Growing up for me was maybe a little different than for most. I liked it though for the most part. I liked getting tended. I liked having sisters my own age. Maggie and Lisa where the other girls in my set of three. We did everything together. Everyday when we finished our breakfast we would head straight for the big playroom and all the other kids. There was always a "Big Girl" there usually sitting on the couch with a large pile of books on her lap ready to read to any that wanted to listen. We would pile on the couch sometimes fighting a little over who got to sit next to her. Where ever you sat we fillied the whole couch. Usually with some one draped ocross the back of the couch leaning on their elbows as they listened to the stories and some sitting on the arms of the couch straining to see the pictures.
Who ever our Big girl was we stuck to her like glue for the entire day. She would take us to the park and shout encouragement to us as we climbed the red rope contraption. She pushed the kids in the swings who were too little to pump themselves. Sometimes she would let us sit on her lap while she swung. That was fun. We would sit facing her and hang on tight while she pumped harder and harder and got us going higher and higher.
Life wasnt idylic just good. Quite often when things would get a little out of controll at the lunch table the big girl would have to patroll the table with her wooden spoon bonking the heads of those who braved to speak. "Not another peep out of you" she would say, her hand on her hip and the spoon waving ominously in the air. "Peep" someone would say and giggles would break out all around. And around the table she would go bonking heads as she went.
Mother Cathy taught the preschoolers. She was Father's second wife. She was good to us and I think we all knew that she loved us. I remember getting a spanking from her once, I dont remember now what I had done wrong but I do remember sitting quietly in the bedroom waiting for her to come in with the stick. When the door opened and she came in she sat and talked with me for a few minutes. She told me that she didnt like having to spank me but that what I had done was wrong and she wanted me to remember that. Then she spanked me and when she thought I had had suffeciant punishment she gave me a hug and talked with me some more/ She told me that she loved me and wanted me to be a good girl. It kind of made me mad because then I felt bad and I didnt want to feel bad I wanted to be angry at her for giving me a spanking. But when she hugged me often with tears in her own eyes and told me how much she wanted for me to grow into a good righteous woman I just couldnt be angry anymore.
But I am getting ahead of myself. All of that is beside the point.
What is the point you ask?
Well the point is just this... two very different worlds have colladed for me and I find myself lost somewhere in between unsure of who I am and what I want.
The world of my childhood was predictable and familiar. There was nothing new, nothing unfamiliar. Everyday was much the same. The people in my world lived predictable lives. It made a sort of pattern so that I knew what to expect.
"The world" on the other hand was a scary place. People walking around like so many trees without names or faces, just people filling up the space in the big world that surrounded my own. They exsisted like props in my world. They were just the traffic that filled the streets and the shoppers that filled the stores.
Sometimes those worlds would touch breifly, like when Maggie and Lisa and I would watch the kids in the neighbors yard. Our neighbor Ivy ran a day care from her home and we could see the kids playing in the yard from our upstairs window. Two of the girls were just my age. There was the blonde little girl that we called blondie and there was the dark haired one that we called blacky. I dont think we ever spoke to those girls. Just watched them from that upstairs window. THere were the times that kids from the park next door shouted names at us. "Hey Plig Kid they would yell. How many moms do you have. Why dont you go back to little house on the prairie!"
There was the person at the checkout counter who smiled nicely and tried not to stare as she went through our pile of groceries.
There were the missionaries and the sales men that came to our front door. Those were the times when the two worlds touched for the briefest of moments.
I belonged to "the work" I was a part of "the group" I was one of "us" the unspoken "we" that were different from everyone else on the planet. Sometimes we would pass one of "us" in the store. We might not know their names but our eyes would meet and there would be a brief nod and we would move on with almost a smug feeling of knowing that amonst all the "others" we had encountered another one of "us."
I passed on of "us" in the store the other day. My eyes searched their eyes waiting for that moment of recognition and the nod of acknowledgment. But it never came. She stared past me as though I didnt exsist as though I was just one of many of the tree like humans that populated the world around her. It was disconcerting but there was a reason why.
I have become one of them. I dress like them, act like them, and live like them. I put on a swim suit and go to the pool on summer afternoons. I walk through a collage campus with a back pack, eating snacks from a vending machine. From all appearances I am one of them. Except that deep down inside I am still one of "us" I still feel the same feelings, I still have the same desires, the same hopes and dreams. I still feel it when I stub my toe. I still bleed when I cut myself. I am still me. But by becoming one of them I am no longer an "us."
Its not so bad with strangers but when I see the same glazed indifferent looks on the faces of my sisters... my family and I know that as one of them I am no longer apart of their world it hurts. Maggie and Lisa, once inseperable from me know pass me and often dont even say hello. As mothers of five children, and husbands and other wives filling up their lives, I have become a distant memory. A sister who somehow faded away and left a stranger in her place.
I see pictures on the internet or tv of my people and my heart tugs at me because they are just that, they are my people and yet the world moves on around me and no one knows. I go to work everyday and the "others" that I work with never know that I am just pretending. I am pretending to be one of them, pretending to know what I am doing, pretending to belong to this world, this foriegn place. I go home and the girls that I live with dont know that I dont belong there. They dont know that somewhere there is a husband and children that should have been mine. They dont know that I am nobody. I have become a tree. A prop in someones world.
So I ask you... Who am I?
Am I an Us or am I a Them
Am I a cow living in the ocean?
Will I continue this disquise long enough to marry one of "them" and to have children? and if so what will they be?
That is the question I ask myself everyday. Who am I?
