::: true story tuesday: stuffed brainwashers :::

Did you know that stuffed animals are aliens who were sent to earth to transform children's brains into nostalgic gobs of senseless, sentimental goo?

I know this because a kid can have a whole swimming pool full of these things, see another one in the store, and immediately become brainwashed. I remember standing in the aisle of K-Mart when I was about ten, crying uncontrollably over the thought of leaving behind the sad-eyed brown furry bear that had brainwashed me. I was sure it would be sad, alone, frightened and pine for me for the rest of its sad, lonely, frightened life.

And, yes, I do remember being fond of the book Corduroy.

I had enough stuffed animals to completely cover my bed. Each one was very special. And I just don't mean that they each had names. They had personality traits, relationships, feelings. The stuffed animal that had the most power over my little child brain was a red and yellow bear named with the same originality as my cat, Kitty. My bear's name was Teddy.

Teddy was given to me by my parents when I was very, very young. Before I could even talk, actually. Teddy was a gift to me when I was only a tiny baby. In fact, I believe Teddy was a gift to me for when I came to live with my parents.

I don't know the whole story, because my parents were so incredibly protective of me, but I do know, and always knew, that I was adopted. That was never a secret. But information about my biological parents (not my "real" parents, I was constantly told, but my "biological" parents. My "real" parents were the ones who raised me) was very guarded. I think my "real" parents were too freaked out to tell me about my "biological" parents because they thought I'd pack my bags and go back to them or something. As if. My "real" parents were very much real to me. My biological parents were strangers. Only my real parents would tuck me into bed every single night and pretend that they couldn't tell which one was me amidst my mountain of brainwashing stuffed animals.

When I was a very young child, my mom was an excellent mother. She would sit by my bed and sing to me, running her fingers very gently over my closed eyelids and my soft eyebrows. This was such a magical feeling. I loved how it felt so much that I would keep my eyes closed long after she'd stopped, because I didn't want to lose that magical feeling or break its spell. I can almost still feel her fingertips on my eyelids. I try, now, to use this technique on my own children. They're not so easily enchanted.

At some point in my little life, my mom decided to bring out a good friend of hers to introduce to me. Barney was a very big, very old teddy bear that was given to my mom when she was a child. I thought it was strange but also kind of cool that a grown-up would keep a teddy bear, and that they would call it by an actual name. My mom trusted me enough to borrow Barney for a while, but it was always very clear to me that Barney was her bear, not mine. While I thought this was a rather selfish thing, for an old person to keep a teddy bear from a little kid, I didn't argue about it. If she wanted to be a grown woman and get all freaky about a stupid old bear, that was fine with me.

Still, I dressed Barney in some nice clothes, a sweater and a pair of jeans, and introduced him to the rest of my stuffed family. From that point on, Barney spent a lot of time on my beds. When I had a camera, I would get Barney, Teddy and all the other stuffed brainwashers in line and photograph them. My dad would give me such a hard time about this. "Film is so expensive! Why do you waste it by taking pictures of your stuffed animals?" Mostly, though, he would just make fun of me. You'd think I was the world's biggest idiot for going to Washington DC on a fifth grade trip and taking pictures of the pigeons instead of the Washington Monument. Big deal. The monument would be there forever. These pigeons were gonna take off. Seriously.

I never regretted taking pictures of my stuffed animals. Sure, I felt silly about it sometimes, but regret? No. After all, these animals were just as much a part of my family as my "real" parents were. As a matter of fact, one of the most traumatic things that ever happened to my little brainwashed self was when we came home from a long drive, returning from West Virginia to visit my mom's relatives. When we arrived home, one of my thoughtless, inconsiderate parents opened the hatchback and Teddy FELL OUT of the car onto the hard, rough gravel driveway. I knew immediately that he was dead and went directly into the process of grieving.

Yes, I was a drama queen.

But it wasn't all my fault! I mean, my mom took my bear very seriously, almost as seriously as she took her own. Once every few months, she would cut a little slit in the seam on the back of Teddy's neck, take out all of his stuffing, and wash his body in the washing machine. After he had been fluffed dry, she would carefully re-stuff him, adding more fluff if necessary, restitch any places that were in need of restitching, and fix any facial features that were in danger of falling off. And then, she would carefully re-stitch that seam in the back of his neck and it would take me days to get his stuffing back the way I liked it.

It was understandable that Teddy needed an occasional bath. I took him absolutely everywhere. And I'm sure I threw up, peed and drooled on him and I most definitely know that I cried on him. He understood so much more than anyone ever did. He understood my heartaches, tears, and all of the unfairness of a child's life. Teddy stood by me. Or rather, sat by me. Or kinda hung limp beside me.

As I grew older, Teddy and I remained close, but Barney and I grew apart. After all, he was my mom's teddy bear. He just shouldn't be around, I thought, when I cried to Teddy about the bad words my mom would say to me, the bad words she would say to my dad, the bad names she would call us both, the embarrassing stories she would tell her friends about me, the fists that struck me, the hands that slapped me. Barney could never have understood the feelings I had. But Teddy did.

Teddy remains with me still. He went with me when I moved out of the house at age 18, no longer able to stand the mental and physical abuse my mom continually dosed out. He stayed with me through a failed engagement, many jobs, several apartments, and a handful of boyfriends. He continued to offer a shoulder (or head, or tummy, or back) to cry on.

 
Shortly after I moved out, Barney left with my mom when she divorced my dad and moved out of the home in which we'd lived for almost my whole life. My dad lived there alone for a while, but since my grown, adult parents couldn't come to an agreement on how their stuff should be divided, and since the divorce continued to get uglier and uglier, they sold the house. My childhood home was no longer mine, and all of my stuff, everything in my yellow room, including Miss Kitty, disappeared from my life forever.

But I still have Teddy, and every once in a while, I'll turn him over and run my fingers along the seam in his back

::: true story tuesday: keeping up with the smiths :::

It's important to find things to keep you occupied when you live in the country. It's especially important to make friends with your neighbors, and to keep the friends you make. When I was a child in my neighborhood, there weren't many houses, which means there weren't many families, which means there weren't many kids. But there were the Smiths.

The Smiths lived in a really nice two story house three cornfields away to the north. Gene and Marilyn Smith were Catholic and had three kids when I first met them, and then had a fourth child later. Dawn was a two years older than I; Tony was my age, and Steffy was three years younger. Timmy came along when I was about eight or nine.

Gene and Marilyn were loud and colorful, and they always had the best things. Gene was a plumber and must have made a nice chunk of change because he could afford that nice two-story house, a very nice yard with a lot of flowers, an in-ground pool with a big, tall fence around it, and all of the coolest toys.

I remember one summer, Gene bought a moped for Tony and I happened to be there when they were riding it. Tony was riding it all over the yard, being the daredevil that he was. It looked so easy and so fun that I just had to try it, which was probably the best bad idea a person could ever have. Naturally, I got my turn. Naturally, I mistook the gas for the brake, and naturally, I flipped the dumb thing over. I didn't get hurt, but I've had a healthy respect for two-wheeled motorized vehicles ever since. Tony, however, did not have a healthy respect for me, and I was teased about this all the way through our school years together.

I spent many hours swimming in the Smiths' pool, which was a miracle given that, #1, my parents didn't seem to care too much for the Smiths (but my parents never had many good things to say about anyone) and, #2, my parents were so overprotective, I wasn't allowed to associate with anyone that they even suspected of being a shifty character. The fact that they let me splash around in the water with people like The Smiths without even staying to watch is, frankly, a bit hard for me to believe now.

Somehow, though, I was able to spend a lot of time with the Smiths, and I was able to spend a lot of time in their pool. Obviously, I didn't spend as much time in their pool as they did. This was so apparent because of my total inability to make any graceful movements in the water. Tony was always very quick to point that out.

"You call that swimmin'?!?" He would laugh his obnoxious Tony Smith laugh. "You're just splashin' around! Don't you know how to swim?"

We had this conversation every time I tried to swim in their pool. Every time, I would splash ungracefully, and every time, he would laugh at me. To this day, when I try to swim, I remember that I really can't swim because Tony Smith said so.

When the pool got boring, or it was too cold to swim, we would play Engine Engine Number Nine in the front yard:

Engine, Engine Number Nine
Going Down the Chicago Line
If the Train Should Jump the Track
Do you want your money back?

And then, there was:

Bubblegum, Bubblegum in a dish
How many pieces do you wish?

And my very favorite, because of the fantastic mental images it conjured:

My mother and your mother were hanging out clothes.
My mother punched your mother right in the nose.
What color was the blood?

I always chose green.

We would also play freeze tag, or TV tag, or some other kind of tag, or hide and seek, or we'd pretend we were spies (sometimes we really were spies, spying on Dawn who would get mad at us and tell us to grow up).

If totally necessary, Marilyn Smith would let us play inside.

In spite of what my parents said, I thought Gene and Marilyn were really nice. They both laughed and smiled a lot, and Gene always had some kind of joke to tell that I didn't really understand. Marilyn never failed to gently touch one of my springy curls and sweetly tease me that she was going to cut them all of to keep them for herself. She loved my brown ringlets.

But Marilyn Smith had rules, too. For instance, we weren't allowed in their living room because it was to stay clean just for company, and we weren't allowed in their parents' bedroom because...well, because it was simply off-limits. I did sneak in there one time, though, because Tony had told me that they had a sink that was made just to wash his parents butts. I didn't believe him, so I snuck in one time, just to see if it was true. And sure enough, there it was. Right by the toilet. It was a toilet-looking thing made just for washing butts, which I now know was a bidet.

But I would have to say that Tony's biggest claim to fame as far as I was concerned was the booger. Tony was the kind of kid who was obsessed with bodily functions, even more so than most boys his age. Tony was the only kid I ever knew who would try really hard to smell his own farts, admitting with no shame whatsoever that he did it because he liked the way his own farts smelled. He liked to brag about any kind of sound, fluid or goo his body produced, and that, of course, included boogers. If Tony found an exceptionally large or gooey booger, he would not for one second hesitate to show it to the closest person, except for his sister Dawn. Dawn was very mature and only tolerated, with a very low patience level, the antics of her annoying little brother, and, in turn, the antics-by-association of me. So, if there was a choice between showing Dawn the booger and showing me the booger, I would win every time. I think.

The thing that was different about Tony was that he didn't get embarrassed when anyone mentioned bodily functions. In our house, no one EVER said the word "fart," though my mom was the queen of gaseousness. And if I were to be caught in school with a booger hanging from my nose, I would simply have died. But not Tony. No. Tony would just laugh and pull it out, maybe even measure it, and show anyone who was nearby so that they could all appreciate the fineness of his great big boogers.

One day, when I got on the bus, there were no seats anywhere, except for next to Tony. Now, I played with Tony during after-school hours mostly out of sheer boredom, but when we were on school property, I really would rather not have seen or been seen with him. What do you expect? He was embarrassing, for crying in the mud! But I was also a fairly nice kid, so if his was the only seat left on the bus, I wasn't going to make a big deal out of it.

So, I sat down next to Tony and started talking to him when I noticed that he had something stuck in the top of his blonde hair. Being the nice person I was, I reached out for it, this thing that was stuck there, right on the top of his head. I took hold of it and pulled, and it was cold, sticky and rubbery.

It was a booger.

I was so totally grossed out, I could have puked. I shook the disgusting thing off of my hand and stared at Tony with repulsion. He just laughed, as if he had placed it there himself, just so I would find it and pull it out of his hair. And maybe he did.

To this day, when I see something in a person's hair, I either point it out to them, or I let them discover it themselves. I never, ever, ever touch it.

::: true story tuesday: crushed :::

In an effort to chronicle my life for my children and grandchildren, and also to hone my writing skills, I've decided to begin a weekly feature titled True Story Tuesday. In it, I will share a true story about my life.

Jimmy was one of the most handsome men in the whole world. He had wavy black hair, very big brown eyes, and the most friendly smile ever. I knew that our lives together would be very happy, and that he would treat me like a queen. Every word he spoke to me was like honey. Every look he gave me sent chills down my spine. Spending the rest of my life with Jimmy was all I could think about. I knew that I would have plenty of time to think about him, too, for the rest of my life.

Jimmy was in my first grade class.

It's so funny that a six-year-old child can have such strong romantic feelings, but I definitely did. I was very serious about Jimmy and could barely concentrate on learning my addition facts or staying inside the lines with someone as cute as he was sitting in the same room with me. And the thing about Jimmy wasn't just that he was cute. He was nice, too! He always had a polite word to say, and a nice smile on his face, and a nice answer for the teacher. There was no better word for him. He was just nice.

You would think, with as nuts about Jimmy as I was, that everyone would know how I felt. But they didn't. Not even Jimmy. He was, and remained until now, my secret crush. Sure, I've mentioned him a time or two. Why not? Jimmy and I were classmates from kindergarten all the way through graduation. But I never shared with anyone exactly how I felt about Jimmy. Not my friends, my other classmates, and especially not my parents.

As a matter of fact, I think that my relationship (or non-relationship, actually) with Jimmy was the conversation piece (or non-conversation piece, actually) that set the tone for communication (or non-communication, actually) with my parents for the rest of my life. I remember, very distinctly, sitting in my room watching T.V., because as an only child, it was totally understandable that I would have my own television in my room, and since my dad was (and still is) a T.V. junky, it only makes sense that there would be T.V.s in every room in the house, including mine. I was probably watching Sesame Street, or The Waltons or Little House on the Prairie. It seems like it was evening, so I could have been watching The Brady Bunch or Sonny and Cher, too. But I remember that I was totally immersed in the show and not really interested in having a conversation. But here came my mom. And somehow, I felt very uncomfortable with her there in my room. I sensed that she was sabotaging me, somehow, and I didn't even know what that word meant when I was six years old. But there I was, and here was this uncharacteristic visit from my mother, right in the middle of one of my favorite shows. Maybe, in all fairness, she was just trying to bond with me. Maybe she had just been thinking, like I often do as a mother, that she should be spending quality time with me instead of letting me sit in my room watching hour after hour of television. But I definitely had the feeling that I was being set up. So here she was, in my room, sitting on my beanbag chair, and she was asking me about my day at school. I may be wrong, but I don't think it was the first day of school, and it wasn't like my mother at all to ask me about my day (at least not that I remember). She just wasn't a milk-and-cookies-when-you-get-home kind of mom.

After a few seconds of chit-chat about who-knows-what, she asked me.

"So...do you have any little boyfriends?"

I knew it. Sabotage. Maybe it was in the way she tried to slip into my room and be all nicey-nice. Maybe it was because of the way she worded the question, so demeaning, "any little boyfriends." Whatever it was, it totally set me off. I, even in my little six-year-old head, was offended by my mother's allusions to my immaturity and childlike silliness.

And it was at this point that I made the decision that would affect my relationship with my mother for the rest of my life.

I lied.

"No." I answered. That was it. Nothing else.

And I went back to watching The Six Million Dollar Man or Sanford and Son, or whatever I was watching. It could even have been Hawaii Five-O, because I just wasn't paying attention anymore. All I could think of was that my mom found out, somehow, about Jimmy, and that she was trying to weasel her way into my personal life, and I just wasn't about to let her.

This was a trend that continued all through my at-home years. Never, not even once, did I share with my mother about my crushes, boyfriends or even my fiances. Somehow I knew that she had some strange ulterior motive, that she was too overprotective or jealous to be trusted with such sensitive information.

I also vowed that I would never refer to my daughters' crushes as her "little boyfriends."

And I never have.

::: true story tuesday: the giant who pulled my pigtails :::

In an effort to chronicle my life for my children and grandchildren, and also to hone my writing skills, I've decided to begin a weekly feature titled True Story Tuesday. In it, I will share a true story about my life.

The Giant Who Pulled My Pigtails

One of the worst things about living in rural Ohio was our very long lane. I can't even begin to count how many times I had to run to the end of that lane to catch the approaching schoolbus. Sometimes, when the icy air froze my nostrils together, my mom would wait with me in the warmth of our Volkswagen van, but most often, I was on my own. Even now, as a forty-year-old woman, I still have nightmares that I'm standing at the storm door in the front room, and I miss the bus, because I either don't have my schoolbooks together, or I'm in my Scooby Doo undies, or I don't have my hair brushed.

And having my hair brushed was a very, very big deal, so I certainly couldn't have gotten on the bus with my tresses in a tangle.

Most times, when I was very young, my mom would tame my stubbornly curly hair into two sections and pull them into pigtails on top of either side of my head. It was the only time my hair looked cute. Usually, it was a stubborn mess, a "rat's nest," as my mom would call it.

On one occasion, when I was in kindergarten, my pigtails and I took that long driveway to the end and got on that big bus full of kids who were all older than I, and I found my seat. I don't think I was particularly bratty as a little child (my pictures of me look sweet enough) but something prompted one of the eighth grade boys (who were absolutely GIGANTIC when I was five) to use my pigtails daily as a source of entertainment. I was so intimidated and afraid of losing this older kid's attention that I didn't even tell my parents that my hair was being yanked. Then again, I don't think I told my parents much at all.

But one evening, as my mom was removing the rubber bands from my pigtails, she noticed that my tender young head was red and swollen, which, believe it or not, was not a normal thing. She finally got it out of me that this big kid...let me see, what was his name...Gary, I think (I feigned, knowing his name full well), had been, once in a while, accidentally tugging on my hair a little bit. She didn't say much as she finished brushing out my rat's nest.

The next day, I rode home on the bus, as usual, and Gary may or may not have pulled my pigtail, as he normally did, and the busdriver, Gib (who was my busdriver from the time I was five until I graduated from high school) made a left turn onto Lovebury Road, just like every day. But what was very NOT normal was that, when we got to eighth-grade Gary's stop, my mother was there, at the end of eighth-grade Gary's driveway, with her hands on her hips. Wow, I thought, I wonder why my mom's picking me up here? But it turned out that my mom wasn't there for me, but for my vengeance. She stomped onto that bus. She pulled big eighth-grade Gary out of his seat. She grabbed two fistfulls of eighth-grade Gary's beautiful black hair. And she yanked. Hard. Again. And again. And again. She yanked until eighth-grade Gary screeched like a little kindergarten girl. And then she stuck her finger in that big kid's face and spoke between gritted teeth.

"If you every touch my daughter again, I'll take each of your fingers off with my teeth." And then she took me by the hand, pulled me off that bus, and walked me home.

And then she took a pair of scissors from my dad's barber kit and lopped off all of my curls, cutting my hair so short that everyone thought I was a boy, including the cute older boys that I wanted to kiss.

::: true story tuesday: yellow :::

In an effort to chronicle my life for my children and grandchildren, and also to hone my writing skills, I've decided to begin a weekly feature titled True Story Tuesday. In it, I will share, ahem, a true story about my life.

In a creative writing class years ago, my professor shared these words of wisdom: "Don't assume it's interesting just because it happened to you. It has to be interesting because you make it interesting through your writing."

Here's hoping it's interesting to you, dear readers.

Yellow 

The first thing that comes to my mind is waking up in my own bedroom.

See, when I think back on my childhood, there are an overwhelming amount of memories...some very, very good ones and some very, very bad ones. I've told parts of most of the good ones many times to whatever poor soul would listen--my kids, my husband, the dog. But it's very hard to narrow it down to the ones that are worth actually sitting down and hammering out in writing. In my megalomaniacal mind, I want to write my whole fascinating life from start to finish. But how practical is that? I know that it's impossible to tell them all, so I'll just tell them as they come to my mind.

I don't know if there was a particular thing that made me feel the way I did that day, but I remember it so clearly that I think of it often, probably once a week. That seems like a lot, but I really do. Maybe I think of my childhood more than most people, I don't know. But I probably recall some bit of my growing-up daily. So much of it affects the way that I relate to my own children and the things that I do for them, and there are things about being a kid in that house that I will never, no matter how hard I try, forget.

But on the day that particular day, I woke up in my room and felt so very fortunate. Even blessed.

I don't think that I was very old, maybe ten or eleven. It's hard to tell, because I spent a lot of time changing rooms in our ranch house on Hartville Road. Since I was an only child, and there were three bedrooms in the house, I switched between the two smaller bedrooms often. It was always so exciting to me to get a new room, like a new world, and to change the view out my bedroom window.

On this particular day, I was in the middle room. The bathroom was directly across the hall from me, and my parent had the bigger room that was attached to the bathroom. I probably spent most of my growing up in this bedroom, because I know that it's the bedroom that I lived in until I moved all of my stuff out of the house when I turned eighteen. Most of my memories come from that room. So, maybe after about ten or eleven, I stopped moving from room to room. Anyway, for the sake of clarity (which can be dangerously close to the same thing as inducing boredom), I'll name the rooms, which we didn't do when I was a child, but it will make it simpler now.

The back room, where I spent a lot of time before I was 10 or so, was mostly pink. After I moved out of it, it became my mother's sewing room. While it still had a twin bed in it, it wasn't really used for sleeping much, except for when I may have decided to sleep in it for the night, just for the sake of novelty. I seemed to like to sleep in a lot of different places, including the bathtub, which was one of my favorite weird-kid rituals, taking all of my pillows and blankets and sleeping in the bathtub all night. I don't know why I did it, because I always woke up many times in the tub uncomfortable and trying to work the kink out of my neck enough that I could go back to sleep, but I often went back to that weird-kid ritual and my parents always let me. They would even come to the bathtub to tuck me in. I guess they were kind of weird parents, too.

So, the pink room was the sewing room.

My room, and this is what I remember about this particular day, was the yellow room. It had yellow-ish wallpaper (though later, or maybe earlier...who knows?...it changed to a different kind of wallpaper. More about that in another post), green carpet, and--and this is the part I remember--yellow princess curtains.

Now, maybe I was influenced by the movie The Little Princess with Shirley Temple and how she woke up the morning after that mysterious Indian guy next door granted her wish, and how she woke up and the first thing she did was run her fingers along the edge of the luxurious linens. I don't remember if I'd seen that movie recently on the day I woke up in my yellow room, or if I had even seen it at all, but that morning, the sunrays came streaming through those yellow princess curtains, danced upon my eyelids, and gently roused me from my sleep. I lay there in the warm sunlight, looking at the sweet color, that happy, sunny yellow of the princess curtains, and I suddenly felt very blessed. I don't know that I can explain the feeling much better than that. I simply felt as if I were the luckiest girl in the world, and that my room was the very prettiest, very sweetest, very most princess-est room that ever existed, and that I was so fortunate to have such a magical and royal room.

Looking back on it, I think it was the beginning of a love for the simple and bucolic. My room was not at all fancy. Most likely, my mother had made the curtains herself or bought them at the discount department store where we often shopped (which was later turned into a K-Mart, and then into something I can't remember, and is now a small strip mall), but there was something about that sunny yellow color that made me very happy. Actually, yellow still makes me very happy, and yet I don't have a single room in my house that has a single wall painted yellow.

Maybe it's just too sacred, that color, and is to be reserved solely for that bedroom in my mind and the reflection of the sun off of the yellow maple leaves in the autumn. Whatever the reason, yellow lifts my spirits and makes me think of that inspiring day when I was certain that I was a true princess, and nothing in my world could go wrong.