worth come with their shadows. For people who preached tolerance, my parents were astonishingly intolerant. My mother was a snob when it came to almost everything—how the neighbors overdecorated their houses at Christmas, how teenagers were degrading the English language, how the real opiates of the masses were television and Disneyland. My father took the despoiling of the natural world personally. He resented the neighbors who lived in the newly constructed subur
ban homes across the street from us. Their lifestyle was
wrong
—the way they washed their cars with the garden hose (waste of water), or their choice of “gaudy” landscape plants (hot-pink azaleas in particular), or the plastic lawn chairs they proudly displayed on their weed-free (toxic) lawns. Both of my parents went into mourning when a shopping mall was built on one of the last remaining farms near us. If that wasn't bad enough, it was named the Walt Whitman Mall because of its proximity to the little house where Whitman was born. The confluence of the sacrilegious desecration of farmland and the dishonoring of an American poet united my parents in their outrage.

I take pride in my parents' reverence for justice and for their protection of nature. They were ahead of their time. I have tried to carry their torch forward. On the other hand, I also inherited their intolerance. Mother Teresa said, “The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.” Widening the family circle to include those with bad grammar, different political views, and plastic lawn chairs has been a lifelong effort for me—grinding the gears in the opposite direction of my parents' conditions of worth.

See, here's the thing: We can offer our children treasured beliefs and customs without demonizing those other “bad” people across the street or across the globe. And we can start by lightening up when our kids show inclinations or interests that may conflict with our own conditions of worth. But being a parent is the world's hardest job. In the daily rigor of family life, we all blindly impose a myriad of conditions on our kids. Some we drag with us from our own childhoods. Some we ladle out without examining their validity because they are drummed into us by church or state. You can
pin a whole slew of common mental ailments—depression, anxiety, confusion, anger, procrastination—on what happens when our very human need to be accepted bumps up against the equally compelling longing to be true to thine own self.

When I went into therapy in my early thirties, I began to identify the conditions of worth that were running my life without my consent. Did I really believe that in order to be a good person, to be loved, to be valued, I must always show grit, emotional restraint, and self-sufficiency? That I must live a certain way, in a certain place, and only with certain kinds of people? At first I was terrified to explore these questions, as if just by asking them I'd be unlovable. Slowly, though, I began to untangle the threads of my adult self from the threads of childhood, and to define my worth for myself. It was a liberating experience. And it not only freed me to be me. As I accepted the exiled parts of myself, I became more accepting of other people—all kinds of people.

But nothing could bring me back to square one more than visiting my family. Driving down Maggie's dirt road, I could feel parts of my fledgling self-worth drop away, as if the back of the car was open and pieces of luggage were falling out. Walking up the rough stone steps to her house, I felt stripped down to everything I was not. I was not a rural, self-sufficient, do-it-yourselfer. I was not Laura Ingalls Wilder, the heroine of our childhood. And worst of all, after I did the unthinkable and got divorced, I was no longer a self-sacrificing married woman. Maggie was happily and righteously all of the above. Or so I thought.

I know now that Maggie feared losing parts of herself in my presence too. That she secretly admired me—my courage to examine my life, to say what I wanted, and to stand up to the powers that be at work, at home, in the world. I didn't know then that
being around me both inspired and threatened her. She was intent on being the good girl in the eyes of my parents and her husband and the doctors she worked for. If she let go of that rigidly held identity—the happy, energetic, good girl—what might happen to her life? I know now it was fear that kept us from being the kind of friends we became later on. We loved each other dearly, but she was afraid to get too close. I was a bad influence; her life might descend into chaos if she opened herself to me. And I was afraid to confront her resistance. What if her judgments of me were correct? What if I had made all the wrong choices?

I mourn those lost years. And even more, I mourn what it took for us to finally find each other.