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.

 

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

I, Tif

Hello, humans! Tif here, with a firm resolve never to dream at night ever again -- which is currently preventing sleep -- and a plan of some sorts to save for grad school that involves pulling one over on the United States government, which I would do with a smile any day of the week. Here's the story:

A few days ago, I, Tif, the ever-intrepid seeker of the eventual Master's Degree in Social Work, (Concentration: SOCIAL POLICY AND REFORM) came into the unfortunate knowledge that there is no state or federal financial aid for graduate school -- whereupon I hit upon the idea of saving/investing my money. Whereupon I spoke with my SSI caseworker and discovered that I am not allowed to have over $2,000 in my combined bank accounts at any given time, including Certificates of Deposit and Money Market Accounts, and that no Education Exemption programs currently exist for people in my age group. My only hope was to open an Education Savings Account with my bank, but according to my banker, those can only be opened for beneficiaries under the age of 18. So, in a nutshell, I was screwed by circumstance: again. I have been scrabbling to cover the cost of tuition since the very first day of my very first semester at USI. My mother refused to sign my financial aid forms, claiming she didn't care if I went to college or not, so I had to peg all my hopes on something called a Dependency Override. Such an override would exempt me from having to have my parents' signatures or financial data on my FAFSA, meaning I could receive aid based upon my own finances. Without it, I was toast.

Dependency Overrides are reviewed by a panel of officials at the college of choice, after the student seeking one has filled out all the forms, gotten letters of recommendation, and written a personal essay describing his or her extenuating circumstance. Said officials can then either reject or approve said override by putting it to a majority vote. I hadn't been out of Hell 2 months, and I was spilling my sorry little guts to a bunch of bigwigs I would never meet and praying like mad for them to take pity on me. It worked. My D.O. was approved by a unanimous vote, but I still had to be the one to figure out how to pay for the schooling. I finagled the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation into paying for books and board. I took every penny I could get in grants. Then, with no parent around to help with the responsibility, I took out loans to cover the rest.

It kind of pisses me off that I had to do all this. Actually, it really pisses me off that I had to do all this. I can understand a parent who can't afford to help his or her child. This was my parents' patent excuse before the advent of, "I don't care whether you go or not": "We just can't afford to help you." And yet somehow, after I left home, my brother ended up with things like classic cars and expensive musical instruments. I was not surprised by this. I had always been the underdog, and I knew it. Matt was Golden: Matt made straight A's, Matt ran track and played ball, Matt was always getting schlepped to some practice or another even though I had to quit my job tutoring after school because my mother said she was sick of coming to town to get me every afternoon. Every bit of positive attention my parents could muster up went directly to Matt. If my mother had to come to one of my choir concerts, she bitched for days beforehand about how much time it would take out of her ever-important daily activities. My senior year, I helped lead the English Academic team to District victory by studying Chaucer and Dante in addition to my other schoolwork, and as far as I know, no one ever noticed. My parents never said, "Good job, Tif." "Way to go, Tif." "We're proud of you, Tif." If I got noticed, it was for failing to be my brother. Sometimes I wonder: if my parents had helped me as much as they spoiled him, would I be sitting in 2010 partway through a Bachelor's degree, poor as dirt and wondering if I'll ever get to see my one singular dream come to fruition? I want to be a social worker. That is all I want. I want to be a social worker and have a decent job in this modest little county, where social workers are so badly needed and in such short supply. I want an apartment I can turn around in without bumping into myself. I'm not having any thoughts of fame or glory or renown: I just want to be a small-town social worker and live a small-town social worker's life. And for that I must fight tooth and claw, every single day. I'm battling for every little bit of everything I have before my feet even hit the floor in  the mornings, but I can't stop: if I stop to rest, I'll lose it all. First my parents, and now the government, by means of the circumstances of my disability, have dropped me in a hole. I ask for a rope, they throw me a shovel. How am I ever supposed to climb out?

But if I know one thing, it's that I absolutely, 100 percent, refuse to give up on this dream. Until earlier today, I had lost sight of one simple fact: that everything that has ever needed to be done for Tif has been done by Tif. Starting when I was a child. I, Tif, learned how to keep myself alive. I, Tif, learned the best hiding places and methods of concealment; I, Tif, paid attention to my father when he used the fuse box so I could learn which switch to throw to plunge the basement into darkness. I, Tif, memorized the schedule of the movies my mother watched and what times she usually fell asleep over her book so I would know when it was safe to go upstairs for food or to use the bathroom. I, Tif, learned to do whatever it took to buy myself one more minute, one more breath, until the fire left my mother's eyes and I knew I would see another day, and I, Tif, did it even if I didn't want to do it, even if I hated it with every fiber of my being, even if it was humiliating and below my humanity. When it came time, I, Tif, figured out how to get myself out for good. I did it even though I was terrified, even though I had very little in the way of a plan, even though I was 18 years old and had never even been grocery shopping. I, Tif, went to college for two years running on fumes before trauma caught up with me. In that time, I taught myself how to stay fed and clothed. I taught myself to have a voice. Well before my 21st birthday, I, Tif, had relocated to another city in another state. I, Tif, bought the bus ticket, then boarded that Greyhound and left behind everything I had ever known so that I, Tif, could start over clean. I taught myself how to live alone without succumbing to loneliness. I learned hard lessons: sometimes love is one-sided and will leave you. Sometimes you will lose a dear friend over something relatively dumbass. Sometimes your religion will fail to comfort you. Sometimes you will realize something about yourself that may make your life harder if you follow your heart, but unbearable if you deny it. This is another one of those things.

Sometimes, my friends, the government will conspire to keep you out of graduate school with nonsense rules and idiotic policies that as good as forbid you to better yourself. There will be another mountain in your way, and eventually you'll have to quit standing at the foot of it feeling sorry for yourself and start climbing the son-of-a-bitch. So that's what I'm doing: I'm climbing the son-of-a-bitch. I have decided to open Certificates of Deposit and monitor my bank accounts online. If I get too close to the Social Security cap, I will pull money out of the bank and put it in my pocket, where it will become nice and invisible. In addition to this, I have scratched the idea of the recumbent bicycle for the time being and am redoubling my money-saving efforts to put toward an in-house grad school fund. It's not much -- just a Foldger's coffee jar with $16.25 in it -- but everybody has to start somewhere. I may not accomplish this goal in the normal time frame -- it may take me years to finish grad school -- but I'll be damned if I'm going to let that stop me. I have to try. I will do it. Only this time, I'm not entirely alone: I have my Biz, to remind me that I'm much more than the sum of the failures I see in myself. I have my Dad, to teach me how to think with a clear head, how to plan my next move and step forward with confidence, to kick in what he can for books and meals, and to do other stuff dads are supposed to do: teach me how to cook, how to save myself some heartache, how to throw a Frisbee, how electricity works, how to love someone even if you fight sometimes. I have my other friends and family too, and even from across several state lines in some cases, they still care enough about me to see to it that I don't forget how much I matter to them. Sometimes I feel like a failure: an idiot, a loser, a motherless child. I get discouraged; it doesn't seem like I'll ever triumph over the things that are trying to hold me down or that I've ever accomplished anything notable. That's when I need my friends to lift me up, and they're always there. Always, helping me believe in myself.

So I'm going to try my damndest to believe in myself. I, Tif, am making a statement right here and now:

I will go to graduate school. I will have my dream, if it takes me my whole life to reach it. I will not stop until I get what I want. I, Tif, will climb that son-of-a-bitch.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Exodus: Why This Bird Flew Away

I decided to move to Pennsylvania in June of 2005. By July, I was gone. I entrusted the transport of most of my worldly goods to a friend who had relatives in Jersey Shore, which is about 30 minutes away from where I live now. (And no, Jersey Shore is not in New Jersey. It's here in PA, hours from New Jersey. Don't ask me why, because I don't remember why.) I bought a one-way bus ticket from Evansville to Lock Haven and boarded it with one small duffel, 2 carry-on bags, and a manual wheelchair. I had a 20 dollar bill in my pocket and another $200 hidden in my shoe. And that was all she wrote. I haven't looked back since.

There are many reasons I decided to do this. One is still too painful for me to talk about, even to this day. The other two were: 1. I was sick, and 2. I had always wanted to move out of state anyway, and PA was simply the first chance I got. The latter requires no further explanation. The former, I will discuss somewhat.

In June of 2005, I was officially diagnosed with something called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and after that, I couldn't get far enough away from French Lick. I wanted to take off running and keep going till I reached the other side of the world. I wanted to dig a hole and pop out in China. My little campus apartment in Evansville could not contain me anymore: I was a bundle of neurotic energy, always afraid of hearing a knock on the door and opening it to see my mother staring me in the face, coming to desecrate everything I had made safe. I jumped at every little noise. I was afraid to leave my apartment. I had nightmares so vivid they even happened when I was awake, which I now know is called a flashback. Every time I went to French Lick for a vacation or a school break, there was a memory lurking down every familiar street. I got paranoid and thought I was being followed through town, so I stopped going to town. Then I stopped leaving the house. Then I stopped leaving my room. I got my grades at the end of my last semester at USI and discovered that within that one semester, my GPA had dropped from a 3.8 to a 3.0 -- I was too busy scouting for danger to concentrate.

There is really no way to describe PTSD accurately; you just have to have suffered it to know. I thought it hit me like a bat out of hell, but I realize now that mine was a slow, inexorable decline that just picked up speed toward the end like a train headed downhill. For months I had tried therapy and prescription drugs and various unhealthy methods of self-medicating -- one look at my arms will tell you that story. The meds made me sleep 24/7; the therapy was a forced ordeal that saw me through one faulty, unethical counselor after another. I swore off it all and tried denial, which landed me on a psych ward in May. I did not breathe a word about this to any of my family members for fear of being judged; people already saw me as the Drama Queen, the attention-seeker. I never did determine whether anyone had ever believed anything I ever said about what happened to me under my mother's roof, and for their sake and mine I have spared them the worst parts. I hope to God no one knew what really happened in that house, because if they knew and no one did anything to save me, I may never be able to forgive them for their inaction. I also still have half a notion that I'd still go unbelieved, and I do not want to open myself up to that kind of rejection. I got some in February from someone I love dearly, and I still don't know what to do about it. Quietly, then, I suffered, as I always had. And I knew something had to change.

Moving here to PA was a way of putting myself in a new world, surrounded by people who had no preconceived notions about me. No one had heard any stories that I myself hadn't told. No one had any expectations, or lack of them. There were no whispers or accusatory glances, no sudden facial expressions that said: "Oh, I know who you are, you're that girl who  ----------- (Fill in the blank.) I will be the first to admit that I was no angel as a child, but I wasn't any worse than any other kid out there until I had to be, until I had reached a point where I was willing to do anything, be it good or bad, to get someone to notice that I existed and that I needed help. This backfired, as it will, but I didn't know that would happen: I was a kid. I should not have had to scrabble and scramble to save my own skin; someone should have been there to save it for me. Kids can't take care of themselves; no wonder I screwed it up! I was trying to do something I never should have been expected to do, and given the circumstances, I think I did an admirable job of it. I am not dead or in prison. That has to count for something.

My illness followed me here, of course, and eventually a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder was added to it. My brain now functions on a carefully balanced mixture of Paxil, Abilify, and some long, complicated-sounding thing for nightmares, plus a stimulant for concentration and the occasional sleeping pill This lovely combination has resulted in a weight gain of 100 pounds, which I fight to reduce and control every day. I refuse to go "home" because I am ashamed to be seen like this. I also couldn't return to school for several years, which means I'm still living in a rent-controlled efficiency apartment while fighting my way toward a BSW, and I am ashamed of my poverty. "What do you do for a living, Tif?" "Oh, I live on SSI and work at the library ten hours a week. I can barely afford a houseplant." That's not something you want to have to say to people you haven't seen in 5 years. It boils down to: "I'm fat and poor and have accomplished next to nothing." I hate the fact that for me, every day my feet hit the floor is an accomplishment. That not having been hospitalized for over a year is an accomplishment. I had such huge plans for my life, and none of them have panned out. Here in PA, people know me, really know me, now, and they know how hard I have fought and what I have won. I'm afraid it won't be that way across the Indiana state line, that my story won't translate across all the miles. Honestly, there are people I want to see, but I can't: I'm afraid to be seen. I'm afraid of not amounting to a hill of beans over there. Sometimes I want to call someone and say, "Hey, I miss you," but I'm afraid if I did that I'd start to cry and I wouldn't be able to stop. But I'm trying. Facebook has let more people back into my life than anything else: know me on facebook for awhile, talk to me, and you'll see the real Tif. And maybe you'll love her, even with the extra weight and the nonexistent income and all those damn insecurities. Or maybe you won't. But I guess all I can do is offer you who I am and let you decide for yourself.

"When all my hopes and dreams have been betrayed,
I stand before you -- my hands are empty ...
I fall and stumble, flat on my face,
I'm  shamed and humbled, in disgrace:
I am yours, if you are mine."
        -- Tracy Chapman