Sunday, December 19, 2010

Let Us Make Pillows. And Soap.

Random Winter Break-ness:

Today I did nothing but watch T.V. and sleep. Grey's Anatomy re-runs and National Graphic documentaries and blissful, long, naps with no "I haven't done my homework" guilt. That is, I slept until Mom called. Then I went shopping for pillow-making stuff. I got two different colors of material to start out with: a dark, vibrant fuchsia and a purple so true it makes my heart happy. Tomorrow, I try my first one. I think I'm going to stuff it with allspice and cinnamon and add a few drops of essence of lavender. If it works, I'll give a pillow each to Mom and Biz for Christmas. If it doesn't, I'll make them cookie-cutter soaps in pretty little baskets.

I also got a coat today. It's the first brand-new coat I've had in six years: deep, plum purple. I feel kind of bad for enjoying it so much, because it was a joint gift from two of my neighbors, one of whom I positively. cannot. stand. I know it and he knows it and I took the money anyway. Does that make me a selfish Christmas ogre? Does it matter at all that I really needed the coat?

Four of my grades came in. 3 A's and a B-plus. I'm still waiting on my Stats grade. If it's good enough, I'll actually make the Dean's List this semester! Do I dare hope? I've always wanted to make the Dean's List at least once. I wish Dr. Morgan would submit the damn grade already!

In other news, I really need to sort out my eating problem. I am overweight. It is unhealthy. I avoid mirrors and I hate having my picture taken and I get depressed every time I try on clothing. Thing is, I also get depressed if I am not constantly eating. It started out harmless enough: freedom eating. I left home, and suddenly there was no one to tell me how gross I was. There was no one to sing ditties about my fatness through the bathroom door as I dressed after my shower, no one to send me away from the table for holding my fork the wrong way. And so I ate. I ate rich, decadent things covered in sugar and icing. I moved to Evansville and ate the globe: Chinese, Indian, Thai, Italian, Greek. Food was a joy. And then I started antidepressants. Lexapro took ten pounds and ballooned it into a lot more than ten. It also made me drool and pretty much put me into a coma. I took so many others in between that I've forgotten their names, except for Zoloft and Remeron. They tried me on Wellbutrin, which supposedly makes people lose weight, but it didn't work. I crashed. Boom. Now I'm on Paxil. It works, but it's horrible for weight control. And it doesn't help that I can't quit eating. I actually get sad when I don't eat, when I don't have something edible in front of me. And I've realized that it's because when I don't eat, I think about my mother. I think about her a lot. In fact, the only time I don't think about her is when I'm stuffing my face. It's like a drug: it makes me feel better, and then when I come down off the eating high, all I can hear is her voice telling me how gross and fat I am, so I eat some more to shut her up. Sigh. All those years of therapy, and all I can do is identify *why* I'm screwed up. I'm a social work student, for pity's sake. I'm being trained to be a therapist, to help other people, and I can't pass a bag of chips without eating the whole damn thing. I know all the tips and tricks and all the right things to say, and I can't do them for myself. I am a social worker who needs a social worker to kick her ass into gear. Sigh.

(I think big women are beautiful. Unless they're me. This is why I've taken up crafting: pillows and soap and suchlike. If I keep my hands busy, maybe I won't eat so much.)

Tuesday I see the orthopedist about my hip. I fell on the 6th and tore my flexor doing a horrible version of the palsied splits that left me howling like a baby on the hallway floor and put me in the hospital for two nights during the last full week of school. When Mom and Dad were in Georgia and I couldn't remember anyone's cell numbers so one of my friends could come sit with me in the ER. It sucked bigtime. And it hurt like hell. It feels better now, though, at least most of the time, which is good: I have a bad knee on the left side. A bad hip on the right side might turn me into a cripple or something, and we wouldn't want that.

Tomorrow: the library. I'm going to get a stack of books up to my eyeballs and read them all in a month. Imagine it: books that I don't have to read! Non-textbook books! Crafts and books. Not food. Crafts and books.

I'm trying.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

December 5, 1984:

The details surrounding my birth are a mystery to me. I have a few tidbits here or there, but I've had to piece the bigger picture together myself: I was never really successful at getting anyone to tell me the story. I have the following things:

1. Methodist Evangelical Hospital in Louisville, KY, was (at least at the time) the nearest hospital with a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Thus it follows that I was born a bonafide Kentuckian, thereafter to be the brunt of many a blond /Kentucky-vs.-Indiana joke: "What did the blond Kentuckian shout across the river to the guy in Indiana?" -- and then there'd be a punchline along the lines of, "Big red truck! Duh!" and all the relatives who had been born safely across the line in Indiana would hee and haw and give my (at one time very, very blond) curls a tug.

2. I do believe my birth was preceded by a helicopter flight.

3. Something, somewhere, went very, very wrong. No one ever told me what actually happened, but apparently a decision was made to let me "take my time" arriving. Perhaps this was the wrong decision. I have chosen not to press the issue, because I do not want to know. Medical error or not, Cerebral Palsy cannot be undone. Knowledge of a mistake would only make me bitter.

4. My parents and grandparents used to tell me that I had been a "Smurf baby," which I took to mean that I was not breathing upon being delivered and had therefore (naturally) turned blue. I do not know how long it took the doctors to revive me. Too long, evidently.

5. I was early (By how much I am not certain) and small enough for my entire body to fit almost entirely along the length of one of my father's hands. I have a photograph of this. There were oxygen tubes in my nose; I was placed in an incubator for a period of time and was not sent home for a good while. At one point a television station in KY did a special on the NICU at Methodist, and I am told that the top of my head appeared on air, peeking out of a Christmas stocking. I wish I had a copy of this broadcast.

My family told me stories of my early life: how the temperature in the house had to be at a constant 70 degrees to ensure my maximum comfort; how I cried inconsolably at all hours of the day and night and could only be calmed by Teena, my once-favorite aunt (before she turned into a hellhound and decided to hate me), who would lie under an electric blanket with me on her stomach and rub my back and sing, "You Are My Sunshine," for hours; how I was so incredibly small that my grandmother used to buy Cabbage Patch dolls with clothes she liked just for the clothes, because they would fit me. I know that I was not officially diagnosed with CP until after I had turned two and still could not walk, at which point the doctors told my mother that I would never walk and that she should probably institutionalize me because I would likely be severely delayed in several critical areas of development. (i.e. retarded.) The doctors, however, did not know me: I talked a blue streak then just like I do now, and was reading at college level by the time I hit the fourth grade. I do in fact have a learning disability: my spatial reasoning is severely compromised, which explains why, at 26, I still have to add on my fingers. But I'm in college, and at the end of this semester I'll have a 3.5 overall GPA and almost a perfect 4-oh in my major, which just goes to show you how wrong people can be sometimes (!)

I had my first surgery when I was two, to correct my crossed eyes, then another at four to lengthen my heel cords so that I would not spend the rest of my life walking on tiptoe like I did back then. I still have some pretty wild scars from that one stretching up the backs of both my legs; sometimes when I'm walking my left foot kicks in too far and catches the back of my right ankle and the scar tissue burns enough to make my vocabulary very colorful for a few seconds. When I was seven, I had my abductors, adductors, and hamstrings done all at the same time and spent several months encased in plaster casts from hips to toes (this is called hell, for those of you not already familiar with the definition), and several more months in a rehabilitation hospital undergoing intensive physical therapy (which is horrifically painful and therefore synonymous with hell, especially when you're seven.)

I got my first pair of leg braces at age four. They started out knee-length, and by the time I turned 18 they had both been shortened to just a few inches over the height of a high-top sneaker. (But at 18 I stopped wearing them because there was no one to make me, and so if I got leg braces tomorrow they'd probably be back to my knees. Teenage rebellion sometimes leads to adult oh, shit moments, as I'm sure many of you have learned for yourselves.) When I was fifteen, my surgeon developed a vested interest in my hammertoe and started making noises about breaking my feet straight and setting them with rods. I threw a screamer. I was so vehemently against this idea (and I'm still against it; I have friends who've had it done and it is not worth the trade-off because the rods hurt more than the hammertoe does, so NO ONE IS TOUCHING MY FEET, DAMMIT) that the surgeon agreed to compromise. Thus came the pure, unadulterated evil of toe straps, an extra piece of Velcro with slight elastic give riveted to the foot of each of my braces that went between my big toe and the rest of my toes and then strapped under the brace, effectively pulling my feet straight and holding them that way. No pun intended, but this crippled me. It completely changed the way I had learned to walk -- I had learned to walk on curved feet, not straight feet; it was unnatural for me -- not to mention hurt like nothing else in the world: for months I hobbled around wincing in pain, feeling as though someone was constantly cracking both my feet with a hammer. I started undoing the straps when I got to school and folding them under the braces, which worked until the mean little squares of Velcro left at the edges rubbed blisters on my toes. Then I'd had enough: I took a huge gamble against punishment for defacing my medical equipment and cut the damn straps off with a paring knife. Unlike the thing with the leg braces, I have never regretted this. I'll keep my crooked feet, thank you. They suit me just fine. The surgeons can keep their metal rods and their evil little straps.

There were other things: a stint with a brace meant to keep me from hyper extending my knee (Which I do these days just to freak people out: "I can pop my kneecap out the back of my leg." "Cannot." "Can so. Wanna see?") and a period of a few years with this horrible foam block between my legs at night to keep the muscles from contracting. Years of physical therapy, which I will have to put up with in cycles till the day I die and which, these days, wears me out to such an extent that I have to wait till school is out to go, because 45 minutes of PT makes my entire body shake with exhaustion and leads to naps of at least two hours, 3 times per week. PT fogs my brain and makes me feel as though I've spent too much time in the sun.

Today, 26 years later, I no longer have the braces or the toe straps or the foam contraptions. I've traded them for crutches and a walker and a manual chair and a scooter, muscle relaxers and arthritis medications. Over the past few years I have had to learn a great deal of humility: as a kid I never said, help. I never really needed to. I fell and sprang back up; I jumped rope and played Tag and learned various gravity-defying in-cast acrobatic maneuvers. But the reality of adulthood with Cerebral Palsy is very different from the reality of a childhood with it. Technically speaking it is not progressive: I can't wake up tomorrow with more brain damage. But the side effects, all the things that essentially make CP what it is, do worsen over time. The older I get, the less I can do. I hurt more. I tire more easily. I have had to learn help and please: Can you help me up? Can you please reach that? Would you mind getting the door? Carrying my tray? Tying my shoe? I am a young mind trapped in a rapidly declining body. It scares me witless. Sometimes I need to be reminded that it's okay for me to only be twenty-six, because I feel so much older. Sometimes I need to be pulled out of my disability for a moment.

Last night, my Mama and Dad did that for me. I don't think they knew it; we were simply going to Olive Garden to celebrate my birthday, as has become our tradition. But lately my body had demanded so much of my attention that I have become afraid of being a burden, and I needed to be reminded that Tiffany is what they see; Tiffany is what they care about. Not the crutch or the walker or the scooter or the limits, but the woman behind them.

So they piled me in the car and off to the Olive Garden we went. Dad bought me a drink at the bar while we were waiting for a table, and Mom mysteriously vanished for a few minutes. (I was too busy with my citrus vodka and real slices of strawberry floating in the fancy glass to notice. Do you know how difficult it is to fish a slice of strawberry out of a tall glass of liquor with a straw? It requires great concentration.) Then they treated me to a feast: signature Olive Garden breadsticks, calamari with marinara sauce, chicken gnocchi, and steak-Gorgonzola alfredo. Just when I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head from the force of all the food, our waitress showed up bearing a chocolate cake with a molten center and white-chocolate shavings on top. Ruined my diet for the next 10, 000 years. Ruined my diet exquisitely. We talked and ate, just the three of us catching up, and they asked the parent things: how's school? Do you need anything? Money? Groceries? We talked about what I wanted to do after graduation, who was going to take my senior pictures, all the good stuff. These two people who missed my entire childhood, who didn't ever get to rock me to sleep or watch me head off to my first day of school, who have, in the past five years, done their share of funding and hauling and loading up wheelchairs and crutches and considering my mobility issues during every family outing, who have listened to me worry and fret about tightening physical restrictions and who have comforted me when it has come down to tears, sat with me at the table and just talked. They talked to me, the person inside the body that has demanded so much of their time and attention -- time and attention they never had to give up in the first place, but that they have handed over because they love me. It reminded me that I am not my disability, that I am not 115 years old, that's it's okay to be twenty-six and cover my mouth and squeal when I get a certain pretty red digital camera I have been wanting presented to me over a slice of cake at the table, a gift I never saw coming because my Mom is a sneaky ninja and vodka-soaked strawberries in tall glasses are a puzzle.

Today, I am twenty-six years old. I'm sitting here on the couch with a pillow behind my back for extra support and a walker within arms' reach, and sometimes I get scared and cry, and that's okay. Because today I am twenty-six years old, and I am not a burden.

Happy Birthday to me.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Crunchetize me, Cap'n

My friends, body parts should never be crunchy. Crunchy is bad in reference to human anatomy -- no one caresses their sweetheart and whispers, "Oh, baby, you're so ... crunchy." And yet, what do I have at this very moment? You guessed it: crunchy anatomy. My left knee, to be exact.

Now, don't be fooled. In all honesty this knee has bothered me for years. When I was fourteen, a Certain Someone I know took the liberty of grinding it into the concrete for me. It crunched then, too. And by the time this Certain Someone took me to the doctor -- weeks later -- arthritis had begun to set in, and the poor knee had to be braced for a period of time. Now I have my own personal barometer: when precipitation shall occur, my knee shall ache. My knee shall also ache if it is bound to be very humid, which pretty much covers every feasible weather pattern Lock Haven is likely to experience. In short, my knee nags me constantly and I have learned to ignore it. I have to: it's on what is otherwise known as my 'good' leg -- good as in strongest, able to bear more weight more often, etc., etc., all of which is quite important to someone such as myself. But now the knee has gotten crunchy. Now I lead with my otherwise-known-as-good leg and wince when my foot touches the ground. I am rapidly losing mobility.

My doctor expressed concern that I was too young to have arthritic joints. I didn't know what to tell her. It's one thing to type the truth on a screen and know people will read it, and quite another to say it out loud. I envision communicating with her through notes:

Dr. P. -- It's a crush injury. My mother did it. This message will self-destruct.

I always considered myself lucky, you know? By which I mean she never broke a bone or burned me horribly or anything like that. I don't know how I escaped those things, but that's why they call it luck. She pulled my arm out of socket once, but that was relatively minor in the lifetime scheme of things. It was in a sling for a few days and then it was fine, and it hasn't bothered me since. But to tell you the truth, I'll never know if my mother's abuse and frequent head injuries caused any long-lasting damage: I'll never know because I already have a neurological disability, and whether or not it has been compounded by brutality is impossible to prove. Is my loss of function more severe than it normally would be because of repeated head trauma? I can't tell you. I don't want to tell you. This knee is enough to deal with.

I don't really know how to handle my ever-so-crunchy reminder of the past. Prior to these last few weeks I could ignore it, push it to the back of my mind, but now it has taken center stage: after sitting for 50 minutes in class, I stand up and topple over. I can barely make it around my tiny living room. Rising in the mornings is proving increasingly difficult. I've tried to get by on Advil, because stronger pain pills often make me sick to my stomach --sometimes for days--but Advil isn't cutting it anymore. Dr. P. prescribed a pain relief gel, but Medicaid is throwing a screaming fit about approving it, so until they can be convinced to do so I am alternating heat and ice and staying off it as much as I can. I have a feeling it'll end up braced again, maybe for good this time. And that pisses me off. It pisses me off so much I don't even want to try to explain how much it pisses me off, because who knows what other emotions are hiding behind there? It could get ugly.

So I make it funny. Laugh it off. Crunchy anatomy, ha ha ha. I think I'll start calling myself Captain Crunch. Might even make a cape and hobble around making whooshing noises. Or maybe I'll pay some secret surgeon to skillfully dis-articulate the knee and replace it with a new one I'll buy for $50 on the black market. Or convince the gods to grant me a body transplant. They could even do it one limb at a time: every year for Yule, the one they call Santa can drop an arm or a leg off at my parents' house for me to open on Christmas a few days later. My options are open. I'm prepared to negotiate. If they want a human sacrifice before performing the deed, I know a small town in Indiana where they can find one ... 

Monday, November 1, 2010

Sistersong

Happy Samhain!

Today the year essentially begins anew for the pagans of the world as the great Wheel turns and the God passes into the underworld, to be born again at Yule. The Mother rules the winter, which I am slowly coming to enjoy: snow days and buttered rum, my little family coming together to decorate the tree while the Christmas music plays, trips to Papa's farm with its pungent smell of evergreens and falling asleep in the backseat on the way home, safe and warm and happy.

Biz an' me decided to ring in the day with a B-grade horror movie marathon. As anyone who knows us well will tell you, when we get together to watch movies my living room becomes the set for a particularly cheesy session of Mystery Science Theater 3000:

"Wait, wait. Stop. 'Katana-wielding half-vampire'? Must watch."
"Oh, he's so totally dead."
"Can't outrun a vampire, you poor bastard."
"She's half-vampire, nimwit. get it right."
"Shut up, jerkface."
"Oh! There go his glasses.Dramatic fall of bad 70s glasses? Obvious indication of death."
"DUN DUN DUN."
"EEEW!
"Cool. Rewind that."

It's not your typical Samhain, I know. No bonfire, which is sad -- we have yet to be able to have a fire. We live in the middle of town; it would definitely be frowned upon. We'd probably get arrested.

"No, officer, you don't understand! It's a religious ritual!"
"Yeah, what the hell? We're trying to worship here, dammit!"
"Hey! Don't we get a phone call?"

It works for us, though. We even went trick-or-treating this year: two twenty-somethings in velvet cloaks with hoods, kicking up leaves and singing show tunes on the way down the street.

"I feel like a moron."
"What the hell for?"
"I'm almost 26! I shouldn't be trick-or treating!"
"Don't worry; you have a babyface."
"Oh, gee. Thanks. And I was going to say you look hot as hell in that corset."
"Next year we should go as Butters and Awesome-O."
"Totally"

It comes naturally to us. The banter. The easy exchange. The deprecating humor. We play a game of put-downs:

"Bitch."
"Whore."
"Slut."
"Herpes sore."
"Dyke."
"That was lame. You lose."

We never mean it, though. It's a game, poking fun at our individual tendencies to dislike ourselves. Most of the time, we reassure each other:

"I'm so fat."
"Shut up, stupid. You are not. You're hot as hell. If you weren't my best friend and also my sister, I'd have you naked in two seconds."
"That's cool. But it would be weird."
"Really weird. But you know half of Lock Haven thinks you're my lover anyway."
"Because we kiss each other goodbye? On the cheek?"
"Because people need a scandal."
"Well, then let's give 'em something to talk about."
"Is that a dare?"
"Double dog."

Sometimes I stop and think: This is the best friend I've ever had. I knew we were destined to be best friends during a Dungeon and Dragons game one night after I first moved here, when I complained that my chest was too big and she told me she thought I had a great rack. From then on, we were inseparable. She'd spend nights at my place and we'd stay up till 3 a.m. talking about everything under the sun. We had similar shitty childhoods, so we bonded a lot over that:

"Your mother is a demon from hell."
"I know. Your mother needs to be punched in the face a few times."
"I know. Wanna go on a retribution road trip?"
"I'll get the baseball bat."

Then we discovered we both had an interest in alternative religions. Then that we both liked reincarnation theory, astrophysics, string theory, quantum foam. We'd order Chinese delivered and sit on the floor in my living room debating the nature of reality and the validity of past-life regression therapy. She taught me how to cast a ritual circle completely in my head, how to form energy shields, how to make myself invisible in plain sight.

"If you want to be unnoticed badly enough, you can make it happen. Think like a fox. Think like a feather."
"I'm too in-your-face to be invisible. The chair? The ... solidity?"
"Stop calling yourself fat. You are a feather."

Biz and I can talk about absolutely everything, from whether or not our clothes look okay to whether or not it's a good idea to sleep with so-and-so. We kiss and tell, and then we snort diet Pepsi out our noses laughing about it. Our secrets are safe with each other. Even before we were considered sisters, we felt like sisters. She coordinates my clothes because I suck at it; I scold her when she forgets her keys and ends up locked out of the house. If she calls and says, "I'm sad. Can I come over?", my door is open. If I call and say, "I'm having nightmares. I'm afraid to sleep. Can you spend the night?", she shows up with a bag of clothes and sacks out on the couch. We have our petty fights, but we can't stay mad at each other for more than fifteen minutes. One of us always breaks the tension:

"I'm sorry. I could've put that better. I was being a bitch."
"Yeah, you were. But so was I. I'm sorry too. I overreacted."
"We're cool?"
"We're cool."

We've both said it: You're the best friend I've ever had. We even have plans for when we are old: when Biz gets her inheritance and becomes a millionaire, she's going to buy a huge house and have it split into two separate apartments. I will live downstairs with half a dozen ferrets and a full-fledged Maine Coon cat the size of a cougar; she will live upstairs with three pugs, Charlotte, Maria, and Alfonse. When we get lonely, we will tap out a code on the adjoining door and have another movie marathon or something. If I die first, she will ensure that I am buried with a supply of Reese's cups, in order that I may begin my next life in a blissful orgy of chocolate and peanut butter. If she dies first, I get the rest of the money. (Haha Biz, haha.) Hopefully we die on the same day at exactly the same second, so neither of us will ever have to mourn the other.

Sometimes, you just know that someone is supposed to be in your life forever. It's like that with Biz and me. If one of us moves away for some reason, we will still make time for each other. Travel back and forth. Call. Video chat. There's a theory we have: no matter how many times they've been around, kindred souls find each other in every life: I have known you before. I will know you again. You are the best friend I've ever had.

You are my sister, and I love you.

Everybody's looking under your mattress
Seems they can't wait to find that pea,
Maybe you were never quite the princess
Everybody was afraid you'd be, 
And all these endless presentations
Must affect your concentration,
So I will stay with you tonight
In case this corset gets too tight,
And I will keep you company,
'Cause that's what a sister should be.
                     -- Rachael Sage, "Sistersong"
 

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Waking Up Beautiful (Rated: Hey, don't read this if you are easily upset.)

I don't want to be afraid;
I just want to wake up
beautiful today.

Every time I go to the Clinton County Women's Center's annual Domestic Violence vigil in Triangle Park, I cry. And not just a few tears, either. Every year for about a minute, I feel as though I'm going to bawl out all my pain and frustration right there on the grass. And I want to. I want to cry and cry until I'm empty of things to cry about, until every last nightmare has worked its way out of my body. I have to work really hard to maintain any semblance of control whatsoever. And then I get strong, and I walk up to the microphone, and I lift my head, and I tell my story. I tell it because it needs to be told. I tell it because I finally can, because no one can threaten me or punish me or force me to keep my mouth shut. As Tori Amos says:

Sometimes I hear my voice, and it's been here, silent all these years.

That's why I started this blog. I put things about my past in this blog because it's my way of making my voice heard. Maybe no one reads it. Maybe people read it and think I'm full of shit. I don't care. I have a voice. I have a voice. I have a voice. I have a voice. Hello, my name is Tiffany Bernard, and I have a voice. Try to silence me now.

Abusers have a thousand different ways of silencing a person's voice. They make you believe you're worthless, that no one will hear you, that no one will believe you, that no one will care. It's a sad testament to the way things are that this so often seems to be the case. People turn away. They close their eyes. They stop their ears. They say to themselves: This isn't real; this doesn't exist. You can be begging for help in every way you know how, and the people around you still go: I can't hear you. They explain away the bruises, the exhaustion, the bloodshot eyes. They never seem to look at you twice. People who are supposed to love you do this. People who are supposed to take care of you do this. People who are supposed to cherish you above all other things in the world do this. They live on in denial, and you spend your days hearing:

You're worthless.
You're a disgrace.
You're a maggot.
No one will ever want you.
You can't survive without me.
If people knew who you really were, no one would love you anymore.
I should've gotten rid of you the second you were born.
I should just kill you now and get it over with. No one will care.

At a certain point in my childhood, my mother actually looked me in the eyes and said, "Do you want to die today, bitch?"
"No Mom, I don't want to die today."
"Then prove it."

This was the world I lived in. A world of fear and pain, a world where my own father would look down at me bleeding on the floor and walk away, actually leaving me to die. I wonder: did he ever ask himself, "Will Tiffany be alive when I get home from work?" My grandmothers, both of them, tended to a potentially life-threatening head injury I sustained one morning after my mother threw a sharp-heeled shoe at my head and busted it open wide. I had a concussion so severe I was limp as a rag doll and had to be re-dressed as if I were a baby, at nine years old. I had to be carried to the car and arranged across the back seat, carried into Jean's house and settled onto the couch. I was so tired. I did not understand why my Mammie would not let me sleep. "Wake up, Tiffy. Don't close your eyes, Tiffy. Talk to me. Don't close your eyes." Did she ever ask herself, "If I send this child back home, will I be burying her tomorrow? Next week? Next month?"

There were so many times I thought I would die. Tumbling head-over-end down the basement stairs. Having my head pounded against the hardwood floor until I became insensate. One terrible night, with my face pressed hard against the bottom of the bathtub under freezing cold water, hearing the oddly magnified sound of my fingernails scrabbling against the fiberglass. I thought I would die with my mother on top of me, so heavy, always so heavy, squeezing all the breath out of me with her weight pressing down and her fingers like a vice around my neck. According to research I have done, it can take anywhere from 4 to 10 seconds before a person faints from strangulation. After 20 seconds, you run the risk of traumatic brain injury, coma, or death. I have learned that the ten seconds before the blackness takes over are the longest ten seconds a person will ever experience. It feels like years. Everything slows down. Sound comes from far away and then just stops altogether. Explosions of color dance in your field of vision. You can actually feel the numbness creeping into your fingers and toes. Static starts to play in your ears and then gets louder and louder and louder until suddenly, it just stops. Everything stops. It's finally quiet. Dark. Peaceful. You are everywhere and nowhere all at once. You don't know how you know yourself, but you do. You are not afraid anymore. Simply resting. Finally resting. And you want to stay. You want to stay because you're okay here, you're safe. There is no screaming, no blood, no pain. You think, without knowing how you are thinking, "If this is what it's like to be dead, it's not frightening at all." You don't mind the idea of being dead. And then the world comes slamming back into you with the force of your brain moving in your skull, an explosion of pain, and you hear yourself drag in a breath as your body's instincts kick in and drag you into life. But something is off. The world still hums, like a thousand hornets trapped against your eardrum. You look at your hand and think, "This is a hand," but you can't remember what it's for. You can't remember how to make this thing called a hand work. You are surprised when it opens and closes. You try to get up and tip drunkenly, watching your own legs as if you have never seen legs before. You are outside these clumsy legs and hands somehow. Not entirely, but in bits: you can see parts of yourself that only an outside observer should be able to see: the backs of your elbows, the outline of your hip as you roll, the crown of your own head. It's as if your soul is saying, "Wait, wait, stop. I haven't caught up." The part of you that makes you a living, thinking, animate person has locked itself out of the car and is climbing in through the window to get back behind the wheel. And when it does, when everything is finally back in motion, there is no one to care that you were just strangled within seconds of death by your own mother. There is no one to care about your screaming headache or the fact that you're shaking with exhaustion and can barely dress yourself for school. There is no one to say, "Oh, honey. How awful. You must have been so scared. Have some water. Lie down. Rest. I'll take care of you." They're off in denial, still going: This isn't real; this doesn't exist.

I do not know how I survived. I honestly, genuinely, do not know. I should not have lived past my seventh birthday. I should not be sitting here now, feeling my fingers on the keys as I type, feeling my feet firmly on the floor. Is there such a thing as divine providence? There must be, though I don't know how I feel about that: I sometimes want to scratch out the eyes of the divine thing that provided the providence, whatever it is. If it has eyes. I want to launch myself at it screaming in a rage and beat the shit out of it. How could you do this? How could you leave me to suffer? How could you not even let me keep death as an end to hell? Didn't you hear me, morning after morning, praying to be whisked away before the blood began to flow? I hate you. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. 

There are still days when I wonder if it means anything that I'm still here. I tip my Paxil into my palm every night and settle in for what will most likely be long hours of nightmares and think, "Is it worth it?" I come out of my apartment into a crisp autumn morning and try to convince myself that the wind on my face and the sun in the sky make up for all the things I lost and all the burdens I now carry, but I'm not always sure they do. I'm becoming a social worker to better someone else's life at the cost of my own childhood, my sense of safety and security. I have crawled through Hell backward. They say what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, but to tell you the truth, I don't really feel strong. I still feel broken. Used. Sometimes I think I'm full of hairline cracks, and  the slightest touch of a hammer and chisel will crumble me like an unwanted statue. I'm not trying to be depressing or say that I do not want to live anymore, so please don't think that if you are reading this. I'm trying to say that I want to live, as a whole, valid, safe, and contented person, and I'm sometimes afraid that will never happen. That it was all for nothing. That I have no purpose. But I want one. And so I keep trying. I do my schoolwork and go to my job and tell my story to the best of my ability. I try to let other people know that they are not alone, in part for selfish reasons: to remind myself that I am not alone. I forget sometimes. But also because I'm pretty sure my purpose, whatever it is, lies there, in other people. I know I can do things well. I am an excellent writer and a good public speaker. I connect easily with other people. I feel pulled to fight for social justice and equality and change. I guess I do it because in spite of my bad days, there is still that little kernel of flame somewhere within me, that child who refuses to die, that woman who hears her voice and refuses to let it be silenced. Honestly, I do not know how that woman functions sometimes. I watch her in awe, and then I realize she's me. Some days I guess I just wake up beautiful, in spite of myself. I do know I try. I try so hard, and I just keep trying. I guess that's a thing they call hope. Either that or I'm just too damn stubborn to let anything kick my ass. Either way, I guess it works.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

A Little Respect

I have had some excellent professors in my time. First there was Howard Gabbenesch, the Sociology professor who challenged me out of academic torpor and taught me that my best, at least in his class, was somewhere around 102.3 percent. He told me I couldn't do it, and I did it to prove him wrong. That man talked to me for 2 minutes and read my personality like a book -- and at the end of the semester, he shook my hand and told me he had known I could do it all along.
Then there was Kirat Baath. Kirat taught me freshman Biology at USI. I hate science, but the next semester I took Human Genetics because Kirat was teaching it, and I loved Kirat. It is impossible to accurately describe what she did for me. In her office I laughed and cried and learned things about life she never could have taught me using a textbook. She stood up for me when I didn't yet know how to stand up for myself. She took me out to lunch and told me stories about India and going to college in Massachusetts. When I started coming here to PA on vacations, she'd call and check in on me. We lost touch for a few years after I moved away, and then found each other again on facebook earlier this year. It's so nice to be able to connect with her again -- there are some people you never forget.Kirat is one of those people.
Michael Paulus was the first Social Work professor I encountered at LHU. I liked him immediately. He's hilarious. Buff the Lecture-Enhancing Bison, a little beanie animal that always went flying around the room during lectures to "encourage participation," was only one of his many good ideas. (Even after Buff took an accidental bath in Dr. P's coffee one morning and smelled like dry roast for the rest of the semester, we used him.) We had mid-semester celebrations complete with Earth, Wind and Fire and Dr. P. dancing the Shopping Cart at the front of the room. No topic was off limits: he'd discuss the perils of "burning a ring on your ass sitting on the pity pot," the viscosity of bowel movements, the nuances of sexual attraction among the extremely aged. He was also way too fond of traumatizing us all by painting very vivid pictures of our parents "getting it on." (He taught Human Behavior and the Social Environment, so this was valid subject material. He just liked it a little too much because it made us all squirm.) Dr. P certainly kept us busy -- his favorite line? "Welcome to your major." -- but he was always available to help, and still is. Though I have finished with the classes he officially teaches, if I need help understanding another assignment I often go straight to Dr. Paulus. Every Social Work major does, because Paulus is like ClearChannel radio: nothing bars the communication. He considers it his job to help us become the best social workers we can be, and if that means he has to explain another professor's assignment a thousand different times in a thousand different ways, he'll do it. He's cool like that -- even in his suspenders and his fishing vest.
But I have to admit it: even Paulus is not *technically* my favorite. That honor belongs to Wade Siebert. If there was a Most Awesome Educator Ever award, I'd hand it to Wade. He's one of those down-to-earth professors who levels with and actively respects all of his students, to the point where he reminds us daily that he respects us because he doesn't think we hear it often enough anywhere else in the university environment. He's on a first-name basis with everyone who's comfortable calling him by his first name -- and he's officially changed his name something like four times because he just gets tired of  hearing the same thing every day. He volunteers with cancer patients and shaves his head out of solidarity with them. He'll teach us things from the book and then supplement the lecture with things the text won't say, like what to do if a client waves a gun at you, how to handle a hoarder, what to do about a terminal client whose dying wish is to get into your pants, etc. He's full of "ethical dilemma" stories and how to resolve them without sacrificing yourself or your profession. He's creative -- he teaches my Aging class, and our first assignment this semester was to draw what we thought we'd look like at 80. He knows his students; he's genuinely interested in what's going on with us and what we dream of doing. If you're a student of his with kids, he knows their names. He's full of questions like, "If you could go anywhere in the world you wanted to go, where would it be? Why?" Wade is also my personal mentor. If I have a problem, I talk to Wade. He has seen me cry, which is a high honor. Wade helps keep me from getting overwhelmed. He advocates for me: he'll wrestle with the Registrar to make sure all my classes are in accessible rooms and fight with the Disability office if they give me trouble about something. He somehow knows things about me I've never had to tell him: he's great at the intuition thing, and he doesn't use it as a power card. He keeps things as equal between us as they can possibly be, and never fails to show me the utmost in respect, for which I pay him in kind. I give Wade my best work because he deserves it. He has offered to take my arm and walk me up the stairs at commencement, and I have accepted without feeling weak or offended. I think it would be an honor to have him help me. He is an excellent social worker: I want to be as good at my job one day as he is at his. I hope I learn to treat people with the same kind of dignity and respect that he does. I do not mind admitting that I look up to him. We all need role models, and Wade is one of mine -- at graduation, he says he's going to turn around and present me to the crowd as an example of what people can do if they truly want to accomplish something. I believe him. And I'm going to throw back my head and laugh and be grateful. And fifteen years from then, I'm going to call Wade from my office somewhere and say, "Thanks for helping me get here." And he'll laugh and be grateful, because that's just Wade.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

I Go Walkin' After Midnight, With Sweet Dreams of You

The best memory I have of my mother is of her singing. Holy fright, could that woman sing! She had a contralto that was out of this world in the best possible way. I used to watch her from the kitchen doorway as she stood over the stove stirring dinner, wrapped in an apron, swaying back and forth with her eyes closed and crooning "I Fall to Pieces," match-for-match with Patsy Cline. The late afternoon sun would come through the kitchen window and bring out the natural red highlights in her auburn hair -- new-copper-penny red, deep, true, ruby red, wildfire red -- and a kind of halo would gather itself around her as her voice rang through the house, twining itself around Patsy's voice and making the air hum as if it were alive. She was so beautiful when she sang. I watched her quietly, hoping that someday I, too, would be that pretty.

People always used to tell me I looked like my mother. I had a love/hate relationship with this concept. Part of me was pleased that I looked like my mother: my mother was beautiful, and what little girl does not want to think that she is maybe even just a little bit beautiful, too? The other part of me resented this with every possible particle of resentment it could muster. Beautiful monsters are still monsters, after all, and I had the idea that one could not exist without the other: if I had my mother's beauty, I was automatically burdened with her ugliness as well. It is no secret that I acted a lot like her. We fought like two cats in a sack, always ready with fangs and claws, and my father used to maintain that this was because we were so much alike we repelled each other. These days, I can admit that there was probably some truth to this statement. I match my mother in stubbornness, I know: if I toed over the line by an inch she'd snatch away two inches, to which I would respond by stealing those two and a third, to which she would respond by snatching four, and so on and so forth. That the line was often in unreasonable places made very little actual difference: teenagers, being teenagers, will toe a line no matter where it is, reasonable or not.

Along with this matched stubbornness came an equally voracious -- and equally as matched -- streak of independence. This, I think, is what led to the two of us falling irreconcilably apart, because this led to jealousy.

My mother, plain and simple, made mistakes and choices that trapped her in a situation she didn't want to be in, and at the time she was too young to figure out how to get back out. The older I got the more it became apparent to her that I would accomplish more than she had accomplished -- I would live independently, I would experience a college-campus lifestyle, I would grow up and move away and know more than Indiana small towns and babies and marriage and budgeting for four -- and she resented me for this, for being the one who got to do all the things she had always wanted to do, before I came along.

She was smart as they come, my mother. She has a genius IQ. She had photo albums full of Math and Science and English awards she won during high school. She could've gone anywhere she wanted, done anything she wanted: Harvard, law school, the space program, international travel to China and Japan in an expensive suit and a business class seat with a glass of wine and a thousand people waiting on her to make the most shrewd, highest-paying decision for corporations and conglomerates. She could have been a neurosurgeon, or a bestselling author, or a thousand other things. The world was at her feet. The possibilities were endless. It must have been the worst kind of hell for her to find herself with two small children, a shaky marriage to a man bent on drinking himself into the ground, and a job waiting tables at White Pines. I can even go so far as to say I understand some of this frustration myself: I'm pretty damn smart in my own right, if I do say so, and circumstances of physical disability and mental health have me trapped in a pro-rated shoebox clawing my way through month after month on less money than some people make in a week and eking my way toward a BSW at a college where accessibility is a foreign term no one has ever encountered. I too could have gone more places, done more things; hell, I could be a Penn right.now. I could be working on a doctorate. I could be in the Rare Books and Special Collections section of the Library of frickin' Congress, handling things no one else is allowed to touch. I'm intelligent enough. I work hard enough. When I want something, I'll run my ass off to get it. But so often I feel like a hamster on a wheel: I run and run and run, and never get anywhere. I bump into a physical impossibility or an income restriction or a depressive episode, and before I know it I'm ten paces behind where I started. My mother must have felt like this every day of her life. Her endless possibilities shrank to a one-inch by one-inch cube and got lost in the dirt, until even the little I feel like I have accomplished seemed like an impossible dream. When I think about it, the level of independence I have acquired must have been something my mother thirsted after with every pore in her body. I have traveled across the country by myself. I have had the guts to move out of state on a whim and a bus ticket with the clothes on my back and some money in my shoe. I can live alone, and thrive that way. My mother has always had someone else to consider, someone else to take care of. Has she ever done something as simple as order a late-night pizza and eat the whole thing by herself with a bottle of wine just because she feels like it? Has she ever fumbled her key in the lock at three a,m. holding a bouquet of roses and wearing someone else's jeans and a secret smile? Somehow I don't think she has.

Not that this excuses the things she did. It doesn't even come close. When your child's best memory of you is watching you from behind your back while you sing because you'll slap her if you see her, you've got a problem. If one of you were to look at me right now and ask me if I love her or not, I would tell you no, and I would mean it. I have no feelings for who she is today, or who she was during almost every single second of my childhood. But I've done a lot of growing up in the many years it has been since most of you last saw me, and today I can acknowledge sympathy for the kid who waded into life too fast and walked in too deep to swim out. Things sucked pretty bad for that kid for a long time. If my mother in her adolescence were one of the girls I have worked with in recent months and years, I'd tell her to turn on her favorite music and talk it out. (Is it just me, or do teenage girls really seem to talk more about what's bothering them when the stereo is on?) We'd go on a road trip to find hidden treasure and dress up for a parade and work our butts off from 9 to 9 at the Relay for Life, so I could watch her be proud of herself for accomplishing something amazing, and when she pulled herself out of last-chance high school by gut and gumption and went off to college, I'd be the one cheering for her the loudest. But my mother didn't have that -- she didn't have anything like that.

If there's one thing I have to thank that woman for, it's for showing me what not to be. It's for making me the kind of strong-willed, independent person who can have the patience of a saint with a 15 year-old girl who acts like she's nine. If my mother had never hurt me, I wouldn't have forged in myself the heart of a social worker, an advocate, a warrior who is passionate about justice and fairness and peace. There's a lot of damage in me that can't be undone, but there's a lot of strength, too, and I never would have found it if I hadn't been forced to fight. I give her a nod for that -- though I still hope she's a dung beetle in her next life.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Yes, I Still Exist :)

Sorry for the hiatus. School has begun anew, and as such I have been kept rather busy of late. This year's schedule is Basic Stats, Aging (Social Work 450), Introduction to Computers, Social Work Practice II, and Social Policy and Research, plus work and volunteer time: I'm eyeballing a 60-hour training course at the county's domestic violence shelter which will certify me to work at any DV shelter in the state of PA. Am I crazy? Most likely. Will it be worth it? Oh yeah.

Since Monday, I've learned some important things about grad schools: state schools are worse than private schools for MSW scholarship funding, so if I want to go to grad school I should aim high. Penn has a stipend program that pays 75% of a student's tuition, if said student is willing to be an adjunct during his or her tenure there. I would DIE, DIE, DIE if I could go to Penn!!! With advanced standing the whole shebang would take me a year, licensing exam and all. My overall GPA is only 3.2, but if I keep the 3.9 in my major I might actually stand a chance. Me, at Penn! Can you imagine? There is also a program called CNET (I think I have that right,) that will pay a percentage of tuition if a student in their program promises a full year of post-graduate work to the Department of Children and Youth in the sponsoring county. I don't think I'd want to work in my county's department, (Today I learned their disturbing motto: "You hatch 'em, we snatch 'em,) but if I could get a neighboring county to sponsor me, that could actually work out quite well. All in all, I am very pleased about all the possibilities. (Ohmigod, Penn!!)

I also plan to keep busy doing college-kid things this semester: plays and concerts and Spring Fling, etc., etc. I think part of my problem in previous semesters was that I didn't get out and have enough fun. I stayed in the library with my studies or at home on the couch with my Compazine, and I wore myself down. In an effort to keep myself healthy this time around, I am monitoring what goes into my rebellious stomach very closely and taking my meds with religious zeal. I don't have time to be chronically ill; I have a life. I have also implemented a reward system: for every time I go to class even when I feel like shit (assuming I don't have something contagious), I can buy a new book that I want. I can get good used paperbacks on Amazon for $1.99. It's perfect. I should go buy some new wall shelves now just for the thrill of watching them fill up. (I am determined to re-acquire the Little House on The Prairie series I had when I was a child, one book at a time. And if you guys are wondering what I'd like for Christmas, that's it. Also look for the ones by Roger Lea McBride about Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter. I had them all. I want them again. They don't have to be  new copies, and don't worry about duplicates.)

Anyway, I should probably quit jabbering and go do some reading. I have two blocks of text due for two different classes by Tuesday, and I like to read them more than once. Ta-ta, y'all. Wish me luck.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.

Sometimes you think you're ready for something, and then you realize you aren't.

I just told my Dad I'm not ready to be adopted:

Loving you has taught me a lot of things. And I know that if it were you in my father's place, I'd still love you even if you didn't deserve it. I don't know why, but it feels too much like a betrayal. A double-sided betrayal: if I let go of Dale I'm betraying him, and if I don't I'm betraying you. I'm not sure what to do. I thought I was ready; I want to be ready. But then I thought maybe I was just still angry from the past few days, and I don't want to do this because I'm angry. I'm sorry.


I had to fight to keep from crying. Ten thousand thoughts are chasing their way through my head, and I can't make sense of any of them. If it were just my mother we were talking about, I wouldn't have to think twice. I'd have the adoption papers signed, sealed and delivered by tomorrow morning.. Michelle Allen went a long way toward erasing any love I ever had for her, and she did a damn good job of it -- I don't have enough good memories of the two of us to use up all the fingers on my left hand. She hated me, and I knew it. And she knew it. And Dale knew it. She used to say things like, "I should have thrown you away the minute you were born. You're useless. You're a disgrace. You'll never amount to anything. I should just kill you now and get it over with." And then she would make me get down on my knees in front of her and beg her not to end my life. I even had to clasp my hands: "I know I'm useless. I know I don't deserve to live, but please don't kill me, Mommy. Please." It was humiliating and degrading. It stripped me of my humanity. I hated it so much I would even go so far as to beg her not to make me beg her, but it never worked: she'd just beat me till I did as I was told. I was eight, nine, ten, eleven, fifteen years old; it went on for years. My knees had permanent bruises, and my powerlessness and rage was pressed and shaped and built upon until it turned into a hatred so profound that no amount of time will be able to erase all of it. These days, I alternate between not giving the slightest bit of a damn about her and waiting meanly for her to die so I can get back the stuff she has that I want: Christmas ornaments, childhood toys, beloved books. Sometimes I feel like sitting down and crying for Mommy, but not her. Not who she is. When I want to cry for Mommy, I cry for who she should have been -- because I know, deep in the very fabric of my being, that I was a motherless child in all but the most technical of definitions. But Dale was a different story.

I was a little girl who adored her Daddy. I didn't care that he was gone most of the time, or that he was constantly drunk. I loved him even though he left me to suffer, even as I watched him walk away time and time again. I would have followed that man to the ends of the earth; I would have trailed him to Hell and back. My fondest memory of him is something so incredibly simple that it almost feels silly even to mention it. It was the day he taught me how to hold a pool stick.

When I was little, the pool sticks from our game table were almost as tall as I was. I was so very clumsy and uncoordinated; try as I might, I could not hold one correctly. My baby brother could do it better. Patiently, over and over again through the course of a single evening, Dale would come up behind me and guide the stick through my fingers. Leaning into his chest, smelling his aftershave and cigars, feeling his big hands over my little ones and moving in tandem as he guided the shot to pocket the ball ... I felt so safe. I didn't want him to let go.

There were other times, too. One day after we moved to Norton Road, me and Matt were helping him wash his semi when he got a strange grin on his face, lifted a sopping, soapy sponge from a bucket of water, and threw it straight at me. This started a water fight to end all other water fights in the world: both buckets ended up being dumped, the water hose entered the fray, and somehow Matt's Super Soaker made an appearance. By the end of it, I was crawling downhill as fast as I could manage while shrieking with laughter, two voices behind me shouting, "Hurry! She's getting away!"

The sheer joy of these simple things was enough to overshadow even the repeated abandonment. For a long time, these little things kept me afloat. Even when things got ugly between us, I could not hate him: instead, I loved him more, with the fierce and bereft kind of love a girl has for the knight in shining armor who, even having turned on her, will forever and always be her first hero. I remember a night of fear and disbelief that ended  with me rocking back and forth at the foot of my bed with my arms wrapped around myself, sobbing out to the empty room: "Daddy, daddy, daddy, can't you see I need you?"

But he could not see, or would not, so in the end I had to go. I finally had to give up on the idea that he would save me and do what had to be done so that I could save myself. I was lucky to find Lou when I did. I will always be grateful that there's a place in his heart with my name on it, because no matter how old she gets, a girl will always need a daddy. Whether she's twelve or 120, there's a spot in a woman's heart for her father. I guess that means I'm lucky, in a way, because I have two of those spots now. One belongs to a man in a brown shirt with "Bennie's Garage" stamped above the pocket, who taught me how to hold a pool stick and let me call for radio checks on the C.B in his truck when I was no more than four. The other belongs to a man who wears a bandanna around his ankle in a persistent throwback to the eighties, who fixes me a pot of chili on my birthday every year because he knows it's my favorite and who turns me around sometimes on the sidewalk so I won't miss the hot girl walking by, which I wholeheartedly appreciate. Today, in 2010, it is this man who makes me feel safe and cared for and protected. I go to sleep at night knowing that if I ever need him, all I'll ever have to do is call his name, and he'll come wading through Hell and high water to keep me from harm. I never had that in Dale; Dale walked away. But somehow, I still can't let go of him, of the memory of that man who used to be my hero and the sense that by being officially adopted, I'll somehow be betraying him. I guess it boils down to what I told my daddy earlier:


Loving you has taught me a lot of things. And I know that if it were you in my father's place, I'd still love you even if you didn't deserve it.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Announcement (Well, Toward the End)

Anyone who knows me well knows this: I am very open and expressive. I smile and chatter; I can debate a point much more than aptly. And yet I am finding it difficult to pull the simplest words out of my head and arrange them into sentences. I've been this way for the past few days, ever since Tropical Storms Carolyn and Teena ripped their way into my peace and threw things around.

I'm doing okay, I guess. I'm studying for a U.S. History II exam, which is keeping my mind occupied. It's been a huge relief to bury myself in World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate -- although to be honest, I'm not sure how much of it I'll remember. Trying to hold a thought in my head  right now is like cracking an egg into a sieve. It leaks out. Slowly, but it leaks out. This, I know, is my mind's way of insulating me from the shock -- because this has truly been a shock. Fantasy world? Leg licker? From Teena? My favorite aunt in the entire world? The woman who gave me cool clothes and taught me to love Janis Joplin, who took me to my first concert and my first live play, who took me to the library for the first time ever, let me get a lap full of books and read them to me over and over and over again? The woman who used to calm me by laying my tiny spastic body on her chest under an electric blanket and patting my back for hours? The one who taught me "Tutti Frutti," "Mary Had A Little Lamb," "Raindrops are Falling on my Head?" The woman who knew one of my deepest, darkest secrets and faithfully kept it to herself for years? If I let myself really think about the scorn and contempt this woman now holds for me, I will not be able to contain my grief. This little voice inside my head says: But you were my favorite. But I loved you. I loved you, I loved you, I loved you. Remember the time we went to Indiana Beach when I was little? Did you know I used to wish I had been born to you instead of your sister? Remember me being a flower girl at your wedding? Remember how excited I was to meet Levi? Logan? Lucas? Remember us watching 28 Days the Spring Break after Lucas was born, while I held him on the sofa bed? When I told you about what happened with Charles and you never, ever told anyone? Did you know that's still my favorite movie? I know every line. I adored you. I worshiped you. I wanted to be just like you: confident and sassy and brave. You were my hero. And now I have lost you. Now you're gone, and I don't know if I can do this without you.

I can't think about it. I can't. So it leaks out of my brain, right along with Stalingrad and the Manhattan Project and Japanese peace-feelers. I study until my hand hurts from holding the pencil and I get blurry vision, and only half of the stuff sticks. My brain, it seems, does not discern between what will hurt my heart and what will help my GPA; it ditches everything, evenly across the board.


I do not know how things will go from here, but I am hereby officially announcing my intentions to be formally adopted into the Bernard family, via a decree of adoption by a judge in a court of law. It's just time. It's time for me to quit pining over people who will never accept me and give my all to the people who do. I've got to quit fishing for love with my heart on a string when it's right here in front of me, just waiting for me to take it. It's a little scary for me to try to comprehend solidity and permanence on this undeniably irrefutable level (Terrifying, actually) but it's what I want. It's what I need. And if there happens to be a miracle whereby God manifests on Earth and slaps some sense into (most of) my biological family, well, they'll just have to share me.

I am Tiffany Bernard, daughter of Lou Bernard and Michelle Cothern Bernard, sister of Chelsey and Elizabeth, and aunt of Evangeline. Take me or leave me -- either way, I won't back down.

Monday, August 16, 2010

All the Things She Said

It is ten minutes of eleven in Central PA, and I am sitting on my couch with half a dozen donuts and a bottle of wine. It was either that or an obscenely stale cigarette from a pack I've had for approximately two and a half years, and I don't need to be anywhere near fire right now. Not with how I'm feeling. I got this little gem today:

Tiffy get out of your little fantasy world You were not treated as bad as you carry on you have always lived in a fantasy if people really wanted to know the whole story it seems that they would be trying to talk to your real family if it w...as so bad you had plently of opportunity to let me or anyone else know you are a spoiled little brat that can"t deal with the fact that you are a leg licker nobody else cares you need to deal with it you want everyone else to feel sorry for you because you can"t deal with yourself And I've been told to fuck off by better your words don"t hurt me but the way you hurt your grandparents and your parents and you brother aunts uncles why do you make them suffer because Somebody did"nt kiss your ass is wrong Have a good life Tiff You are nuts and leave Levi out of it he will be fine

There are things I want to say to this. Many, many, many things. They will do no good; I know that by now. But I'm pissed and it will make me feel better, so I am going to say them anyway.

1. Do not call me Tiffy. You have forever lost the right to call me Tiffy. It is a term of endearment I will no longer accept from you, because the only thing I want to endear you to from now on is my foot up your ass.

2. If I really had always lived in a fantasy, it sure as hell wouldn't have had so much blood in it. Or so many hospitals. Or social workers. Or tears.

3. Let you know? LET YOU KNOW?! ARE YOU BLIND? ARE YOU STUPID? You'll recall that I TRIED to let you -- and everyone else -- know. I told, didn't I? More than once. But I wasn't little and cute anymore by then, so no one believed me. Including you, you self-righteous bitch. So don't tell me how many opportunities I had to LET YOU KNOW. You ignored me then just like you're ignoring me now. But hey, whatever you have to do to sleep at night.

4. Leg licker? Is this some kind of anti-lesbian term I have yet to hear? Or have you been watching too many Orbit gum commercials? I'd call you a cunt licker in retaliation, but it would be an insult to my kind.

5. As for dealing with myself, I do that every day. You want a confession? Fine. In my lifetime I have lied, stolen, and set things on fire. I have picked fights; I have been selfish at the expense of others. I never claimed to be a perfect person, ESPECIALLY as a kid. These days I have a short temper and a low tolerance for stress. I know my faults. I have plenty of them. It seems to me that YOU'RE the one who has the problem dealing with herself: I can admit all these things to the world, but you can't acknowledge that your inaction contributed to my suffering. Which makes me stronger than you will ever be.

6.You've been told to fuck off by better, huh? Well, I find that hard to believe because bitch, it don't get no better than me. I don't owe you a damn thing, and I didn't HAVE to give you another chance to be in my life, but I did. And the fact that I am not burning you in effigy or sticking pins through your little poppet eyes right now speaks for itself. Do not doubt the power I have to make you suffer if I so choose. The only reason your bones aren't breaking one at a time is because I am honorable enough to keep an oath to do no harm.

7. I hurt you? You're really, seriously bringing up how I hurt YOU. Let me tell you something, you rancid sack of pus. Kids don't move out of state, change their names and find new families because they grew up well-adjusted. They do it because no one gave them what they needed where they started out. You abandoned me, and we both know it. You don't want to admit it, but you know it. And what about that letter in February, huh? You don't think that hurt? If my saving my own ass hurts you, then perhaps you should have done it for me. I was a child, after all. You know what they say: you want something done right, do it yourself.

8. I didn't bring Levi into it. You did, when you hacked into his facebook account to send me your snotty little message. The fact that I called you on it does not change the truth.

9. This is the second time in a year you've told me to have a nice life. Perhaps I would, if you would actually leave it.

10. I can't believe you used to be my favorite aunt. I'd die a thousand brutal deaths before I did something like this to MY niece.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Little Wonders

Let me tell you what family is:

The note said: "Open this when you get to PA." I cheated. I opened it on the bus, figuring West Virginia was close enough to call it even. That thing had been burning a hole in my pocket since she'd slid it across the counter to me the morning I left. As I unfolded it, a friendship bracelet fell out. Silver, with a heart dangling from the end. On the paper she'd written: this is the part of my heart that belongs to you. I have the other half. Keep it for when you miss me. And I don't care what anyone says: you'll always be my sister.

I don't have the note anymore. It got wet in my pocket when I spilled my soda on the bus and disintegrated into little pieces. I was so upset that I cried. The bracelet I wore until it came apart. Then I put it in a little baggie and tucked it away in the corner of my top drawer, under the handkerchiefs from India, a tiny antique teacup half the size of my thumb, and two small Post-Its bearing the handwriting of a dear friend I hadn't seen in a long, long time. My little treasures. 

Five years later, we had yet to see each other again. I missed her wedding. I missed the birth of her child. There were times I wanted so badly to be there, participating in her life, helping her and laughing with her and crying with her, being a big sister. We spoke on the phone, but it was never enough. Then I got an unexpected windfall of cash due to a corrected bureaucratic error, and all I could think of was the sister I had missed so much, the brother-in-law I had never met, and the niece I had never held. Within the month, I was on a train to St. Paul.

As the train slowed for the last few miles into the Twin Cities, I worried and fretted. My appearance was all wrong. I weighed too much. What if I wasn't interesting anymore? What if hauling around all my mobility junk was more trouble than it was worth? What if, what if, what if? And then I saw them, sitting there in the depot, and everything was fine. More than fine. As I hugged my baby sister, standing at the baggage claim, for the first time in five years, I could not believe I wasn't crying. I saved that for later.

Holding my infant niece for the first time was an absolute wonder. I drank in everything: the big blue eyes, the tiny hands and feet, the adorable little pout, the gorgeous, slobbery, toothless smile. I loved running my hand over the fine blond fuzz on her head, stroking the silky skin on the back of her tiny knuckles. I could not get enough of her. She was perfect. During that visit, I held her every chance I got. I'd never really particularly liked babies, but one look at Evangeline and I fell in love.I cooed and trilled and grinned and played peek-a-boo, read her stories and learned "Tick tock, baby clock," the particular rocking motion that seems to calm her best.

Early in the morning following my sister's birthday, Evangeline began to cry. The rest of the house was asleep, so I got up and padded to the nursery, turning on the light in the unfamiliar room. The baby had rolled herself over and was grasping at the bars of the crib with her tiny little hands, trying to stand. She looked up at me and wailed. Tiny tears ran down her face. As quietly as I could, I went to the fridge and got a bottle. Back in the nursery I thought quickly, then kicked things well out of my way to make a path to the rocking chair. I had never walked with her before; I was too afraid of dropping her and causing her pain. But she needed me, and I wanted her to trust that I would be there. I didn't want her to see me walk away and not return -- though I'd send someone else, I wanted her to know she could count on me. I said a prayer. "Please, God, don't let me drop the baby." I picked her up as gently as I could and took the three  most careful steps of my life.

I settled into the rocking chair and offered her the bottle. Her little fingers curled around it. Her body stopped shaking. The crying subsided. After a few minutes, I reached out and very, very carefully wiped a tear from her face with my index finger. She reached up and wrapped her hand around it; that perfect baby hand around a single one of my big, clumsy, adult fingers. She looked up at me and smiled: a wet, formula-drool smile that seemed to say, "Hey, you're pretty cool." I thought how it hadn't even been a week since I'd officially met her, how much of her I'd already missed, how not one drop of the same blood ran in our veins. And none of these things mattered at all.

I never thought I'd get a little sister, let alone two of them. I never thought I'd get to hold and cherish nieces and nephews either, given the way things stand between me and Matt. As I sat there in that rocking chair murmuring quietly to that baby, a wave of gratitude and love hit me that might have knocked me over, had I been standing. Chelsey didn't have to call herself my sister, but she did. She didn't have to open the door to her life and let me in, but she did. She didn't have to let me be an aunt, but she did. She didn't have to love me, but she did. Just like Lou and Michelle and Biz, Vera and Becky and Kirat, Lee and Jim and Sara, writer of the "grace notes" on the Post-Its I have kept for so long. Whether they are still in my life or have gone, so many people have left fingerprints on my heart. Evangeline's are just the latest in a series of many, but still so very precious.

As I sat there rocking as quietly as I could in that creaky chair, a particular song made its way into my head. It's called "Little Wonders," by Rob Thomas, and I have always considered it the theme song of my crazy, big-hearted, open-armed, unconventional, amazing family that didn't have to be:

"And I don't mind,
If it's me you need to turn to:
We'll get by;
It's the heart that really matters in the end.
Time falls away, but these small hours,
These little wonders,
Still remain." 


I ran my thumb over the back of my niece's perfect little hand, and a tear ran into the corner of my mouth as I smiled while I cried. And that -- that feeling, that love, that gratitude and wonder and amazement -- that, above anything else, is the true meaning of family.
 

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

"Two Roads Diverged in A Yellow Wood ..."

"Pick which way."

I am with Sarah Feeko in her awesome new car. We're driving down back roads to nowhere in particular. Her awesome taste in music is rocking my socks off. At a fork in the road, she hits the brakes and lets me pick the next turn. Left? Right? Straight? We both have a fascination with roads less taken; in the course of half an hour I have seen her stop and back up to take a more interesting road at least twice. I pick. She drives. At the next fork, she asks again. I pick. She drives. As the road ribbons its way past cornfields and tumbledown barns I would love to explore -- somehow I can feel the magick coming off the ruins even from behind the rolled-up window -- I lean back in the seat and let the music carry me through the halls of memory to a little white Chevy half-ton, a fruit pie, a can of Pepsi, and the wind ripping joyfully through my hair.

We are getting lost. On purpose. I think we are, at least, and neither of the women in the front seat bothers to tell me otherwise. We have a full tank of gas, a cooler full of food and an insanely happy sheepdog named Ozzie, and we are on a grand adventure. 

I'm sitting in the back of the truck, on the cooler. I have a Pepsi in one hand and one of those 50-cent fruit pies in the other. I am sticky and smiling and hopped up on sugar. The wind roars in my ears as we drive; the sun reaches through the trees to make patterns on my skin. I am kicking my ankles against the Styrofoam side of the cooler, thud, thud, thud, making as much noise as I want with no one to tell me to stop because no one can hear me anyway. I am nine years old, and I don't think I've ever been so happy. Simple joys have swallowed me whole, and I have no desire to slice open the belly of this particular whale to free myself. No thanks. I'll stay here forever.

The truck stops at a crossroads. My grandmother leans through the little window in the cab and says, "Pick which way." A little thrill shoots its way through my body. The possibilities are absolutely delicious. The attraction is twofold: not only am I going somewhere I have never been, but I am being allowed to choose the path. It takes me a long minute to decide. Picking one direction means excluding the others, and I want to see everything. I want to go everywhere. I, Tiffany Allen, have the soul of an explorer, and it is coming alive.

We drive and drive and drive some more, until we come to a little creek running clear and bright in the afternoon sun. My grandmother and great-grandmother get out of the truck. Someone hefts me over the tailgate. The dog and I go bounding toward the water, one of us barking, the other letting loose one of those screams of joy that only children are capable of. I cram my feet into the cold water and eat my lunch sitting on the bank, still happily kicking my legs. Water splashes up to catch the sun as Ozzie runs back and forth in the shallow water. My grandmother spots fresh wild strawberries and reaches to pick them, dropping  them into my palm like rubies. There are plenty, and I eat strawberries until my mouth and my fingers are stained red.

On the way home, the sun is beginning to set. My great-grandmother leans out the window and points to a little building like a shack, telling me that is where she went to school when she was my age. I feel a vague sense of superiority over the fact that my school is so much bigger. On the last few miles of the most amazing day of my life, I tilt my face to the wind and laugh for no reason. I am slant-eyed with contentment, sassy and sleek as a cat. I am a girl with wild hair who is brave and daring and adventurous enough to get lost for no reason. I am invincible. I can do anything.

In the white Honda, Sarah switches the song. We drive past a blur of color on the left-hand side and back up to laugh at two roosters strutting along in the grass next to the road: the chickens from nowhere. I recognize one as a Rhode Island Red; my father's mother used to keep them. Later, we watch a white-tailed doe bound through the underbrush. It is August in Pennsylvania; the corn is high and the breeze is cool. The mountains are cloaked in dark summer green. Sarah couldn't have picked a better day to show up unexpectedly at my door, jangling the keys:

"Where are we going?"
"On an adventure."

Yes.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Autobiography Project, Section Two: Forests of the Night

It is the year 2004, and I am strapped to the floor of a city bus in a purple wheelchair called the Chariot, headed across Evansville to the mall to do some Christmas shopping. The landscape outside the window is November gray. Soggy. Yards are more mud than grass; houses look drab and tired. I don't know if it's just the light that makes everything appear dilapidated, or if everything in this section of the city really is falling apart. It's a back street. I've never been down it. I've never been down a lot of the streets in Evansville, and my traveler's soul gets the best of me: despite the drab scenery, I can't stop looking. If I were younger, I would press my face to the glass and breathe an 'O' with my mouth to look out of, like a small, secret eye recording everything and storing it for later, blink, blink.

The houses press themselves close together, flank to flank. Some have a walkway between; some do not. There isn't enough room. A person must either exit the house using the front door or circle back behind three houses, traipsing across muddy, squishing lawns. I have never seen this crowded phenomenon before. In the houses I grew up in, neighbors were not meant to be seen or heard. "Next door" might mean walking a mile. In the city, next door could be reached from your porch if you had a long enough stick. I thought about looking out my bedroom window at night and seeing nothing but the ribs of my neighbor's house. I decided that when I bought a house, it would not be a set of conjoined triplets. It would have a yard, and trees, and a fence, and neighbors. Lots of neighbors.

To me, the hustle and bustle of the city has always meant safety. Realistically I know this isn't true: cities have more people in them, and more people means more crime. But I like noise. Distractions. The sound of busyness. When I lay down my head at night, I actually welcome the sound of cars passing by on the avenue. In the winter when it snows a particular lot and no one can get out on the roads, the absence of tires on asphalt creates a silence so deep it presses on my brain. I long for the 12:05 train to go by, for the bells to ring at the college. I listen to see if the street sweeper will make it out. Sometimes I'm still awake at 4 o'clock when Housing Authority maintenance crews come to clear the sidewalks and the parking lot before the old people get up and the crippled college kid makes a go of getting to class, and only the noise of their shovels scraping along beneath the snow can relax me enough to fall asleep. Without some kind of noise from the outside world, I suffer a wild, nerve-pinching sense of abandonment that feels like a hole carved out of my belly. I have been this way for a long, long time.

"I'm going to go away and leave you. We're all going away, me and Matt and your dad. We will leave you here all alone, and no one will come to take care of you, and you will die."

I don't remember the first time she said it, but I know I was young enough to believe it with very little convincing. Why should I not believe her? I knew very well the side of my mother that would not mind hoisting my brother onto her hip and simply walking away from me. She used to threaten to leave me in stores and alongside strange streets in strange cities. My mind's eye had no trouble at all picturing her abandoning me in the middle of the night. As for my father, what proof did I have that he wouldn't leave me, too? I had watched him walk away often enough. It could happen. It might happen. It would probably happen.

For this reason, I did not sleep. If there was a light on in the house but I couldn't hear anyone, I just knew that somehow they had tricked me: they had manged to sneak away from me unnoticed, and had left the light on to make me think they were home so I wouldn't get out of bed and come looking for them till it was too late. They weren't going to come back to take care of me, and I would be all alone and then I would die. Every night, I stayed awake listening for a footfall or the creak of a stair or a whisper, something to let me know I wasn't alone in the world. Every night, I cried.

When the house grew dark and quiet, my imagination would kick into double overtime. Every shadow was a bad man coming to get me. Every creak was a murderer sneaking up on me. Every glint in the window took on features and became a face staring in at me, waiting for me to fall asleep so the person belonging to the face could come in and kill me. Some primal instinct drove me to seek protection in my blankets: I would wrap them tight around me, layer upon layer, until I was so swathed in blankets I could barely move. I would leave only my head poking out, to scan the room for danger. I wanted to see it coming and meet it with claws. Danger would not get me without a fight.

I am now twenty-five years old, and I still haven't grown out of this. During the day, I'm fine: danger doesn't stalk me anymore. I know how to fight with purpose now; I took lessons from the man I now call Dad, in his library or in his basement. He'd come up behind me and put his arm around my neck in a mock choke hold: "Alright Tif, what do you do?" He taught me how to fight from a wheelchair and how to fight from flat on my back on the ground. He made me a set of Filipino fighting sticks, painted them purple, and taught me how to wield them with painful, disarming force. He gave me a recipe for pepper spray. Thanks to him, I know I can defend myself well and victoriously if I have to. But somehow that knowledge fails to comfort me after dark. After dark, I become a paranoid 8-year old and experience compulsive desires to check the closets for bad men with knives. Danger is real to me: I have seen it. I have felt it. I can smell it, and it can smell me. And darkness hides danger, and darkness cloaks me in abandonment. I am forever wielding off the darkness.

The lamp in my living room has a 7-year bulb that will probably only last me four years, because it stays on 24 hours a day. I have lived here for four summers now, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have turned it off. Rain or shine, noon or night, that lamp burns. In the winter, I keep the shades drawn so that I don't have to watch the sun set and anticipate the oncoming darkness. I keep that lamp on and let night surprise me when it will. If the electricity goes out before the sun does, I head for Dad's house long before evening arrives. If my lights are out his lights are also out, but I don't mind candlelit shadows as long as there are people I trust around me. Those rare times I have had a partner, I have slept in the darkness curled around her body like a comma, trusting her solidity. I just can't do it alone. If the lights go out after darkness has already fallen, I streak for the hallway like a programmed explosive and sit in the light from the generator until electricity is fully restored. I'll sit there all night if I must.

I rarely sleep in my bed, though I have been making more of an effort at it these days. Usually I make the rounds of spots in the living room: a few weeks curled up on the love seat, a few weeks in the recliner, a few weeks on the floor. This amounts to: uncomfortable, uncomfortable, and extremely uncomfortable, but the security factor is worth the trade. When I do happen to sleep in the bed, I always put my head at the foot and sleep thus, upside-down. This is to be closer to the doorway should I need to launch a defense attack. Also, I set up a barrier of junk in said doorway: 1 very noisy beaded curtain, one manual wheelchair, one old oscillating fan. Every nighttime noise in my environment is carefully recorded and then located before I lie down. Thanks to a blind eye I have the hearing of a bat; anything amiss will wake me immediately. Heaven forbid anyone actually surprise me while I'm sleeping. I'll kill the bastard in 3 seconds flat, before I even realize my feet have hit the floor.

I have tried to cure myself of my fear of darkness through logic, reason, and even force, i.e. exposure therapy. Sometimes I turn off the lights and make it back to the bed and climb in and cover up before I can't take it anymore; sometimes I can't even drop my hand to my side before my heart is beating in my throat. Every once in a great while, I will take a particularly strong sleeping pill and force myself to turn off the lights mere seconds before I pass out cold. What I need, I think, is a life partner: someone who won't mind spending night after night with my cheek against her spine, until finally I trust her presence enough to let go. I can just imagine advertising for that on chemistry.com: "Wanted: One dark haired, dark eyed lesbian who knows how to cook, likes grumpy, cantankerous cats, and never, ever, ever has to get up in the middle of the night to pee."

Maybe I'll buy a body pillow and curl around it like a comma. That's just pathetic enough to work.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Autiobiography Project, Section One: On Weebles, and Wobbling, and Falling Down

I have just finished Markus Zusak's "The Book Thief," and now I need to tell a story. My own story. I am putting it here because of one simple truth: the only way I'm ever going to finish it is to tell it directly to you, whoever you are, reading this. There have been a hundred stops and starts in dozens of notebooks and on more than a few hard drives, but somehow I always lose the words. My memory fogs. I lose the proper time line and question my own remembering, getting lost in the numbers. I am desperate to tell this story right, as if not slipping up even one tiny time will ensure that you believe it at the end.

But the older I get, the less and less it matters to me whether or not you believe it. I just need to tell it, to have someone witness it. I can't promise that it will make sense. I can't promise you will like it. I can't promise I won't mess up a year, or a detail, or lose a chunk of time altogether right in the middle of recalling it. That happens sometimes. I'm walking along and suddenly there's a crater bombed into the surface of my brain, and the only way to get to the place where the words start up again is to hold my breath and jump. If you are still listening when I land, I will hand you the next piece of the story. Come with me, if you will. Let me tell you who Tif is.

The train tracks ran a few yards from our trailer. Rocks hit the window sometimes, and the deafening shriek of the train in the middle of the night was enough to unnerve me every time I heard it. I never got used to that train. Every time it thundered by I would match its whistle with the length and breadth of my screaming. I was four years old. I had a puppy, a baby brother, and a best friend named Jimmy who lived next door. My aunt and uncle lived across the road from us in a big green house behind an unpainted fence, and across the road the other way was a weather-beaten old house with "Massey's Old-Fashioned Grocery" painted on a sign above the porch.
I loved Mr. Massey. I remember him as tall and bald, always wearing a black jacket and little spectacles perched on his nose. Once he showed me an old rat trap, lifting a little door to demonstrate how the rat would fall into the water at the bottom of the trap and drown. I have no idea whether or not this was accurate. He could've been joking, or telling me a story just to keep me entertained, but I thought he was a god. I'd have followed him everywhere if he had let me. He did something even better, though, in giving me candy.
I remember his candy counter as being absolutely huge. It seemed to span the entire room from one end to the next. It shone with its own special light from a little girl's version of Heaven. I would press my nose to the glass and stare in at all the colorful candies, and Mr. Massey would open a white sack and reach into the counter to scoop out Sixlets and M&Ms and candy lipsticks, Whoppers and Butterfingers, candy cigarettes, necklaces and bracelets made of candy. I'd eat the candy lipsticks first and then put the pink and yellow tubes over my fingers to make long witch fingernails. I never knew I'd grow up to be a real Witch.I guess some things are in the cards.
Before I left home so many years later, I looked through my mother's photo albums and appropriated for my own uses a handful of photographs from my younger years: a baby picture, infant Tif in a pink dress with a white collar and the soft spot on her head still visible beneath her furring of hair, staring open-mouthed and wide-eyed at the camera; toddler Tif sprawled on a hotel bed during a vacation to Florida, all dimples and brown ringlets and plaster casts. According to my great-grandmother, rest her soul, I told a boy in the elevator to come to my room and play with me, and he did. It may have been the bellhop. That's the impression I got when I heard the story.
The other picture with me in it has my father in it, too. He's sprawled on the front steps of our trailer grinning cheekily at the camera, shirtless, wearing blue jeans. I'm sitting next to him, summer-blonde, my tanned little legs curving oddly, beaming my widest little-Tif smile. Both of us are wearing sunglasses. Mine are much too big, and somehow I've hooked them behind my ears upside-down. I look like a mutant fly. I look innocent and happy, the way a child is supposed to look. I pick up that photograph now and stare in at myself frozen in time, and I wish I could remember that day, crawl back into that picture and assume that sturdy little body and sit next to that man for a few minutes, wearing his sunglasses upside-down and both of us smiling. I miss that man.
My father was in the same category as Mr. Massey back then: he was a god. I was always learning new things to please him: "Look, Daddy, look!" concentrating to pump my willowy little legs in time with the swing, to make him proud of me. He'd say, "Good job, Sissy!" and slap me fives: high five, low five, middle five. He was there when I needed help navigating something, flying me through the air in a glorious swoop before setting me on my feet again with, "Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down." And when his weeble did fall down, he taught her to be tough: 
"Are you broken?"
"No."
Are you bleedin'?"
"No."
"Are you dead?"
"No."
"Well, get up and walk it off, then." And I would.
Even today I go through this mental inventory when I've crashed to the floor somewhere and feel like crying: "Are you broken? Are you bleeding? Are you dead? Get up and walk it off, then." 
When I did happen to be hurt, he always took care of me. If I fell and bloodied my nose, he'd show me how to sit with my head between my knees to keep from swallowing the blood. Once, I lost my balance on the edge of what I can only describe as a small cliff and crashed through the undergrowth rolling over and over and over, until my back connected hard with a tree. I had skinned my arm from the wrist to the shoulder in a painful, bloody mess.He was there the second after I gathered my breath to scream, vaulting over the side of that hill like an Olympian. I didn't even notice the other man with him. I just saw my daddy, coming to save me. 
A long time later, grown and in college, I tripped in my living room and fell, cracking my head open on the sharp corner of a table. I  curled into the pain and clutched the wound, then pulled my hand away to find blood running down my arm. I almost panicked. Then I remembered my father's calm voice, taking inventory. I sucked in a breath and took my own. What did I need? Help. Stitches. And therefore a phone. I crawled to the phone and hit the emergency number, 444. I calmly explained what had happened: "This is Tiffany in 8014, O'Daniel. I just fell and hit my head. I'm bleeding."
The first security officer to arrive reminded me a lot of my father. Physically, they were nothing alike: my father was tall and slender with dark hair, and this man had gray hair and was built like a linebacker. But their words were the same. I was crying by the time he came in, because blood had pooled in the lenses of my glasses and turned my vision red. He walked to the bathroom and wet me a rag. He handed it to me and sat on my coffee table like an old friend. "It's alright," he said. "You're not dead. You're just scared. You're a tough cookie, you know that?"
Tough cookie. My father used to say that. I quit crying. When the EMT's arrived to strap me onto a backboard and hoist me into the ambulance, I didn't cry. The whole bumpy way to the hospital, even though the wound on my head ground harder against the backboard with every pothole we hit, I didn't cry. When they wheeled me into an empty room and left me there for a good half hour, still strapped with my open wound tight against the backboard, I didn't cry. I gritted my teeth and dug my fingernails into the bed rail. I was a tough cookie, and somehow, even though he wasn't there, I was trying to prove it. I was trying to make him proud. 
I almost called him when I got home that night, just to tell him. To hear him say, "Good job, Sissy." But a lot of things had happened between us by then, and yesterday's pain has a way of obstructing today's redemption. I got my stitches, collected my pain medication, and went home. I let the night pass without picking up the phone. I didn't know what to say. I still don't.
Sometimes I imagine a reunion. He'll be standing in the garage in his blue jeans and boots with a handkerchief tied around his forehead and a grease rag poking out of his back pocket. The radio will be playing his favorite CCR song, and I'll come up next to him and we'll sing it together: 
"When I was a little bitty baby, my Mama used to rock me in the cradle ..." 
There will be no need for explanations. He will know, and I will know, and it will be enough. Only it wouldn't  be enough. Not really. Because I don't think I could stop myself from opening my mouth. I don't think I could stop myself from saying, "Why did you let her? Why did you always leave me? How can I ever trust you again?" I don't think I could stop myself from shaking in his presence. From remembering his fist going through my bedroom door. The sound of his belt cracking against the wall. The sound of his voice raised in anger and directed at me. Me. The one who had always thought he walked on water. The one who watched her last hero become someone she didn't know, someone she was afraid of. But mostly, I don't think I could look at him without seeing his back as he walked away, leaving me behind to suffer. And no matter what he said about it, I know I wouldn't trust him. I wouldn't want to and I wouldn't learn to. Some things, once broken, cannot be fixed.