Judy Blume has often spoken about experiencing anxiety as a child, something journalist Mark Oppenheimer explores in Judy Blume: A Life.
During her family’s temporary move from New Jersey to Miami for her brother’s health, Blume worried constantly about her father, who remained behind for work and visited on weekends.
She explained that her fears were tied to the fact that two of his brothers had died at the age of forty-three, which she came to see as a dangerous milestone for him.
As her father approached that age, Blume developed ritualistic behaviors, believing her actions could protect him. She described making bargains with God, such as promising to score perfectly on spelling tests in exchange for her father’s safety.
These compulsive thoughts left her feeling responsible for keeping him alive, a heavy burden for a young child. Despite her efforts, her father, Rudy Sussman, died of a heart attack in 1959 at age fifty-four, just weeks before her wedding.
Blume later acknowledged that the sense of bargaining she felt as a child influenced her writing, particularly in Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Reflecting on those years, Blume noted that she was fortunate her ritualistic tendencies faded by fifth grade, though her mother continued to struggle with more severe anxiety throughout her life.
She recalled her mother’s obsessive need to check the stove or imagine worst-case scenarios to prevent them from happening, behaviors that today might be recognized as OCD.
Blume has since observed how modern medicine offers treatments for such conditions, contrasting her mother’s lifelong struggles with the support available now.
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