Why My Friend’s Reaction to My Bracelet Charm Filled Me with Shame

A tiny charm exposed a lifetime negotiating class, race, and belonging

Although it was cold, and I was outside, the heat rose up through me, that hot surge of shame that ends with a flush in the cheeks.

A new friend had just asked about the charm I wear on my wrist.

This charm is a tooth. A baby tooth. White and smooth, it hangs from a link on my bracelet. I’d never before thought to question the Peruvian tradition of wearing that particular type of charm; until then I had understood it only as a representation of the maternal bond, of the love between mother and child. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, a charm to claim my children as always mine, small and tender-looking—pretty, like a pearl or a bit of shimmery shell. Set in 22-karat gold, a tiny talisman claiming a stake in the maternal self.

But that easy embrace of a familial and cultural tradition changed when my new friend asked about the charm hanging from my wrist and then . . . flinched.

We were sitting, my new friend and I, outside my recently purchased home, on a terraced portion of the hillside garden. It was a fall day, in the afternoon, and the air was chilly. But the children wanted to play, and the interior of the house was only sparsely decorated, as we had no money at the time to invest in a designer, whole sets of matching furniture, or even a nice sofa. The bedrooms had only mattresses on the floor and our living room was empty save for a brass urn I’d bought years earlier at a Neiman Marcus sale.

The terraced bit of garden on which my new friend and I sat was supposed to be a patio, but was only a poor imitation of one at that time, having been molded, literally, from the claylike soil and pounded into a semblance of a flat deck. There was no railing or flagstone, just a drop from the edge of pressed dirt. I had placed on this dirt a couple of teak patio chairs brought from our small backyard in Seattle, and the two of us sitting on them resembled a pair of birds perched on a cliff, the wind chilling our skin and goosebumping our flesh, our noses threatening to run and our eyes to water as we strove to chat companionably about our children, their teachers, the school.

Then came the moment when this new friend noticed my charm. This was a charm that my mother had three of herself, one for each of her own children. A charm that my mother and I had planned even before my sons were born. One for which I had given her my toddler’s baby tooth to have set in gold in Peru, where it was a common type of adornment. A charm that she had brought back, packed with loving care, in a small velvet jewelry bag.

It is fascinating and strange to me how a mere gesture, a small movement, an oh-so-slight recoil can cause, like a finger in a socket, that surge charged with shame. The actual moment was subtle, barely discernible, even though it felt to me like a slap in the face. The person who flinched, this school-parent friend, would never have been obvious in her distaste. She was too polite. Too reserved to exhibit judgment beyond the slightest widening of the eyes, a tiny lift of the eyebrows, the centimeter of movement back—at most the suggestion of a gesture rather than a crude, obvious sign. In Spanish, the word used for disrespectful or rude is malcriada, which literally translates into badly brought up or badly raised. My Anglo American friend had been, within her family’s traditions, bien criada.

The first time I saw Meredith as an adult was during a tour of a garden carefully cultivated to be viewed and appreciated, even coveted. This garden tour was part of an annual fundraiser for the aforementioned school, the school where one of my sons and one of hers shared a grade. In some ways Meredith had grown up to be my doppelgänger. Same age. Tall like me. Dark hair and eyes. Serious, if not quite bookish. Native of the same small town. Graduate of the same large university. For a few years, decades prior, we’d even shared an elementary class in the same school our boys now attended. Yet there were key differences.

Meredith had short hair. Straight and shiny and neatly trimmed. Contained. Her whole persona was contained and controlled in a neat, WASP-y package. My own hair was thick and unruly—the polar opposite of Meredith’s neat short cut, of her tidy poised persona.

That first day we met on the garden tour, after all those decades, she had on a white button-down shirt, crisp and clean, and a pair of pale khaki maternity slacks, for she was a few months pregnant with her fourth child. Diamond studs shone from her small, exposed ears, and the diamonds were stunning—large, but not too large, sparkling and clear.

I wanted to continue the custom in my mother’s family of setting children’s baby teeth in gold and keeping them as a kind of amulet by wearing them as charms. What was so awful about this small, defenseless object? So offensive? What made it something to draw away from, to flinch at when first recognized for what it was? It may have been the perceived crudeness, the primitiveness of wearing a physical part of another person—a piece of bone, made from calcium, first grown in a mother’s womb and then in a baby’s mouth—as jewelry. Perhaps it was an association with superstitious practices that deemed the wearing of such a charm un-Christian, uncivilized. Or an association with the body and therefore the dirty, grotesque, or even sinful.

There exist various scenarios in my mind, but they are all assumptions. I can’t really know, since I didn’t ask. I would never have asked. It would have been too embarrassing—bringing my insecurity into the light, exposing my self-doubt. I also noted the Christian cross my friend wore that day, and realized how bizarre and pagan my tooth charm might seem in comparison.

Yet I had the urge to defend myself, even if only to myself, in the face of that judgment. If I had been in court, both as defendant and lawyer, I would have pointed out the underlying history of the Christian cross hanging from my friend’s neck. I would have reminded the jury that the cross is a bloody symbol that has been sanitized not only by time and exposure and acculturation but also, in this case, by the platinum and diamonds from which it had been crafted, by the thin, elegant chain from which it hung as it rested on the smooth, perfumed skin of this white woman, this wealthy wife and mother, this critical tourist of cultivated gardens and automatic condemner of another’s talismanic charm. Was it fair, I would have demanded the court, that I was to be judged for my innocent little piece of baby bone, one given up by my child’s body willingly, appropriately, and naturally as superfluous, when my friend could wear—with approval and even admiration—a symbol originating in violence and gore?

If people are shaped by experience, by the way they are nurtured as well as by their genetic makeup, then I have been shaped by layers of indirect, implied shame, a sense of humiliation that arrives obliquely and stays backstage in the shadows, never venturing into direct sunlight so that it can be seen, recognized, and named. This is the way shame thrives—like a dank mushroom, a slippery, nocturnal creature, one that can exist only in the darkness and the shade.

The twisted layers of complicated shame in my life originate on my mother’s side. Shame is a ball we have passed back and forth all my life, from mother to daughter, again and again. There are times I’ve rejected it, when I’ve tried to hit it out of the park, a home run, never to come back—but then, becoming a boomerang, it inevitably does.

My mother, born and raised in the upper classes of Peru, educated by nuns, served by maids, taught English and horseback riding and piano, in this country strains toward whiteness, threatened always by the negative stereotypes that exist here in words like immigrant and Hispanic. She lives a precarious balance between the past and the present, brown and white, Lima and California, Spanish and English. She balances there always, as if on a tightrope between skyscrapers or a slippery ledge on a rocky mountainside. A woman in exile, having left her beloved Peru in her twenties to marry my father, she must constantly negotiate the racism here in Northern California, where brown people from Central and South America are stuck, for the most part, in the service sector. They maintain the gardens and clean the houses, they wipe the tables in restaurants and fix the engines of SUVs and sedans, but they don’t live in our kind of town, in our kind of house, with our kind of privilege.

My mother has her own prejudices, of course: She forbade me once I became a teenager from even setting foot on Haight Street, for example, fearing not only drugs and promiscuity but also grime and hippies. She’d flinch at things and people and ideas in the United States only to feel like an outsider when others—the women in our town, the mothers of my classmates, those who spoke flawless English with only American accents—would flinch, literally or figuratively, at something about her.

Yet I myself own the flinch. It seems I have inherited it, an early bequest, from my mother. When I visit Lima as an adult, when I spend time with my mother’s family and in my Peruvian relatives’ homes, I often draw back, internally, with distaste at the things I hear and see: My aunt looking through her maids’ bags before they leave for their homes, suspecting them of stealing. My cousin driving off in irritation when the light turns green after yelling out the window—¡Demasiado tarde!—at the ragged brown girl frantically searching through her boxes for the exact flavor of chewing gum my cousin had insisted on. Another cousin’s friends, when all of us are sitting outside with drinks together one summer evening, talking about the “dirty Arabs,” not knowing or not caring that I am married to one. In the United States, I have flinched as well: In the morgue where my father-in-law lay when I saw a room full of urns for pet ashes next to the room full of urns for people’s remains. At an acquaintance who threatened the principal of the elementary school with withholding much-needed donations if she wouldn’t add Chinese to the curriculum. At a white friend of a white friend who, well-intentioned yet ignorant, still uses the word “mulatto.”

I have periods of time when I believe myself free not only from my mother’s prejudices—ones that she turns on people of different races or classes or nationalities with different customs and behaviors from her own—but also from the shame that is the other side of the coin. Clearly, however, as my friend’s flinch showed me, I am not. This shame is the shame of the colonized and therefore the shame of imposed inferiority. It is the shame fed by fear: fear of exclusion, of embarrassment, of the faux pas. The back-and-forth movement between cultures, the constant negotiation of traditions and mores demanded of the immigrant, render weak and assailable my mother’s standards of behavior and attire. I inherited these standards that could be questioned and judged, that could be deemed primitive or tacky. It is in this space that the immigrant and her children live, the space between a sure, strong, established knowledge of the self, of the rightness of how one presents the self through dress or rituals or speech, and the feeling that one’s culture and taste are wrong, aberrant, vulgar. I remain divided into two selves: the cerebral and the visceral. I know in my head what my values are—they are a blend of the maternal, the immigrant, the Peruvian, and also the paternal, the first world, the Anglo American. My mind feels no shame at the flinch; it is the body that reacts instinctively, the emotional self that has been trained since birth to look out for judgment and contempt.

So there I was, holding within myself the constant conflict between familial history and my mother’s advice on the one hand and my own observations and experiences on the other, sitting on a chilly terrace on wooden folding chairs, making small talk with a woman who embodied, to my eyes, the successful wife-mother-WASP-yuppie.

Meredith was the daughter of one of those women whom my mother would avoid after moving to the town where we still live—the mothers of the other children at our local school, the mothers who knew what to say, what to do, and what to wear. My mother avoided these women, never making a single friend in our town or from our school, because she dreaded ostracization, gaze aversion, flinching. Like these women, Meredith seemed complacent in her own identity and looked satisfied, more than satisfied, with her own family, their spacious home, their big golden dog. Her living room had a grand piano in one corner, windows traditionally curtained with heavy drapes, a large, finely worked carpet in dignified shades of blue and cream. Family photos in Tiffany frames adorned the Ethan Allen side tables artfully placed around the room. And this person—someone versed in thoroughbred culture, someone harking back to the American version of blue-blood heritage—saw the charm I wore and flinched.

It was so small that the entire thing, gold casing and pearly tooth, could fit easily on my pinkie fingernail, yet so powerful that it could elicit a flinch—a flinch with the ability to bring forth a self-consciousness that, only shallowly buried, seems always lying in wait.

Excerpt from Portrait of a Mestiza: A Life Between Cultures by Marianna Marlowe. Copyright © 2026 by She Writes Press. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Portrait of a Mestiza is our September 2026 Open Secrets Book Club pick. Join us Thursday, October 1 at 8:30 p.m. ET for a Substack Live Q&A with Marianna Marlowe. Click here for a reminder.

Marianna Marlowe is a Latina writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. After devoting years to academic writing, her focus now is creative nonfiction that explores issues of gender identity, feminism, cultural hybridity, intersectionality, and more. Her short memoir has been published in Narrative, Hippocampus, The Woven Tale Press, Eclectica, Sukoon, and The Acentos Review, among others. Her debut memoir, Portrait of a Feminist, was published in February, 2025 with She Writes Press. Her second memoir, Portrait of a Mestiza: A Life Between Cultures, was published in May, 2026.