Being Raised by a Cartoon Shark

Who often smelled blood in the water

Aug 19, 2024

Remember Bruce from Finding Nemo?

Ello Bruce!

He was the friendly great white shark, leader of the 12-step meeting where shark members vowed to stop killing and eating fish.

Bruce brings Nemo and Dory to the meeting, and in his briny Australian accent, he assures them, the other sharks, and himself, that “Fish are friends, not food!”

Nemo and Dory are afraid, but the situation seems manageable, so they begin to believe they just may survive.

Until Bruce smells blood in the water.

Then the whites of his laughing eyes go black and he transforms into a mindless killing machine.

After that, there’s no reasoning with him. The only thing to do is to run.

I was three-years-old the first time I remember my mother erupting into an anger that caused me to cower and shield my eyes.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you!” she roared, looming over me, a gold-ringed finger pointing close to my face. I looked up, and in her dark brown eyes, I saw something I couldn’t name. She had changed. She looked furious and lethal.

I ran from her.

After that, I learned to try to keep her happy. I learned to try to prevent her from smelling blood in the water. But what constituted blood always varied. So I grew cautious. I tiptoed and hid. I smiled obediently.

But sometimes I forgot my shoes by the back door. Sometimes I left my plate in the sink. Sometimes I shoved my little brother. And before I knew what was happening, my mother’s eyes went black with rage.

When I ran, of course, she caught me. That never went well.

After a while, I stopped running. Instead, I froze. I appeased. I fawned.

As I grew into an adult, rather than dissipate, the fear grew with me.

I was thirty when my husband was unmoored by a major job loss. My mother opened her small Santa Fe home to us and our three children. Her kindness was a huge relief.

About three weeks in, my mother offered to keep the kids while we went away overnight for a job interview. While we were gone, she loaded them into her car and offered to let my ten-year-old son drive. He drove her and his little sisters over a mile up a busy, four-lane road to a sandwich shop, and then back to my mother’s house where he crashed through her next-door neighbor’s garage door.

She told him not to tell us.

When we returned and saw the neighbor’s bashed-in garage door, my mother blamed it on a friend, and my son shrugged nervously. Later that day, our five-year-old detonated the truth.

I walked into the kitchen where my mother was putting clean dishes into cabinets. I stood a few feet away, my hands trembling. I cleared my throat

“I know who broke the neighbor’s garage door,” I said.

Her head jerked up. She coughed out a jumpy, high-pitched laugh. “You caught me!”

I stared at her, my face hot with anger and fear. I waited for an apology or an explanation. But she just stared back defiantly. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

“Mom, you told my children to lie to me?”

“Yeah, so?” Her face broke into a thin-lipped smile. Her eyes became aggressively huge.

“You think it’s okay to tell your grandchildren to lie to their parents?”

“You’re one to talk, little girl. You lied to me when you were a teenager.”

I blinked at her, dumbfounded. I opened my mouth once, then again, like a fish. “That’s what you’re comparing this to?”

“You bet I am.”

And that’s when I saw it—deep inside her brown eyes—something ferocious.

There was blood in the water.

There would be no reasoning. No distracting the shark. Suddenly, nothing in my body felt rational. I had to get away. Had to get my children to safety. I hurried back into the small guestroom and shut the door.

Jesus, why had I left my children with her? I had endangered them. I had never been safe with her, why would they? The shame made my head feel tight, as though it was dangerously ballooning out, ready to burst. My husband tried to comfort me, but I knew there wasn’t anything to do but run.

We packed up and drove to the east coast to stay with my in-laws. It was a desperate time. Within a couple of months, we relocated to Maine.

I didn’t leave my children alone with my mother again until the youngest ones were in high school. I lied in order to avoid her.

Many years later, a therapist suggested there might be healthier and more empowering ways of dealing with her. That’s when I learned that I was still stuck in childhood fear.

It took many more years of therapy to ultimately let go.

Now I hardly ever worry about blood in the water.

I’ve de-fanged the sharks.