April 14, 2004

• …but wait, there’s more.

  I thought the broken shovel story was ended, but I learned this evening
  that it had another happy ending beyond the one when I handed over the
  plastic card that represented my hard-won $35.00 refund to the young
  woman who said she would “get things for the baby.”

  Last weekend, she and her husband were at loose ends, driving without
  anyplace special to go, bored and broke, just waiting for payday and
  for other things hard to wait for and beyond their power to hurry
  along.  Near Sears, he said to her, “Didn’t you say Kathy gave you
  a Sears card?  Wanna go in and see if they have a maternity bra
  that feels good?”  She’s gotten huge fast and is visibly
  uncomfortable, overflowing her bras.

  She looked, but found nothing fitting.  She said to him, “Let’s
  look at baby strollers.”  They found one they really liked, with a
  steering wheel and horn and other nifty features.  It was just
  what she wanted, but there was a problem.  It was the floor demo
  model and there were no more in stock.  The clerk couldn’t find a
  bar code and there was no indication of a price anywhere.  The
  supervisor was called, and he went back to the office, that office
  ruled by Mary’s iron hand under the not-so-watchful eyes of Asset
  Protection.  He came back and said the regular price was about
  $65.00, and they could have the floor model for $32.00.  She is
  very pleased.  So am I.

  Tonight’s topic at the meeting was people-pleasing, the tendency for
  those of us in an addictive frame of mind to seek external validation
  to take the place of the healthy self-esteem we lack.  Since I was
  the one who read the day’s meditation that set the topic, and the chair
  asked me if I would care to elaborate on it, I shared about my own
  total lack of self-esteem growing up.  I said that when I was a
  little girl, one day I was pissed off at my father for having spanked
  me for lying.  The morning after the spanking I was still
  resentful.  He had a heart attack that morning, I said, and as the
  ambulance pulled away from the curb taking him to the hospital, I
  thought to myself, “I hope he dies!”  I heard gasps when I went
  on, “…and he did.”  I said that from then on for the next
  twenty-three years I held onto that shameful secret, knowing I’d killed
  my father, and that the secret shame had killed my self-esteem.

  “We’re only as sick as our secrets,” is one of the truisms I hear
  occasionally in the meeting rooms.  For thirty years, since the
  aggressive confrontation of Reality Attack Therapy brought that secret
  out of me in group, I have been dropping secrets, revealing my hidden
  stuff, all along the way.  I said tonight in that meeting that I
  have no secrets, that my life (what part of it I’ve gotten written) is
  now a public record.  On the drive home I was reflecting on what
  I’ve written in my memoirs here, and more pertinently, what I have not
  yet written.  I thought about where I stalled.  The memoirs
  are stalled in two places:  adolescence and my thirties.

  I understand why I started writing the memoirs where I did, in the
  1960s.  It started with my freight yard epiphany and the loaf of
  lettuce and head of bread trick.  I hadn’t intended to write my
  memoirs.  I was new to blogging, had up to that point been making
  it a “healing” journal, trying to sort out and resolve the issues that
  were keeping me in active sugar addiction, indulging in foods I knew
  were making me ill.  Something impelled me to tell a little story
  from my past.  That something was my observation of Xanga’s subtle
  code of conduct, those social mores that only become explicitly stated
  when someone violates them and some outraged Xangan takes
  exception.  I drew a parallel with the unwritten rules in prison
  and my having run afoul of them.  Some readers liked my stories
  and asked for more and thus the memoirs began.

  For a while they took on a life of their own.  I found some
  healing and closure in recounting the time of my deepest insanity and
  most uncontrolled addictive behavior.  When I got to the trip to
  Alaska, and past it to my “settling down” time, I bogged down, ran out
  of momentum when I came to some parts of my story that I don’t mind
  telling, but which involve others who are not so comfortable with
  letting it all hang out.  Uncertain how to proceed without
  violating trust, I stopped..  That was about the time I got my
  scanner, so I scanned in a bunch of childhood photos, backed up and
  told the story of my beginnings.  When I got to my adolescence, I
  stopped again, but it was not the same, not a loss of momentum as much
  as a loss of appetite for remembering.  Everyone’s adolescence is
  traumatic, I’ve been told.  I know that mine was.   But
  I do remember it.  It comes back to me in bits and pieces and I
  intend to start writing them down.  Some of what I’ve already
  written and posted here will need revision and there are a few pieces I
  wrote on the laptop that have yet to be posted here.  I’m making
  this public commitment to get back to writing my memoirs to make it
  harder for myself to wimp out and back out.  Any job worth
  starting deserves to be finished, I think.

  • 2:57 am
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