be sleeping from now on.”
I looked up at my mother and asked, “Where will you and Margie sleep?”
All three grown-ups laughed.
“Margie and I will sleep at home,” my mother said.
Panic shook me. I was being sent away again. For the past year, I’d lived in the apartment with my mother and aunt. Margie’s lingerie sales salary was so low that it was cheaper for her to work evenings and Saturdays, and take care of me on weekdays, than for my mother to pay for me to live at a boarding home. I loved being with Margie every day. She and I slept in the same room—so I wouldn’t disturb my mother’s sleep—and I knew that she’d comfort me if I called out for her at night. Now I felt sick to my stomach.
A brand-new doll sat on the pillow. It had perfectly curled brown hair, brown eyes, and a stiff pink dress. I hated it immediately. I hated the lady with the weird black clothes. I didn’t want to stay in this place. I wanted to go home with Margie to my own bed. I wanted to hear Margie breathing if I woke up scared in the middle of the night.
My mother opened the long box and showed me the contents. All my clothes and shoes were folded and stacked neatly, along with pink towels, white sheets, and a green blanket. My mother and aunt made the bed.
“There, honey,” my mother said, “now it’s all ready for you.” Then she put my clothes into the two drawers of a small metal cabinet that stood by the head of the bed.
“All your things are in here,” she added. “Your pajamas and underwear are in the top drawer, and your dresses and sweaters are in the bottom drawer. Your toothbrush, toothpaste, and hairbrush are here on the top of your cabinet. I’ll leave your jacket in the trunk.” She closed the lid of the trunk and slid it under the bed.
“My tummy hurts,” I said.
“You’ll be fine,” my mother snapped.
I looked at Margie. Her eyes were wet, so she looked around the room and at the nun, not at me.
“Has Anne had her dinner today?” Sister Mary Joseph asked.
“Yes, I cooked a big Sunday dinner. She ate a nice meal.”
“Good, then we’ll just give her some sandwiches in the dorm later. The cafeteria won’t be open until tomorrow.”
I wondered what a cafeteria was.
Sister Mary Joseph brought us back down the stairs to another, smaller, room. It had books, several tables and chairs that looked about my size, and bright-colored things like blocks, pegs, and crayons. On the other side of the room, a door and two windows looked out on a playground.
A different lady, dressed exactly like Sister Mary Joseph, greeted us. Her black shoes with black laces peeked out from under her dress. This new lady smiled and talked with my mother and aunt, but I wasn’t listening. Instead, I looked around at the things in the room, wondering what they all were. There were no other people around, just the four of us. The room echoed a little as the three women talked.
After a while, my mother announced, “It’s time for us to go, Anne Marie. Be a good girl now.”
“No, don’t leave me,” I cried.
“We’ll be back real soon, Anna Banana,” said Margie. “On Friday. I love you.”
I cried while my mother and Margie walked out the door then watched as they walked through the playground. Margie turned around and waved. My mother didn’t turn back. I thought I’d never see them again.
“There now, Anne Marie, it will be okay,” reassured the nun as she picked me up. “No need to cry. You’ll have fun here at Rosary. Tomorrow you’ll start school and meet the other children who will be here for you to play with.”
I should have been used to institutional life by that time. Throw my things into a duffle bag on Sunday afternoons and say, “C’mon, Ma and Margie, gotta get to Rosary on time.” But, being four years old, I wasn’t quite up to being a trooper about this leaving home stuff. I’d certainly had a lot of practice at it in my short life, though.
My mother later told me that I began my semi-incarceration at three months of age. I lived at the first group home Sunday afternoon through Thursday night and at my mother and aunt’s apartment for the rest of the week. The facility’s owner devised shortcuts to handle the dozen or so babies in her charge. Toddlers and older babies sat on potty chairs while they ate—to accomplish two functions at one time. Diapers were changed once a day. Babies were fed in their cribs with bottles propped on their chests. Crying babies were left alone.
By the time I was eight months old, I had a diaper rash severe enough for Margie to bring me to the family doctor despite the five-dollar charge—about a quarter of my mother’s weekly salary. Later in medical school, I shuddered when I saw pictures of bacterial skin infections that developed in severe diaper rashes, as I remembered Margie describing the raw, red area stretching from my upper legs to my waist, covering front, back, and sides. It would have been swollen and oozing a yellow liquid with areas of bleeding and peeling skin. After the doctor examined me, he told my mother to take me out of that home.
Years later, when my mother told me her side of this story, she talked about the difficulty of finding childcare in a time and place where women were expected to stay home with their babies. “That doctor made my life hell,” she said.
Now as a doctor myself, I can see the influence this man had on me. Some people become physicians to follow a family tradition or because they aspire to wealth and status. A few enter the medical profession in gratitude for excellent treatment through an injury or illness. I chose medicine in part because I wanted to save people—similar to how my childhood doctor rescued me from neglect. My research extends this desire to the general public; if I can discover whether diet changes, weight loss, or exercise reduces risk for cancer or other illness, then hopefully some people will be saved from suffering.
Within a month, my mother sent me to a home for physically and mentally handicapped children near Boston. Teresa Burns took care of babies and children with diverse conditions, such as polio, rheumatic heart disease, water on the brain, cerebral palsy, brain injury, and Down syndrome. In the 1950s, many of these children had life expectancies of only months or years. Their parents could not, or would not, care for them.
I’m not sure how I managed to get admitted to her facility. Maybe our doctor pulled some strings, saying I needed special treatment for the skin infection from my diaper rash. I certainly fit the criteria of having parents who did not want to take care of me. Full of love and warmth, Teresa was as wide as she was tall, her body as soft as a feather pillow. To this day I love the comfort of being hugged by a chubby woman. This helps as an obesity physician and researcher, as I’ve never thought of obese patients as ugly, but rather as people with a health condition. I stayed with Teresa until I was three years old. For the following year, Margie babysat me on weekdays while my mother worked. The comfort and joy I experienced with Margie during this period made the move to Rosary Academy even more wrenching.
Rosary was my third institutional home. It was as if I was a repeat offender. Go to an institution, do your time, get a short reprieve at home, commit a crime against your mother, face more time. My mother would often slap my face
