I ALMOST GOT KILLED!

I was almost beaten to death as a child.

My mother ordered a new sofa, and it had a very beautiful burgundy red silky fabric with a floral design. She was very pleased with it. Somehow or other, on that very same day, I was about four or five and I found my big sister's manicure set. There were various scissors and files and what was probably a little cuticle blade with a handle. I looked at it closely and saw that it looked sharp, but I didn't know how sharp it was, so I tried it out on the fabric of the new couch. Surprisingly, it cut into the fabric like a scalpel. I didn't know it was that sharp. I hoped that nobody would notice the cut, as the fabric separated and the stuffing was beginning to show. Sure enough, my mother saw it right away and saw me red handed with the cuticle knife.

"What did you do?" she shouted, and my face turned red.

"How could you do such a thing?"

I had no answer. She asked again and again, raising her voice each time. Luckily her screaming attracted the attention of my big sister Belle, who came running. Lucky for me, because my sister was about to save my life. By the time Belle came, my mother was glaring at me and biting her fist. I was sure that when she was done biting her fist, she would bite my head off and I would be dead, but just in time, my sister told my mother,

"he's only a little boy, he didn't mean it, he didn't know what he was doing."

My mother took her fist out of her mouth and lowered her voice and asked me again, why did I do it. I felt I had no choice but to tell her the truth. I told her that I wanted to see if it was sharp.

Then she raised both fists in the air and was about to beat me into a pulp, but my sister intervened again, reminding her that I was just a little boy and didn't know any better and didn't mean to cut her new couch.

If not for my big sister, Belle, I would not be here typing this. I would not have grown up and gone to elementary school and junior high school and the Bronx High School of Science and the University of MIchigan undergraduate and medical school, and then an internship and psychiatric residency and had a ten year Freudian psychoanalysis, which helped me be sane to this very day.

Honest to God, I didn't mean to cut that couch. I only wanted to see if that little knife was sharp. It sure was, like a little scalpel. Perhaps this event was the reason I did not become a surgeon, but became the opposite, a psychiatrist, also known as a shrink. The near death experience with my enraged mother shrunk my ego and forced me to realize I was a small and helpless and vulnerable and an insignificant little creature that deserved to die.

It took a lifetime to reassure myself that it is OK to be alive, even to be happy and relatively secure, even to be typing these words without breaking out into a sweat.