Fifth Grade: part one

Fifth grade was the first time in my life I was actively aware of so many people disliking me. It wasn't necessarily daily torment; they might leave me alone if I could just shut up and stop being overtly weird for a while. But like a puppy that doesn't know how to avoid a kick, I kept trying to make friends with them. I wanted them to like me. I had had a good set of friends, or at least girls I got along with and could be part of a group with, back at Christian school, and I'd been especially close to two of those girls, Brook and Trisha. And in my neighborhood I'd lost Pam as a friend earlier that year, before we moved, when I told the police what her dad liked to do to me. Lindsay had stayed my friend to the end, but our parents didn't like us hanging out, after the time her married dad hit on my mom, or when Lindsay yelled at my grandma. I'd lost my best friend in the world, my cousin Jason, and I'd lost all my aunts and my two baby cousins and my Giggy.

My mom was working a full-time day job now, and I was in public school for the first time. Instead of my mom dropping me off in the morning and my grandmother picking me up in the afternoon, I had to stand in the snow for twenty minutes at the bus stop at the top of the hill. In negative twenty degrees. With a wind chill of negative fifty. I was a latch-key kid now for the first time, and I was cooped up indoors for the afternoon, because my chest always hurt after sledding, and it was just too damn cold all the time. The snow falls were never very thick, but there were months of freezing rain. In Florida the daily afternoon rains cleared all the dust from the air, and left all the flowers shining and aromatic. In Iowa the rain pounded into the ground, soaked the earth, and drowned the worms. The stench of bloated earthworms would last for days after one of these rains.

As the school year went on, I withdrew more and more. Recess was torture - all the kids would stand around me and the boys would taunt me, calling me ugly and "big nose". Once they spotted the skin-colored mole on my forehead, I was known as "wart girl" as well. I started to read books during lunch, since I'd given up on anyone talking to me. At recess I'd take my book off to a corner of the big yard, beyond the blacktop where kids played four square and the swings were kids laughed and jumped, to sit beneath a tree and escape into other worlds. I loved "Ramona Quimby, Age 8" and Patricia Wrede's "Dealing With Dragons" series. I fell in love with Edgar Eager, and through him, with E. Nesbit.

If it wasn't for the library, I don't know how I would have survived. It was a big, beautiful, two story library with huge windows on the open second floor streaming down to the first. We weren't allowed up there, as it was the adult book section, but there was a fabulous, glassed in children's library room. Rather than the tilted library reference desks we'd gotten used to from our beloved public library back home, this room had a book shelf mountain of carpeted square crates. Each cube was open on one side to reveal a cache of books, and my sister and I would climb up and around, gathering good books and playing Queen of the Mountain till my mother told us it was time to check out.

I'd always liked books. I started reading young and grew up in a house with floor to ceiling bookshelves lining the house. But I didn't start to rely on books till Iowa. I started fantastizing and day dreaming all the time - if only I could go to Fantasia, Narnia, Pern. If only I could play piano like "Libby Johnson" or wear a magic ring like in "The Enchanted Castle". If only I could find a magical library book on the shelves one day, and go off on exciting adventures far from here, .like in "Seven Day Magic". If only I could be some storybook hero and go on a knight's quest to slay dragons and save ladies fair. If only I could be anyone, anywhere but here.

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Prayer Bugs Me

My mother never pried. She had faults as a mother, but invasion of privacy was never one of them. She knew the importance of private thoughts. While I think her unwillingness to pry into my feelings left her unaware of the pain and mental confusion I was in for a long time, I have to say I value and respect the choice she made to let me be my own person, with my own thoughts and feelings. I could leave my diary open on the coffee table and know that she'd never read it.

Yet, I always felt better writing outside of the house, somewhere secret and quasi-magical. It was down by the blackberry patch at the creek when I was a small child, then onto a copse of trees beside a frozen golf course waterfall at the first place in Iowa, and either in a tree at the edge of a cornfield or on top of a wall holding back a hill from a parking lot at the second place in Iowa. When we first moved back to Florida, in to the apartments, I would sit beneath the willow tree on the bank of the man-made lake; once we moved into the house in the suburbs, I sat at on the dock at the riverfront park down the road.

So it shouldn't have surprised me, at 20 years old and living in my own place, that I still might feel the need to leave to write in peace. I remember crying, gasping in big tantruming toddler gulps of air, sobbing out loud to Jesus. "They say you won't give me more than I handle, but I'm telling you, I can't handle this! It's too hard. It never gets any easier and it never gets any better. Every time I think it's gonna get better, it just gets worse, and I'm tired of fighting all the damn time!" At the time, I was crying about money and how there just didn't seem to be enough of it. At other times, I cried nearly the exact same script, at the end of my rope, utterly desperate, crying heavenward and begging for mercy. Sometimes things would seem to get a little bit better following one of these break downs, but I didn't seem to be getting spiritual fruit or reaping any benefit for the trials I was going through. I was under the impression that when God tested you, when He gave you all that you could handle, when you survived it, you were rewarded for remaining faithful. Wasn't that the whole point of Job?

I feel sad and betrayed when I look back on those times. I knew that I needed help to carry life's burdens, but because I thought God was going to do that - and when there were only one set of footprints in the sand, that meant He was carrying me - I didn't look hard enough at the resources around me. Two weeks later, one night instead of calling on God, I called the suicide hotline. I'm typing this today because that was the right choice. It would still be another year till I got my first mental health diagnosis, and another five years till I found the right combination of diet, exercise, sleep, and medication, but it was a start. I was beginning to deal with my problems, instead of waiting on God to fix my breakfast.

Because God was nothing more than a voice in a head, He could never offer any comfort I wasn't capable of giving myself, or any insight I was incapable of having. Reliance on God, in mental and emotional anguish as in all things, caused me more pain. When I depend on God, when I say "It's all in His hands", I stop taking positive actions in my own life.

I would have gotten a therapist, a diagnosis, and medication sooner if I hadn't been raised in a faith healing cult, certainly. But I think I would have got them sooner still if I hadn't been raised a believer. I hate prayer now. It actively infuriates me when people bow before an imaginary construct, grovel and beg NOTHING, to fix their problems instead of working to fix them themselves.

I still struggle with money and I still struggle with a list of mental disorders. I am still crazy. But I don't have to beg any god to make me sane now - I can take medications, make alterations to my lifestyle, avoid certain foods. I can manage my life without a higher power. Believing in one hindered my drive for self-sufficiency and kept me dependent and child-like long past the time the world expected me to behave as an adult.

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Speaking in Tongues

I loved the story of the Tower of Babble as a kid. For some reason, in my head the tower looked like Pisa (only burnt by the fires of God's heavenly wrath, rather than merely leaning). It's a neat little "just so" story to explain language differences, although I'm rather embarrassed about swallowing this story whole as a real explanation.

When I was 9 and she was 11, the year we moved to Iowa and were so utterly friendless and miserable, my sister created her own language. It started as a complicated substitution system (like Pig Latin on steroids) but quickly evolved as she forced me to learn it (and practice - with a marker board). Over time as we talked to each other, new words had to be created, and new inside jokes and unique cultural concepts had to be expressed. When my grandmother found out about it that summer when we came to visit her, she was furious. Apparently creating your own Pig Latin is a sin, because God giving us lots of languages and making it hard to communicate was a curse for man's ambition. Great moral of the story, huh? This is also her xenophobic justification for why all immigrants (especially Latinos) need to speak only in English.

My three year old son is really starting to talk now, after a late beginning. I've realized though, that I've learned yet another language. A little while ago he walked up to me and said, "Buh-mmm. Wocket! Raitzch. Bidget!" And I understood exactly what that meant. I guess this is the weirdest part about having a child in the early stages of language - only parents (and siblings) can understand. I serve as his translator for the world. Translation of the above?

1. Literal - "Button. Rocket! Race. Big Jet!"
2. Final - "Mom, please use this remote to turn on the episode of Little Einsteins where Rocket and Big Jet race. You know the one."

No Tower of Babble necessary for a whole new tongue to emerge :)
Oh, and as a side note, my sister and I still sometimes speak to each other in our own made-up language. It was especially fun on double dates, before she had to up and marry a decent guy.

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