Appearance

I've known since I was a teen that people don't see themselves the same as others do. I saw it watching overweight girls wearing too tight clothing looking in a mirror. They couldn't see how much better they would look in clothes that fit properly.  Then later, when I was doing photo retouching, I would intentionally make people more beautiful than they were, try to see them and make them as they might see themselves. And they never said That doesn't look like me. Not once. 

Then there's me. I've always struggled to See myself. I believed that I was the ugliest girl until I was 14. (It didn't help that I photographed terrible. Way too self conscious!) Even when I knew that I was attractive to others I would still often be surprised by the face in the mirror and photographs. Especially my expressions. 

Now with old age it is even murkier. This is probably true for all of us. (Maybe all of this is?) I have trouble seeing the face I have Now in my mind. I usually see myself much younger and I am startled by the face in the mirror. 

I know my mother always saw herself as beautiful and attractive. Even in her seventies.  Partly because she truly was, but I sensed more. Her skill at applying makeup got bizarre, sometimes she looked down right crazy! but she never saw that. I envy her vision of Self throughout her life. She knew she was beautiful and never lost sight of it. 

I am now old and truly ugly. I Am finally aware of how beautiful I was but know it is gone. I have Not aged gracefully like Mom. All of my trauma and grief is stamped on my face with very little of the joy I have known showing.  It seemed to happen overnight a few years ago. I went from Looks Amazing for Her Age to ten years older in a flash. 

In my dreams I am usually young again but if I am aged I am aged even more than I really am. ? 

I feel badly for Jeremy.  The 20 year difference between us looks even worse than it is now. If I was rich people would easily think he was with me for my money!! But I'm not so he just looks crazy. 😏 

Then I just let it go. Hardly bother dressing let alone dressing up. Makeup seems to make it all worse. I think makeup now looks like I am delusional thinking it makes me young and beautiful.   

I don't get to shine with Inner Beauty like many either. I must be too full of Dark Matter now. I know I had inner beauty but death, sorrow, pain and loss of faith squashed that years ago. 

That is what I hope to reclaim now before I die. It is my only hope to die beautiful!! 

*Wry Smile*

Really Who Am I

I am someone who has never known who I was, someone who always thought I was someone I wasn't,  someone I don't recognize and hate when others describe me. 

Most of my life, I would have claimed that I was a Good Person. Sometimes a good Christian person. 

I thought I was a good mother. I remember always trying to do what was best for my children. 

They ALL remember an abusive tyrant. 

I sang to them all the time when they were little. Read to them at night. Planned outings to parks and lakes.  That is True. 

But that will never be the first thing my girls say about me. 

For years I thought their hatred of me a Teenage Phase of rebellion. They would grow up, have children of their own and See how hard I tried.  

I stopped waiting for them to remember the Mother I thought I was. 

They can't ALL be wrong, so I have to believe that I am wrong. Have always been wrong. 

Then, when they did have their own children and so often left them in my care, I thought that meant they Really did remember I was a good mother. Why else would they trust me with their children??

That still makes no sense to me!!! 

So I now have another generation growing up to hate me. Why did I let this happen?? I have no clue. 

Who Am I?

That's a funny question. We are all so many people in our life times. But I still ask it of myself a lot. I know I am accused of being a person I absolutely am not a lot. I know I am not the person I am sometimes praised for being. I know I have been several completely different people. I'm pretty sure a lot of people are although there are some who seem exactly the same from childhood to old age. 

Everyone said I was shy as a child but I never felt that I was. We moved a lot and I always went out and made friends wherever we lived. True, I didn't talk to adults I didn't know much but I just felt like I didn't have much to say to them. And I was raised in the Children are to be seen and not heard era. Plus don't talk to strangers. That's called Stranger Danger now.

And there is so much lost, well, because I'm 62 1/2.....

I was a molested child so there is an early split in who I am. Not the mulitipersonality kind of split, just two realities I was forced to live. Compartmentalization kids do to survive.

If I wasn't presently being molested I never thought about it. So I could be raped and then run outside and play like any kid. 

With that I can say I was a happy little girl. I laughed a lot. Early I was often the leader in play, directing play weddings and getting neighborhood kids into projects with me. 

One dark part of growing up was when I had to realize that I was living with racism. I didn't know that was the word for it until I was an adult, but it was always Just There. But that didn't take up too much of my time. 

I was terrified of the dark at night but feared very little during the day. I would climb anything and Loved adventure.  

I was always curious about everything. I inspected every bug and creature I found and tried to make pets out of all of them. 

I was a "bookworm " by age 8. Birthdays and Christmas were all about new books and stuffed animals. 

Oh, I also had a very special relationship with all my dolls and stuffed animals.  I believed they were alive when I wasn't looking and even if they were broken I couldn't bear to part with them. I had a doll whose arm kept falling apart and when it did I put her away until I saw Granddaddy who always magically fixed her. Mom threw her away when we moved to Louisiana and I mourned her for years. I had a stuffed pink poodle whose head fell off and her body was destroyed so I kept her head in a small wooden bowl on my dresser for years. I think mom threw her away when we moved to Texas because I never saw her after that.

I loved children's biographies, read every one in the Rice Elementary library. They were probably mostly made up. Really, who can know in detail Martha Washington's childhood in detail. But the time periods. I do believe the authors of all those books tried to convey historically accurate childhood experiences and that was what I loved most. When I read The Five Little Peppers I would toast bread black and eat it because Polly was always talking about the black bread the poor people ate. I just knew it would be the best thing in the world if I could get some goats milk and cheese like Heidi ate. I plugged my ears and stumbled around blindfolded to experience Helen Keller.  I also tried to get the neighborhood kids to put on a production of The Miracle Worker and stories from Caddie Woodlawn and Little Women. I decided that I would be a Tomboy like Annie Oakley and had Herbert take pictures of me wearing his clothes posing with his BB gun. 

I loved tagging along on my brothers' adventures and nothing was better than their praise for my fortitude or bravery.

After we moved to Texas things started to change. The boys and I went our separate ways more and we had a bigger house with us all in our own rooms. We were 9, 12, and 15. I guess we were growing up.

Then Daddy died. We were distinctly two different families, Before and After. Mom, who always had a depression problem from the war went even deeper into it, even farther from us. I see us After clinging together for the first 6 months terrified of everything. We were fatherless with a mother shut in her room crying. The only one who felt more alone than us kids was Mom, but it would be Years before I understood that.

Mom put Mike out of the house for dropping out of high school. That was devastating. I was angry at her and scared to death Mike was out there homeless and starving. I would learn later of good families who took him in but then it was like the world swallowed him when he walked out the door.

Wow. I really can't stand to write this part.

Herb and I almost never left the house the summer After. We played days long monopoly games, cards, anything to do Together.

Mike would sneak home when he could to check on us. Sometimes I wouldn't even see him, just wake up to a note from him, usually something goofy, but I knew the message was I Love You.

Mom had to get a job. She sold the big house, Daddy's little Simca and everything of value not needed. Daddy hadn't been able to get homeowners insurance because he had Childhood Arthritis. We got social security but it wasn't enough.  

Mom went out every day looking for work. She had a degree in pharmacology but it was from Japan and at the time considered almost worthless in America.

She had Daddy creamated and his ashes were kept on her dresser with the cross from his coffin standing in front of it. Mom always swore that at her lowest point, when she was about to give up, that she was walking out of her room and as she passed the ashes she heard Daddy's voice say "Dont give up!" and that it filled her with Light and Hope and the job she interviewed for that day, Merit Pharmaceutical,  hired her. It was demeaning work Way Below her but it was a job. 

The years after Daddy died are just sad. I'm sure they affected Who I was for quite a while. There was a LOT that I wouldn't understand until Much Later.

One huge event was when Mom decided to kill all of us. We were all three in Herbert's room and Mom came in with Daddy's gun pointed at us. She was sobbing and said that she was going to shoot all of us and then herself. At first we just froze. Then Herbert started talking to her in a super soothing voice. I'm not even sure what he was saying. But while he talked she was looking at him and Mike was slipping around to get behind her and took the gun away. She ran to her room still crying and Mike climbed up to the attic and threw the gun way back in the corner. It may still be there for all I know.

Much later I would hear about mothers committing familiacide and i would be someone who Understood what could drive a mother to do that. Thankfully, we all survived ours.

My brothers had wild teen years. Mom started dating 18 months after Daddy died and the boys often threw Big Pot Parties at our house. I remember the house being standing room only at times. I was terrified of n.v marijuana and all drugs. The first time Mike told me Herb and his friends smoked pot I cried. 

These were also nights when no one knew or cared where I was. The Brady family across the street on Foredale had taken me in and at first I was usually with them. Then I met Julie in 7th grade. She was what I considered one of the "cool" kids and I was, still am, thrilled she was my friend.

My early teen years I was kind of a Non Person. I became who I was with very easily. 

Julie and I had FUN. We did everything together for years including dressing alike.  We explored the world of boys together. Julie was everything I wanted to be those years. She was pretty, sassy, funny, smart and a magnet for cute boys. I was still sure I was the ugliest girl alive and skinny and flat chested to add insult to injury!!

See?? I'm still not really saying who I Was or Am. Only things that might have made me who i was!!

I'm at about age 13. I did Not like me then. Not because I was Bad or Evil. I was just very disappointed in who I was. 

I was a good sister to my brothers. A good friend to my friends. NOT a great daughter to what seemed to be a bad mother.

Mom would say "All of you are against me!" and she was really right.  Yes, I still think she was very wrong to throw Mike out right after our father died. Maybe she was wrong to admit to us that she had never wanted children, that our father did, and that she hated him for dying and leaving her stuck with us. Oh, and the gun thing was a little off. But after those things my brothers mocked and tortured her and I often felt sorry for her,  but I almost never spoke up for her. 

I may never forgive myself for that.

I was like a pet to my brothers friends until they started molesting me. But I don't want to talk about that.

When I was 14 I started noticing boys noticing me. Not just Julie but Me. But not as a person, just the way all teenage boys first notice girls. That took me a minute to catch onto.

I started a diary when I was 8 that I would keep up with through most of my life. I loved to write. Poetry and short stories but mostly poetry. It was effortless. I'm pretty sure that's called Having a Muse.

I had my first huge crush on a boy named Gene that lasted most of my life. I was late to our first arranged date, I had a good reason, but the words stuck in my throat never spoken. Then several look years later his family moved out of state and a "friend" told me they were all killed. Thus the lifetime crush. I couldn't believe it. Later when I took a traveling sales job I checked the phone book in every city for his family. 30 years later I found him very much alive on Facebook 

My first real not dead boyfriend happened my freshman year. One of the most popular boys in school, Tom, noticed me. I was sitting at a lunch table and he walked by and dropped a Peppermint Patty on my table. I thought it had to be a mistake but then it kept happening every day! un th il one day he sat down and introduced himself. 

I really couldn't believe it!! And this was a boy Julie had been eying all year!!

We went out for 2 years. I could have married him.

But there was a LOT wrong with the relationship. I had NO pride. I was one of many girls he flirted and went out with. Not behind my back, right in front of me. Once I was at his house and a girl from across town stopped by who turned out to be his girlfriend for a year before me!!

I was just sickeningly grateful he noticed me at all. I despise That Girl, too. 

I noticed a picture in his room of a guy on a chopper with an Asian girl on back. Tom explained that That was why he had noticed and claimed me. I don't know what he thought I we would feel but I felt like a Nothing. It reaffirmed my belier that Who I was didn't matter.

It was also the first time I was favorably singled out for being Asian, so there is That.

Tom went to work in Louisiana for the summer and got the daughter of his boss pregnant. I'm pretty sure, don't really remember if he married her?? Big Catholic family and they didn't shoot him so he probably married her. It didn't take up too much of his time, I was still His Girl. 

I would realize Much Later that at some point Tom started to really care about, maybe even Love me. 

But I was long gone by then.

He gave me a promise ring that I was over the moon about until a friend of my brother's told me Tom got it in a cheap trade for a bike part.

My home life was in tatters, I was living with my brothers in a house Mike talked a realtor into letting us have after I told Mike the man had tried to rape me when I was 12. 

The House was a partying nightmare.  It wasn't just marijuana now, it was LSD, mushrooms, and inhalants. Mike and his friends burglarized every business in the area for money. Herbert worked at a burger joint.

I had to get out of there!!

The friendly family who had taken me in after Daddy died had moved out of town but left me their contact information. I called from a payphone and Mrs. Brady came and got me.

Tom was part of what I left behind.