The Path

Back when I went to elementary school, in the mid-seventies, life was pretty old-fashioned. Unlike the chaufferred children of today, kids back then – all of us – walked to school. Though there never seemed to be anyone to play with during the summer or on weekends, hordes of kids came out of the woodwork like zombies every school morning, stumbling sleepily towards compulsory attendance.

The elementary school was at the end of the block behind my street. From my house, it was actually faster to walk there than to get in the car and drive around the block, not that anybody would have driven us; that’s something people just didn’t do in the seventies. There were two neighbors between my house and a path that cut back to the school. The path took you along Mr. Geisinger’s property and past his gargantuan woodpile before opening up into a large field. Through the field you hit the tennis courts (which also served as parking lots for the teachers), then the playground, and finally the brick school building.

By the time first grade came around, I was expected to get myself to and from school. I walked the path every morning and afternoon. It was a really nice walk, actually. There were a lot of trees on our end of the path, a perfect setting for a seven year old with a wild imagination. There was a blackberry bush at the back of Mr. Geisinger’s lot, and in the wintertime, a low, wet area near the field would freeze over and make a perfect little spot for sliding and skating.

I walked to school by myself. There weren’t any kids in the houses immediately surrounding ours. It seemed like most of the kids lived at the far ends of our street. But there were a few boys one or two years older than I who lived somewhere near us. Oddly, I never knew where they lived, or what their names were. But they were a classic gang of bullies. All three of them are probably fat and bald and have to pay for sex nowadays. That’s my fantasy, anyway.

Now, maybe it was because I walked by myself, or maybe it was because I was a silly-looking girl with funny teeth and glasses, but for whatever reason, those three boys decided to pick on me. It started out as just teasing, but as time went on and no one ever said anything to them, they got bolder (and meaner). I remember walking home one really snowy winter afternoon, heading across the tennis courts. When I got to the field and stepped onto the path, the boys were there, playing around on the icy patch. They started teasing, taunting me. I just kept walking. If I don’t look at them, they’ll forget I’m here, I remember thinking to myself. One of them picked up a snowball and threw it in my direction. It missed, and I kept going. My teeth were clenched. I was angry, not scared. I knew that there were more of them than me, and they were bigger. I couldn’t do anything but keep walking, and that made me really mad.

Suddenly, WHOOOOMPF. Something violently knocked the wind out of me. Then I realized that an icy snowball had hit me square in the back. My eyes welled up and I could hardly breathe. I stopped for a second to catch my breath, and everything got unnaturally quiet. My boots no longer made crunching noises in the crusty snow. My winter coat stopped swishhing as I walked. The boys were quiet, too. They knew someone had hit me hard, and they were waiting to see what I would do. Part of me wanted to cry, because I was scared now on top of being really, really angry. Plus, the snowball had hurt. A lot. But I knew that crying was something I could not do.

Catching my breath, I paused a second longer. They boys had started laughing again and I knew they were going to start throwing more snowballs soon. As much as I wanted them to feel bad for hurting me, I knew it wouldn’t do any good. I took a deep breath, and without turning around, I just kept walking.

Their disappointment was palpable.

But I had just discovered a very valuable secret. I had figured out, with my innocent, naive, seven-year-old brain, that this was an interesting sort of outcome. Those bullies had hit me, so score one for them. But I had kept my composure, and had not let myself give in to fear and panic. They expected me to burst into tears and run home, but I hadn’t; and this, for them, was a total spoiler. I didn’t enjoy my moral victory much, but I sure felt better about ruining theirs.

After the snowball incident, the bullies seemed far less interested in picking on me than they did some of the other young kids. That lasted until late spring. Just when the weather had started to warm up and the days began to grow longer, the three boys started antagonizing me again. They did annoying things like splashing me with water from a puddle, or standing in the middle of the path so I had to walk around them. I never said a word to them. This was mostly because I had no idea what to say; plus, I figured that talking would let on exactly how scared I really was of them, and it seemed better to to just keep quiet. I’m sure they thought I was a weird kid.  That probably didn’t help matters.

One really nice afternoon, I started down the path on my way home. They boys were ahead of me and I walked really slowly, hoping they wouldn’t see me. For some reason, I just didn’t want to have to walk past them that day.

Unfortunately, they stopped, and I didn’t have much choice. They stopped just past Mr. Geisinger’s wood pile, a tall, neatly-stacked thing that was probably higher than my dad’s head. One of them pointed back at me and said something I couldn’t understand. Another one said something like, “hey, let’s have a fight.” A fight? What sort of kid would want to fight with a girl? I stopped, my shoulders even with the wood pile.

“Yeah,” said the biggest one. “Let’s have a fight.” He picked up a couple of pieces of gravel from the path. “Let’s have a rock fight,” he grinned.

My stomach lurched. Were they planning to throw rocks at me? I glanced around, trying really hard not to look as scared as I felt. There was no way to get home other than past them, down the path. The brush was too thick for me to try to run through the back yards, and anyway, I had never tried to go that way before. I wasn’t sure where I would end up. And above all, my mother had told me very sternly to stay on the path. I was almost as scared of breaking that rule as I was of these boys about to throw rocks at me.

The big one tossed his rock near my feet, as if he was inviting me to pick it up and play with them. I didn’t move. What should I do? What could I do? My heart was pounding. This was the most afraid I had ever been in my whole young life. The other boys picked up some rocks, too. I did the only thing I could think of: I ducked behind the woodpile.

Though it was tall, the pile wasn’t very wide across. I would guess it was six feet wide or so, and maybe about the same height. I’m sure it is actually even smaller, since this happened when I was quite small. But, for some bizarre reason, the boys didn’t try to come around the sides of the wood pile to get me. And I felt strangely safe behind it, as if there were unwritten, unspoken rules about the pile being an uncrossable line. I pressed my back as close to the musty wood as I could get.

Soon enough, the rocks started coming over the top of the wood pile.   At first, they landed quite far behind me, since the pile was tall and the boys had to throw the rocks fairly high to get them over it.  But after a while, they started getting better, throwing them higher and landing them closer to my side of the stack.  I tried to look through the logs to see them.  Finally, I found a chink big enough to get a glimpse of the other side of my barricade.  They were standing a short distance away from the pile, picking and throwing the stones lazily, as if they were skipping rocks down at the pond.

As I watched them, my heart pounded so loudly I was sure they could hear it.  I glanced to my left, towards the back yards, to see if I could spot my own house.  Even if I could have seen it, there was no clear way to get through the brush, and I was leery of giving up the relative safety of the woodpile for an exposed retreat through unfamiliar territory.  I was trapped.

Suddenly, there was a sharp sting on my cheek, just beside my nose.  It startled me more than it hurt, but I put my hand up to where I had felt the pain.  My fingers came away bloody.  I shrieked, mostly out of surprise.  The rocks stopped coming.

I stepped out from behind the woodpile.  There were the three boys, each one holding a little stone.  My hand was up to my face as I came out.  I walked towards them, lowering my hand as I did.  Blood gushed from my nose and dripped onto the ground.  The boys dropped their rocks, and stared at me in shock.  Later, I wondered if they thought I had run away long before.

Clenching my teeth to keep from crying, I walked past the three of them.  None of us said a word, and I looked hard at each of them as I went past.  Finally, when I reached the edge of Mr. Geisinger’s house, my self-control gave out, and I ran the rest of the way home as fast as I could.  Once inside, with the door locked behind me, I tore up the stairs to my bedroom and finally let mysef cry.

NaBloPoMo – or, “How To Justify Droning On Endlessly About Not So Much”

I’m not very consistent with my blog, and I have purposefully avoided NaBloPoMo thus far because it was a pressure I really didn’t want to lay on myself. But things have been sort of funky lately, and I haven’t had  much luck in coming up with anything to write about, anyhow; so having a writing requirement like this is a good excuse to get some baggage unpacked and laid to rest. Accordingly, I’ve decided to spend this November writing incessantly – daily, even – about myself.  Feel free to come back December 1 if it gets too ugly.  I won’t ever hold it against you.

— *** —

School was, to paraphrase one of my kids’ favorite books, a Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad [Twelve or Thirteen Worst Years of my Life]. It truly was awful. School was where I first learned about pettiness, cattiness, meanness, cruelty, bullying, peer pressure, social ostracization, and all the other wonderful things that can happen to you in the William Golding landscape that was, and probably still is, school.

Once I left the warm cocoon of home and began the first day of kindergarten, it was as if the pretty blue sky had been ripped open by a horrific claw, revealing a dark and terrible Real World behind the bright façade. My initial naive love for all my classmates was systematically and categorically destroyed as I discovered, over and over again, that not everyone liked me, not everyone wanted to play with me, and not everyone was my friend. Worse, I discovered that, sometimes, people enjoy hurting other people. Most often it was emotional harm, but sometimes there was even physical hurt, as I remember a terrifying encounter with three or four boys who assaulted me with rocks. This tortuous and endless agony was often more than I could bear. But I was trapped in my hellish nightmare for an unforseeable eternity. And something told me that this was a purgatory I had to endure alone, and without complaint. I had no way of expressing the black hole of despair and terror that ate away at my insides, even if there had been someone to describe them to.

These feelings have long been suppressed, but they sometimes well up again- usually in moments of self-doubt and uncertainty. I often feel the dark wound deep inside me, which has only a thin scab of time and maturity covering it over, bubble and tear open anew, allowing some of its purulence to ooze out. I will it to recede, and mentally stanch it with a compress of cynical fortitude. But it still festers, even to this day. I would gladly have a scar on my soul, because that would at least mean that this terrible injury had finally healed.

In other news, today is my brother’s 35th birthday.  I’m surprised (but very glad) he’s had so many, seeing as his youth was truly bizarre and terrifying.  Have a happy one, bro!

— *** —

I promise not to be this dreary all month long.  It’s probably because Hallowe’en was only just yesterday.

In Which The Weekend Looms Ahead Like The Big Hill Of A Roller Coaster

Well, it’s Friday morning.  I am sitting here at the computer, drinking my first* coffee and checking all the important things online: three email addys (don’t ask), Bloglines, my own blog’s stats and comments (zero, since bedtime, in case you’re wondering), news, weather, comments I left on other blogs, recipes for the day, garden advice, some miscellaneous blather, and Twitter.  Gawd.  It’s no wonder my morning routine takes me an hour and a half.

*Since it’s my first cup of coffee, you can rightly assume that I have not been up for very long**.

**This would be because I had a bout of insomnia last night, and couldn’t sleep until after 4AM.

Anyway, we have a very, very busy weekend ahead of us, beginning today, when friends come to stay over.  This is followed by a picnic on Sunday and a trip up to the lake on Monday.  And all week long, when I should have been doing things like laundry, scrubbing the guest bathroom, changing the sheets on the guest bed, hunting down the beach toys, etc., I have been procrastinating.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  Procrastinating would imply that I completely ignored the fact that there are these things to do.  I have been thinking about them all week, cogitating, summarizing the tasks to be performed, making mental lists, formulating a plan of action- one which I will frantically execute mere hours before the guests arrive.

Oh, wait.  That would be about now.

(Perhaps this has something to do with my insomnia?)

Truth be told, the only real pressure is tonight, because I like my house to be reasonably presentable when people come to visit.  This means no surprise diapers hiding in dark corners, no gobs of toothpaste smeared on various bathroom surfaces, no ugly dust bunnies lying in wait under the dining room table.  It’s easy to mask these things when someone stops for a couple of hours.  You can usually quarantine the guests to one or two rooms and be fine.  But when they stay over, ugh!  Then they really get to see how you live.  Stayovers involve all the sensitive areas of the house, usually the grossest and dirtiest ones.  This requires much more serious camouflage cleaning.

But I have been slowly picking up this week, and while there are still things like the bathrooms to scrub and some sheets to change, I learned long ago that I didn’t need to kill myself and make things absolutely perfect when people come to visit.  There’s no point.  With the kids in our lives now, it’s like building a dam with toothpicks.  The water will most certainly wash the dam away before you construct anything useful.  So I just concentrate on the big things, like clean(er) bathrooms and an empty kitchen sink.  Everything else is just gravy.  And once they get here and see that the house is relatively clean, we can all mess it up together and not give a hoot.

Then, there is the cooking.  Oh, how I love to be the food provisioner.  It is one of my favorite things in life, really.  I say everything with food.  And being a total weirdo, I have to make pretty much everything from scratch.  What can I say?  I’m a geek.  But weekend guests require careful planning, because you don’t want to be entertaining and all of a sudden realize you’ve forgotten the butter or coffee creamer.  It’s very inconvenient to rush to the store while guests are over.  So I had to make a concerted effort to get all of my supplies last night.  I think I’m ready.

So now, in the quiet (but late) morning, I’m feeling the excitement and anticipation (and a touch of nerves) build.  For just a few more hours, my brain will anticipate the coming events, hovering in the calm before the zaniness begins.  And then the ride will start, and once it does, I’ll be swept along, no longer completely autonomous but part of a larger series of events that include me but over which I have very little control.  It is both thrilling and frightening.   And when it happens, I’ll be glad to be on the ride, but a small part of me will also be very glad when it’s over.

I like my feet on the ground these days, it seems.

Wonder Women

I’ve just spent the last hour reading some local bloggers. It’s stuffy in our bedroom, and the kids were sticking to me. Husband was snoring. I couldn’t sleep, turned the coffee pot on at 5AM, and – instead of doing useful things, like knitting my sock, or washing clothes – sat at the computer and clicked away.

The blog world is such a fascinating place. The webbiness of the web is most tangible here. Read a blog, and you’ll no doubt find five (or ten, or twenty) other bloggers with interesting ideas. This is, of course, breeds reading lists about as exponentially as cockroaches reproduce. Pretty soon, your browser is just a mess of open tabs and loading links. I curse Bloglines daily for making it sooooo easy to add new feeds.

Anyway, this all started with a woman I met at S4′s ballet class. I usually don’t talk with other parents when I take my kids to places. We just never seem to click. I’m sure it’s me; I don’t wear the right clothes, my hair’s generally unbrushed, I don’t wear makeup, etc. I must seem very unapproachable to the other suburban, well-groomed, fashionable women in the room. (I’m also very self-conscious about my incorrect clothing, unbrushed hair, and unmade face.) Plus, and I know this is going to come out really, really snobbish, they don’t interest me.  Or is this a defense-mechanism?  Most other women I meet around here don’t do anything interesting. Or, to be more accurate, they don’t think anything interesting. They don’t really think much at all. Not that my brain is teeming with super-fabulouso intellectual thoughts, but it’s at least grinding away. (Note: my interesting thoughts usually involve something along the lines of, “and the title of this blog post would be …..”)

This time, though, it was a little different. This woman was vibrant. She was verbal. She sought out conversation, instead of enduring it. She never once looked at her watch (well, not until I asked her for the time). She made eye contact, listened as much as she talked, and had really cool stuff to talk about, too. Such a breath of fresh air! I could have talked with her for hours. THAT is a rarity in these parts. Best part? She’s got a blog. Her husband has a blog. They’re homeschoolers. They’re progressive and inclusive and open-minded AND energetic. They’re from here.  Any one of those qualities is a rare find around these stifled, backwoodswards, repressive parts. But all of those? In one, sweet, kind, pretty package? Wowza.

Of course, the first thing I did when I got home was to look up her blog. And read it. And then I read her husband’s blog. And then I proceeded to blogroll them, and at least a half-dozen other blogs that they read. It’s vicious, I tell you.

So finally, this morning, with no sleep happening and not much else going on, I started reading one of these other blogs, and it turned out to be a local mom. I’m only calling her that because that’s how I would meet her, if we were ever to meet. I think she also teaches, and probably has several other self-identifiers, but “local mom” is what we have in common. As I read her last fifty five or six posts, it occurred to me that she was bright. She had wit. She had a decent vocabulary. She had some depth to her. She was interesting.

Why don’t I ever seem to meet people like this?

And then it occurred to me, while responding to a friend’s request to go berry picking today, that I actually have met people – women – like this. I think I just haven’t seen the forest for the trees. I think I have a bad habit of focusing on the narrow negatives and not the broader positives of such situations. Yes, there are a lot of dull, shallow, boring, clique-ish, catty, petty, flighty women out there. But there are also a lot of vibrant, interesting, colorful, amazing women out there, too. And I even know some of them.  And some of them even talk to me.

This then got me to thinking about a couple of other women I’ve met very recently. I started attending a knitting group about a year ago, and through it I’ve met some very nice women. It’s a casual group that meets only monthly, but a couple of us have really clicked and are starting to do things together outside of the regular get-togethers. One woman is a librarian, and invited the girls and me to a program last month. We went and had a wonderful time, and I got to see her in her “professional” capacity, which is always fun. There’s also a professor, who is wonderfully animated, and I enjoy talking with her so much that I joked to another friend that I’ve got a girl-crush on this woman. The group organizer is another woman that is really easy to just sit and be with. I hope to spend a little time with her, too.

It occurred to me, after thinking about these women, that there are actually quite a few strong, powerful, enjoyable women in my life. There’s my mom, of course. There’s G, who taught the bellydance class that I attended while pregnant with S4.  She’s since closed her studio, but is still a magnet for fascinating and interesting people, thanks to the regular coffee-get-togethers she organizes.  There’s T, who just went through a divorce and has custody of her two kids and works her butt off to support them all but still manages to paint and be creative and infect everyone around her with her laughter and energy. There’s S, a mirror of myself- staying at home with two children, just trying to be herself and doing the best she can (which, in her case at least, is pretty darn good). There’s my friend who doesn’t get an initial because I’m not sure how she’d want to be identified; she’s the one who is dealing with depression AND the right-wing politics of our community at the same time while still managing to keep a sense of humor about things and throw wicked dinner parties to boot. There’s E, who has a degree in English; she works as a flight attendant and loves it. I think it is so great that she allows herself to enjoy her job and never gets hung up on the fact that she’s probably overqualified for what she does for a living. There’s P, who I met when she started dating a friend; she’s from Canada and risks dangerous border-crossings once a month to be with her lover. In the interim, she knits him socks.

There are other women, fabulous women, in my life. Many are in my family: Aunties A and K, who are legends in their own right; Aunt K, who adopted the most adorable twins a few years ago; my grandma, of course; MIL, who is an avid gardener and practices yoga twice-weekly; MIL’s daughter (my step-sister-in-law?), who is losing her sight and hearing due to a rare, degenerative disease, but still is one of the sweetest, fiestiest, funniest women I know.

Then there are the bloggers, women I’ve never met and probably never will, but whose lives I hawkishly, voyeuristically follow online. Yeah. You know who you are.

I’m glad I thought about it this morning.  This really brightened my day.  Now I’m going to get my two girls, who will hopefully grow up to be amazing women in their own right, and see about doing some berry-picking.

Of Great Impotence

The weather has warmed up a bit in our corner of the globe. That’s nice. I feel too shitty to take much notice, other than to wallow deeper in my own self-pity at the impending heat and its annoying abbreviated attire.

Yeah, you heard me. Wallowing. I’m all about the wallowing these days. Not sure if it’s a hormonal-menstrual thing, or a resurgence of teen angst brought about by the lack of proximity to my teenage years. I was a late bloomer on many levels, so it could just be delayed teen angst. Adult-onset angst. I wonder if there’s a pill for that. Who cares? I couldn’t take it anyway, since I’m nursing.

My body hurts. My back feels like it’s missing a couple of discs, and it takes a second for the remaining ones to get their collective acts together when I try to stand up. I don’t know if that’s really the case, but it’s the best description I could come up with on this kind of notice. Beyond that, if I squat down, my knees grind and creak the way a raw chicken drumstick does when you try to separate it from the thigh. Do you have any idea how often a mother has to squat down, particularly when her charges are both less than three feet high? There are also confirmed heel spurs on both feet, the left being particularly bad, and with a plantar’s wart to boot. (That’s a horrible, terrible, awful pun, in case you missed it). And anytime I sit, stand or otherwise change position, it sounds like someone’s stepping on a case full of bubble wrap. Oh, wait: that would be my joints.

I now weigh almost as much as I did when DD2 was full-term. I weigh more than I did when DD1 was born. This undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that my body is so angry. I’ve gained so much weight from excessive eating and lack of exercise – which has led to excessive weight and decreased mobility – that it now hurts to exercise. I eat instead. You can see where this vicious cycle is headed.

I’ve googled things like “fibromyalgia” and “rheumatoid arthritis” already. Christ. These are things you talk about in the retirement home over Milk of Magnesia milkshakes. I’m only in my 30s. I should be googling things like “hot things to do with husband after kids go to bed”. Unfortunately, I’m too fat and achy to do anything hot. And our bed hurts my back, so I’ve taken to sleeping in the recliner. Not much hot stuff you can do when one spouse is up until all hours working while the other is passed out on a recliner.

Mentally, I’ve had a rough go of it lately, too. I have these soul-sucking resentments rearing their ugly heads left and right like an imaginary hydra. It’s hard battling hydras, especially when they’re in your head. Of course, the logical person would just banish the imaginary hydra with an imaginary magical sword, or go read about how Hercules did it since he’s obviously in the know. I, however, am not feeling very logical.

The nine-headed hydra of hateful resentment is worthy of a post in and of itself. It has a lot to do with my complete and utter belief that my parents totally fucked me up, completely by accident, but done, nonetheless; it also has to do with my complete and utter belief that these deep-seated “issues” with which I am battling constantly are causing me to fuck my own children up, which causes even further resentment on my part. See what I mean about not feeling very logical? Vicious.

That’s another thing. Logic has just completely left me. My ability to form coherent sentences has gone out the window right after it. Do you know why it’s been like two weeks since I last posted? That’s how long it’s taken me to write these seven paragraphs so far. I keep having to look things up in the thesaurus because I can’t think of the words. Every time I try to have a conversation with my husband, he walks away before I say anything because he thinks I’m done talking. I want to tell him that I’m just cogitating, but I can’t seem to put that thought into words before he leaves, and I forget about it by the time I see him again.

Again with the vicious.

To sum up, all of this ickyness is making me feel pretty impotent these days. I am ashamed of my physique, especially since it is entirely self-inflicted through my own laziness and lack of self control; I am in physical pain, which never helps one’s mental state in any case and, again, is largely self-inflicted; I’m completely unable to express any of this in a verbal conversation with the one person who cares and might actually be willing to help me out; and all of it is the result of a horrible, painful, lonely, insecure, awkward, uninspired childhood that led to a disillusioned, lonely, insecure, awkward, and unmotivated mother terrified of recreating this whole chain of events in her own daughters.

Crap.