Good Girls Don't Get Angry
By Jeanette Miller In the 1960s, an invisible, unwritten code of the small, midwestern town where I came of age required girls to grow up Iowa-nice, and nice meant you didn’t get angry, let alone feel it. When my younger brother and I spoke angry words to each other, even in jest, our mother would exclaim, “Don’t fight! You’ll spoil our supper!" We got the message that anger was a sin and that food was sacred. No matter what a person does, don’t tell on them. If you do, you’re a tattle tale. I heard this on the school playground and from my cousins, my first playmates. But I’m not tattling my tale here. I’m telling my brother’s. Shortly after he and I started taking care of our parents, when Dad was ninety-four and Mom was eighty-eight, we talked over a bottle of wine. For the first time Jim told me his story. When he was a boy, five or six years old, and Mom thought that Jim had been a naughty boy, she would shout, “Go get the belt!” He was to get a designated belt, the same on