#memior
The time has finally come. I’m now in the pre-order stage of my memoir. If you can contribute it would be the world to me. Please share this with everyone you know, and please, reblog. My story is important to me and I believe meaningful to many others. Thank you so much in advance!
My mom was always horrible at hiding things. She couldn’t hide from me that we were poor, though she rarely tried. She referred to food stamps often and we lived in a trailer park. She told us right off the bat we were getting toys for tots stuff for Christmas one year. There was a little interests sheet she had to fill out so they could try to match us with toys that would hopefully fit our desires. Present wise, it was bad. They gave us dollar store dolls with hair that came out too easily and plastic that dented at the slightest touch. They were impossible to fix - like an off-brand bottled of water. It wasn’t that toys were cheap that made it bad, it was that we didn’t play with dolls. I was probably eleven or twelve and my sister was in high school and it just wasn’t us. We don’t have pictures of that Christmas, probably because we couldn’t afford the film.
On years she saved and bought presents, I always knew where she hid those, too. At first it was in the cabinets, above the washer and drier, shoved behind towels and double or triple wrapped in Kmart bags. After she realized that spot was useless, she hid them in the nook in her closet that expanded past the boundaries of the sliding doors. Then it was the shed dad built us that was kept locked for the mass amount of tools she housed there. There was a spare, though, and I knew right where it was. Finally she moved them to the toolbox in the bed of her little Mazda pick-up, the white paint chipped and rusted. She had the only key and while we both knew they were there, we also knew there was no getting in there.
What she tried to hide most and what I believe I always hid my knowledge of, was how lonely she was. I’m a nostalgic sort. I would go through the whole house and dust and touch and inspect. The empty Huckleberry Cream Soda bottles and the ankh mom had molded from clay. The bamboo goblets and the 3D puzzle statue of King Tut. Mom’s jewelry box. Her drawers full of notebooks with lyrics and poems I thought she had written. Instead they were songs she’d heard and lingered on, written word for word and filled hundreds of pages. All of which were yellowed. Dawning from before my birth up to the years I first found them.
She worked a lot. At one point, she was the manager of three separate departments in Kmart: auto, hardware, and toys. I would go in before and after school and help her front board games or Matchbox cars. They laid her off mere months before her ten year anniversary but while she was there, she would come home, kick off her shoes, and sit in her bedroom, leaving my sister and I to occupy ourselves.
She hid her chocolate stash in her dresser drawers - easy. She’d go to work and I’d hang out it her room, watch movies, and chip away at it. I’d stand on her bed and belt out Panic! at the Disco.
I’ve always had a lot of anxiety. When I was younger, I dealt with some anxiety induced insomnia. I would lay wide away in my bed and any noise was a sign of an intruder. That creak in the linoleum was not the cat, it was the systematic murder of my mother and my sister. If I were to step outside of my bedroom, I would find them both in their rooms, dead. Blood everywhere. I would wait for an hour after the last violent noise,walk silently to my door and open it slowly, looking for signs of the massacre I’d imagined, then walk down the hall to my mom’s room and open her cracked door even more slowly.
There she’d be, fast asleep in her ragged red flannel in the fetal position, the blankets disheveled. And every time I knew, there would be no sleep for me if I didn’t sleep there. So I’d crawl in. Sometimes, she would turn over and wrap her arms around me and sometimes she would tell me to go back to my room, though I don’t know that I ever actually did.
Later, after I told her why I came to her room, she said I should have told her. She would’ve done something. There was nothing she could have done, though, beyond letting me sleep there. Letting me make sure she was safe.
I was able to predict her mood by the songs we listened to on the way to town every morning. If it was Alanis, she was angry - ramped up and ready to take on the bullshit that is misogyny. If it was Train, she was hopeful and happy, or at least content. Matchbox Twenty was for when she was unloved and unwanted.
She was never either of those things, but being loved and wanted by your daughter is never quite the same.
When Jess and I grew tall, my small mother took to calling us her Amazon Women. Her protectors. Her girls. It was around the time she actually started to shrink in size and I started countering her arguments with “I can lift you."
Physically, I could. Emotionally, I’d like to think the same. The time has come and gone where I was the same age as she when she had her first daughter. I imagine myself in her position: living with an alcoholic husband and a small child and I don’t know how she did it. She was so strong.
I’ve always been better than her at hiding. The anxiety. The depression. The crushes. The outings into the desert. Bike rides into town. My sister’s secrets. And my own.
It was my last semester at University of Idaho that I realized hiding was the reason I didn’t feel connected to anyone. The reason I’d stop letting myself feel anything. I was too afraid they wouldn’t want me for whoever I was - I honestly didn’t know, anymore, who I was.
I think we shared a journey. I did mine without a husband and two crazy kids, but in the end, we both lost a lot to get back to who we are and what we truly want. It’s taken a lot for us to let ourselves have it.
It’s been years since it was just Mom and I against the world and, thankfully, she’s not lonely anymore. She finally found someone who doesn’t make her write Nicselfkleback songs in 49 cent spirals. And she replaced me with a cat that she spoils (Mom, Miss Kitten is fat, admit it to yourself). I miss her every single day, but just as I told her when I was little and showed the first signs of awful math skills: I love her. Ten to a thousand. And no manner of miles or mountains or live in boyfriends or fat cats she clearly loves more than me is going to change that.
Although this meta-photo of her might…
Ice cream cake is very important. It brings people together. Unless you are lactose intolerant. Or you have a gluten problem. But everyone else. Sorry.
When I came to college, I spent the better part of my time at The Wardrobe’s dorm on the sixth floor of the Tower. There were a number of people associated with this story, a lot of participants, but i won’t mention anyone by name. What you are about to hear is both the best and worst of the people I have come to love very dearly, I would say, because of this moment.
We had been in college for maybe two months or so when The Wardrobe’s mom called in an ice cream cake order to the Moscow Baskin and Robbins. We went together to pick it up and when we returned she walked through the hall inviting all of our new friends to partake.
There was great joy.
She set the immaculate vanilla on chocolate masterpiece just a few paces away from her dorm room door and stood, feed spread shoulder width apart and hands in front of her chest as if to stay the onslaught of people.
“Okay,” She said in an authority that did not beg for peace, but demanded it. “Who needs forks?”
Not plates, not bowls, not napkins, not dignity.
Forks.
We assumed our weapons and encircled the gluten and dairy delight, prepared for battle more than enjoyment.
One of our party suffered an illness, though unlike a herd of zebra who may leave their weakest to the lion, we behaved like well-minded, thoughtful humans, quarantining a corner for her and declaring it hers alone. Not that it did much good as to keep her involved, the corner remained solidly attached.
And we were at it like wolves to a sweet, chocolate, creamy, melty, doe.
At least until we realized that after twenty minutes, that gift from Sandpoint above was still frozen solid. Not a fork, steel, silver, or otherwise, would penetrate that Canadian glacier exterior.
We were trapped. Yes, trapped. Stuck within a want and a can’t have. Much like being a toddler again. We fanned out along the hall, hoping it might drop it’s defenses and allow us a share. After a half hour of defrostation, The Wardrobe stuck a fork in it and declared it done. Kind of.
Just hardly soft enough to consume, but good enough for our time, energy, and patience.
And so we ate. Bite after bite until a discarded center was left in the middle of us, too soft and too sweet. We were finished, though the cake would have had us believe otherwise.
Cake on the floor, ice cream on chins, eighteen year old collegians laying on the floors of hallways, feeling a delayed sense of regret. Maybe wishing there had been more of us. Maybe wishing there had been less of it.
When I returned in the spring of the following year, I would uphold a would be mocked, detested, highly anticipated tradition of The Ice Cream Cake. By no means timed nor quantified.
I would simply show up at a friends dorm with a cake. Any who would answer the siren call would join us - always in the same manner. No plates. No bowls. No dignity.
Only cake.
October 11th is National Coming Out Day and though I never considered what I did as a ‘coming out’, I suppose it felt that way to a lot of people.
I never knew what I was, but I always knew what I felt and I never intentionally hid it from anyone. I wasn’t straight, I knew that because girls. I liked them. But I had too many crushes on the boys I knew to be a lesbian.
I never considered myself 'Bi" because it felt wrong to limit my love to two groups labeled arbitrarily. I knew there where more out there and I knew they deserved as much love and consideration as anyone else. That I could give that love. I still know those things.
When I came to the University of Idaho and found myself thoroughly surrounded by the LGBTQA* community I also found that people were not sorted into cubbyholes of sexuality. That, much like cravings you have for this or that, it is fluid, changing, and very much a spectrum.
I also learned there are different degrees of sexual desire. As a teenager you learn that every teen wants to have sex. Their hormones are elevated and insane and all they want is to lose their pants.
Through self-reflection and close friendships, I now know that not to be true. Asexuality is one degree in which a person has no interest or desire in sexual contact. What they call sexual addiction, is a desire for constant sexual activity. There is also Demi-sexuality. A Demi-sexual only feels attraction to someone they have had an emotional connection with.
If I were to put myself in the societal cubbyholes, I would be in one entitled “Pan-romanitic, Demi-sexual.” Google is a great tool if you are confused by any of these terms.
As I said, this was not something I 'came out’ over. There were far more heavy situations where I had to admit something to members of my family.
I spent a lot of my childhood going to church and was baptized at age ten as a Christian. When I was thirteen, I realized that though I tried,my faith was neither genuine nor sustainable. It was not in my hard-wiring to be a person of faith.
My aunt questioned me and asked me to try again, my father said my reasoning was stupid. My mother, an unaffiliated spiritualist, looked sad but was not otherwise upset.
When it slipped out of me at my Gramma’s house, she told me I was going to hell.
Let me explain my Gramma’s sentiment. She was raised, I believe, Presbyterian. Her father did not often attend services and she disagreed with her mother’s church. As she grew into a woman, she found an interest in Catholicism. She met my Grandpa Fred, who was Catholic, fell in love and converted to the church. She has been a dedicated member ever since, deriding her own meaning from the bible while still staying within the faith.
So when she said I was going to Hell, it wasn’t because I’ve my deviance from faith, it wasn’t because of my sexuality, and it wasn’t because of some harsh, intricate, Catholic judgement. I have always been on the path to Hell, in her mind, because I was born outside of the catholic church and have never converted. No other religion can save me.
Her comment hurt the least.
When I came out to my dad about my lifeong anxiety and depression, his words were: “See, if you would ask God, he would heal you.”
This was the hardest thing to tell my family. It was the biggest lie spread over the widest timeline that I’d ever admitted to. I wasn’t happy, I didn’t think I’d been truly happy since I was seven.
What my dad couldn’t bring himself to hear was that I had tried for years when I was a child. But much like praying the gay away, praying the mental illness away does not work. Still, he insists that God is my answer.
Serenity, is my answer and I find it in energy. I believe, I told him, that everything in this universe is connected and I believe as the Pagans did. Every word, every action, every thought resonates and effects everything else.
So in the spirit of National Coming Out Day, I not come out to you as mess of a Pan-Romantic, Demi-Sexual, mentally ill, Atheistic Pagan Witch.
Still no more important or special than anyone else. Neither am I less important or special than anyone else. Coming out isn’t about gaining the spotlight and it isn’t a symptom of Special Snowflake syndrome. It is someone humbling themselves in front of you saying “Here I am. This is it.” Instead of being upset by their deviance from the social norm, remind yourself that this individual has exposed a part of themselves to you out of love and trust.
Happy NCOD!
