One time I came back to visit my family, after college I think, and Dad had the trap and some clay pigeons out. He got the shotgun and my brothers were shooting at clay pigeons. And missing.
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Tag Archives: family
In the Beginning
Also written on Oct. 6 but could not post until today. One I’ve been meaning to write for several months now.
Rosemary for Remembrance
She doesn’t know that the jewelry box has her name taped to the bottom, in case something happens and I don’t come back. But she points to the rabbit pelt underneath it.
“Is that from a rabbit?” she asks, feeling it.
“Yes,” I tell her, not sure if she’ll be upset relating it to her pet who died last year.
“I like it,” she says, surprising me.
Continue reading Rosemary for Remembrance
Sisters
I listen to women tell their story, and they tell my story, too. One part of my story I hear them telling goes like this: “I never felt like I got along with other women. I just got along better with men.”
It started at an early age for me. I never felt a lot of sibling rivalry with my brothers, but my sister and I were always at odds. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her…it was just that something inside of me always twisted itself up in envy at her success or hostility at her innocence. She just seemed to move easily within the world even though she had a certain vulnerability. Her feelings showed.
I was always fighting upstream against myself, trying to rein myself in until the pressure built too much and it came out in bursts of defiance and bad decisions. The part of me that demands honest self-expression always being dragged down by the self-loathing coward.
Of course, I didn’t see any of that then. I just stewed in resentment. It came out in bad behavior that I often came to regret.
………………………………..
It was summer and we were bored. A friend of the family, Curly, was visiting. Curly was an older bald guy, the father of my dad’s childhood friend, and he was something like a grandfather to us. He and Mom sat at the kitchen table chatting while my brothers and I played upstairs.
We had a big hard plastic toboggan. It was kind of silly, really…we lived in Ohio, on land that had once been The Great Black Swamp. It’s hard to imagine a place more flat…you had to drive in towards town, near the river, to find anything even close to a hill for sledding. We always went “belly whomping” in the ice-covered fields instead….holding the sled at your chest as you run, then leaping with it as if you were doing a head-first slide into second base. Not the kind of thing you do with a plastic toboggan…you need sturdy wood with metal runners for that.
Still, on that summer day I thought the plastic toboggan had a certain promise that was irresistible. What if we could ride it down the wooden stairs of our old farm house?
My brothers and I were at the top of the stairs with the toboggan thinking it over. We really wanted it to work, but we also really wanted to see someone else try it first. I was the oldest and always the ringleader in these kinds of escapades, but I always looked for someone else to take the risk. I was more the idea person.
My sister came down the hall, looked at us sitting there with the toboggan, and brightly asked, “Are you guys riding that down the stairs?!”
I looked at my brothers, and they looked at me, waiting for me to answer. Sis would sometimes report our activities to the authorities; caution was required. I remember looking at my brother and smiling before I looked back to her. “Yes!” I said enthusiastically. “It’s a lot of fun! Do you want to try it?”
We helped her get situated. She held the stair railing as we tilted everything downhill and I remember her saying, “Are you sure this works?”
“Oh yes.”
She grabbed the rope handles and we nudged the toboggan forward as it slid down the first few steps. Then it bounced funny. WHAM!
WHAM!
WHAM!
Sis screamed, grabbed the railing, legs flying, and the toboggan continued on its merry way, crashing onto the living room floor.
Curly and Mom came running. Mom saw Sis laying on the steps. “What are you doing?!!”
Curly stood looking up the stairs at us, and put the whole story together right away. He laughed, nodded at us and told my mom, “There’s the real trouble. Up there.”
………………………………..
My sister grew up to be the amazing person I always knew she’d be. I see her now with her family, still full of feeling and vulnerability, yet with a strength she’s forged out of her own being. I don’t envy her life now…I want something different. But even though the envy is gone, it’s still not so easy always to do the right thing. I screw up a lot. But it’s worth the effort to try to get it right. I need her.
If there is anything that I’ve learned in the past year, it’s how much I value the relationships I have with the women in my life. While I’m working on my relationship with my blood sister, I find that I now have a whole community of sisters in my life. Incredible women, full of the grace of feeling and vulnerability. Through them, I begin to accept appreciate those sides of myself.
It turns out that the feeling that I just “got along better with men” wasn’t a matter of getting along with men at all. It was really a rejection of women because they showed the same qualities I rejected in myself. It was fear.
It turns out that all along, I needed the kind of courage that women have. I needed my sisters.
The Mouse in the Storeroom
It wasn’t the first time I stole candy. Nor was it the last. But it’s the memory I return to again and again.
They were chocolate malted milk balls, in a clear plastic bag. They were being stored, with other candy and food, in one of several large yellow tin cans. I think the tins had been used for some sort of food-service product; my dad probably scavenged them for his storeroom, along with the old grocery store shelves.
The “storeroom” is a room upstairs in our old farm house. You have to walk through my parents’ bedroom to get to it. It holds anything that that we shouldn’t be getting into and more; locked trunks that held guns and who knows what else; shelves with old army electronic manuals and other things from a life before us.
Along one whole wall are the wire shelves; under and in front of the shelves are the cans. The shelves are laden with canned foods, jars of preserves (both home-made and store-bought), and all manner of dry goods. The cans hold anything that isn’t impervious to mice: flour, bags of rice and beans, marshmallows….and candy. My dad grew up during the depression, and he made sure that his family would never be left without enough to eat. He buys on-sale and stocks up, even to this day.
I was sent upstairs frequently to get ingredients for mom as she cooked, so I knew where all the food was. I’d known about the malted milk balls for some time. One day, I decided to snitch…just a couple. I tore a tiny hole in the bottom of the bag and squeezed the candies through it, and stuffed them into my mouth. I’d hardly gotten the can closed before I was opening it for more. Just a couple more. I tucked the bag down into the bottom of the can, under the other items.
This went on for a day or two as the bag, to my horror, became more than half empty. I was out of control and I couldn’t stop. I was a criminal and I was going to be caught. Weeks later, when the evidence surfaced into my dad’s attention, I was in fact caught. Not only did I feel ashamed of my behavior, but my methods were ridiculed. My attempts at misdirection by opening the bag from the bottom and not finishing the whole bag were obvious. Did I really think he would be so stupid as to believe that a mouse had opened the can and gotten into the bag? Or that the bag was not full to begin with?
All too often today I find myself back in that store room, an insatiable mouse whose food is always stolen, because when you have a lifetime of eating too much, ALL of your food is stolen. “I really shouldn’t…”
And the voice in my head mocks me as I put on my jeans or look in the mirror. “Did you really think I would be so stupid as to not notice?”
Altered States
I almost drowned as a child. As my dad tells it, we were at the kiddie pool with relatives. They were sitting right there, keeping an eye on us, but suddenly he looked down to see me laying on my back, under the water, a sickly unfocused smile on my face. He leaned over, grabbed my suit, and hauled me out of the water…but also submerging the camera that was hanging from his neck. It was a nice camera, and it was ruined.
I remember it differently. In my memory, I’m swimming underwater, belly down. I taste a little vomit in the back of my throat, and the light changes; everything becomes brighter, the refracted ripples in the turquoise water.
Then the fish appear. Animated cartoon fish, swimming by me, then a friendly big black whale with a big smile. It is delightful.
Then I am yanked out of it, and the grownups are yelling.
I remember a feeling that used to come over me as a kid. I didn’t have a name for it, but I associated it with the feeling you get when you push a sewing needle through the top layers of the skin on your thumb…it doesn’t hurt…there’s just sort of an odd pressure of something there, under your skin.
When it happened, my sense of time (if you call it that; this is hard to describe) became stretched out. It was as if part of me was moving along slowly, like molasses, like slow motion, while another part was moving quickly. Physically it felt like I was in the back top of my head, with a lifting sensation.
I knew that what I was experiencing was internal; it wasn’t something others were feeling. It scared me. I didn’t know if I would come out of it, and I was fearful of surrendering to staying in it. I knew better than to try to explain what was happening to anyone; I didn’t have the vocabulary to do it.
It was as if, had I stayed in that state, I could have moved among people so quickly that they couldn’t see me, darting around like a hummingbird while they all moved in slow motion…not physically, but in a part of my mind that maybe was now separate.
Sometimes this would come over me at night; I remember once going downstairs to use the bathroom and being overcome by this surreal feeling, hyper-aware of the sensation of my feet and hands on the wood steps as I went back upstairs on all fours, slapping the steps with my palms as I went.
I’ve never tried to describe these in writing before, and it’s interesting to see how they appear when it is all set down. You would think that we know, then we write down what we know. But I learn about myself by writing. Sometimes I have to write it to know it.
Not an Astronomer
I’m not sure when it really happened, but I know that at a very young age, I became very manipulative. It wasn’t that I wanted to be evil. I just didn’t think I was worthy of getting what I wanted because I wanted it. I had to find another way.
What I wanted most of all, of course, was to be loved. But I had love confused with approval. (True fact: I actually had love and approval confused until just a couple of months ago…seriously! I still have to ponder the difference for a while to really get it.)
Perhaps, for me, the opposite of approval was anger. I dreaded anger, especially the anger of adults. I harbored a lot of fear that wasn’t really based on reality. I didn’t have a Toto to pull away the curtain that revealed that the wizard was only a man.
I got the idea that if I did the right things, I could keep the adults from getting angry. This wasn’t the simple, usual “if I’m good, I won’t be punished” kind of mindset. This was much bigger. I operated on a principle (that was not concious) that if I did everything right, everyone would be happy. So if I managed to chime in at the right time, or deflect attention in some way, I could prevent the anger that I dreaded.
A good example of this was during family car trips. If there was tension, I knew that the way to prevent a blowup would be to get a different conversation going. The best way to do this was to ask my dad a science question. Dad is smart and he loved to teach us. If I could get him going about something scientific, then we would just have a science lecture to sit through instead of an argument. “What is electricity?” was a really good one, as was (on stormy nights) “What is lightning?” I never understood the explanations, so I had no trouble asking those, time after time. I always pretended to understand.
In junior high school, our science class did a section on astronomy. For homework, we had to actually make little astrolabes out of protractors and go out and observe the planets and the moon, and chart their path from night to night. I loved it, or at least loved the idea of it. I was pretty bad at the follow-through, but found that I could look that stuff up in Sky and Telescope and mark it down on the charts on the day we had to hand it in.
I mentioned that, since I liked this so much, I thought that perhaps I’d be an astronomer when I grew up. This was met with lots of approval, and I ate it up. I couldn’t get enough.
Science fairs were another part of junior high school, and then high school. I got good at them. I won trophies and medals. It gave me the attention and approval I craved.
I got a summer job working at the planetarium at the University of Toledo. This was really a big bonus…not only did I get the approval for being so career-minded as a 17-year-old, but I got to move away from home a little earlier than most other kids my age. I worked there for four summers, sometimes getting to help out during real observation time with the big 40″ telescope on campus.
All this time, during high school, I was struggling with math. I hated math. I didn’t apply myself. I actually got some C’s, which shocked my parents and shamed me. I remember at an open house, my English teacher suggested that, when I got to college, I might find that astronomy wasn’t a good fit for me…the reading and writing in her classes came to me without effort. But I thought that was just silly, because I was clearly going to be an astronomer.
And off to college I went. My first quarter, I took Astronomy, Physics, and Calculus (and started a 20 hour/week job in the astronomy department, doing mind-numbing work for a professor emeritus who really had no idea of what to do with me.) I think I got a B, a C, and a D. That same quarter, I discovered binge drinking and hangovers. It’s a wonder I got grades that good, honestly.
To say that I struggled through college would be a great understatement. No matter how painful it became, how obvious it was to everyone else that I was in the wrong major, I would not give up.
I got pretty far in, and then started the electromagnetics course. I had this idea that if I just memorized the equations, I would be able to figure out how to apply them. But nothing made sense to me. When the first midterms were handed back to us, my score was “0”. That was zero points out of 100.
I dropped the class. I decided that I’d do better the next year; I’d take five years to graduate after all, as many did. I took some extra math in the meantime, because I had a crush on a grad student who I thought would help me. I did well in those courses, partly because of my interest in showing off, and partly because, at a certain point, all the numbers drop out of mathematics and somehow that seemed easier to me.
Next fall, I tried to take electromagnetics again. But it was more of the same. I never would understand electricity or lightning! I didn’t even make it to the first midterm…I just quit going and officially failed the course.
I decided to change my major. I went to my advisor and told him of my plan. I knew it was going to be a lot more work, and that maybe I wouldn’t even be able to swing it financially. But he looked at my record, and with some clever substitutions (“History of Astronomy” instead of “Electromagnetics”), I was able to graduate. I got a B.S. in Astronomy. Everybody was happy. Right?
Well, my friends at the bar I worked at said they would miss me, because somehow I talked my way into an internship at Hayden Planetarium in New York City. I definitely wasn’t going to graduate school, so planetarium work seemed like the only option to make use of my degree.
New York was a great experience for me. I lasted about seven months there, living in Manhattan, working days for the planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and bartending nights at a club, “The Ritz”, where I got to see some of my favorite bands and swiped drinks for myself. If I had any energy left, my museum ID got me into any other museum in the city for free; I haunted MOMA and the Whitney whenever I could. I started looking more and more like a punk, which didn’t go over great at the museum. Eventually, it was all too hard to keep up. I also started having panic attacks. I finally admitted to myself that I really had no interest in astronomy. I missed my boyfriend terribly…he was living in Columbus, and I was grateful to move back there to be with him.
There was enormous freedom in making that decision. But it also felt like I was letting people down…my parents, and everyone who had helped me with jobs along the way. And, perhaps most painfully of all, it hurt to think that my college experience had been a waste. I worked hard and suffered for that degree, lousy as it was. It cost me a lot, in more than just dollars and time. But our path is our path. It shaped me in ways that I may still learn to appreciate.
I do know this: when I see parents celebrating the ways their child is unique, a part of me worries. Does that child understand that they are allowed to change? And when I hear about encouraging girls to go into math and science, I cringe. What about just not discouraging them from going into anything? Because I was on the vanguard of that girls-in-math-and-science wave, and I feel that, as a girl, I was very very susceptible to doing things for approval rather than out of my own true nature.
What was it that got me into all of this trouble over astronomy? It was my own need for approval, my own way of manipulating the world to love…or at least approve of…. this dumpy, clumsy girl with glasses. Because I myself didn’t think what was really inside was worth loving, and so I lost track of it.
And now I’m 46 years old and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.