A Closer Look at the school years

My first blog post gave you the basic details of my start in the world. I’m sure it’s not all that uncommon of a start unfortunately. I feel it’s important to point out here that I was clothed and fed daily with a roof over my head. Also, while my mom could be extremely controlling and abusive, I do have many happy childhood memories. I got to grow up on a family farm! How cool is that? I grew up playing with cousins at my grandparents’ house, riding bikes all over the farm, and naming all of the cats that got dropped off there because people always seem to assume farmers need more cats. My childhood wasn’t completely terrible. I also think it’s important to share that I am someone with BIG feelings. Like, all those normal feelings people have–sadness, happiness, anger, hurt–I feel them at a sometimes alarming level. Not only do I carry my own emotions heavily, but I also feel the energy of the people around me and somehow add it to the load I’m carrying. I am working through this in therapy, but as it’s a very deeply rooted part of me, it’s not an easy fix for sure. I tell you this because sometimes the things I consider to be a big deal aren’t all that big of a deal to others, and so you may read something I write and think “Really? What’s so bad about that?” If I’m writing about it, I felt it on a massive scale. That’s really all I can say about that.

I also feel it’s imperative that I mention that I know I do not have it worse than everyone else in the world. There are people starving, living on the streets. There are mothers and fathers with children with terminal illness. There are people who have been beat into the ground. I am not one of these people. I am a fairly average individual with big feelings who allowed those big feelings to rule her life. How did I do that? We’ll get there eventually, I promise.

For now, let’s look closer at my childhood. A few years after mom and dad got married and made us an official family, another sister joined the family. We’ll call her Annie. Then a few years after that, we got a brother, Keith. From the days they each came home, Renee and I could feel the difference in how we were loved compared to how they were loved. Call it biology or whatever, there was a clear line in the sand. Not only that, but we also knew, from a very early age, that dad wanted a boy to hopefully take over the farm someday. So the baby born with a penis was definitely the chosen one. That said, these siblings didn’t have easy childhoods either. They may have been wanted and loved, but mom had never had a good example of parental love, so she tried to parent by making us into little marionettes she could pull the strings to move. Nothing was off-limits. Write in a diary? She was tearing apart the bedroom to read it. Repeat something we’d heard on the bus or at school that she didn’t like? Stand against the sink to be smacked over and over with a plastic or wooden spoon. I remember feeling like she owned my thoughts, like I couldn’t breathe without her permission. So, we lied. Wait, I have to be careful not to speak for my sister. While we have similar stories from our childhoods, I don’t want to interpret how she was feeling. But I do know how I was feeling. I lied to survive. 

At school, I had lots of friends. I got along well with pretty much everyone. Of course there were spats, but I don’t remember any major falling outs from elementary school. In fact, elementary school was a fantastic time for me. It didn’t take me long to realize that school gave me eight hours of escape every day, five days a week. For those hours, I could just exist, without having to worry that everything I said or did would result in punishment. 

Middle school was a much rougher time. I was heavier in stature but not technically fat. I had glasses and huge boobs and pimples were taking over my face. I also had vampire teeth that my parents refused to pay for braces to fix. (I did that on my own much later as an adult.) And those emotions that had always been big seemed to double in size and rotate on like an hourly basis. I was basically a mess all of the time. It was during this time that I really discovered boys as well, and so I made an absolute ass out of myself chasing them around. Know what the worst part of growing up and then staying in a small town is? Being an absolute lunatic over a boy in 6th grade and then seeing him at our kids’ sporting events 20 years later and wondering if he still sees you as the crazy girl who was obsessed with him in middle school. Insert face palm emoji here. Let’s dig into the middle school era at home for a minute, but first, that requires some backstory. 

We were a religious family. We went to church every Sunday and Wednesday evening. Renee and I even participated in Bible Quizzing at regional events. At some point in time, our church informed parishioners that dancing was a sin or something like that, and so mom decided we’d never be allowed to attend a dance. We also weren’t allowed to wear makeup. One time I snuck some of my mom’s foundation to try to cover some of the pimples on my face before a reading competition fieldtrip, and she showed up at the school to put the fear of God into me, which turned me into a babbling mess for the competition. I was definitely punished when I got home and likely grounded for a long time. Not to jump ahead, but I was grounded my entire 11th grade year. I’d been placed in an advanced math class in the middle school, and by 11th grade, I was in a math class I simply could not understand. Well, math is a subject that just keeps adding steps, so if you don’t get it from the beginning, you’re not going to get it later. I asked over and over if I could drop the class and take something else, and every time mom told me no. I failed that class every marking period, and thus, I was grounded for an entire year of high school. Don’t feel all that bad for me. Renee was a bit more openly boy crazy than me, and after getting caught in a makeout session on the band bus, she was pulled out of school by mom and made to homeschool herself while working a full-time job for no pay. She definitely had the high school years way worse than I did.

My friends often gave me a look of “Huh?” when they’d ask me to do something or they knew I wanted to do something that I was ultimately never allowed to do. They eventually stopped asking. I wanted to play sports. I had been good at recreational softball in my younger years and would’ve loved to participate in several high school sports, but I was never allowed. I remember once in middle school, sitting in the gym in my gym shorts, and having a boy ask me why I didn’t shave my hairy ass legs. Then he and his buddies laughed about it when they saw me for the rest of the day. I wasn’t allowed. No matter what the question was, the answer was always “not allowed.” Heck, as a farm kid, I was expected to help milk cows and feed calves every day after school, and I was only allowed to shower every other day. Let’s just say, it’s not easy being the girl who smells like cow shit at school.

So when I say I lied my way through my childhood, I mean that since I was never allowed to do anything, I had to lie in order to live. I lied so mom would love me. I lied so I could have friends and boyfriends and experience life. One of the worst things I’ve ever done was “borrow” my dad’s church key to lose my virginity in the church basement to a guy who really didn’t give two shits about me while the pastor was upstairs in her office. Yeah, that happened, four days before my 18th birthday. I don’t feel good about it, honestly, not only because we chose a house of worship for our sinful act, but also because I wish I’d chosen someone who was interested in me to give my virginity to. Insert second facepalm emoji here. 

By the time senior year rolled around, all of my friends knew what was next for them. My two best friends were going off to different schools to do really big exciting things. At the time, what I wanted more than anything was a journalism degree. I’d wanted to move to NYC and work for the Times. But when it was time to apply and visit and fill out the financial forms, I had zero help, despite asking multiple times. Things at home were extremely rough by this time, and I had a boyfriend I wanted to be able to see outside of school, so, even though I didn’t have a driver’s license (wasn’t allowed), I moved out of my homeplace and into an apartment in town one month after graduating from high school. I walked across town to work at a local grocery store and then back across town to my second job at a retail clothing and sporting goods store. This was a happy time for me because I had a pretty kick ass boyfriend whose family welcomed me with open arms. They taught me so much about what life could be like. This was one of the happiest seasons of my life, and to this day, I’m grateful for them.

Well, I’ll let you gnaw on all of that info for awhile before diving into something else. Keep reading, I promise it’s worth it.