March 20, 2006

Closets

And no, this probably doesn't refer to quite what you're thinking it might refer to.

(I had a really funny line here about it being safe for work, even if you're a nun ... but while surfing BlogMad and writing this post, I hit a website that crashed my browser and I lost everything that I couldn't get a fast screenshot of. *sigh*)

So, from the last couple of serious posts, I know I've made it sound as if joining the Cub Scouts was the most important thing ever, and strictly speaking, that's not really true. It's just that the whole issue with the Cub Scouts really uncapsulated a whole raft of issues which nicely demonstrate some of the challenges my mom and I had as I was growing up.

The real battles, though, came from Mom's addiction to the rules.

You see, as an infant, Mom was quite scared that I would be a victim of SIDS - Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Now part of that fear was simply Mom's terror over being a new mother. Part of it was something more "real." At three, I was finally diagnosed with both allergies and asthma which helped to explain why I often had such a difficult time breathing as an infant. In fact, I was allergic to a whole slew of things: grass, cedar trees (including pines ... think allergic to Christmas tree before people had fake trees), dust, dogs, cats, tomatoes, soy, peas, green beans, cottonwood trees ... and, of course, everything scored a 4 out of 4, meaning I was highly allergic to all of those things, not just mildly annoyed by them.

So, at the age of 3, I started allergy shots once a week. I got a "nifty" dry powder inhaler for the asthma ... which meant that I had to put a little pill into the inhaler and then suck real hard on it ... the little fan blades inside the inhaler helped break up the medicine and hopefully I'd inhale enough of it to forestall an asthma attack. That's a lot for a little kid to remember to do correctly!

My mom, wanting to do everything just exactly right, tore the house apart to make it more hypo-allergenic for her little girl. This meant that my mattress and box springs were covered in an allergy bag (which also made it crinkly and noisy), soon, though, the "bag" came off the mattress because I couldn't sleep for all the noise. For some reason, Mom didn't think that sleeping on the floor was good for my dust allergy.

She set up a cleaning regimen to make sure that the house was as completely dust-free as she could make it. She vacuumed the house on Monday and Friday. Sheets were washed every Thursday. The house was dusted constantly.

And, of course, something had to be done about my room.

According to my baby book and to pictures of me as a little squirt, I had at least three stuffed monkeys that I adored, several dolls, and a host of other stuffed animals. I particularly remember having a panda bear that I adored at age three.

Stuffed animals collect dust.

Not long after my diagnosis, during Mom's crusade to rid the house of allergens, we went for a drive in the car. I was strapped in to my toddler seat in the front of the car (this was before airbags and such, so every mother put their toddler shotgun to keep an eye on us). And Mom started bringing out all of my stuffed animals.

I thought I had the coolest Mom in the world. I was going for a ride with all of my stuffed animals and dolls. I'm happily singing a little song or babbling out the window and chatting with all of my toys who are residing in the back seat of our massive Delta 88 boat of a car.

We pulled up to a strip mall and I paid no real attention. Until Mom began removing all of my stuffed animals and taking them in to the Salvation Army.

Stuffed animals collect dust.

I was allergic to dust.

The rule was, get rid of the stuffed animals or wash them weekly (which was going to get expensive as they probably wouldn't survive that many washings for long).

I frantically twisted around in my little strapped in seat and fought with the buckles. I had to save at least my panda bear (who I'd already managed to wiggle out of the bag he was in). I tried shoving him under the seat, but Mom was thorough and hiding him did me no good.

I don't care how you try ... you can NOT explain to a three year old why "all" of their toys have to be given away. Now, you might get away with this if the toys disappeared over the course of a few weeks. Sneak into the kid's room at night and start snagging a few of the least played with stuffies and have them "disappear" like some mafioso ... have the kid pick out some stuffed animals to give away. Anything to pare the herd down with as little notice as possible. I mean, almost all kids go through the trauma of having toys outgrown and given away, but it doesn't have to be a complete shock to the system.

When we got home I was inconsolable. I ran through the house, desperately searching for any stuffed animal. Nothing.

I asked Mom about this incident years later and she was surprised that I remembered it at all, but she defended her decision to rid the house of stuffies in the way that she did. I pointed out to her that she could have gathered them while I was sleeping and perhaps put them in the trunk so I couldn't see what she was doing.

"I didn't think it would matter to you."

"Why couldn't you have left me just one?"

The answer was completely unexpected, even though I had long since become accustomed to her odd twists in logic.

"Because I knew your dad wouldn't quit smoking, and I didn't want to, either."

You see, the doctors had gone over a whole list of things that needed to be done in the house to help improve my health. Get rid of dust-catchers had been one thing, cleaning the bedding more frequently another, twice weekly vacuuming another ... and quitting smoking was another. Now, this was 1971 or so. No one was quitting smoking just yet.

So Mom's solution was to do absolutely everything the doctor said, absolutely, fully, to the complete letter of the law and courting OCD as she did it ... except for the smoking. That they continued to do, chain-smoking until I was in college. Then, finally, Mom was able to muster enough willpower (and, to be perfectly fair, it wasn't until the appearance of the Nicorette gum that she thought she'd have the support) to finally quit. It wasn't until we found a doll made of rubbery plastic, Baby Tender Love, that I got any kind of doll again ... and only because she could be dunked in water and bathed along with me every night.

From that early, defining moment on, I hid any toy that I really liked.

Later, when I was old enough to understand it had been done for my health, I still questioned her method of getting rid of the toys. And I think leaving a three year old one stuffed animal would probably not have killed me, either.

These were the things on the surface. These were the things that I told other kids, other adults about.

There were other things that I didn't talk about ... in fact, that I pretty much physically could not utter aloud. Or write, when I finally learned to do that.

There were those things out in my room ... the stuffed animals incident.

And then, there were things that I sequestered away in my closet, with the door firmly shut.

So, much later when I found the whole Cub Scouts story funny and an early indicator that I might need to be coming "out of the closet," I laughed. As far as I was concerned, that had been so obvious from such an early age, there was nothing that had ever been hidden.

A harder closet to come out of was to admit just how bad the abuse had been.

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:49 AM | Comments (5) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble

March 15, 2006

Be Yourself

One of the things I brought up in yesterday's post was:

Eventually, my mother was able to convince me that I was not allowed to be a Cub Scout. Some already highly suspicious part of me, though, still suspected that this was simply one of Mom's crazy rules and not something "real."

You see, even by the time I was just five years old, I was already at war with my family. Not because I wanted to be, but largely because I was told at school and at home to "be myself," and yet, my mother never seemed to really like that self that I tried to be true to.

Now, look, that's an old, old story that many of us have been through. There's always a terrible struggle in every family about the time that a child hits the age of two or three and begins to truly assert a growing independence and a personality all their own. And like all such stories, mine certainly starts at that point, but the conflict was much deeper than the "normal" growing pains of a family.

I was a really self-reliant child, even given the developmental idiosyncrasies of a first-born child. My mother, never much of a morning person, was astonished to discover early on, that even before making the migration to the toddler's bed, I would wake up in the morning and play in my crib, quietly and alone for hours (before my stomach woke up and demanded some breakfast). I was soon climbing out of that crib so that I could further amuse myself before Mom had to make an appearance to attend to some baby-hood need or another. So, Mom put a babygate in my doorway to keep me out of trouble.

Resourceful, at two, I pulled my little blue kid's chair over to the gate, unlatched it, got into the cabinets in the bathroom and rooted around for something fun. Luckily I only discovered a jar of Vaseline and not something poisonous. With my newly discovered booty, I went back to my room, closed and latched the gate and proceeded to climb back into my crib and promptly cover my self, bedding and walls with the Vaseline.

Mom only figured out what happened because I neglected to move the little blue chair away from the gate and doorway.

My self-confidence and will to do knew no real bounds at two or even at three and four. If I couldn't do it on the first try, I simply looked around, gathered what tools I thought I needed and tried again.

The battles, of course, were between that child's will and determination and my parents' desires to keep me safe.

At least, on the surface that was the battle.

The secondary battle that almost always happens in any family is how difficult a parent finds it to allow the child to develop his or her own personality and not become a carbon copy of the parent. Sometimes this is an easy task because it's obvious the child has a very strong-personality. Sometimes it's a harder task because the parent sees the child going down a road of which they don't approve or are afraid of.

This was our primary battle … keeping me safe was always secondary to "reining in" my desire to be myself.

The battle surfaced in odd ways when I was small … there were terrible fights about what I would wear, how my hair would look, what I could play with, who I could play with … and I didn't understand why there were so many rules until I was much, much older.

Example. My hair was very very fine, very prone to tangles and I had a pretty sensitive scalp. So, the use of the extra fine tooth plastic comb every morning was something I dreaded beyond all else. At three, I was hiding the comb as soon as I got up in the morning … once Mom was onto that, I would snag it before bed at night and hide it. But somehow, it was always found and the dreaded combing would begin, generally with me in tears very quickly. My mother assumed that I just didn't like it, and I could never seem to make her understand that it really truly did hurt. A lot.

By the time I was four, I was lobbying to have it cut short. Less hair, fewer tangles, less pain, no screaming and crying … obviously this was the best solution.

My mother, though, had a lot of rules. One of them was that women could not have short hair. I pointed out the women on the TV who had short hair. That tennis player … Billie Jean King. This did not make my mother feel better at all. In fact, it made the issue much worse. At four, I had no idea why!

There was a litany of other rules as well. Girls do not play with cars … at least at home. At nursery school it was "okay," but we would be buying no cars. Girls played with Barbies, not Mego superheroes … and certainly not GI Joes. Blocks were "okay," but LEGOs were not. Piano was all right … the drum Grandma got me was not (and for more reasons than just the noise factor that every grandmother seems to love to perpetrate onto their kids). Dad buying me a Snap-Tite model of an F-14 airplane was Not Good … but then again, he bought me something, so Mom couldn't quite make up her mind about that one.

Suffice it to say that my gender was not that of the pink and fluffy girly-girl and Mom was simply devastated by this. She did everything possible to try to convince me to like pink, dolls and dresses, but it simply never took.

Now, I knew other little girls who did not wear dresses, had short hair and played with cars and Barbies, so I knew that I could not possibly be the only girl in the world who felt this way. So, Mom and I battled frequently.

And, when she finally told me that girls could not be Cub Scouts, well, frankly, I assumed that she was simply making up another one of her "crazy" rules.

So, I did what I always did ... tried to find out for myself. I asked the kids at school and I was shocked to discover that none of the girls knew any girls in the Cub Scouts. I asked one of the boys in our neighborhood who answered with the disdain of most five-year-old boys. Something just short of "Hell no, are you CRAZY?"

I certainly felt that way for a while.

Posted by Red Monkey at 4:55 PM | Comments (4) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble

March 13, 2006

That Blue Uniform

You can be anything you want to be.

Is there any bigger lie we tell kids?

I learned very early on that this is not strictly true.

In kindergarten, the big thing was what "group" you were going to join. Now, I don't mean the popular group or the nerds or anything like that. No, were you going to be in 4-H? How about Indian Guides/Indian Princesses? Brownies? Cub Scouts? Boys & Girls Club? What were you going to join?

My first choice was 4-H because you got to be outside and do things with animals. My mother quickly nixed this as "too hick." My second choice was Cub Scouts.

Now, this may take some explaining as I rarely talk about my gender or my sex on my blog. First, just to get things straight, sex and gender are two different things, to my way of thinking. Gender refers to a societal construct and there are far more than two genders in the human race. At one extreme you might have the 1950s-style Barbie-housewife. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Then you might have a woman who enjoys working with her hands, and still enjoys tending her children and her husband. Likewise, the other extreme might be a man who's the Iron John man's man, banging a drum and his wife and hunting during the fall. And you might also have a man who enjoys fashion, how fabrics look, and also enjoys hunting and taking his wife out to the movies.

Then you can start shading in all the variations in between. Straight, gay, stereotype and those who might feel like a complete contradiction to those at the extremes. That's gender for you: how we perceive how others are fitting in to our perceived social roles of male and female.

Lecture over. :D

So, back to the Cub Scouts and being anything you want to be.

Yeah, there's just this little detail that kept me out of the Cub Scouts. The Cub Scouts were for boys. Brownies were for little girls.

I stormed, I wailed, I screeched about "you can be anything you want to be, you SAID" all to absolutely no avail at all. I could not be a Cub Scout.

Now, I wanted to be a Cub Scout for a few good reasons and few umm, well, childish reasons. One, Cub Scouts got to do outdoors-y things (this was a constant battle in my life … I wanted to be Kit Carson and explore the Wild West … I was crushed that I was over a century late to that party … then I found out more about Kit Carson later on and … well, that's another story for another day). Also, Cub Scouts got to build things like the little soapbox derby cars. How cool was that? Build it, paint it with cool flames and then RACE it! What could be better, I ask you?

The silly reason was, well, they had the best uniform out of all the groups I'd seen. That blue and gold? Classy, man, classy.

Eventually, my mother was able to convince me that I was not allowed to be a Cub Scout. Some already highly suspicious part of me, though, still suspected that this was simply one of Mom's crazy rules and not something "real."

So, I decided to be an Indian Guide. Of course, there were a couple of problems with this. First, it was Indian Guides and Indian Princesses, not just Indian Guides. Girls were supposed to go to meetings with their fathers and be princesses and boys were supposed to go with their moms and be guides. Not a bad set-up really, but certainly not one in which I would ever fit in real well.

First, Mom tried to talk me out of it because "You know your father …."

He was rarely around in the evenings, working late instead. Actually, I was beginning to suspect, even at five years old, that he was not working all of those hours. Not when he would often come home after ten, loud and obnoxious and violent. And I'd been around long enough to know that this was how he acted after a Saturday of beer-drinking and yard-work.

So, I made my pitch directly to Daddy, who agreed that he would make the organizational meeting with me. We were all essentially ignoring the Guide/Princess bit. I, for one, was utterly convinced that once I was in the group, I could certainly talk them into letting me be a Guide instead of a Princess. I mean, come on, did I act like a frigging princess???

Pins and needles the night of the meeting.

Bed in utter tears. Mom tried to console me, but at the same time, she just kept making excuses for him and "you know how he is."

You can only be who you want to be if those around you let you and encourage you to be who you want to be.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:04 AM | Comments (9) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble

March 12, 2006

Common Ground

So, I said I was going to get all serious and stuff.

After watching the movie Jim in Bold at my churchthis past Friday night, and, after talking with various folks online and at church, I thought I would share more of my story with my readers than I have before. Imagine my surprise, after already coming to this decision to see as the meditation for the morning in our church bulletin the following words:

Everyone of us has a story, a sacred story …. People do have religious experiences in the heart of ordinary life …."
From Windsong

Now this is not, actually, going to be some weird religious post, so don't read into those previous sentences that I'm gonna preach to anyone or try to convert anyone. That couldn't be further from the truth. To be honest, I have a tendency to close a blog, website or book that starts preaching to me when I didn't purposefully go out seeking something about religion or beliefs. It just so happens that church is where I saw the movie and then got smacked with that quote.

K … 'nuff said.

I do think, though, that it's pretty obvious that we all have a story. There's a reason, there's a multitude of reasons that we think and believe and act the way that we do. And, so many of us feel so alone in our experiences. We hear, time and time again, about people who didn't know there was truly any other way of life than her husband beating her … or the husband who truly thought that wives were supposed to nag and work the man near to death … or the kid who thought that all moms were drunk … or that all dads were crackhead thieves. We've all run into times when we feel like our boss is the worst ever and there's no way we'll be able to get another career or job or that … even worse that there's really nothing better out there.

And yet, the more people share their stories honestly, the more we wind up connecting to each other and learning that one, we're NOT alone. That our experiences may not be exactly the same, our situations might, in fact, be quite different … but there's still this sense of connection and familiarity that we find tying us all together instead of separating us.

In the movie, Jim in Bold, we hear about a young man who simply can no longer find a way to balance the way he is and the way those around him see him. He kills himself despite the honest and earnest help that his family and friends try to give him. Further along in the movie we hear a young man talking about how he felt like he was in the middle of the ocean and all he wanted to do was to swim to shore, to solid ground. But, since the ocean was all around him, he was unsure which way the shore was … picking a direction to swim might very well mean that he was actually swimming further out to sea and further away from land beneath his feet. And so, he just kind of treaded water, stayed in place, afraid that any direction would be the wrong direction.

It's so very easy for us to do that.

So, while the experiences that I discuss over the next few posts may not be something you've experienced directly, there's a good chance that we can connect on some level through what we've learned or felt from other experiences.

Because even in our differences, we're more alike than we think. My hope is that as I share with you, you'll respond in the comments not with argument, but with bits of your own story. Sure, there's going to be plenty to argue with – I'm as opinionated as the next person, and if you disagree, that's fine. But I think even in our arguments we're going to find some similarities and some common ground on which to stand.

And maybe our conversations will help someone pick a direction and find their own ground on which to stand.

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:31 PM | Comments (2) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble

March 11, 2006

Coming Soon

I went to see a movie at my church Friday night, which was conceived and filmed by three north American teenagers. In 1997, a young man named Jim Wheeler, feeling alone and despairing, took his own life. These teens took Jimmy's poetry and art across the United States and listened to other teenagers talk about their lives.

One of the most poignant moments for everyone in the audience was when one young man discussed how he had been like Jimmy Wheeler. How he felt like he was in the middle of the ocean and all he wanted to do was to swim to shore, to solid ground. But, since the ocean was all around him, he was unsure which way the shore was … picking a direction to swim might very well mean that you're actually swimming further out to sea and further away from land beneath your feet. And so, you just kind of tread water in place, afraid that any direction would be the wrong direction.

With that in mind, I'm going to begin telling bits of my teenaged story over the next few weeks … so that maybe those folks who are afraid to swim to a shore they can't see will gain some sense of direction.

I guess I'm just warning folks that things are gonna be mostly serious around here for a while, so be ready. ?

Posted by Red Monkey at 4:14 PM | Comments (2) | Struggles | TrackBack | Stumble