Saturday, December 31, 2011

Long Time Traveller

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes in Indiana was a damn White Castle. Seriously. 7, 8 years, and the first thing I lay my eyes on is the White Castle outside Union Station in Indy. And I smirked. I smirked because in Pennsylvania, it would have been a Sheetz MTO Mart. Geographical humor never fails to humor me by showing itself, pop! at just the right second.

I tell you what, though. On the way back to PA, I was looking for that first Sheetz like the landscape outside the bus window was a Seek-and-Find book with a million dollar prize stapled to the cover. Here's a test for you: if you ever doubt whether the place you're in is your true home, leave it for 9 days and go revisit the ghosts of your past. By the time I returned to my present, fully to my present, every cell in my body was pulling me East. Pennsylvania was a magnet, and I was polarized. But I'm getting ahead of myself.


There is now a Whole Foods Co-op and Cafe in the town next door to where I grew up. Geographical humor again. If you know anything about where I grew up, a whole foods co-op is a huge leap up the civility chain. Especially considering that when it comes to bus services, this town dumps their passengers at the side of the road next to a gas station which is across from the police station, and the police station is a mobile home. Banjos: I hear 'em.

My friends and I ate there, figuring it a safe bet that nobody from my gene pool would be visiting someplace so healthy. To tell you the truth though, I wasn't really looking to avoid my gene pool. Part of my reason for going back to Indiana was a certain inexplicable desire to see how many of those fishes I could handle. I made a halfhearted attempt at veiling my presence, but that was mainly to service some outdated sense of the fugitive child's decorum that still sleeps here and there inside me. To put it simply, when you duck and run once, it becomes a reflex and you keep doing it till you wear yourself out, until suddenly it occurs to you that you're strong enough now to simply stand tall and observe. And so that is what I did: I stood tall and observed.

Parts of it felt like an out-of-body experience, or like I was visiting my past as someone else, some anthropologist come to do cultural immersion. Life immersion. To take my life, as it is and as it had been, and study it by juxtaposing the two realities and one-two stepping between them. So many things had changed. So many things had not. I became momentarily afraid of confusing myself in the time travel: Who was I, again? But that did not happen. The present is in many ways inextricably linked with the past, but I don't have to stare at the individual links to figure out which is which these days. We all have pasts. We all have todays. God willing, we'll all have tomorrows. And we carry them, all the yesterdays and right nows and tomorrows, all around with us, all at once. It's second nature. It's the thinking about it that makes it complicated.

There were hard things, though they were not what I expected them to be. I expected to freak out in a major, major way if I had to see my parents, but I rode in a car with my mother. An enclosed space! With my mother! I talked to her. Polite chit-chat and all that. Oh, have you ever tried cutting out your bangs? You're re-doing the den? That's neat. At the end of the night, I remembered what it was about her that had driven me away in the first place. I still couldn't name it, never have been able to, but it was still there: something vital is missing in my mother. She talks and laughs, blinks and breathes, smiles and frowns, but there's not enough of what makes her human to go around coloring her in and completing the picture. It's like she's trying to stretch herself over the head of the barrel that is her life, but she can't quite make it from one side to the other. I used to demonize her for this. God knows I still have the right to point and judge and begrudge her the things she did to me, but I don't feel the need for that anymore. I felt pity for this piece-of-a-woman. Somehow, some way, whatever happened to her, I'm not sure she could've stopped it. I'm not sure she even knew it was happening until it, whatever it was, whatever it is, was already there. Like a cancer you don't know is growing till it's too late to do anything but die. I have a mother, and there is something wrong with her that no one may ever be able to name. That's how it is. No use kicking against it.

I can say all that, but I would've removed my left kidney and hacked it to bits with a garden spade if I'd needed to, to avoid Mary. The wound where Mother Mary used to be is somehow still a gaping chasm I don't even want to peek into. I can't even begin to explain it. Thankfully, she was on her own trip, and we smoothly passed by each other with not so much as a ripple in the water of that lake of tears.

Did you know the house I did the most memorable parts of my growing up in, the basement and Sweetie-Cat house, is gone? It is. Just gone. I looked up on the hill where it should have been, and that hill was bare of anything but weeds. I almost made Chelsey turn the car around and go back so I could search for it in the tall grass like a lost trinket. It's a funny feeling, knowing that something that was once so real to everyone you knew is now only real in your own memory. I wouldn't say I felt grief, exactly, but the place where that house should have been is like the hole in your mouth after a lost tooth: you just keep poking your tongue in. I just keep poking my tongue in to the empty space once occupied by Sweetie-Cat house and feeling all the strange new dimensions. There is building space there now. What will I make, or what will grow of its own accord, out of the soil of that memory? I will watch awhile, and see.

Then, of course, all things new. Lina being 2. Gideon being here, the solid heft of him, the weight of him asleep in my arms, his still-new eyes trying to find and hold my face. Sitting with a dear old friend at dinner, trying to puzzle out how things work now that both parties, not just her, not just the one, are adults standing on equal ground. The ease of familiarity and fondness interwoven with awkward baby steps trying to cover new territory: the territory of me realizing how difficult it must have been for her, then younger than I am now, to have done what she did for me. This epiphany is a new piece of furniture in the space of my mind. I'm still walking around it, measuring it, looking for somewhere it will fit. It may become, for awhile, like that old chair you don't want but just can't get rid of. I guess everyone's attic has a little clutter, eh?

I was reminded of what is truly family, once again. Oh, tiny hands. Oh, books and milk cups. Oh, my brother-in-law awkwardly patting me on the shoulder for the first time, to say goodnight and thanks for helping. Oh, my picture on the wall with all the other pictures of family. Oh, my sister's earnest effort to crochet her first-ever blanket and make it for me, just because she wants to give me something she thought about out of love and worked on with her own 2 hands. I'd take the world's longest chain stitch and be warm forever, honey.

And I was reminded what home is. Not so much a sense of place, though I was infinitely relieved when I got into Lock Haven today and the mountains circled me like so many protective giants, when I saw the Susquehanna spread out to either side of the bridge, welcoming me back. Home is the same as family. Home is a love, is a sense of freedom and bondage all at once, a push and a pull. Home is where you choose to go when you know you're dying and you want to watch the water, smell the air, in a place where you have left so many of your life's allotment of footprints. Home is where and what you choose to love, when you could just as easily or maybe even more easily train yourself to love somewhere else, something else. It is possible to have more than one home, and divide your heart like an orange to mark the map. But this, for me, right now, is the place I have my whole orange. I'm thinking about those segments, but I haven't peeled that orange yet and cut them out. We'll see. I'll see. I read a quote in a novel on the road that makes a tidy little package of my thoughts:

"She who ain't free not to love ain't free to love."

Amen.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Temple of Books and Voices


A book, a book, a book: everywhere I went, I took a book. I read in the car and never got sick. I read on the bus to and from school every day. I took novels to school and hid them on my lap to read when I was supposed to be doing something else. The only recess I ever sat as a form of punishment was in the fourth grade: we had a speaker that day who bored me beyond comprehension, so I ignored him in favor of actually reading the glossary in my Social Studies text. (Now that is boring, ladies and gentlemen.) As penance, I spent 30 minutes sitting next to the fence at the playground – without a book. It was torture.
Once a week, the class had Library Day. Needless to say, this was the highlight of my elementary school career: in my mind, a library was more sacred than a church. In fact, if I’m to tell the truth, I have to admit that if it came down to it, I’d pick a library over a church any day. Church buildings have always made me uncomfortable. I don’t like the smell of them; I don’t like the way the air seems to press in and make me feel small and stifled. A church has the wrong kind of solemnity to me: I always sense an undercurrent of fear flowing along beneath the reverence, a sense of responsibility tied to some primal fear of punishment for non-compliance. Maybe that’s just me, or maybe I haven’t been to the right building yet. I don’t quite know – but I worship in a coffee shop for a reason.
If a church is a world in a box that’s been nailed shut then a library is a world in a treasure chest, flung open and glimmering with rubies and gold: you are limited in your taking only by what you can carry in one trip. And I would go to great lengths to carry as many books as possible. If I could’ve stuffed books in my shoes and my pockets and down the front of my shirt, I would have. I practically did, when I went to the public library: I was allowed one plastic grocery sack full of books per visit, and I’d stuff that sack as full as I could possibly get it without it falling completely apart. Sometimes I had to put my hand under it on the way back to the car to hold everything in. But on Library Day at school, we were only permitted to check out one book at a time. For some of my classmates, this was just fine; general consensus seemed to be, Why read more than we absolutely have to? But in my bibliophilic little brain, the one-book rule led to some excruciating moments of indecision that could only be solved by every child’s last resort: eeny, meeny, miney, moe.
I always forced myself to hurry so that I could snatch a few minutes of quality time with my chosen book before library period ended. I’d sit at one of the round, gleaming wooden tables, open it up, and dive right in. One day I was absolutely engrossed in The Secret Garden when the librarian came over to me, pulled out a chair, and sat down. I was annoyed. I squared my body off and put up an invisible wall: Go away, woman. I’m reading. But the librarian leaned closer. “What book is that?” she asked. I showed her, grudgingly. Then she said, “Oh, I love that book,” and smiled.
The Tiffany shut up inside my head huffed: So do I. And I’ll love it even more when you leave me alone so I can get back to it. But the librarian did not leave me alone. Instead she made a strange request: “Will you read me some?”
It is worth noting, here, that I actually liked this lady under most circumstances, by which I mean any circumstances that did not involve her interrupting my reading time. How could I not like her? As far as I knew, she was the keeper of the keys to my favorite kingdom. That made her worthy of adoration. But getting between me and a story? Come on, now. Surely, as Queen of the Books, she knew better. I gazed at her steadily: Go. Away. She gazed back. Finally I determined that the only way for me to get what I wanted was to give her what she wanted. I sighed.
“Where do you want me to start?”
She took the book, flipped some pages, pointed out a line.
“When do you want me to stop?”
“I’ll say when.”
Suppressing the urge to roll my eyes to the ceiling, I resumed possession of the book and began to read:

She went out of the room and slammed the door after her, and Mary went and sat on the hearth-rug, pale with rage. She did not cry, but ground her teeth.

"There was some one crying--there was--there was!" she said to herself.

She had heard it twice now, and sometime she would find out. She had found out a great deal this morning. She felt as if she had been on a long journey, and at any rate she had had something to amuse her all the time …”

I got so caught up in the reading, the librarian had to touch my shoulder to silence me. She sat looking at me as if I were some sort of holy revelation. “My goodness!” she said. “You really do read well!”

It didn’t occur to me that she was surprised because she’d never actually heard a third-grader read The Secret Garden. As was always the case back then, I had the sneaking suspicion that she thought I was some kind of slobbering idiot because I walked funny – it was clearly what my classmates thought, so I generalized it to everyone. Consequently, a lot of the academic things I did well as a child were spitfire attempts to show everyone up: Oh yeah? Watch this. But reading was too much of a passion for me to allow it to fall into that category, even for a moment. I was so flattered to be praised for it that all I could do was blush and look down at my lap.

After that, the librarian kept aside books she thought I might like. As time went by, she introduced me to Summer of the Monkeys, The Yearling, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Caddie Woodlawn, and so many more. It was through her that I read about the wooden doll named Hitty who was a hundred years old and swam in the sea – Hitty, one of the cast of characters brought to life again and again over the years keep me company in my loneliness. Bambi was the same way. Book Bambi was different from Disney Bambi, so much more real to me on a page than on a screen. Also Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Heidi and her grandfather, and Pippi Longstocking, who mopped the floor with brushes attached to her shoes.

I developed a habit of getting through the days by imagining that I was a character in my very own book. It had no discernible premise other than the fight to get through each day, but that was all I needed: in books, the meat of the story is the primary character’s valiant struggle to overcome some kind of challenge or ordeal. My ordeal was life itself, and so I made my life into a story and imagined it shut between two covers, with a title page and a copyright and a pocket in the front for a library card. And then, when things got too difficult for me to live through in the first person, I imagined that whatever was happening to me was just some spine-tingling part of the plot and I would come through it a hero.

Perhaps I have dwelt too much on the subject of books. I must confess that I have gone on about books to such an extent because, well, I don’t know where to go from here – and I’m telling you that because this is stream-of-consciousness writing, and my brain is telling me to tell you that I don’t know where to go from here. Congratulations; you have become privy to writer’s block.

There are so many ends I could pick up. I have told you about Boyleston, about Plum Street, about Benjii and the chickenpox. I have told you about Hostage and about the basement and about the begging ritual and morning stretches; about rehab and Mrs. Kaiser and the cat called Sweetie and my love of books. If I could, I would pry open the doors and windows of self-expression and take you inside how it really felt to be me, how it really felt to suffer and be forever clamped in terror but somehow hold on to life by a second, by a word, by a giggle, but I can’t do that. I know I am not the only one to have suffered these things, but there is a kind of wild lonesomeness in the fact that all the words I know, all the words I could ever learn, will never express everything I need to say. They won’t do it for me, and they won’t do it for anyone else: survivors of childhood trauma are a group of people together, alone. We share what we can. What we cannot share will never be shared at all, because there is no way to share it. It is a profound  loneliness, knowing the things that I know, having in my mind all the memories that depravity handed me. Sometimes when I pray, I think my very soul cries out: the words don’t come because they don’t exist, but something inside me reaches for God like a child wanting her father’s lap. That’s the only way I can explain it; the only way.

I have never been very religious. I even shy away from spirituality more than I’d like, though I crave that dimension, that facet of basic human existence, with every last pore of my body sometimes. I just don’t seem to be capable of faith; not like other people are capable – I don’t trust it. I half-expect it not to be real. I’m afraid of going through life fooling myself. For someone with such a rich imagination as I have, I am very oriented to things I can see, touch taste, hear and smell. If I’m going to invest myself so completely in something as big as faith, I damn well better be able to hold it in my hands and hear its heart beat. The objective, academic part of my brain talks me out of faith at every turn. I have to keep trying again and again and again to just believe. I have to start over every day, intentionally shutting off my analytical processes and persuading myself that I am not just some bones and skin with some neurons firing here and there. I do the best I can, but I am afraid: I am afraid that what I fight for isn’t really faith at all, but a farce. I’m afraid God will reject my effort, deem me not good enough, and then sit back and watch me suffer, just like so many others have done.

There are two basic times I can connect with God: when I’m feeling that wild, ragged loneliness and the very essence of who I am cries out without input from my brain, and when I am singing.  

I have always loved to sing. I’m no star or anything – in fact, my vocal range is quite limited and my breath control sucks – but singing has always soothed me. Maybe there’s a memory buried somewhere in my brain of “Farther Along” being hummed over me as I lay cuddled in my Memaw’s lap. Maybe I subconsciously credit singing with saving me from complete madness back in the basement, especially before Sweetie came along. Maybe, after so many long days of screaming and sobbing, I just like to hear a lilt in my voice. Whatever it is, I am comforted by the act of singing. Singing allows me to forget myself for a few moments, to push everything out of my mind but the sound of the notes coming off my lips. It takes me from a fenced-in place of fear to a place where there are no walls or gates, an open meadow of being where fear cannot exist. There, in that place, I can meet God – God as a peace, God as a feeling of surrender, God as a sense of awareness that somehow, someway, I am connected to all the things that my spirit needs and that I am good and right simply because I live and breathe and hope.

Sometimes, I’ll admit, I only go to church for the singing. If there is a weekly church service someplace that exists simply for the purpose of singing, singing, and more singing, I want to find it. Song is my worship. Everything else can so easily turn me upside-down and inside-out with anxiety and confusion. Everything else must be thought about, analyzed, made sense of, filed away. Singing just is. I don’t know how else to explain it.

I have been in some kind of choir or chorus or some singing ensemble since I was a little girl in Music class at school. I never particularly cared what I was singing, either – there are very few songs I really can’t stand, and most of those are on popular radio. For many years, I had a music teacher who made us sing Anne Murray every week. The rest of my classmates grumbled, but I didn’t give a damn who wrote the song or performed it. Half the time, I didn’t even care about the words. I just wanted to sing.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Tif's Birthday Top 10: Terrific Two-fer!


Signs That I am Getting Older

1. I refer to my 19 and 20 year-old classmates as "kids."

2. I have been known to yell out the window to the drunk "kids" who like to hang out in the parking lot: "Shut the hell up! Some of us plan on fulfilling our responsibilities tomorrow. We need sleep for that!"

3. I no longer get carded when I order wine with a meal.

4. I no longer get any rebellious satisfaction from ordering wine with a meal.

5. I have developed a greater dislike for American consumerism with every passing Christmas.

6. The Smurfs movie desecrates everything my 4 year-old self held sacred.

7. So does the new, slimmer, tech-savvy Strawberry Shortcake. SOMEONE WILL PAY FOR THIS. PAY.

8. I flip through all the Top 40 radio stations going, "Crap. Crap. Crap. Oh God. Should be illegal. How is this music?!" and then queue up some CCR.

9. I remember when the Internet was still relatively new to the public, which meant that if you wanted to know something, you actually had to *go to a library*, look it up in the *card catalog*, and fetch an *real book.* It really burns my ass when my professors run around screaming about "electronic sources" and "digital competence." I did a lot more work hunting that book down than Ms. 2.0 GPA over there did when she typed it into Google. I shouldn't be penalized for that. In fact, I should be rewarded with bonus points, because when all the computers die, I WILL RULE THE WORLD.

10. I just re-read to above rant and said, "Oh, shit. I sound like my Dad."

10 Signs That I Haven't Aged a Day Since 1992

1. I still sleep with a teddy bear. Screw you. Stop judging.

2. When I pass the toy section at the store, I have to physically restrain myself from playing with all the cool stuff. ("My. Little. Pony. Waaaaaaaannnnnnnt!")

3. Fruity Pebbles: best cereal ever. I hardly ever buy them, because I am literally capable of snarfing down an entire box in one night.

4. Grape soda makes me the happiest person on the planet.

5. I cry during Disney movies. Watching Dumbo get his Mommy taken away from him? Saddest thing I've ever seen.

6. I *really* want to launch water balloons off my balcony and watch them hit people 5 stories below.

7. I show off my bruises, scabs, scrapes, scars, etc. with exorbitant pride. ("See this one? Little tussle with the edge of the coffee table. Needed four stitches.")

8. Hard as I try, I cannot entirely suppress my desire to launch my manual wheelchair off that gigantic hill by Glennon Infirmary with myself in it. I don't have a death wish; I just want to see if I can register G-force.

9. If it's purple, I want it. I don't care what it is.

10. Anytime I hear the "Little House on the Prairie" theme song, I streak for the nearest television and adhere myself to the screen. An entire battalion of Marines would not be capable of dragging me away.




Wednesday, November 23, 2011

I'd Totally Tumble That (if I ever got the chance) -- Mariska.

Guess what? It's right on top of 2 a.m., and I can't sleep! Whoo! Reason: I quit drinking highly caffeinated things awhile ago, but I recently bought a 2-liter of Coke to take to a shindig and we ended up not drinking it. Any of it. So, not being one to waste perfectly good Coke -- there are thirsty kids in Sri Lanka who want this Coke, dammit -- I carried it back home and have been drinking it myself. From the bottle. (What? I'm single. I get to do this shit whenever. I. want.) Needless to say, I'm WIRED. As a matter of fact, I'm about two degrees south of "high as a damn kite."

Now, there are many things I could use this excessive energy to bitch about -- like how, for instance, Medicaid temporarily quit paying for my Dexadrine just in time for me to get fat again before going on vacation, or how the Department of Public Welfare has started referring to the scooter they bought me as "not medically necessary," and therefore continually refusing to pay for repairs, even though they bought the damn thing in the first place. Oh, oh, oh, I wish I could walk well: if I could walk well, I'd march down to the regional office in Harrisburg and start kicking the ass of every bureaucrat from here to Ohio. Then again, if I could walk well, I wouldn't need to deal with the DPW anyway. Life sucks and then you die.

Anywho. Instead of doing that, I have decided to regale you with hotness. Yes, you heard me right: I said hotness. Hotness as in, "incredible, mind-blowing, powers of attraction." Stop holding your breath. I am not regaling you with myself. That'd put you in psychotherapy. I am giving you, oh my readers, my list. You know, the LIST. Everybody has one. "List of People I'd Totally Tumble if I Ever Got the Chance." "List of Celebrities my Spouse and I have Both Agreed I Can Leave Her For, Assuming She Gets Those Celebrities Over There." etc. Only my list is not so much a list as a collection, because I just can't number these people. I can't number them because I can't decide who's hotter. It's impossible. My brain would short out.

This list, urm, "collection," has ladies AND gents on it. Most of you know by now that bodies are just so much packaging to me. I have to believe they are, else I have to believe the one I'm stuck in actually somehow defines me. Piss on that. Usually I'm not even interested in the packaging at all -- I fall for personalities. I fall for smiles. I fall for kindness and humor and intelligence. The plumbing is secondary. But let's face it: some people come wrapped up REALLY nicely, and just like anyone else, I can appreciate that. (You should see my room. Betty Paige lives next to Audrey Hepburn, who lives next to Rosie the Riveter, who lives next to Marilyn Monroe, who lives next to a concert bill of Janis Joplin strategically draped in necklaces. And then there's this Tanya Chalkin poster called "Kiss." Look it up. Very tasteful, if scantily clad. I don't do trashy.)

I bet some of you are now thinking, "What has been read cannot be unread." But it's not my objective to freak you out. I just make a conscious effort to make what you get match up with what you see. I'm not a perfect person. Half the time, I probably don't even qualify as "kinda good." But if there's one thing I strive to do, it's to stay true to myself and to those around me by refusing to hide. This is me, not hiding. Hi. I'm Tif. I like classic pin-ups. I kissed a girl and I liked it, so I did it again. But I can't stand that moronic song.

Anywho again. Enough with the moral lesson and on with the hotness. Due to space, I shall make the hotness ongoing -- I'll post a person here and there, every once in awhile. It'll keep you from drooling on the keyboard.

Drum roll, please ....

I'd Totally Tumble That if I Ever Got the Chance:

Mariska Hargitay.

Yes, she's old enough to be my mother. In fact, she might even be older than BOTH of my mothers. I don't care. She's hot. Seriously, are you seeing this right now? If you are not appreciating this on some level, check your pulse. You might be dead. This woman ROCKS pushing 50. And she kicks ass as detective Olivia Benson on Law and Order: SVU. All that brooding intensity, and a gun. Someone fan me before I faint.

Not to mention, she founded The Joyful Heart Foundation , a charity to fight sexual abuse, assault, and child abuse. This gives her beacoup points in my book. Not that she needed any extra. She's already the hottest woman alive.

Stay tuuuunned ... for more. You know you want to. Don't fight it.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

The Book


When you’re lost in a forest, all you can see is trees. When you’re drowning, all you can see when your head breaks the surface of the water is the next wave. When you’re a child in fear, all you can see is another thing to be afraid of – and then another thing, and another thing, on and on forever.
My life was dominated by fear. I was afraid to go to sleep at night because some unnamed horror might claim me for its own. I was afraid to wake up in the morning because pain came alive with the sun. I was afraid to go to school because I’d have to go home at the end of the day; I was afraid not to go to school because I’d have to stay home all day. I was afraid to go out and play because I’d have to go in when dusk fell. I was afraid of every noise I made: every hiccup, every sneeze, every cough. It seemed I could never stop attracting attention to myself, though I tried so hard to go through life without a ripple. The more I yearned to be invisible, the more visible I got.
I have no idea how I functioned under all that fear. That I ever played amazes me now. That I ever went out in the public eye and acted like a fairly normal child is a miracle. That I never, ever lost my natural inclination to giggle at every little thing astounds me. Nearly every day I fought for the right to have another day, another breath, and still I laughed. I laughed whenever I could. Any little thing would start it: a mad fit of chortling  that would grow and grow until I had to throw my head back and let it ring out of me at full volume. Laughter, for me, is like a bubble in my throat that suddenly bursts into a rainbow and has to escape. It’s a thousand tiny prisms of light that I cannot shutter. I’ve never seen any reason not to share them.
I feel my tears with equal emotion. Sorrow comes from the very pit of my belly and soaks into all my bones; I can’t contain it. When I weep, I am broken. I have to keen out all the little pieces of grief before I can put myself back together – I have to see everything in front of me before I know where it goes. Anger is the same. It comes rarely, but when it comes it is fast and hot. Rejection. Joy. Embarrassment. Excitement. Emotions roll through me so strongly, I can’t help but open the door and let them out. I know enough now to hold back when I must, but I am a tempest: I will fling wide the gates sooner or later, because if I keep them shut I will drown. I’ve always been that way. I have my passions; there’s no use in pretending I don’t, at least not these days.
As a child, I fought so hard to contain them that at times I thought I’d shatter. Don’t cry at the wrong time; don’t smile at the wrong time; don’t yell at the wrong time; don’t hope at the wrong time. As a matter of fact, never cry at all. Never yell. What are you smiling about? I’ll teach you to hope for something! Everything that made me human was something to fear. The only way I could survive was to push that fear as far back in my mind as it could possibly go and ignore it for as long as I could. Laughter helped me do that; laughter was the one thing that insisted upon being seen and heard when everything else was tamped and silent. After a while, I used it to express everything. Sad? Laugh. Angry? Laugh. Scared? Laugh. In all that you do, you must laugh. It’s laugh or die.
And so my childhood continued on, and I laughed in the face of my suffering.

In the third grade, I became familiar with the notion that there are things you don’t know you need until you have already gotten them. I had Mrs. Kaiser that year. She was the best teacher ever, hands down. I’ve known some good teachers, what with high school and two different doses of college, but Mrs. Kaiser beats them all. There was just something about her that drew me in. She was kind, always smiling or chuckling, and she had the best voice. She spoke like a warm fire on a snowy day, like hot soup when you’re sick. She was magnetic. It was a privilege to learn from her.
She read to us, too. I think that was the thing that cemented my adoration: the reading. I already loved books, but Mrs. Kaiser brought them to life in a way that even I didn’t know how to do. Every afternoon after recess, we’d sit down at our desks and Mrs. Kaiser would read. She read Hank the Cowdog books and books from The Boxcar Children series. She read Where the Red Fern Grows, which graces my bookshelf even all these years later – every time I read it, I laugh out loud at the memory of her describing Grandpa’s cold dance before the campfire in his long underwear in her merry, excited voice.
I loved reading time. I lived for reading time. As far as I was concerned, we could skip recess altogether and just spend all that time reading. Today, at 26, when I look back into my past to seek out some small comfort amid all the pain, it is Mrs. Kaiser and her books that comes up first. I’m sure she’s a large part of the reason behind my continued passion for reading. Walk into my apartment on any given day, and you will find piles and stacks and rows of books everywhere: on the shelf above the bed, on the dresser, on the desk, on the coffee table; sometimes even a book in the kitchen because I read and stir spaghetti at the same time. When I shake out the blankets to make up the bed, books fall out. I have books stacked under the T.V table and even in the closets because I’ve run out of places to put them. One of my biggest aspirations in this digital age is to teach the next generation the joy of a real book, something you can see and smell and hold in your hands, something that won’t get lost if your hard drive crashes or you drop your Kindle in the sink. I imagine having one entire room in a future home dedicated to a kind of community library: take a book, leave a book, read a book and love it.
I will never forget how I felt when Mrs. Kaiser told me I could bring in a book for her to read to the class. I was so excited, I almost popped! I could not make up my mind which book to take. This one? That one? Hardcover or paperback? One I’d read a hundred times, or one that I’d read only once? After much agonizing, I finally decided on Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: the Story of Mary Jemison, a fictionalized account of a true story: a woman named Mary Jemison was captured in a raid as a young girl and brought up among the Seneca. It was such a good book, it made me squirm every time I thought about it. It was full of beautifully drawn illustrations, and I read it in one long gulp so many times that I can still remember whole lines of dialogue and the detail in some of the pictures.
To me, that book was a holy thing. It was one of my most prized possessions. I was worried that something awful might happen to it the second it left my hands, but I gave it over to be read because it meant more to entrust my beloved teacher with a book I treasured rather than one I merely liked. The rush I got when she opened my book and began to read nearly catapulted me to the moon. I felt special. I felt superior to my classmates for once: this time, I was the one with something someone else wanted. I was the one who had been picked for something exclusive. I was the one the teacher had asked for a book; kudos to me.
But even that, delicious as it was, wasn’t the best part. The best part was the sense I got that maybe, just maybe, I could do something right after all, that maybe I was a good girl and someone liked me and cared about me. On those afternoons during the reading of my precious book, I felt cradled and cherished and perfectly content. It was a feeling I would draw strength from for a very long time.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Destination: God.

Nickel Creek's "Doubting Thomas"

What will be left
When I've drawn my last breath,
Besides the folks I've met and the folks who know me?
Will I discover a soul-saving love,
Or just the dirt above and below me?
I'm a doubting Thomas;
I took a promise, but I do not feel safe.
Oh me of little faith. 



My friend Sara Grimes likes to say that my past encounters with God were just pit-stops on the way to the final destination. Wherever I'm going, it must be a really long trip: I've made a lot of those stops.

Stop #1: I was 15. My father had just stopped drinking, which might have been a good thing if he'd had a little help doing it. Putting down the beer and simply walking away is a noble thought, but it's an ideal: very few people can actually do it successfully. Dale never picked up another drink -- that much I'll applaud him for. But there were times when I wanted so badly to pop open a can of whatever swill I could find and wave it under his nose: "Here. Drink this. It'll make you less of an asshole." Because when my father stopped drinking, he was never quite my father again. When he was drunk he was a coward who turned his back and walked away from his bleeding, broken little girl, but I could always count on him to be there later with my favorite cassette tape or a game of kickball -- his own way, however misguided, of trying to make things better. That stopped when the beer did. He got nasty and mean instead. Instead of being my ally, he became another active abuser. He got violent, shouting and ranting; he punched holes in my walls, my bedroom door; he started beating me. My Daddy. My Daddy. He did whatever my mother told him to do -- if she said punish, he punished. Instead of being relieved to have him come home, I was terrified. Nothing will ever match the level of dread and despair I always felt when he walked into my room, shut the door behind him, and pulled his belt from around his waist.

My life was a shambles. I was so young. I was so scared. I was so bitterly sad, so angry. When my father decided to become nasty and mean and devout and my mother followed suit, I was boxed in: I had nowhere to go. Desperate, I tried copying my parents' behavior: I decided to get baptized.

I only did it because I thought I was going to die and was afraid to go to Hell. That was the new party line in my house: if you die without being baptized, that's it. Say hello to the underworld. I had someone in my life at that time who tried valiantly to show me that God is Love, but I didn't understand. How could I, when I had only ever known fear? I gave in to that fear. I didn't know any better.

When I allowed myself to be ducked beneath the water of the baptistery at Prospect Church of Christ, I didn't feel changed. I still felt hopeless. Worthless. Everyone sang "Oh Happy Day" like they always did at every baptism, and smiled and nodded and hugged their approval. I wanted to shatter into thousands of pieces, curl up in the corner and die, run from the room screaming, grab people by the shoulders and cry, Help me! You have to help me! But I didn't. I couldn't. My parents were devout, faithful, good, God-fearing people in the eyes of everyone who knew them. Who would believe me? I'd already tried and failed to make them see what I saw. I'd been labeled as ill, delusional, even a pathological liar by some of the people in my life. People looked at me with scorn, with pitying contempt. I could scream at them all I wanted and never be heard. It was a horribly lonely way to live. It made a girl think of so many different ways of deliberately dying.

Stop #2: Fast forward three years or so. I was 18 and out, free: I had made it. I had lived through years of brutality and horror and my own urge to die. Somehow, I rolled over out of the nightmare that had been my entire life and found myself on a college campus two hours from my hometown, taking summer classes and living in a little campus apartment. I had no idea what I was doing; I could barely have told you, back then, how I'd gotten there in the first place. I was living on adrenaline and delivery pizza. And I was desperately looking for a place to belong.

In my one and only bid for freedom that didn't involve my own funeral, I alienated myself from my entire family even further than I had already been exiled by showing up at home one day after school in the passenger seat of my guidance counselor's car, accompanied by a county police officer. With their help, a box, and two duffel bags donated by the sheriff's office, I packed up some clothes and a few precious things and walked out for good. I moved in with my best friend for a week, and then, when her mother was uncomfortable having me stay, with my boss and her family. That was in May, before I even graduated high school. The day after I left was actually the day of my senior trip. I celebrated my independence by getting nine full inches of hair cut off at a MasterCuts inside the Opry Mills Mall in Tennessee. I acted like I was large and in charge, putting on a defiant face and tossing my (now lighter) head with a flourish. Really, I was compensating for the fact that I was pretty much scared straight out of my mind. I had family members calling me at my new house, demanding to know what the hell I thought I was doing. Everyone was angry: I had aired the family's legacy secret, and I did not appear to be sorry. I wasn't sorry, not in the damndest, not for that, but I was hurting very deeply because it seemed to me that the people who were supposed to love me most only cared about me as long as I did exactly what they wanted me to do. In some cases, the years have proven me wrong -- and in some others, more right than I'd care to be.

I felt empty. I craved connections, attention, affection -- something to let me know I mattered. I slept with the boy I'd started seeing and then dumped him before he knew what had hit him because I couldn't deal with the way it made me feel. Then I went on a date with an older man and ended up alone with him on the empty third floor of the city's Civic Center -- not because I wanted to be, but because I had no idea, at that point in my life, that I had a right to the word "No." I managed to get away that time, but there's no telling what might have happened if the Baptist College Ministry hadn't found me.

It was like having instant family. So many wonderful people, people who shined from the inside out with a force I could see but had never known: God is Love. They lived it. They believed it: God is Love. It showed. But I confused God's love with theirs; God's approval with their approval. They saved me, of that I'm sure: instead of continuing down a path that could very easily have led to a lifetime of meaningless, empty sexual encounters I didn't really want but couldn't find my way out of, I spent my spare time building churches and singing in Praise teams. But as much as I thought I was doing it because of the driving force of God in my life, I came to realize I was only doing it in order to feel that I really belonged somewhere. I had missed the mark again.

Stop #3: Pennsylvania, 2006. I was running from my past as fast as I could move. In mid-summer of '05, I had been diagnosed as having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This came after a horrible semester at school: I had become so depressed I could hardly get out of bed in the mornings; I was paranoid and nervous and had begun to isolate myself out of sheer terror of the world outside my front door; I had started having lurid, nasty nightmares full of blood and the screams of dying children. It had been a long while since I had left home. All the adrenaline was finally gone, and I was forced to face 18 years of blood and pain that I had tried to deny and know them as true. To cope with the flashbacks and panic attacks I'd started having, I started cutting myself. I'd done it pretty much consistently for a period of about 2 years when I still lived with my parents, but I'd managed, if not to stop it entirely, to drastically curtail it since then. All that effort was lost my last semester at USI. I was every bit as cruel to my own body as anyone else had ever been.

I decided I couldn't handle summer classes at that point and went home for the summer instead. I was still living with my boss's family. They had come to stand in for my own: I called them "Mama" and "Papa" and "brother" and "sisters". But when I got sick, "Mama" couldn't handle it. Three days after I'd spent a weekend on the psychiatric unit of a nearby hospital for debilitating depression, she told me to pack my things and get out.That was early July. She gave me till the end of the month, but I couldn't stand to stay there after that: my very soul was crushed. This is your home, she'd said. My house is your house, she'd said. We love you like our own. She meant she'd love me like her own until it got a little hard to love me, and then I'd become the Other.

Once again, I had lost everything in my life and had nowhere to go. I moved to Pennsylvania because I'd made friends here who happened to have a spare room in their house and were willing to let me rent it. I didn't expect them to stick around after I lived with them awhile: no one ever did. Obviously I was defective; there was something horribly wrong with me that I couldn't see, something that made everyone I loved throw me away. I am happy to say that I have been proven wrong, that I have encountered, finally, two people who love me so much that they hang onto me all the more tightly even when I get scared of their constancy and try to push them away. I think maybe God is like that, because I keep balking and he just holds on tighter and waits for me to get it all out till next time.

I joined the Episcopal church when I moved here because it was so drastically different from anything I'd ever encountered before. I thought maybe I'd find God in the unfamiliar hymns and rituals, and instead I found myself using the rituals to substitute for God. I missed the mark again. Disenchanted, I stopped going to church, period. I never planned on attending a church service ever again. And then I found The Common Place.

Here I am now, looking down the barrel at 2012 and searching for God in a coffee shop. And finding him there. I don't know what it is-- maybe it's how much I have grown in the past few years; leaps and bounds of it. I'm stronger now than I have ever been -- and weaker than I have ever been. I am ready to stop making pit-stops. I want, I need, something bigger than myself. I need to answer this thing that keeps pulling, this thing that keeps hanging on while I kick and scream and try to run. It makes me vulnerable, this needing. I don't like it. It frightens me. Especially since doubt comes naturally to me, particularly in terms of faith. There are things I don't understand about doubt, I guess, and about forgiveness: Will God still want me if I have to fight every day to believe that God is Love exists, that God exists at all? Because for something I need so much, I certainly struggle with this idea of trusting something I can't touch with my own two hands to actually be real. I could be deluded. Everyone could be deluded. We could all be wrong. Maybe when we're dead, we're dead. The end. And sometimes, even though I need God, even though I can't go for very long without trying to find God, I prefer this version of events because it lets me continue in what I have always known. I'm miserable there, but I'm safe. God makes no promises that faith won't be the hardest thing I have ever done. God isn't going to tell me that I won't have to fight for it tooth and claw every day. I might have to. I guess I'm just worried I don't have it in me: I'm not strong enough; I'm not good enough -- when I stand before God and say "Lord, I tried," I expect him to say, "You should have tried harder." I expect to be cast out. I expect to be rejected.

And yet I keep trying. I keep going. I keep looking. Will I find what I'm looking for this time, or is this just another pit-stop? I guess the only way to answer that is to give it all I've got and find out.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Freaky Little Tribesmen


I was always immensely relieved when Sweetheart climbed into bed with me. I was more afraid of the dark at that point in my life than I had ever been. I spent so many of my days in the dark that I should have been used to it, but I never adjusted. There was something about nighttime darkness that made it extra scary, more frightening than even the basement was. In the nighttime darkness, the house was quiet except for the box fans that rattled in the summer to keep the house cool. My old fear of being abandoned resurfaced, and I’d watch the doorway for hours to make sure my family wouldn’t sneak away and leave me using all that noise for cover. That they would never simply drop their home and all their belongings just to get away from me hardly even entered my head as a glimmer of an idea: if I was as horrible as my mother said, why wouldn’t they want to leave? My greatest fear was waking up one morning to find the beds empty and everyone gone, never to be found again.
My paranoia manufactured other dangers, too: bad men in the doorway that would swarm me and cut my throat if I closed my eyes; creatures under the bed waiting to grab me by the arm and drag me down to eat me up if I slept too close to the edge; phantoms in the corners that would swoop down to strangle me if I fell asleep. I became convinced that there was someone waiting outside my window with a rifle to shoot me dead if I moved. Somehow I got the idea that bullets could not go through blankets, so I wrapped myself up so tightly I could barely catch a breath. Even in the summer I huddled under a comforter, sweating till I was limp and sick. Only my head poked out, eyes roving the room in endless circuits: doorway, corners, closet, window, back to the doorway.
I’d have curled up at the foot of the bed to hide if I had been able, but this was prevented by medical equipment: after my surgery, I spent several months wearing what I called “night braces.” They were two thick sleeves that went from the thigh to right below the knee and buckled tight with a row of Velcro straps up the front. Once I had strapped them on, I slid my legs into two grooves carved one into each side of a blue foam block, and then I secured my legs to this block with thick strips of foam that went up along the sides and fastened to the top. The purpose of the block was to hold my legs wide enough apart to stretch the muscles I’d had fixed in my hips, and the two individual braces prevented me from bending my knees to ease the pull. It was a horridly uncomfortable arrangement. My muscles hurt. My legs itched. The foam block was as high and unyielding as a mountain; I couldn’t have rolled over if I’d wanted to, not without first removing the block and then strapping it back on. I was a huge bump in the bed. I was an easy target. I practically screamed: “I’m here! Right here! Come and kill me!”
I hardly ever slept. I was so thoroughly exhausted, I began falling asleep at school.
I was in the second grade by then. My teacher was a pleasant, bespectacled older woman named Mrs. Stevens. When I’d nod off at my desk with my head pillowed on my forearm, she’d let me sleep. Several times she even stayed inside with me at recess so she wouldn’t have to rouse me. I’d wake in the afternoon when the other children came marching back in, and dutifully resume my lessons. That’s pretty much all I remember about the second grade: sleeping. I was just so tired, that whole year. So very tired.
I didn’t have a lot of friends in primary school – it’s hard to make friends when you’re asleep. It’s also hard to make friends when you’re visibly different, like I was. A pronounced limp, high leg braces, a special padded chair, even a physical therapist who came to the school once a week and took me off into a private room to undo all my kinks and smooth out all my aches and pains – to my peers, these things screamed out, This girl is a capital-F freak! I was marked. Branded. The majority of my classmates teased me mercilessly. When I walked down the hall, kids would quack at me. They hid my library books. They laughed about me behind their hands. Sometimes, one of them would decide to keep me trapped inside the bathroom during a class break and guard the door until I cried, or purposely block my entrance into the only free stall until the teacher called us to line up. I’d have to hold my bladder till I could hardly stand it and then get scolded for asking for a restroom pass when I had just been to the restroom not twenty minutes before. And I hardly ever got to play anything fun when I did go to recess – nobody wanted me on their kickball or softball team because I would make them lose. If I joined in a game of Tag, I was unceasingly It. The little brats would taunt me by coming just within reach and then leaping out of the way seconds before I touched them, jeering and pulling ugly faces. It hurt me so much that eventually I stopped trying to play and sat off by myself, reading a book.
Enter my fellow freaks. I don’t mean to offend any of them by saying that – a few of them are my very good friends to this day. But when you put the limping kid, the God-obsessed kid, the WWF wrestling fanatic with a particular liking for off-color jokes and the girl who has always secretly desired to be a cat into the same little group and plop them down on an elementary school playground, what you get is that band of weirdoes on the bottom of the social totem pole. Over time we acquired other drifting, outcast souls: transfer students, band geeks, kids who couldn’t break into the It crowd because they were overweight or liked the wrong boys or had the wrong clothes or a multitude of other social sins as determined by the ruling-class kids, the kids with all the power, the kids who dominated the hallways and the playground and the classroom and had some unspoken permission to make everyone else’s life miserable. The Haves and the Have-Nots have always existed in this manner, in every school that’s ever been, anywhere in the world. We were the Have-Nots; it was that simple. But what we did have was each other, and we stuck together – a little tribe of castaways making ourselves at home in the borderlands.
I don’t remember precisely when Danielle became my best friend. I know it wasn’t anytime during that second grade year, when I could barely stay awake long enough to account for my presence at roll call, but I know it happened. Certainly we were close by the time we hit the seventh grade, and by sophomore year we were practically joined at the hip in the particular way that adolescent girls bond, with equal parts of love and jealousy and a loyalty so solid it is very nearly fierce.
Danielle helped me have some semblance of an ordinary adolescent’s life. On sleepovers at her house, we’d smack each other’s hands in a bowl of cheddar popcorn and laugh over stupid movies till we cried. One night in early Spring, when the snow had scarcely melted off the grass, we put on bikinis and rigged the water hose to the porch as a sprinkler, then took turns dashing through the spray. Our giddy screaming turned to narratives of steamy porn-film shower scenes, complete with slurping, kissing noises. When we finally trooped back inside, throats raw from laughter, covered in grass clippings because the lawn had been mowed that morning and pocked with goose bumps, Danielle’s mother revealed that she had taped the entire thing from the second-floor balcony. Scandalized, we made off with the evidence. We vowed to destroy it. While we sat there on the bed with the tape between us, trying to figure out what to do with it, it occurred to us that we simply could not banish it without watching it at least once. So we did. And then we watched it again, and then again, and then again, till we had seen it so much we could quote one another. We giggled and kicked and shrieked. We swore eternal embarrassment. Then we decided to keep it, and Danielle probably still has it to this day.
Dani snuck me out when I wasn’t supposed to be out, just to keep me sane. On the relatively few nights I was permitted to stay with her, my mother would order me to stay at the house and not go anywhere else, period. No fast food. No Blockbuster. No drives for the hell of it. Danielle decided this was bullshit. Against my fear of being caught, I’d go out with her to a nearby playground and we’d play on the swings and climb all over the equipment like little kids. She’d take me to Wal-Mart to buy things I needed that my mother wouldn’t let me have, like Icy-Hot and Poise, and then keep them in her car and bring me a short-term supply every morning at school. One night, she dragged me to the theater a few towns over to see Monsters, Inc.
I only say “dragged” because I was paranoid of being found out. I wanted to go to the movie, if only to rebel, to do something I wasn’t supposed to do: I was seventeen and had never been to a mall or a theater or an ice cream place with a group of friends. I went only to their houses; that was it – and it was rare. When my friends got together I had to stay home, chafing under a load of chores like Cinderella before the ball. Going to a movie just to go, just because I wanted to and I could, was an absolutely exotic idea to me. You could’ve put me on a plane to Calcutta and I would have felt exactly the same way I did at the prospect of walking into a theater with Danielle: excited. Elated. Terrified.
I had lived my life so haunted by the way my mother seemed to know everything I ever did, thought, or dreamed about doing without ever being told that I was half-convinced she was omniscient. I couldn’t shake the idea that she would somehow sense my disobedience, that she would know about it the second I stepped out the door. Then she’d call to check on my whereabouts, and Danielle’s mother would tell her we’d gone to the movies – after which I’d never be allowed to leave the house again for as long as I lived, a consequence preceded by violent and possibly bloody punishment. My fear of this scenario had a life of its own. I almost didn’t go. I almost begged my best friend not to insist upon going anywhere public with me, ever. But in the end, rebellion won: I wanted a life too, damn it. I wanted a little freedom. And if I had to pay for it with my skin, so be it – I’d pay. We went to the movie.
It was exhilarating. I felt so alive. To say that sitting in a stadium seat staring at a screen made me feel alive sounds absolutely pathetic. But there I was, at a movie with my best friend, pointing and laughing and whispering and fighting over popcorn – I was doing those things. Me. I was out. I had slipped my leash. I was giddy with excitement; the world felt bigger, I felt taller, I thought that if I took a breath deep enough, I could suck up every atom of possibility that had ever existed. I almost felt detached from myself, as if nothing about that night could possibly really be happening and I was watching someone else have fun. That night, a rebel was born: if this is freedom, give me more.
In so many ways, that little taste of what it felt like to be untethered made the next year so much harder for me than it would have been otherwise, because I just couldn’t fathom giving it up. Forcing myself to submit to perfect obedience and the same old fear and helplessness I had always walked under almost tore me apart after that. But it was worth it, too, because it showed me what I could have instead of terror and helplessness and depression. It made life outside of those things real. It gave me something to live for, something to leave for. Way back in second grade, I never dreamed that I’d ever get out. The days ahead of me all looked the same. The days behind me all looked the same. I didn’t really know that there was anything else for me. I certainly never thought that sneaking out to a children’s movie would give me a reason to keep fighting, and that it would all come about because I was accepted into a group of misfit kids on a playground one day when I was eight. The universe works its magic well.