Learning to Listen

ONE

Waco to Princeton:

“Berry’s So Good with Babies”

Waco, where I was born on May 10, 1918, to Pauline Battle Brazelton and Thomas Berry Brazelton, is known as the “Heart of Texas.” It was a small town in those days, and to the residents’ dismay, it has stayed a small town. When I was little, Waco had one tall building. I used to dream about it falling on our house and killing all of us. No one could entirely convince me that we were too many blocks away.

There were three distinct social classes in Waco: white, black, and Mexican American. White people owned and ran everything. Black people did all of the domestic work, and Mexican Americans did the rest. The black woman who primarily raised me from age two on was our cook, my beloved Annie May. She had a son my age with whom I was never allowed to play. In our Texas town, there was openly expressed prejudice about how “uppity” blacks could be. In school black children were treated differently, as if they were expected to fail. As for the Mexican American children, few even got to school. In my memory, those few wore ragged, dirty clothes, and we white children were taught early on to shun them. I remember wanting to play with them and resenting these societal barriers. Looking back I wonder whether part of my life’s work may have been compensation for the deep hurts and prejudices I saw inflicted on many children in this small, ultraconservative town.

My Parents

My father, Thomas Berry Brazelton, was born and raised in Waco. His family owned lumberyards throughout Texas. After attending the Virginia Military Institute for one year, he headed to Princeton. While he was there, he lettered in football, track, crew, and swimming. His real love was diving, and he was an intercollegiate champion at Princeton in 1914.

Dad was a rebel in Waco. Though a member of the conservative city council, he advocated for equal rights for blacks and Mexican Americans. His father, my grandfather Ba, famous as a liberal before him, tried to prevent the lynching of a young black boy who was on trial for allegedly raping a white woman. We were a marked family in a religious, right-wing town. As I remember, when I was in preschool, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of our house. Dad would disappear because they often came looking for him. Mother would fend them off. Annie May would gather my brother, Chuck, and me and climb under the bed in the back room as if that might shield us.

During prohibition in the late 1920s, Dad also took an independent position. I remember hearing a bang in our cellar as we sat upstairs at dinner. His face paled and he said, “Oh my God! Now don’t any of you go into the cellar until we hear twenty-nine more bangs.” He was making homemade beer, and it was exploding. Dad was high-strung because of hyperthyroidism and had to have his thyroid removed in 1925 by Dr. George Crile in Cleveland, Ohio. Before that he had been terribly difficult to live with. At one point we went to a resort in Arkansas to try to calm him down. Once my father was on medication, he was quiet and subdued, but Mother remained preoccupied by his illness and was often hard to reach. In an effort to make everyone happier, I stole a toy train from a shop to give to Chuck. Mother made me return it and apologize to the owner. I was devastated.

My mother was a gallant and strong-minded woman. Gifted as a pianist, she was sent away to the conservatory in Cleveland and subsequently performed as a solo pianist with the Fort Worth symphony. At some point in her teens she was diagnosed with TB (as were so many in those days) and sent to a spa in Asheville, North Carolina, for the summer. One night while playing the piano, she was approached by my father, then a sprightly Princetonian. “Can you play any Gershwin?” Back then this was new and daring music. She played for him and their courtship began. Marriage was inevitable. My parents were married in Waco but traveled back to Asheville for their honeymoon. I’m told I was conceived at the Manor Hotel in Asheville. Though my father had wanted to settle in New York, having been offered the equivalent of a seat on the stock exchange, his father wanted him to return to Waco to help run the lumber business. In those days, sons and daughters were expected to accept their family’s wishes. I am not sure that he ever fully recovered from his longing to be on the East Coast. My mother sensed his anguish at being brought back to Waco and did her best to support him. She gave up her piano for golf. They played together every day. Family meals were about the shots they should have made but didn’t. They were both top seeded, so tournaments were the highlights of their lives. I’ve hated golf ever since and have never played it.

When I was born during the First World War, my father was away training on the East Coast. I was nine months old when he first saw me. I was told my mother was waiting in a long line at the station, dressed in her best new suit. I was in her arms, probably fingering her nose, her mouth, pulling on her earrings. A long line of uniformed and medaled men came off the train. My father would have come down the platform, half running, in his well-cut uniform with its captain’s bars. He was handsome—not his face and his prominent nose but in the athletic way he carried himself. Apparently he rushed up, hugging both of us at once and took me abruptly out of my mother’s arms. “Little Berry!” he shouted as he squeezed me in a big hug. As the story goes, I began to cry, louder and louder. What right did this absolute stranger have to take me from my mother’s familiar and warm chest? What right did he have to yell at me and squeeze me? I’m told I wailed louder and louder, in the chaos of all these reuniting families. My father was no doubt stunned. “He doesn’t like me!” he said to my mother as he handed me back.

The story rings true to me as I’ve grown to understand both the acute awareness of nine-month-old babies at the peak of stranger anxiety and the hypersensitivity of a new father as he tries to connect with his baby for the first time. Had my father known to wait until I reached out for him, our relationship might have been different from the first. Reflecting on this story later on sparked my interest in establishing a rapport with fathers-to-be during pregnancy and preparing them for times when their relationship with the baby may be strained, so that they can understand the baby’s behavior and not feel hurt or resentful. In my practice, I’ve sought to capture fathers for their babies from the first.

The chance in later years to watch fathers who weren’t present for the first several months of their child’s life confirmed the importance of a father’s early experiences with his baby. It isn’t easy for a parent to catch up with the milestones of development; the stresses around a new baby—the diapering, the burping, the unresolved crying, the mistakes—all become positive steps in the family’s growth. A father who has to suffer through these initial vicissitudes is setting down layers of attachment to his baby.

My father missed out on this early relationship and, perhaps as a result, always seemed pretty distant, even wary of me. I’m sure he loved me but I never really knew him. My mother fostered that distance with what I now see as unconscious “gatekeeping.” In my work I’ve learned that everyone who cares deeply about a baby is in competition for that baby: parents with each other, grandparents who feel “if only they’d do it my way,” caregiver and parent, parent and teacher, coach and parent. It’s an inevitable reaction and part of attachment. Since my mother had been sole parent through my early infancy, she believed she knew me better. She probably corrected my father whenever he tried to take any responsibility for me, and, as a result, he may have given up early. I have learned that, by alerting adults who care about the same baby to this gatekeeping tendency, they are less at its mercy. Otherwise, they are bound to try to shut the other adult out. When I was older, I interpreted my father’s tentativeness as disappointment. Now I am able to see it more clearly. He always professed pride in me but was distant. Remoteness may have been an incentive to me to make him proud, but it also fueled my ambitions. But we were never really friends. He actually seemed closer to my peers than to me.

Swimming and diving continued to be important to my father. He used to take me and my best friend, Jesse Milam, out to the Fish Pond country club’s pool for diving lessons. He spent all of his time encouraging and praising Jesse. Yet when I’d try and even succeed in completing the same maneuvers, he was silent, without comment, as if he had expected me to learn from the teaching he gave my friend. Feeling that I couldn’t please him, I became clumsier, and he would ignore me even more. To me, locker rooms smelled of sweat and danger. Perhaps the danger I felt was due to the competitive atmosphere. I dreaded going with him and have never been comfortable in clubs since. He wanted to show me off, but I must have made a poor showing. We slid right past each other in our clumsy efforts to connect as father and son. As an adult I missed out on the chance to get to know him better, for he died after my first year of medical school. Years later, when my youngest daughter asked me about her grandfather, I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know much about who he was as a person.

Minding the Cousins

At every family event, and there were many, I was put in charge of all nine first cousins while aunts and uncles and grandparents prepared for the big dinner. In order to please my grandmother, whom I called Bama, I became adept at handling many small children at once. I could keep them amused and safe and keep them from crying for up to two hours at a time. A miraculous feat, I realize today! Only ten or eleven years old myself, my relative seniority nevertheless dominated them, and they didn’t dare not mind me. I learned something else that has served me well over the years: to study children’s behavior in order to understand them as individuals. I could look at a face and tell you when one of my cousins was getting hungry rather than dizzy in the rocking swing. I learned to sing to them, to read to them, and to anticipate their meltdowns. Bama used to say, “Berry’s so good with babies.” Whenever I hear that today, I hear her voice. I’ve never been as proud of any other accolade. She pointed the way to my becoming a pediatrician and observer of infant and child behavior.

My Brother

My first memory of my only sibling was his birth two and a half years after mine. Churchill Jones Brazelton, whom we called Chuck, was born, as I was, at our house on Gorman Avenue in Waco. My mother was reluctant to give up anything as important as childbirth to a hospital setting. Hospitals were for illness, not for anything that could be done at home. My tonsils were extracted on our kitchen table when I was five. For an earache, my eardrums were punctured at home, without anesthesia. Why have a baby in the hospital?

During the birth, my father sat with me on the porch awaiting the doctor’s arrival. The house was quiet. There were no groans, no crying out with labor pains that I can remember. My father, dressed for work in his suit and tie, fidgeted restlessly beside me. Unused to his company, I sat primly by his side—both of us waiting. It seemed endless.

Finally the doctor drove up in his Model T Ford. He extracted his black bag and marched with dignity and assurance past us into the house. “You boys stay here.” From that moment, I’ve never wanted a black doctor’s bag because I associate them with my brother’s birth and my resentment of him. (My doctor’s bag is brown and to this day sits by the front door.) In a short while, there was a piercing infant wail from the back bedroom. “It’s over!” shouted my father as he rushed into the house, leaving me alone on the porch. I cringed but didn’t move. Would they come back to get me? After an endless time, the doctor returned with his black bag. He gave me what seemed to be a pitying look and said, “You’re lucky, you have a lovely little brother. His name is Churchill. Go on in and see him!” I remembered creeping into the house, peeping into the bedroom where my mother was lying in bed, barely awake. My father was sitting in the only chair, exhausted. The nurse midwife who had been with my mother throughout her labor and had directed the delivery was straightening up the bedroom. My new little brother was wrapped up like a mummy and lying quietly in his special little crib next to the bed. I felt as if I must watch this without making a noise. No one had remembered me. I stood alone in the doorway, quiet, afraid to speak. I’ll never forget that empty feeling.

It was not an auspicious beginning for my relationship with Chuck. But it got worse. He was so “cute.” He was roly-poly most of our childhood. Eminently squeezable. And I wanted terribly to squeeze him but hard. He had a turned-up nose, wavy blonde hair, and a merry, bewitching smile.

I hated him. And in truth we never got to know one another. My mother kept us apart, keeping Chuck to herself. Again, she was gatekeeping without realizing it. I have no memory of playing with him but many memories of fighting with him. We argued about anything and everything, yelling at each other until Mother would yell louder and tell us to stop. Mother always blamed me for the fighting, even when Chuck started it. Did he do it for the attention and, if so, whose? He already had Mother’s. Was this an attempt to have as intense a relationship with me as with our mother? But that did not happen. Even at Princeton, where our enrollments overlapped, we had nothing in common and therefore interacted very little. I don’t even know what he did there.

When he was born, Bama told my mother, “Chuck will never live up to Berry.” This statement aggravated my mother, who subsequently began a lifelong job of spoiling and overprotecting him. She hovered over him in a way that did not allow him to make his own choices about anything. She hand-fed him until he was four. Toilet training and the other important steps in childhood were further occasions for her excessive attention. It left him too dependent on her, and I believe he paid a terrible price for it later in his life.

Chuck was drafted into the army in 1940 and never finished Princeton. He went to Germany, and I was told that he was the first lieutenant to go into Hitler’s office after his suicide. He brought home important relics from Hitler’s office, which I still have and plan to donate to the Holocaust Museum. After four years in the army, Chuck moved to Paris, where he became an expert on French antiques. Of course, Mother went to visit him there. She and Chuck were more like friends than mother and son. Her visits to me and my family around that time were neither easy nor affectionate. She was uncomfortable with my new wife and had no idea about what my work entailed. Although I think she was proud of my accomplishments, she never expressed that pride.

After Paris, Chuck went to New Orleans and from there to New York City, where he became a well-known collector and dealer. Looking back, I think my mother’s overprotection made independent life hard for him. He became an alcoholic. From then on, he depended on her to rescue him from the crises of an alcoholic’s life. Even though she went to Al-Anon and learned about enabling, she could not help but continue to try to save him. As for our relationship, Chuck and I came together when he was fifty. We had several years to relate as brothers, though much of that time I was taking care of him and supporting him financially. My children remember frequent calls from New York saying that Chuck had been found drunk and was in Bellevue or needed to go to rehab. When Mother died in 1976, Chuck was undone. He died in 1980 at age sixty from alcoholism. My mother had suffered greatly over his problems, and it was hard for me to watch. I came to realize that my mother’s lifelong hovering was a sign of misguided passion. One of the more important goals of my pediatric practice has been to help parents channel their passions in a constructive direction, to face problems early on, not waiting until after a child has already failed. I’m also aware that my use of the word hovering is pejorative and damning and that it is a judgment leveled at my mother. At the same time it is a useful concept for anyone trying to understand the effects of overprotection and to devise ways of warning overprotective parents of the dangers for their child’s subsequent futures. Watching my mother and Chuck certainly gave me insight for my preventive work: our current generation of two-career parents is likely to hover out of guilt at not being at home enough with their children.

Annie May

My caregiver when I was little was a wonderful, ample black woman named Annie May. She lived in the small servant’s house behind our house in Waco. She was in her forties and had no husband—just lots of “visitors” to the house out back. Annie May was always there when I came home from school. She always said, “Hello, little Berry! I’m glad you’re here. Now, how about some milk and a donut?” She was also our cook during my childhood. I loved her.

Annie May always made me laugh and feel cared for. We giggled every afternoon. I told her my troubles. She told me some of hers. She loved my younger brother, but she loved me openly. She was our main source of security as well as our disciplinarian. After school Mother was always out, often playing golf with my father. When anyone came to visit Annie May, I was jealous. I didn’t want to share her. Once, when I was four, I was dressed up and called in to greet Mother’s club of stylish ladies. They oohed and aahed, then asked me cutely, “And who do you love best in all the world?” “Annie May,” I chirped. My mother’s face fell, and I ran out of the room.

When I was sent to preschool, I felt torn away from Annie May, and, with each step in my ventures away from home, I felt a bit more separated from her. Because I wasn’t sure she could read, I never wrote her letters from boarding school or college. But I would rush into the kitchen when I got back. She could read my face and we would just pick up where we left off.

After my father died and our circumstances changed, Annie May went to work for another family in Waco. I kept in touch with her there until she died in 1986. I felt devastated and wished that I could have brought her north with me to live.

Montessori

At four, I was sent to a Montessori school. This had been started by a Mrs. Alice Greenhill, who, farsighted for Waco, went to Italy to train under Maria Montessori. Montessori had been a physician in Rome but soon became involved in children’s learning. She gave up her medical practice to become a teacher of teachers. One of her important insights was that children learned from “within” much more than they learned from “without.” In order to reach each child, she developed a way of observing so as to respond to the individuality of each one. She trained teachers to watch and listen and to trust their observations of each child’s temperament, learning style, and desire to learn. For example, she’d urge a teacher to watch a child with a puzzle and not to help her unless she became overwhelmed. She described how, after a child had struggled to solve the puzzle, one could watch her face as she finally mastered it. The glorious recognition of “I did it myself!” showed learning from within. This recognition by Dr. Montessori was twenty to thirty years ahead of Jean Piaget, who later called it the child’s “inner feedback cycle” and labeled it the most powerful force of learning. I use their theories to help parents see both their child’s struggles and ultimate successes in each stage of development and to urge them to hold off long enough to let the child “do it myself.” That sense is a powerful driver of the development of the central nervous system.

I was lucky to be admitted to Mrs. Greenhill’s school. It was right across the street. Four of us went to preschool together and became fast friends. After this early exposure to the excitement of “inner learning,” we left Montessori after two years and entered first grade at the age of six. We were kept together all the way through school, jumping grades twice, and ended up graduating at the ages of fifteen and sixteen. All four of us were intellectually way ahead of our physical development, and this disconnect cost us emotionally. As the smallest and least developed of all my classmates, it was a terrible burden to my self-esteem to be the last one chosen for every team. No one wanted me on their side. They had begun to grow and develop, to have smelly feet and underarm hair, at least two years before I did. Even if I’d been an athletic star, I’d have had trouble with other boys my age. But I wasn’t athletic. I was smart. I ended up as salutatorian, which didn’t contribute to my popularity.

As an adult, I realize what a fine foundation Mrs. Greenhill laid in kindergarten. In contrast, reflecting upon my later school years convinced me that precocity in any area could have a cost in other areas of development. In areas other than schoolwork, I was always seeking reassurance that I could fit in. Although individual differences in children’s abilities should be respected as early as possible, precocity in some areas must not overshadow the areas that are underdeveloped.

Nearly Saved

My mother was a fervent Presbyterian whose credo was to think of others before thinking of oneself. She saw to it that on Sunday we attended seven hours of church. I haven’t been in church since childhood as a result. My father, however, did not join her in her beliefs and never once came to services with us. Mother believed strongly in all the religious doctrine, especially the part that predicted doom around every corner and required preparedness for disaster at the same time one was enjoying good fortune. In her mind and in what she taught me, the only way to forestall doom’s arrival was to work hard for less privileged people. I took this to heart and at the age of eight wanted to be a missionary in Africa in order to give people there better lives.

When I was six, a traveling evangelist named Gypsy Smith came to town. His visit was anticipated eagerly in our otherwise dull world. My mother took Chuck and me to his evening service. Gypsy Smith was flamboyant and exciting as he wooed the audience with his face, his voice, and his flying hands. He was much more convincing than any preacher I’d heard before, especially at the First Presbyterian Church. I was mesmerized. As he invoked the Lord’s blessing, he waved his arms, he strutted, and he spoke in a loud, passionate voice. He urged us all to repent our sins and to come forward for redemption during the next hymn. “Just walk up the aisle with your hand out and your souls open. Gypsy Smith and the Lord together will redeem you. Your sins will vanish.” I thought about my major sin, cringing at the thought of my deep hatred for my little brother. Could Gypsy Smith be my salvation?

As the organ started up, Gypsy Smith marched back and forth in front of the congregation, calling out to us to “come up and be saved” from our sins. I slid out of my pew and made my way up the aisle to where Gypsy was and gave myself up to be saved. He didn’t look at me but past me to the adults who came up behind me. Thinking he couldn’t see me because I was small, I pulled on his robe. He looked down and with a look of disdain said, “Get away from me, kid.” It sent me crying back to my seat. There would be no redemption that day. And, because of Gypsy Smith, I gave up my dream of being a missionary.

Animal Doctor

Adolescence seemed pretty frightening to me. I turned inward and to my animals for an understanding of the changes I was going through. I had ducks, chickens, rabbits, and my dearest friend, a German shepherd, Smokey. Smokey followed me everywhere. He watched me, listened to me, and followed my directions without my having to train him. He was the favorite of all the newsboys in Waco because he’d rush up to pick up a paper if they missed the porch. He’d carry it up on the porch, deposit it, then return to the newsboy, wagging his tail furiously and looking for his approval. I don’t know how I could have faced my own delayed adolescence without him and the rest of my menagerie. I read Dr. Dolittle books and tried to talk to my animals as he did. I learned that their behavior was their language, an insight that has served me all of my professional life. I thought I could talk to them and they to me. When one of my chickens fell off her perch and broke her leg, I mended it by attaching a splint made out of a Popsicle stick. I talked to her all the way through my procedure. I believed that she looked up at me with gratitude after I’d splinted her leg. That confirmed my decision to become a doctor. The leg mended. The chicken would even follow me around the yard afterward. It was a wonderful, heady feeling. I was no longer at the mercy of my peers’ image of me as a wimp. My animals trusted me.

When the rabbits produced babies, it became obvious that we’d have to sell or eat some of them. Of course, I couldn’t bear to do either. Thank heaven I had a friend next door, an older lady, Mrs. Wood. She offered to take the surplus rabbits off my hands, so I’d have no awful decision to make. In retrospect, I’m sure she ate them, but I didn’t have to watch or participate. Mrs. Wood became another surrogate mother to me as we talked about our animals and shared the best way of raising them. She treated me as an equal.

My animals thrived. The ducks and chickens produced eggs. I learned to tell when the rabbits were pregnant by the way they began to walk—to clump rather than dance with their hind legs. Ducks and chickens seemed to act more arrogant just before they laid an egg. The laying was painful, but they seemed to go through it stoically in order to crow about it afterward—a wonderful transition to watch. Smokey and my animals were a great introduction to the facts of life. My father never talked to me about the birds and the bees. No one did. The only talk about sex we had was when he offered the warning typical of that time, not to masturbate, “because it would make you go crazy.”

Texas is famous for flash floods. One year, a wall of water came rushing through the creek bed in our yard and carried my animals away with it. Only two pairs of ducks survived, turning up a mile down the creek bed. I felt responsible and guilty. Perhaps I might have become a veterinarian, but this event was too painful. So I decided to be a Dr. Dolittle for people.

Heading East

When I finished high school the month after I turned sixteen, my parents were aware that I was still too immature, both socially and physically, to go to college. My father had gone to Princeton, where he’d been a star and had loved it, so I was destined to be sent there. My grades made the cut, but I was too small, too young and underdeveloped to be considered.