Susan P. (1937-38)

This entry is written at the specific instruction of my daughter, who says, "your grandchildren will want to know about your birth. It's their history too." The following paragraphs are for them and for their descendants.

My older sister, Susan, died of pneumonia at the age of nine months on March 15, 1938. If she had lived, I wouldn't exist, nor would my ten descendants, and no one would notice.

I was born on March 11, 1939, just one year minus four days after Susan died. It seems obvious that I was purposely conceived as a substitute for the dead child -- and it therefore follows that I was delivered into a disrupted, stressed family. Was I to be treasured as a compensation for past grief or to be resented as an imperfect interloper? Or both, simultaneously? To raise the ante, it is also a fact that during that fatal March of 1938 when Susan lay dying, my older brother Eugene, then just shy of three years of age, was gravely ill of the same disease that killed his younger sister, and that although he was at death's door, he managed to pull through.

So let us consider the situation of my parents, Manny and Lil, in June of 1938, the month of my conception. Poor Susan lay a-mouldering in her tiny grave for just three months. The Great Depression was still going strong and Hitler's Nuremberg Laws had been in force since 1935. Father Coughlin, celebrity Jew-hater, was agitating thirty million American radio listeners a week. Kristallnacht was just five months away and most everyone knew that war was imminent. Residing on East 9th Street in Flatbush were my grief-stricken young parents, who had helplessly watched one child die and had come within a hairbreadth of losing another. We must imagine them reeling, tearful, clinging to one another, dealing as best they might with heartbreaking anxiety and pain. Yet despite public and personal disasters, they made the courageous choice to throw the dice again, and out of their anguish to bring forth another child -- and to run the real risk, in those pre-antibiotic days, of offering still another sacrifice to pneumonia or some other dread incurable illness.

If my parents were still alive, I'd congratulate them, celebrate them, not because their resilience produced me, but because to beget a substitute child in chaotic, dangerous 1938 seems to me, now, looking back from the perspective of 2020, to be an act of unfathomable courage.

Or so I would like to think. It's also possible that I'm here not because of their heroism but because of a failure of contraception. I'll never know. I didn't ask; they never said, and the facts are unrecoverable. Lil and Manny wouldn't dream of speaking aloud about anything so intimate as sex or reproduction, certainly not with their children and, who knows, perhaps not even with one another. In that regard, they were typical of their generation. Personal matters were kept close to the vest. 

When Lil was five months pregnant, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland. Exactly three weeks before I landed on this planet, 20,000 Nazi supporters rallied, complete with Fascist salutes, at the old Madison Square Garden on 49th Street. Four days after I arrived, on the anniversary --the yahrzeit -- of the death of little Susan, while my mother was regaining her strength in Manhattan's Park East hospital on East 83rd Street, German tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. For Lil, for Manny, personal and public crises intersected. Nazis foreign and domestic were at the gates, and inside the hospital, my mother was still mourning the loss of the little girl whom my Uncle Dan, my mother's brother, remembered as an "exceptionally beautiful child." And lying beside Lil in her bed was the newborn, who was welcomed with joy, I'm sure, but with ambivalence also. Not an eternally glowing-in-memory girl child but me --an undistinguished chap, to put it in the most favorable light. Not "trailing clouds of glory" but instead enveloped in a fog of danger and possibly regret.

My parents, as I have said, kept their emotions tightly buttoned, so while Susan was not mourned or even mentioned within the family, she was never forgotten. In fact, throughout my childhood she remained a mysterious ghostly presence. In my parents' bedroom was a simple display -- a child-size wood-and-wicker chair and above it, on the wall, a gold-framed picture of a very pretty infant. The shrine fascinated me, and I would sneak into my parent's bedroom to study it. Sneak? Yes, because their bedroom was a consecrated place not to be defiled by Eugene or Jonathan or me. Off limits. It was the sin of all childhood sins to violate the taboo and cross into the forbidden zone. My mother made an unholy fuss about this rule. "You are not to go into our bedroom. Ever." Which I did, regularly, when no one was looking --- but it felt like a midnight intrusion into a deep dark country graveyard. Very creepy. Who is that infant in the picture? And why is she not allowed to rest in peace? I knew better than to ask.

I never thought, then, to wonder how Manny and Lil, contemplating the gilded idol morn and eve, could fail to compare their frozen-in-time lost infant to her scruffy successor? Of course I was aware that my "difficult" mother was a deeply troubled woman. But never, trust me, did I have the least glimmer that the shade of the dead infant haunted our family -- and myself in particular. No child, certainly not me, would have been so insightful. It's transparent now, but it was anything but obvious then. Nor could anyone possibly have predicted that there was to be an area of study within the discipline of psychology called "The Replacement Child Syndrome" (RCS). And that I was unequivocally a textbook case of such.  

RCS lay dormant. Forty years later, and forty years ago, when I was in midlife, not having thought for decades about my dead sister or her shrine or my long-departed parents, I experienced something of a revelation. It came about indirectly, but dramatically.

I was teaching classes on Shakespeare's plays. and I found myself paying much more heed to Romeo and Juliet than that immature early tragedy warrants. I was especially intrigued by Shakespeare's invention of the character of young Juliet -- which is far more subtle than is necessary for the plot. With Juliet, Shakespeare attempted something utterly unprecedented in any previous work of literature. He cleverly situated his young heroine in a complicated family in which Juliet had, in effect, two mothers -- a birth mother, Capulet wife, who is cold, distant and aloof, and a metaphorical and therefore real mother, Nurse Angelica, who is undisciplined but sensual and sexual. The two mothers, carefully differentiated, precipitate or echo or explain the conflict within Juliet between propriety and passion. One mother embraces and promulgates Verona's rigid mores, while the other is impulsive, emotional, and anarchic. In addition -- and now it all was starting to become extremely personal for me -- Shakespeare provided Juliet with a backstory (unusual because his characters rarely have prior histories). It comes to light that the Nurse's own natural daughter had died in infancy, that the bereaved mother was engaged to suckle Juliet -- and that Angelica has been Juliet's surrogate mother and companion for almost fourteen years. So Juliet is, for the Nurse, clearly and obviously a replacement child. How curiously relevant! How provocative!

I then remembered that William Shakespeare himself was such a child. According to the Trinity Church records, John and Mary Shakespeare had suffered two tragedies before April 23, 1564 when William was born. Their first child, a daughter named Joan, had been baptized four years earlier, in 1560, but lived only for two months. A second daughter, Margaret, was baptized in 1562 and lived for just under one year. A full year! and then the grave! How horrible for all concerned! Young Will therefore entered the world as the boy child who replaced not one but two older sisters. Even in an age of staggering infant mortality, two such premature deaths must surely have weighed on both John and Mary and on William himself. Is it an accident that Juliet is the only certified replacement child in early modern English literature (at least, the only one that I can recall at this moment)?

Mulling these matters, I soon discovered that I had failed to register some additional facts about the Capulet family that by rights ought to have set my heart all aflutter. Listen to the Nurse nattering on about her surrogate daughter Juliet.

Even or odd, of all days in the year,

Come Lamass Eve at night shall she be fourteen,.

Susan and she -- God rest all Christian souls--

Were of an age.  Well, Susan is with God.

She was too good for me.

How could I have missed it?  Right at the heart of the Capulet family dynamics, and therefore at the heart of the play, is not just a dead infant and a dead daughter, but a dead Susan.  

I have to say that this discovery put my brain into quite an epiphanic tizzy. How could I not have recognized the parallels between the Capulet family and my own?  And also, given my near-compulsive interest in the bonds and affiliations among Capulet wife and Nurse Angelica and Juliet -- how could my conscious mind have ignored information that had so vexed my unconscious?  

Alerted by this 1595 play to my own personal being, I set out to learn about the Replacement Child Syndrome (RCS) in what is charitably called the "literature" of psychoanalysis. While almost everything I read was either obtuse or so encrusted with obscurantist jargon as to be indecipherable, it was not hard to distill the gist. According to the experts, a replacement is always vulnerable and at hazard, especially so if the deceased infant has not been properly mourned, or-- as they say -- if there has not been "closure." Such a lad or lass goes through childhood constantly judged to be inferior to the idealized dead child. At worst, the love that is owed to the living child may be withdrawn and the replacement resented --  less loved, or even unloved; tolerated but undervalued.

Had she lived, the dead girl, let us call her Susan, of infinite and golden potential, would certainly have grown up to be an exceedingly dutiful daughter as well as a concert cellist and a world-class figure-skater who when just two years out of Yale would have created a state-of-the-art gynecological clinic in an underserved village in Moldova. The other, the replacement -- me -- bawls and pukes, bites a neighbor child on the cheek, throws a colossal shitfit over a missing puzzle piece, shatters an heirloom lamp, steals comic books from the local candy store, wastes weeks moping in his bedroom, totals the DeSoto, and fails trigonometry. No wonder he's a disappointment.

Well, maybe I'm laying it on with a trowel, but that's the general idea. 

Now (this is still forty years ago) reconstituted as a Syndrome, I entered into my "poor poor pitiful me" period. I wasted kilowatts of energy and eons of precious time conceptualizing myself as a case of "wrongful birth." I shifted the blame for all my emotional foibles onto my parents, especially, to be honest, onto my mother. Right at her doorstep I laid low self-esteem, intermittent depression, fear of success, disabling shyness and even (this was a bit of stretch) procrastination. But it didn't wash and it didn't last. I'm ashamed and embarrassed that I allowed myself to attribute my personal problems to my willing but helpless mother. Not that there wasn't a smidgeon of truth to the RCS analysis. Freud says that "a man who has won the love of his mother is always a hero in his own eyes"; well, that kind of heroism wasn't going to be my lot. Of course I would have preferred to have enjoyed intimacy with a smiling supportive mother. Not what happened. But it was selfish and wrong of me to dwell on slights which were trivial compared to the traumas undergone by my parents.They, not me, were and are the heroes of this story.

The bedrock is that the RCS, though real, was only of middling significance to me. It was devastating for Juliet, because it led directly to her suicide, and it may have served as a spur to Shakespeare, who became Shakespeare and, incidentally, fathered a daughter named Susannah. For me -- well, it was it only important for the moment. I was a wounded child -- no, not wounded, scratched --but not a disabled one. I was healthy enough to pursue if not a distinguished, certainly a respectable career, to become a reliable father, to meet my obligations to my extended family and community and to form a long-lasting marriage -- and when that first marriage was cut short by disease and death, to achieve in old age a second mature and satisfying relationship. My parents must have done a great deal right, for I became what my father used to praise, without a shred of irony, as a "proper, tax-paying citizen." At this point in my octogenarian life, there's no room for that old self-pitying me; instead, there's great admiration and regard for both Lil and Manny, who endured. And who, in the successes of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, continue to thrive and prosper.  

An addendum: in the psychological "literature", I found no mention, neither jot nor tittle, of the family configuration in which a male child replaces a female. No doubt such situations have by now been thoroughly researched by trained analysts, but not back then, when such a discussion might have been useful to me. The case of Juliet, where one girl replaces another, has been explored, but not Shakespeare's situation, or mine. I wonder sometimes whether the case of a boy succeeding a girl might lead to gender confusion, or as they now say, "fluidity" (if, for example, the parents unconsciously favor female traits in their son). I don't mean sexual practice, because I myself have never been (or wanted to be) anything other than a vanilla heterosexual. But I'm not even slightly macho; I am strongly domestic, comfortable with roles that have been traditionally reserved for women. I'm a gatherer, not a hunter; not the kind of person who goes to the fights with the guys or plays rugby and eventually, shunning the entrapment of wife or family, rides off on his horse into the sunset. I am much more likely to clean the bathroom, weed the garden, make some bad rhymes, play casino with the grandkids, and whip up a beef stew for dinner. 

Another addendum: I always wondered why Lil and Manny decided to give me an awkward obscure Biblical name. They had no interest in anything remotely smacking of religion. So why choose the name of one of Job's false comforters?  What were they thinking?  During my pitiful period, I imagined that they chose the name because they were disappointed with me. We can't name him Susan, said their joint unconscious, so let's give him an ugly name the diminutive of which is female. That was my theory, but now I have another idea. Perhaps, in March of 1939, to resurrect an obscure biblical name was to give the middle finger to Hitler. If so, it was an act of defiance. I hope I'm right.

And finally: my younger brother Jonathan, who was as equally improbable a replacement as I, was born in July of 1942, seven month after the Day of Infamy. He too entered in troubling times. Jon was an extremely handsome youth, regularly gushed over by friends and family -- and slightly envied by me. One of his shaping childhood experiences is of my mother holding his head in her hands and saying, "You would have made a very beautiful girl."

Jon too is a gatherer rather than a hunter, and when I'm in the kitchen slicing the potatoes and carrots for a big pot of beef stew, it's his excellent recipe that I follow.

Comments

[Kristina Schellinski]

Dear Dr. Metablog,
I read with great interest your insightful autobiographical 'in-a-nutshell' experience of being a replacement child.
I am a psychoanalyst and author of "Individuation for Adult Replacement Children. Ways of Coming into Being" and co-founder of https://replacementchildforum.com.
Would you authorize us to post this blog on our website, or could we invite you to contribute a letter or blog of your choosing?
We are raising consciousness for the replacement child syndrome which affects very many people, many of them unawares that this is what they suffer from. Our site is for those directly concerned and for therapists helping them.
Yours sincerely, Kristina Schellinski, Geneva, Switzerland

[Don Z. Block]

A Jonathan Pearlman was in several of my classes in P.S. 217; I think the last one was the 8th grade with Kieselbach. (The birthdates match up, too. I was born on March 10, 1943, so he was older but could have been in the same grade.) He was a very good athlete who (I think) occasionally spoke with a slight stutter. He was not a big guy but could punch a ball with power. I came across a book once by Jonathan Pearlman, "Two To Tango," and figured out that the picture of the author on the dustjacket had to be the Jonathan Pearlman from P.S. 217 in Brooklyn. I even managed to contact him and got him to sign several copies. The book had many quotable passages, too, that lent themselves to double acrostic puzzles. There is also one chapter in that book that really stands out, a chapter where the narrator revisits the house he grew up in and meets his deceased parents. Sound familiar?