Wow. It has come to my attention that I’ve never written about The Mushroom Story. I can’t believe I’ve left out this gem.
I’ve mentioned before that no one talks much about the years starting from when I was born up to The Divorce. This story is one of the very few I know, and it comes from brother #3. When I was in college, in Colorado, brother #3 was also living in Colorado. So I went to visit him one weekend, during my senior year.
Some background: he is seven years older than I am, and at the time of The Divorce, when I was about 6YO, he was about 13YO. A tough age for kids, and especially so in our dysfunctional family. Brother #3 was always held to have been badly affected by The Divorce, and it’s probably true. By the time I was old enough to pay attention, he was already the “black sheep”: he dropped out of high school, experimented with drugs and alcohol, went to live with Mom for a while, and then moved to some unspecified living arrangement that was probably Not Discussed, at least not around me. I would guess that he stopped living at Dad’s home around 16YO or so, when I would only have been about 9YO.
All this is to say that, 14 years later, I barely knew him. But at that point I had a car, and he was my brother, and within driving distance, so one weekend I went to see him.
One memorable thing stands out about that visit. At some point we were ordering a pizza, and he asked what I liked on my pizza. I said, “No mushrooms.” He asked why; I gave my usual answer, which was, “I just don’t like mushrooms.”
And that’s when I found out EXACTLY why I had a lifelong dislike of mushrooms.
Brother #3 told me a story that happened around the year prior to The Divorce, when he was 12YO and I was 5YO.
We lived in a house with four bedrooms and one roomy bathroom upstairs, so it was not unusual to share the bathroom. With up to seven people in the house of all ages, it was simply a matter of efficiency — even in high school, when there were only three people left in the house, brother #4 and I would both be getting ready for school as late as possible, and both trying to brush our teeth or whatever at the single sink.
On this day, brother #3 was taking a bath in the tub, while our mother and I were also in the bathroom for some reason. The tub was separate from the shower stall, so it didn’t have a curtain or anything.
While in the tub, brother #3 got an erection. And I, as a curious and apparently observant 5-year-old child, said, “It looks like a big mushroom!”
Now, he was our mother’s 3rd son. Pre-teen erections cannot have been news to her. But she came unglued, both at him for having it, and at me for noticing it.
My brother told me all he knew of the fallout for me was that our mother immediately hustled me out of the bathroom; then she came back and proceeded to grill him about whether he had “been aroused by his sister”.
FFS, anyone who knows anything about maturing boys knows they get erections at the passing of the breeze, sometimes. But instead of a natural biological occurrence, she was suspicious that something sexual, something “dirty”, must have occurred.
Projection? Paranoia? Oedipal? Wherever she got the idea that his erection had to be sexual, it sure as hell wasn’t a healthy or reasonable one — it was completely inappropriate.
As for me, I have zero conscious memory of this event, and I don’t know what she said or did to me after she took me out of the bathroom.
It’s clear, though, that whatever she did to me, it was traumatic or painful or terrifying enough to establish a very definite, lifelong, mushroom phobia — and equally clear that it too was completely inappropriate to the situation.
I told my first therapist this story and she asked if I had ever had a negative reaction to, say, my husband’s erection. I said, “No, I was freaking FIVE YEARS OLD, and CLEARLY I THOUGHT IT WAS ABOUT MUSHROOMS!”
Later, I realized I was probably very lucky to have come away from whatever was done to me that day with only a phobia of mushrooms.
And I still won’t eat mushrooms to this day. Knowing how my phobia came about hasn’t changed anything. Our unhealthy mother terrified her own child, over what she chose to see in a perfectly natural occurrence, to the point of creating this permanent, negative effect.
Fortunately this has only been a minor inconvenience for me — but it could have been so much worse, and who knows what other events like this occurred, what unhinged reactions she had, and what negative effects they had on all of us.
Hobson’s choice, but I think maybe I was better off with the neglect.