“I would have traded a lot of the privilege I had just to feel safe. If you’re a child in constant self-preservation mode, it really doesn’t matter if you’re living in a penthouse on the Upper East Side”
Photo: Marion Ettlinger Ariel Leve, an award-winning U.K. journalist, grew up with her larger-than-life feminist poet mother and a series of nannies in a penthouse apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Her father, a lawyer, lived in South East Asia; Leve saw him about once a year for summer vacations.
The book opens with a scene from when you were six and your nanny died while sitting next to you — on a plane — as you were returning from visiting your father in Bangkok. You are suspended in air and the only stable force in your life vanishes. That must have had a huge impact. What she did was extraordinary. She had these dispatches about what was going on in my life and she kept carbon copies of them. It was as if she handed me my childhood. And to read about what I went through from the point of view of this adult was a relief in some ways because I finally had a source that validated my feelings. But then, at the same time, it was also painful and sad to think about me as this vulnerable little girl.
And your mother had suffered, too. She’d been abandoned when she was younger , and it seems like she had a pathological fear of being alone. I didn’t even recognize until I was an adult that that was inappropriate behavior. My mother needed me to spend time with her, and there was no awareness of improper behavior. Once I had a classmate over who my mother let join in because she didn’t see anything shameful or secretive about what was going on. Of course, after that, the classmate was never allowed to come over again. I was very young, six or seven, and I didn’t understand why. For me, it was a gift to have my mother’s attention.
It took me a very long time to recover from my childhood. I was able to function, but the vibrations and aftershocks were always beneath the surface. To cope as a child, I had to be on guard at all times. And that was something that really did carry over into my adult life, specifically in my twenties. In my thirties, intimacy was not to be trusted; hope would be met with disappointment. I wore a suit of armor to survive my childhood, and my adulthood was all about learning to take it off.
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