I always joked: "If my parents could have locked me in the attic and fed me through a hole in the door, they would have done so."

When I had just turned 50, I ended up taking care of my 99-year-old Aunt. When she had lucid moments, she told me stories about when I was a kid. I began to realize how right I was with the "locked in the attic" scenario.

"When you were growing up, your family would visit us most Sunday afternoons," she told me. "After you left, John (her husband) and I would discuss endlessly how abnormal your life was and whether there was anything we could do about it."

Of course, they didn't do anything about it. They couldn't do anything about it. What could be done? How could you report your own family to Family Services? And, what would Family Services do anyway? Probably nothing.

But they knew it wasn't normal for a young girl to sit on the couch listening avidly to adult conversations. To have no interest in playing. To be too shy to answer any questions put to her. To have no thoughts or actions not approved by her parents.

You see, it was not JUST that I was lacking a Y chromosome and JUST that I was too smart for the adoption agency to allow my parents to adopt the all-important boy. I was disappointing in a variety of other ways.

First, I was sickly. Starting when I was about three and a half, I began to have to be taken to the emergency room about once a month with awful stomach pains. As I matured, this got worse and worse. All the usual tests were negative. Doctors could make no diagnosis and believed I was dying. Part of me wonders if my parents might have thought this was the answer to finally being able to adopt a son...

When I was 6 years old, a desperate and creative doctor, having tried everything else, decided to test me for ulcers. I remember being in a cold, dim unit, drinking what I described as "ground-up chalk" (the barium), being flipped into all kinds of weird postures and told to "Hold it just like that!" It seemed to go on for hours. Of course, everything seems like it lasts for hours when you are a little kid.

But, my doctor was right: they discovered a duodenal ulcer. Everyone was shell-shocked: ulcers in a little kid??? That's for middle-aged, high-pressure executives!

But, they put me on a couple of ulcer medications and the BART diet, and my health took a turn-around. They didn't know what had caused the ulcer then, but now, we have an idea.

It seems, when I was an infant, I had roseola; not a scary, dangerous disease, but uncomfortable, and I was crying a lot.

Well, my dad's way of handling a crying infant was to hit me and yell, "Stop crying! You don't have anything to cry about!" If I didn't immediately obey, he'd hit me again. My Aunt has described this behavior to me, and how my mom would sit, lips pressed together tightly in the next room and saying NOTHING.

Since I was about a year and a half old when I had roseola, you can imagine how successful my dad's strategy was. But, he kept at it. You have to understand, this was the "Spare the rod, Spoil the child" era.

My mom was frantic to stop my crying. She had always believed that because she was being a naughty child when she was three years old, her father had deserted the family, moved to Australia, and had a second family there. She lived terrified that her child (me) would do something to make her husband (my dad) desert the family. Anything she could do to prevent me making dad angry was justified. And it was REALLY for my sake; my mom knew how hard it was to grow up without a dad, so anything she could do to keep dad happy was really for my benefit...

So my mom (who was a doctor and knew better) gave me what they called "baby aspirin" in hopes of stopping my crying. It lowered the fever, and I did stop crying so much. But, since "baby aspirin" wasn't really supposed to be given to children under the age of three, the result was an ulcer. And expensive visits to the emergency room.

In addition to my hospital visits and multitudes of tests for my stomach problems, I also had some leg/ankle muscle problems. These appeared at a very early age, when I just began to walk.

You see, once again I wasn't being the "normal" child my parents wanted. Instead of crawling, l sort of "swam" across the floor: I'd stretch my arms out then pull my body forward with my arms, legs dragging behind.

My godfather, a very prim and proper Swedish college professor of what they called at that time "Business Machines" (we would call it Computer Science today) decided to step in. He got down on the floor next to me and demonstrated How To Crawl. Then he stood up.

I've always thought that was all I needed: I saw someone get up from off the floor. Rather than mimicking the crawling movements, I stood up and started walking. I was about 7 months old.

Now everyone was in a panic that I was walking too early! That spurred concern about shoes. The doctor said I needed special orthopedic shoes (think individually hand-made and expensive) or my leg muscles would not develop properly. My folks bit the bullet and had hand-made orthopedic shoes made, the smallest the cobbler had ever constructed.

As I passed beyond toddler stage (in my expensive hand-made orthopedic shoes), the doctor began talking about leg braces. He gave my parents a choice: leg braces or ballet class.

I started ballet at age 4.

And, of course, there were the hearing and balance problems I've described elsewhere.

So, I was a disappointing "problem child" health-wise, and an expensive one at that.

But, I was also not "cute." Little girls were supposed to be lively and "cute." I was somber, terminally-shy and, well, not "cute."

When I was eight, my mom and I were watching the Miss America Beauty Pageant. During a commercial break, I asked my mom: "Mom, am I beautiful?"

She hesitated not even an instant: "No."

Now remember, my mom was BLIND. She had the perfect out: "How should I know?" or, the ever-popular mom-response: "You're always beautiful to me!"

But, my parents had decided I was to be raised with TRUTH, no matter how brutal it was. So: "No."

But, I pressed on. "Am I pretty?"

"No."

I thought a bit. "Am I cute?"

"No."

Now, even at age 8, I knew the socially-accepted end of this conversation was supposed to be mom saying: "But you have a wonderful disposition!"

And, even at age 8, I knew that having a wonderful disposition, in a culture that values only physical beauty in a female, was a poor second place prize. But not even that was offered. The commercial break ended, and so did the conversation.

It wasn't until I was 22 and my mom was dying of cancer that she finished that conversation. "I think you have a lousy disposition," she told me. "You act like you know everything and have to inflict your knowledge onto everybody else."

Well, that's probably true. It's probably why I ended up teaching. But it's a hard thing to hear from your dying mother.

So, as a (disappointing) girl, I was also disappointingly unhealthy, non-cute and had a lousy disposition.

Then there was religion...

My mom was Jewish. In a community with no other Jews, no synagogue, no Hadassah. But, she was Jewish. When she moved to D.C. during the Second World War, she took Hebrew lessons at the local JCC (Jewish Community Center.) My mom's bible was ALL HEBREW - no English translation at all. She was much better at languages than I am...

My mom's first husband was Jewish. When she was in the hospital giving birth to twin daughters, she found out he was having an affair with another woman. When the two girls died within a week, he moved out because my mom was "too depressing to be around." He died within a year in a high-speed chase trying to flee the police.

Mom pretty much decided that marrying a nice Jewish boy could probably be improved on...

She moved back to her original home in southeast Kansas to be with her family.

My dad was a not-very-into-it Mormon. Being in the army of Occupation in Germany, he heard the terrible stories, saw the death camps. He returned to America determined to show the Jewish people that not all Gentiles were anti-Semitic. But, of course, he lived in southeast Kansas where Jews were few and far between.

Naturally they met. Naturally they fell in love. Naturally they got married. Naturally they had NOTHING in common. But they developed a way of navigating Christmas, Easter, expectations about baby rituals. Other than no William, everything was chugging along.

And my dad's parents divorced when he was about 10 years old - VERY unusual in 1930s America. With my mom's father deserting the family, neither my mom nor my dad was going to EVER consider divorce! They would make their marriage WORK! No matter WHAT!

When I was ten years old, we moved from Denver to a small university town in northern Colorado. And my dad got religion...

Meanwhile, I was becoming a scientist. People would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I would respond: "An archaeologist, anthropologist, or astronomer."

Adults found me scary...

Luckily (?) by the time my dad began trying to convert me to his religion, I had run afoul of the evolution controversy. For a book report at Girl Scouts, I chose a book on Early Human Species. While most of the troop were fascinated, the leader's daughter was pretty skeptical: "But what about the Bible?" she demanded.

I responded immediately: "Well, we don't actually know what Adam and Eve LOOKED like." I still think it's a pretty good answer.

But, I knew this was actually a pretty serious problem. If you could not simultaneously believe both the Bible and evolution... well... I was a scientist. I had to go where the evidence led me.

A guy at my dad's office argued: "Those fossils were created by the devil to mislead people."

I had gone to Hebrew afternoon school in Denver while my mom worked. I felt it unlikely that the devil could do any such thing: creation was the privilege of God. But now, I was living in a town with no synagogue. And it was pre-Internet, much less was I able to "Ask the AI Rabbi." There was no one I could go to for a definitive answer.

I had to rely on my own brain, and that was easy: if you can't believe in God AND evolution... evolution won, and >poof< I was an atheist.

I wonder how many other people have been turned into total non-believers by religious zealots?

Anyway, I knew that this new trait of mine would NOT be popular with dad, and mom would try to sabotage me into whatever dad wanted. But, I had discovered: "Die Gedanken sind frei." I could believe whatever I wanted as long as I didn't mention it to my folks.

But, I had been raised to please dad. I REALLY WANTED to do whatever he wanted. I think if he had been anything but a Mormon (I was a budding feminist) I would be a Christian now. In fact, as an archaeologist, I was interested by the possibility of the Book of Mormon being about an ancient American civilization.

But this meant I had a tense early teenage. Dad was trying to convert me; mom wanted me not to convert but not to make dad unhappy. And I was an unhappy atheist reading the Book of Mormon to try to detect pre-Columbian cultural traits.

When I was 15, I was sitting in the library at school, when I suddenly realized, "Oh, wow! I kinda believe in God!" I dropped the book I was reading and thought about it for a while. I decided I was actually more comfortable with "kinda believing in God" than with being an atheist. I thought a bit more and told myself: "You'd better not think about this too hard, or it won't make any sense and you'll have to go back to being an atheist again."

In college, still in my synagogue-less town, I got into the Israeli Student Organization and the college International Folk Dancers, who did a lot of Israeli dances. I joked I did religion "through my feet."

After my mom died, I moved to Columbia, Missouri and for the first time was able to join a Jewish community. When I told my dad about it, he said (deeply disappointed), "But Jews aren't Christian! I thought you were a Christian!"

So I guess I had kept my thoughts to myself quite successfully.

And SURPRISE MOM! Dad didn't disown me after all, even after what must have been the most disappointing thing I had ever done in his eyes. We continued our weekly phone calls. He never expressed a desire to come to synagogue, and I never offered.

But the Rabbi in Missouri DID ask me an important question: "Did your dad go to Salt Lake within a year after your mom died?"

And he had...

I realized dad had had my mom baptized so she could go to Mormon heaven.

So, I guess my dad disappointed me, too...

After my Aunt died (at age 102), my dad was visiting me. He was chatting with the neighbor. I was on the back porch where I could hear him, but he couldn't see me. He told the neighbor: "Everything she does is to help people. I never realized that..."

OK. I was touched to think he (finally!) thought well of me. But, he spoke with such amazed astonishment in his voice!

After my own experiences as a kid, I really didn't plan to have children of my own. I ended up being a mom completely by surprise.

Although I have not always understood what they were thinking, why they wanted to do what they wanted to do, they have NEVER disappointed me. I may not understand them, but I think they are wonderful.

I just hope my relationship with them hasn't left them requiring 35 years in therapy...