The Girl in the Red Fishnet Tights
The Enduring Scars of Transgenerational Trauma
An Invisible Note
The chill of a late December morning still pricks at my memory, a sharp counterpoint to the excitement bubbling within my five-year-old self as I began to dress for school. The thought of wearing my new red fishnet tights for the first time (despite my having asked ‘Santa’ for black ones) was an undeniable thrill. Red or not, they were fishnet stockings, after all, and I was eager to parade their novelty in front of my classmates now that school had resumed after the 2-week holiday break.
The fact that these red fishnet stockings were new and not hand-me-downs from my older sister gave me a sense of being special - of being like them: Those shiny, fashionably dressed children with stay-at-home moms who drove them to school, sending them out of the car with home-made lunches carefully packed in brown paper bags or gleaming lunch boxes embossed with superheroes; mothers who smiled and hugged their children when they saw them at the end of the day when school let out.
How I envied them.
As a painfully conscientious, shy, anxious, and easily humiliated child, I always strove to do everything right, to follow every rule. That morning, though, a forgotten detail would unravel my carefully constructed world.
I was a “latchkey kid” as a result of convincing my mother I didn't need a babysitter. My mornings were a solitary dance of dressing myself and walking the two blocks to kindergarten. On this particular day, having been sick the day before, I knew I needed an "excuse" note from my mother (my father did not live with us - my mother had told him to move out the year before due to his chronic alcoholism and increasingly violent behavior toward her — and at times his children). It was a rule, a critical piece of paper that would validate my absence due to illness. Standing in line outside of my kindergarten class, a sudden realization hit me with the force of a physical blow: My mother had not given me the note!
Panic, cold, and a sense of suffocating anxiety suddenly seized me. I bolted, running back home, my small legs pumping with a frantic urgency. I searched everywhere for the note, certain she must have left it somewhere, my heart pounding against my ribs.
No note.
Now, not only was I without my excuse note, I was going to be late to class. The catastrophic scenarios played out in my mind: Being sent to the principal's office, possible expulsion, the crushing weight of having done something wrong when I worked so very hard to be “good” and do everything “right” every waking moment — my one means of receiving praise and positive attention from my mother, teachers, and those few others who seemed aware of my existence.
Not finding the note at my house, I turned and ran back towards the school. Then, the world tilted. I was somehow flying through the air, lost in a dizzying moment before the jarring impact. I landed hard, both knees scraping against the rough sidewalk pavement.
The searing pain was instant, raw and undeniable. My beautiful new red fishnet tights, a symbol of my brief joy at feeling like other children in my class who seemed loved and well cared for, were torn, ruined. Blood seeped from gashes in both knees, gravel embedded in my skin. The stinging, the pain, the profound sense of loss as I stared at my torn tights, overwhelmed me. I began to cry, the tears hot against my freezing cheeks.
Limping into the line outside the classroom, my teacher saw me. Her hand on my arm was gentle, but her question about what happened felt like an accusation. I confessed, my voice trembling, that I didn't have my absence excuse note. I braced myself for the inevitable punishment. But her response was bewildered, not angry. "It's right there!" she said, pointing to my coat. My mother, unbeknownst to me, had pinned the note to my jacket without telling me. In my blind panic, I hadn't even noticed.
Human Comfort Denied
Later that day, I showed my mother my torn tights and skinned knees. A registered nurse, she was plainly unphased by the sight of blood and scrapes. A quick application of Band-Aids, a dismissive wave of her hand, and the message was clear: it wasn't a big deal. But for me, it was. My new tights, the ones I had waited months for, now had two big holes at the knees. I pleaded for her to replace my tights, my heart aching with the injustice of it all when I realized she was being non-committal.
A few days later, she presented me with the same tights, clumsily darned with red thread. Hideous, knotted, and utterly unwearable. I felt punished, even though my overlooking the note and the fall hadn't been my fault.
This experience of the red fishnet tights taught me, at a tender age, that fairness wasn't a universal constant. It was a fluid, often arbitrary concept, especially within the confines of certain relationships. It taught me that sometimes you could do everything "right," strive for perfection, and still be met with an inexplicable harshness. It laid the groundwork for a deep-seated understanding of injustice – the feeling of being blamed or made to suffer for something that was not your fault. Later, I learned that injustice could also be something that was a manifestation of someone else's unexamined pain.
Recently, while soaking in the hot tub on a cool Pacific Northwest morning, I found my gaze drawn to the faded scars on my knees, still visible, still a part of me. As I stared at the uneven skin, the memory of this girl that I was, and those red fishnet tights, flooded into my consciousness. These now-faint scars on my knees are a constant, quiet reminder of events from that distressing and confusing day, and of so many other perceived injustices in my life.
I felt that little girl in me wonder: Why hadn't my mother simply replaced the tights? We weren't wealthy, but they weren't that expensive. I remembered how humiliated and confused I had felt at the thought of wearing the mangled tights and my mother telling me they were “fine” and nothing was wrong with them when I tentatively protested.
Soaking in the hot tub, staring at the small, smooth scars on my knees, I was able to finally allow myself to feel sad and angry regarding what my mother had done. My heart felt heavy as I wept for that little girl that I had been as I sat in the bubbling, heated water.
The Enduring Scars of Trauma
Then, while still in the hot tub, I experienced a sudden, piercing "A-ha!" moment: I remembered a particular story my mother would often tell: As a teenager, after getting her braces off, she was showing off to a friend how well she could ride, coaxing the horse into a fast gallop. But the horse, feisty from a winter’s stalling, had ran away with her instead. When it came to a sudden stop as it approached a fence, my mother was thrown, landing face first on the ground, bashing in her newly straightened front teeth in the fall.
Her father, furious at having had his hard-earned money wasted (he was a Minister that served the poor and braces had been quite an investment), refused to have my mother’s teeth fixed, a punishment for her moment of youthful pride.
My mother lived for decades with gray-black front teeth, a constant, humiliating reminder of her youthful folly and her father’s anger and disappointment in her. From that day on, she smiled with her mouth closed to cover her broken, dead teeth, or with her hand covering her mouth like a geisha. Her teeth severely impacted her self-esteem and likely resulted in her poor choices in men (my father included). It wasn't until her forties, when she could finally afford it, that she had her teeth repaired. Turned out she had a beautiful smile.
In that instant of this remembering, the missing pieces clicked into place: My mother was likely unconsciously reenacting her own trauma that fateful Winter day I had fallen and destroyed my new fishnet tights. She had been punished by her father for falling, and so I, too, would be punished. Her pitiless — even merciless — treatment of me was yet another manifestation of the projections she carried whereby I was little more than an extension of her - the same dynamic that had fueled my being scapegoated by her for most of my life.
And yes, the "punishment" felt deliberate. The ruined tights, my broken heart over their loss, and my mother’s almost clinical dismissal of my distress, followed by the grotesque "darning" that rendered them unwearable – it all coalesced into a potent feeling of being unfairly treated.
Why, when the fall was clearly an accident, and the note's presence a simple oversight on my part, was I made to suffer the indignity of those ugly, repaired tights? Why wasn't my genuine distress met with comfort, kindness, or even simple understanding?
The answer, as I realized decades later, lay not in my five-year-old self’s supposed transgression, but in my mother's own unhealed wounds. Her teenage humiliation, her father's cruel refusal to fix her teeth as a "punishment" for perceived pride, became a blueprint for her own parental responses.
Unconsciously, my mother had projected her own past onto my present. My accidental fall, my injuries, my beautiful red tights being destroyed — all this became a mirror reflecting her own unaddressed trauma regarding her damaged, unrepaired teeth. She was punished in a cold and unfeeling manner by her father; therefore, I would be punished too, even though the two circumstances of mother and daughter bore no logical resemblance.
This is where the insidious nature of transgenerational trauma and family scapegoating abuse subtly weaves itself into the narrative. While not a dramatic, overt act of abuse, my mother's response subtly positioned me as the recipient of her unexpressed pain and unresolved grievances. I became the vessel for her own deeply embedded feelings of injustice. My innocent fall, my ruined tights, became an opportunity for her to unconsciously re-enact her own suffering, to "punish" the perceived negligence or clumsiness she saw in me due to her projections, just as her father had done to her.
A wave of profound sadness washed over me—sadness for that little girl in the torn red fishnet tights, and sadness, too, for my mother, trapped in the echoes of her own unhealed wounds.
Today, the scars on my knees are not just a record of a fall; they are a testament to the intricate, often painful, ways our pasts can shape our present, and how the "inviolate self" often bears the quiet marks of experiences not even our own.
Have you ever found yourself connecting a seemingly small childhood memory to a much larger, unspoken family pattern? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Please remember your comments are public.
Recommended Reads
Things We Haven’t Talked About - By Caroline Whole: https://crokodilla.substack.com/p/things-we-havent-talked-about
The Mother Wound, Boundaries, and the Erosion of Self - By Kathy Parker https://kathyparkerwriter.substack.com/p/the-mother-wound-boundaries-and-the
Thank you, LinMaree, I relate to so many things here in your comment. I wonder sometimes if my incredibly elaborate imagination was in part a result of the neglect I experienced those first five critical years of my life. That's another story for another time and involves my father more than my mother.
"While not a dramatic, overt act of abuse, my mother's response subtly positioned me as the recipient of her unexpressed pain and unresolved grievances."
I still wonder why some people become aware of these patterns and others don't.
My mother once told me how she was treated by her mother and that she later did exactly the same with me. In that moment she was not ware of what she was doing.
But later she was, when she told me. Nevertheless, she didn't say that she felt sorry...
That actually shocked me a bit... she saw the pattern, knew what the damage done feels... but still not show any sign of regret or at least take it as a lesson for the future.