dysfunction – Emptying The Backpack

Facing the Big Dogs (Part 2 of 2)

To read part one of this two-part essay, see Speak Up, Young Lady. Be warned, parts of that essay may trigger victims.

Wise ones tell us that we often have to “learn” the same lesson over and over until we get it right. My hint: once you figure out whatever lesson it is you seem doomed to repeat in your life, get on that. Study it. Dissect it. Get it right so you can get it done…or, at least, get good at it.

For me, evidently, one lesson that I have felt doomed to repeat is “Speak up.”

After being fired at age 17 from a fast food restaurant for daring to write a letter to corporate about requiring female workers to wear short skirts (this was in the late 70’s) I found work that fit my college schedule at the county juvenile detention facility. I was thrilled to get the job if only because I was considering a career in social work by that time. Never mind that there was little or no training for the position or that most of my co-workers and I were still teens ourselves; the county simply needed folks willing to work all hours, and willing to be locked into the facility with teens in trouble. College students fit that bill nicely. There were three shifts a day, each eight hours, round the clock, and we all pulled at least one midnight to eight a.m. shift a week. I’m grateful that the teens we supervised were “less criminal and more neglected” teens, picked up mostly for truancy or petty theft or vandalism, but mostly just guilty of being unsupervised. There were three pods of four teens each and our biggest struggle was keeping them from being bored and trying to ignore smartass remarks. I generally worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift on three of my four shifts, always sharing supervision and feeding and fielding complaints alongside another college student, always a guy since we were locked in every night with boys and girls.

When the dog bites….

Only once did we realize how vulnerable we were, but some training we received came in really handy then and years later for me. During a self-defense training, we learned about getting out of holds and about using weak spots like the instep which is usually vulnerable when someone grabs you from behind. I would years later be grateful for another piece of that training: when we were taught how to react when someone bites you. An unarmed combatant might bite and, while the instinct is to pull away, the best move is to push into the open jaws. That movement will cause the assailant to open their jaw wider and allow you to then pull away. Years later, while out walking in my neighborhood, I would use that with a dog that jumped his fence and lunged for me. I am grateful I saw him coming, though, raised my arm (covered thankfully by a heavy jacket) and pushed back into his jaw as he lunged. He was unable to bite down. We repeated this two more times, him lunging and me pushing back while I yelled for help before another neighbor came out. I’d heard people say time seems to slow in life-threatening moments, and I remember calmly being focussed on my arm going into that dog’s jaw.

It was terrifying.

It was also empowering and would help me in so many ways.

I’d been given one way to stand my ground and I’d seen it work. This would not come in handy until years later, though. At that time, I am grateful to say we had little reason to be afraid of our detainees in the juvenile detention facility.

Again with the troublemaking.

After working there for nearly a year, though, as the juvenile detention facility (which seemed like a lifetime for me at eighteen, by the way) a new worker was hired. Without warning, my schedule was cut in half. It took a week or so to figure out what was happening, but, evidently, the new worker was dating the boss. Remember, this was the seventies. No one even thought of filing complaints then, at least not in Springfield, Missouri. I was angry, but was told at our monthly staff meeting this arrangement would be temporary. By that time, I was living in a tiny apartment. The kitchen was so small I could not open the oven door more than three inches because the refrigerator stood in the way. The bathroom had a claw foot tub with a skylight overhead, though, and a balcony, and I was thrilled to have it, but I would not be able to pay my rent on half a paycheck. Already, I had learned the art of “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” and relied as well on the four meals a week I shared with the detainees at work. This job had been my way out of working fast food; I knew I was far too clumsy to be a server at a restaurant. After nearly a month with my hours cut though, I found it difficult to be cordial when I went to pick up my diminished paycheck and encountered my replacement. I’d thus far received good evaluations, so I was frustrated about having to consider another job. That is perhaps why I figured I had little to lose when the next monthly staff meeting rolled around. After our boss offered updates and training information, he handed out new schedules for the month and, again, I was facing half of my regular paycheck. I raised my hand. My boss called on me. I was standing at the back of the room, aware that others were disgruntled at how things were working out but only two of us had lost significant portions of our paychecks. I simply asked, “What do I have to do to get my hours back?”

My boss looked at me, frowned, and asked me what I meant.

“You know what I mean.” I said, “What do I have to DO to get my hours back?” He definitely knew what I meant. He looked at his girlfriend who was seated next to him up front, then frowned at me. I guessed it was time to start searching for another job. I certainly had no intention of actually sleeping with the jerk. And, while a well-reasoned letter to my boss’s boss might have seemed more professional, as it happened, I got my hours back the next day. Troublemaker. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. Noted.

Speaking up, asking people to do the right thing hasn’t always been as successful as I might wish, though. Over the years, the stakes became higher. Sometimes, it did not make me friends with those in charge, and sometimes those in charge used their power in ways that cost me lost opportunities and/or lost income. The best news for me was that often there were others standing with me, and, on occasion, I have been pleasantly surprised by someone speaking up for me.

Sometimes, feeling the need to speak up cost me more than a lost date. While in college, I was invited to apply for a scholarship through a local civic organization to study in France for a year because French was my minor. The opportunity to study abroad would no doubt have opened doors I could not imagine. I wrote my application essay and my resume in French and English, and, of course I listed Leadership opportunities, including some speaking engagements explaining the Equal Rights Amendment in town or on campus. I was told, though, that the scholarship was given to a young man. I would have received it had it not been for my work on women’s issues; evidently the group imagined me sailing across the sea to start riots, maybe even to burn my bra.

I had two ways to see that, I reasoned. I could stop speaking up and go along to get along, but I would have to agree to be like the people who had disappointed me which might lead to me being the reason someone else was disappointed. All these lessons in speaking up followed (or led?) me into teaching and ministry and, while it got some easier, I never really got used to people being angry when I speak up. Now, when I find out, though, that there’ll be consequences or someone is angry, I (eventually) shrug. There are people close to me who I am loathe to upset, but everyone else can just take a number. I might be surprised and disappointed but we’ve come too far now. People just expect it.

Who Knew? My Life Lessons Aren’t Just For Me.

Turns out, learning our life lessons isn’t just for us. What we learn can benefit others. In ministry, I have been called to speak up for my LGBTQ students, those behind bars, wounded soldiers. I was, honestly, as proud as I was distressed to be called “that woman” by some of the folks dealing with wounded warriors at Fort Campbell.

All of my lessons, it turned out, helped in these cases, as did the understanding that the folks who needed someone to stand with them or speak up for them were in far greater pain than any discomfort I felt at speaking up at this point in my life.

Personally, speaking up was easier, in fact, when I was no longer the only one affected. When I had children, I felt keenly the need to protect my boys or anyone else who was vulnerable. My first chance to act on that came when a neighborhood dog began getting out of his fenced-in yard.

Facing the Big Dogs

In this case, I thought the “Big Dog” in the small town where my husband and I had settled with our boys was the Collie living on the corner across the street from one of my son’s friends. He was so large he could put his front paws on the shoulders of an adult and look him in the eye. He started demonstrating this on folks in the neighborhood who were strolling around the small downtown area, knocking more than a few of them down. The owner, when informed, usually snarled and slammed the door. When I heard the dog had knocked down the elderly piano teacher around the corner, though, I resolved to call animal control. I discovered though there was only a part time animal control staff in our small town in spite of a growing number of dogs allowed to roam free. I decided to write a letter to the editor -again with the letters, right? – to encourage folks to speak up and perhaps convince our city government to make the animal control agent a full time position. The letter was also an “open letter” to my neighbors with dogs to encourage them to follow the leash law in town and inform them of what was then the local rule at least. According to that rule, a dog owner whose pet bit another person could be made to pay any doctor bills. A dog owner whose dog bit a second time could be sued and, after a third offense, an animal would be put down by the city. I encouraged dog owners to protect both their neighbors and their dogs. Once again, I believed I’d written a well-reasoned letter.

The Big Dogs Bark

The letter was published on a Wednesday. That evening, I received a phone call from the mayor. My anticipation of a good conversation was usurped almost immediately when our illustrious city leader, whom I had never met, began berating me angrily and basically telling me to mind my own business. The big dogs were barking.

I quickly gave up on an actual conversation when it became apparent this was not a dialog. I was honestly surprised that any adult would yell like that at any other adult who wasn’t in their family. He didn’t even know me. I was also confused about why he’d been so rude and aggressive and I began to worry about encountering him in public. I was still pretty unsure what to think about his behavior when, early the next morning, I answered my front door to find the animal control officer in uniform.

You gotta be kidding, I thought.

She was smiling, though, and, after introducing herself, asked if by any chance I’d received a call the night before from the city mayor. Turns out, the mayor had made a habit of nightly drunken calls to people who ticked him off, and this officer often was dispatched by the local sheriff to apologize to the recipients of those calls. No wonder the city couldn’t afford a full time Animal Control officer. We took notice that the understanding was they’d keep up this practice of apologizing for him until the next election. I began to worry about how angry our neighbor with the collie likely was, if he had read the paper.

The Bite

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

We got the chance to face him fairly quickly when, a week or two later, I was walking with my eight-year-old to his friend’s house and the collie on the corner lunged out from behind a bush and bit me on the hip before we even knew what was happening. He only lunged once, thank God, and, fortunately, we were just a few feet from the friend’s house. The boy’s mother and I quickly decided I needed to see a doctor. The bite had punctured the skin and drawn blood, but he had not clamped down or torn the flesh. I had not needed to put my juvenile court training into action, I thought, since he only lunged once. The importance of the lesson about standing your ground, though, contained a much wider meaning, I would find out.

The bleeding was minimal but the bruising had already begun and I’d need a tetanus shot. As soon as I finished at our local clinic that day, I walked over to the police department and swore out a warrant. I was driven by the terrifying thought that, had my son been walking on the other side of me that morning, the dog would likely have bitten his face or neck. The thought made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and I knew this was a chance to begin the process to make our neighborhood safer. Though I feared we’d all still have to avoid that part of the neighborhood for a long while, we had put this bully and his dog on notice and try to find some official help.

Amusing detail: the officer who took my information was surprised to discover, through a congenial conversation, that I not only actually loved dogs, we had two big dogs; we just didn’t let them run free. She and her colleagues were under the impression I hated all dogs. She gave me a court date and I left, already afraid and realizing I’d need to warn my boys to watch out in case the neighbor decided to retaliate once he was served with the papers. We stayed close to home for the next few weeks.

When the morning came to face the dog’s owner in court, I will admit I was nauseous and more than a bit afraid not only of facing him but also of how the case would be treated. For all I knew, this dog owner played pool with the local judge. When the judge called us both up to his bench, the neighbor immediately started complaining, “Judge,” he said, “this crazy woman–” but the judge cut him off and asked me for the evidence I had of the bite, which meant both men would be viewing pictures of my butt and hip showing the puncture marks and bruising. A stellar start.

I was beginning to regret the warrant when the judge laid the pictures down, turned to the dog owner and asked, “You drunk, Sir?” My neighbor’s blustery and belligerent response was the judge’s answer.

“You, Sir,” the judge continued, “may or may not be aware that this bite is your dog’s first offense, his first strike.” He held up his hand when my neighbor began to protest.

“You will pay her for her medical bills before you leave. And because you disrespected this court by showing up drunk, your dog now has two strikes against him.” Once again, he held up his hand to stop any protests. “I understand you own some property outside of town; I’d suggest the dog move there. Today. Step back.”

Going through all of that was exhausting and literally gut-wrenching, but I had reached a point where NOT doing anything would have felt far worse.

I’d finally reached a point where NOT speaking up was more painful than swallowing what I needed to say. I did not want to end my life filled with regrets. I’ve hated learning to speak up but I hated not speaking up more.

…where I am today is light years better than where I began, represents so much distance from curling up in the backseat, sure no one would believe me if I spoke up.

This has been my journey and, while speaking up can still be tiring, today I have allies, I have freedom to walk away and I have lots of practice. The need to speak up is mostly easier to face.

This life lesson is no longer the big dog in my emotional neighborhood lunging at me until I fall down.

Maybe you never think twice about speaking up, but I know you have your own challenges, your own life lessons, and I hope you’re moving through them, growing, reaching, finding your freedom. I hope as you reflect on where you’ve been, that you give yourself the benefit of the doubt and that you recognize you likely did the best you could, the best you knew to do, at the time. If nothing else, you survived and learned to do things differently the next time.

My hope for you, then, is this:

May you figure out your life lessons swiftly and early in life.

May you accept help and welcome allies along the way.

May you not reach the end of your life wondering

Where you’d be or

What you’d be doing

If you had stared down your hounds,

If you had pushed back on the jaws that threatened you,

If you had felt strong enough…finally…, become fed up enough, worn out enough to say what you needed to say when you needed to say it.

“Honestly, I wanna see you be brave….”

Sara Bareilles, “Brave,” 2013

What’s ‘Just enough’ Christmas?

Christmas swings like a pendulum do….

My paternal grandmother, Arbaleta (Grandma Leta), and maternal grandmother, Marie (Grandma Ree), could not have been more different creatures, and this was never more obvious than at Christmas. At first glance, it seemed to me that they were polar opposites when it came to wintry holidays especially; in retrospect, it is evident they were each on opposite points of the pendulum that has come to symbolize Christmas for me. Generation after generation on both sides of my family seemed to be unconsciously caught up by the wild swings of this holiday pendulum, a reactionary arc between a resounding “Yes!” to Christmas and its counterpart, an adamant “Hell, no!”

My Granddaughter’s depiction of our favorite activity: swinging. She is so wise….

Finding Healing Around Christmas

Maybe your family needs some healing around holidays as well. Sure, it seems strange to talk about Christmas amidst all the paper and ribbon and cookies and tinsel, but it is, in fact, the best time to step back, recognize struggles and disappointment and start our families on paths to peace with Christmas; maybe along the way we could even figure out what’s “enough” for joy. I offer this reflection then to all our families because we cannot find healing if we do not know our family’s wounds. Here’s hope for discussions about upcoming celebrations: may they be intentional, loving and truly joyful for all.

For me, it seems the best place to start is with the grandmothers. Both of my grandmothers were born around WWI; each married during the Great Depression. Neither had, as they say, “a pot to piss in,” not while they were growing up and not while they were young mothers. Both worked hard to support their families outside the home as well as in. Dad’s mom, Arbaleta, had two children, a boy and a girl, nine years apart. Mom’s mother, Marie, had three daughters all close in age.

Arbaleta’s husband, my Grandpa Mac, fell from an electric pole when he was young and wasn’t supposed to ever walk again, but did, in great part because Arbaleta would not let him not walk. She reportedly insisted he move his legs and even moved them for him for months as physical therapy until he could walk and work again. While I was never close to Grandma Leta, I have always admired the steely determination that these actions showed.

Marie had a husband who was always on the road as a truck driver, mostly because the bus or truck driver jobs close to town weren’t well-paying. He died of a massive heart attack at age 50; she lived another 30-plus years and married her high school sweetheart, then outlived him and married another kind man when she was eighty. At that wedding, the minister declared what we all knew, “Marie is a hopeful woman!” Grandma Ree, as we called her, was the quintessential kindergarten teacher when teachers still had time for nature walks, ironing leaves between sheets of waxed paper, and silly songs. Thus, she was the kind of grandmother I aspired to be: she played games with us, prayed for us, encouraged us and defended us when necessary. For most of her life, she modeled a love of learning: she earned a master’s degree, helped “plant” two churches, became an accomplished painter and was memorizing her favorite Bible verses in her seventies because she was losing her eyesight.

While I know little of Arbaleta’s childhood except poverty and hardship, I know Marie helped her mother run a boarding house after her chiropractor father divorced her mother, something which mortified both women.

That I’m aware of, Arbaleta seldom left her home after we were born. At least we never saw her leave her home, though, as far as we knew, she was perfectly capable. Our collective memory of her is of her seated on the sofa in her silk pajamas. Every time we visited her, we would wave to her from a few feet away as she perched on the sectional sofa in the corner, surrounded by shelves of various sizes and shapes of cacti. In one hand she held a lit cigarette, ashes threatening to crumble onto the silk, and the other hand held the ever-present bean bag ashtray (you know, the kind that has the bean bag on the bottom and the colorful aluminum tin bowl on the top.) That I can remember, she never once kissed, hugged or touched us in any way, shape or form. And, though she was pleasant, there were no memorable conversations, just the cloud of cigarette smoke that circled above her.

As for Christmas, well, I can’t remember there being much of it in their home at the edge of a Kansas golf course where she and Grandpa had retired. Ironically, I’m not aware Grandpa played golf, though my Dad did well into his eighties. As far as Christmas goes, Arbaleta represented the point in the arc where celebration was merely tolerated. Every few years, our parents would tote our gifts to their house to open on that rare occasion we woke up there on a Christmas morning, but the mood in the house was that Christmas decoration was, well, perfunctory. There was a tree and maybe a wreath, but evidently, for Grandpa and Arbaleta, a tree and some lights outside were “just enough,” though I suspect they were only put up to satisfy us. If overcoming poverty was Arbaleta’s life goal, she met it, thus the home on the golf course as well as the purchase of a new Lincoln every year. Secular or religious, it didn’t matter; Christmas was a formality, expected, tolerated for the children. Christmas dinner involved polished silver and store bought sweets, if any. “Please wait until you have permission to touch.”

Arbaleta died when I was seven and, suddenly, the focus of Christmas on my father’s side of the family shuddered and swung hard to the opposite extreme. Her daughter brought in Christmas every year from then on with a vengeance, lovingly, but with an overwhelming force. Every year, my aunt seemed to be competing for best Christmas ever, ostensibly in response to her own mother’s lackadaisical attempts.

While certain treasured and expensive statuary graced my aunt’s mantle for Christmas, for example, every year, the Christmas tree itself, usually the biggest tree I’d ever seen, sported a different theme with new, all handmade ornaments. I often asked when she started making them, sure she must have begun the previous New Year’s Day. She also made most of our gifts; they were always of Pinterest quality and I treasured several sweaters she knitted for me, for example.

As if it were necessary, she also became an amazing cook and thus, Christmas visits always involved impressing us with recipes for new dishes. Ironically, my mother didn’t want the recipes and my mother’s mother, Marie, didn’t need them; my mother was too busy leaning into that dysfunctional pendulum that was swinging back to the starker side, likely in reaction to her mother’s seasonal excess.

Marie, my mother’s mother, was on that same swing of the pendulum as my aunt, though I believe Grandma Ree went all out for her Christmas celebration for different reasons. Her husband, Grandpa George, also died when I was seven, but that did not slow Marie down in life or around the holidays. From the moment you opened the door into her home at Christmas, the scent of pine and wild berry candles carried you through room after room of greenery, holly, bells, poinsettias and new figurines or miniatures each year. Also new each year were the sweetbreads and cookies and homemade candies, all awaiting our discovery after hugs and kisses were exchanged and the coats and mittens and caps were piled onto a bed in the back of the house.

Grandma Ree with her brother, Mother and Sister, c. 1960’s.

A Family Nightmare

While Marie’s response seemed to me to somewhat resemble that of Arbaleta’s daughter, the driving force behind Marie’s likely unconscious Christmas reverie gone amuck was a well-kept secret, a family nightmare. On two separate Christmas Eves, during her childhood and youth, Grandma Ree had lost family members to suicide. I was, of course, an adult before I was made aware of that history or the details: one drank poisoned alcohol and one shot himself, both on separate Christmas Eves. Of course, the grief and shock of their actions was complicated by their (conscious or unconscious) efforts to ruin Christmas forever for some of their family.

How painful were their memories of the holidays?

Before we assume that Marie’s attempts to reclaim Christmas was the reason for the pendulum’s extreme movements, though, we need to recognize that some calamity in earlier generations drove those men to choose Christmas Eve to end their lives; we have to ask how painful were their memories of the holidays that drove them to risk also ruining the holiday for their spouses and children? How far back did the pain begin and what don’t we know about that?

In other words, it’s not likely either man, both of whom must have been suffering and feeling hopeless, started the family on that path.

The result, though, seems to have been an unconscious struggle to compensate. Those grand swings between holiday excess and hopelessness left subsequent generations still unconsciously at a loss to figure out what’s enough celebration. Further, while we can understand what might have spurred Marie’s need to excel at Christmas, I’ll likely never know what caused Arbaleta’s lack of enthusiasm for the holidays, and so I’m left simply to marvel at the overwhelming force of her daughter’s frenzied Christmas efforts. Sadly, or thankfully, no one now has picked up that mantle and the extended family is so fractured as to make these discussions nearly impossible.

I offer these reflections then to my nuclear family as the beginning of some discussions around conscious choices rather than wild reactions.

How does a family figure out what’s enough Christmas when the family’s history is, well, fractured? My own efforts were often emotionally unsatisfying; not only were my mother’s Christmas efforts headed for the stark extreme in reaction to her mother’s and her sister-in-law’s excesses, but they were complicated by my general lack of interest in cooking or baking except when absolutely necessary.

It was my ex-husband who started me thinking about some of our responses to holidays years ago: he protested the idea of Valentines’ Day for example, saying we could and should give one another cards or flowers or candy at anytime of the year and not just one day chosen by candy and card companies and florists. Yes, we can, I agreed wholeheartedly. But do we? Of course not, I pointed out. To his credit, he came by his dislike and struggle with holidays honestly and thus brought his own reactions to our holiday table: his birthday is the day after Christmas, and he was one of six children. His Christmas gift always came with a declaration that, “Oh-that’s your birthday gift too.”

Over the years, I certainly have struggled with holidays, whether it’s decorating or preparing a feast or just planning. Don’t get me started on birthdays for children; too many of those ended in my tears from exhaustion and a sense of failure. Did I tell you about all the “Pinterest Fails?”

All these things and more (all these things and more) that’s what Christmas means to me, my love….)
Stevie Wonder

Plenty of us struggle with the holidays, though, whether because of grieving a loss or knowing you’re the only one who can’t afford the gift exchange. I’ve tried over the years to make our gifts for Christmas but again, I know too many of my family members and friends were less than thrilled with the results. Mea culpa. We tried spreading the Christmas holiday over several days to lessen the wild two-minute frenzy of Christmas morning. We tried taking Christmas to the mountains; we tried staying home. We wondered what would happen if our family just gave up one Christmas and had lots of little ones? Could that not translate into lots of chances to do or give or be kind to one another? So many of our attempts at intentional Christmases revolved around not expecting one or two people to create a magical holiday that only left them in tears and exhausted.

We’ve finally begun to incorporate some activities intentionally. Instead of china and crystal, we copied someone else’s snowman place settings, something the granddaughter and I could share. Last year, we started some silly story telling. This year, we introduced Karaoke and I am trying to reclaim the joy of baking by helping my granddaughter learn; watching her “knead” the goop she bought at the store made me think. Lo and behold, she discovered the joy of yeast and how it rises and how the baker must punch down the dough, then knead it. Her eyes grew wide after she made a fist and punched away. “That is soooo satisfying,” she said. A keeper.

In case you’re wondering, religion did not seem to figure at all in the wild reactions to the holiday through the years for my extended family. While Arbaleta was, as far as I know, agnostic, and Marie was a strong Christian, neither of them addressed or seemed to include the religious holiday in their efforts to reclaim or dismiss Christmas. For our family, that’s a different pendulum altogether. I personally love a good candlelight Christmas eve service singing and the idea that God came to be with us as an infant. Nevertheless, culturally we continue to struggle with all that Christmas celebrations have become for generations and we cannot heal from pain we do not acknowledge.

For our family, the faith and religious rituals are different pendulum altogether. I will never know why my Grandma Ree did not incorporate more of her personal faith into the celebration. Personal experience suggests she was treading lightly with agnostic family members and, as is true for many families, also celebrated on different days with different parts of the family, balancing church events with home. Nevertheless, culturally, we continue to struggle with all that our secular celebrations of Christmas have become for generations, often leaving us to begin another year frustrated, sad, discouraged. That is where we can start, but we must look collectively at this because we cannot heal from pain we do not acknowledge.

The best time, I believe, to reflect on how we celebrate Christmas is when we are all together…and we’ll before Christmas comes around-unexamined-again.

For my family, I continue to try to reframe Christmas in light of the history I bring to the holiday. I guess I hope through reflections and questions to step completely back from that wild, reactionary swinging between excessive celebration to indifference and even disdain.

I think one key is that we focus on the children, but with respect for their needs and not our own needs to give them the best holiday ever!

They get tired; we pay attention. They want to dress up; they don’t want to dress up. Quiet time, dancing in the kitchen time, gifts that involve us engaging with them. I’m not saying we’re the best with children ever or that ours are happier than any other. What I am saying is that like in so much of life, the children around me ground me. What they need is so often what I need. Let’s sing Jingle Bells, yes, at a gathering, but we mustn’t forget the bells themselves and our need to jingle them to make the song come to life.

A little percussion goes a long way and when we sing “Jingle Bells” there need to be jingling bells….A five-year-old taught me that.

Music must also be a source of holiday joy for many families. I’m jealous of those who manage a musical gathering but hopeful that might be in our future as well. Certainly with percussion everyone can participate! The idea of introducing music brings us back, though, both to the need for sensory awareness and to the idea of joy and reverie throughout the year. In order for there to be music next year, we need to practice throughout the year – often and, by practicing, remember the things that do bring us joy without wearing us out. I write this and share it now, after the holiday blitz, planning to share it with my family, to start the conversation we can have in anticipation of next year. I am curious to hear from them, and find out if they are aware of, or experiencing their own pendulum of Christmases, maybe even unknowingly riding that pendulum right now. I’m hopeful that with some lowered expectations of ourselves and a little yeast, we just might be able to rescue the holidays from the extremes of that dysfunctional pendulum my family rode for far too long AND decide for ourselves what is “enough Christmas.”

The First Time I Ran Away

Always a Fashionista…gotta love the boots.

When I was five, I ran away from home. Of course I didn’t get far. My world then revolved around a quarter-acre yard in Springfield, Missouri, on a corner lot, two blocks from my elementary school. We lived a short drive away from where I was attending kindergarten at our First Baptist Church and near enough to some train tracks that I knew it was bedtime by the train whistle every night. The little three-bedroom, one bath brick house on Marlin Street had a fenced-in backyard, a sand box, a metal clothesline and a weeping willow tree, all seemingly perfect for three children under six. Its feathery leaves hung to the ground, draping around the trunk with just enough room under the canopy for a five- year-old to hide and imagine different worlds than were to be found inside the little house on Marlin.

For the longest time, I couldn’t tell you why I ran away on that particular day. I often wondered if it hadn’t been that I didn’t want to go back to kindergarten. I went on the afternoon shift, so we basically had an hour or two of ABC’s, singing, and a snack in the gymnasium of First Baptist Church before we took a nap. I already could read and write some when I got to kindergarten, so there was no struggle for me there.

There had been a memorable first day spent on the vinyl chair in our kitchen trying to learn to tie my shoes. “Little boys and girls who can’t tie their own shoes are not big enough to go to kindergarten,” I’d been told again and again. “They’ll send you right home.” I had spent the morning of my first day of kindergarten tying and untying my red plaid tennis shoes, both my mother and me praying I’d avoid the shame of the teacher calling my mother to bring her little “baby” home. We needn’t have worried. Not once did I ever have to tie my shoes while at school.

Perhaps, on that morning, I simply didn’t want another perm.

My mother struggled daily with my full head of “straight as a pencil” “dirty-brown” hair because it was constantly tangled. Every day, we’d have the same conversation about brushing the underside of my hair, that thick mat next to my neck, and every day I would stare at her as if I were hearing the laments and reprisals for the first time. My hair may have been the bane of her existence but her brushing my hair is the only physical connection with her I remember. Her brushing it angrily. Her trimming errant bangs until the top of my head was nearly visible. Her trying to make it curl. Her finally chopping the hair off rudely, at a strange angle because she was done with it, as fed up as I was with trying to tame that mane.

Mom had been introduced that summer to the “home permanent.” I’d never been to a salon even to have my hair cut. Mom cut our hair herself with her sewing scissors, black handled shears that were never sharpened or oiled, as far as I could tell, so they’d pull when she hacked away at the thick bunch she’d grab in her left hand and chop with her right hand. I remember staring into the bathroom mirror blankly. I hadn’t cared that she cut it because of how horrid it looked, I realize now. I cared because she said, as she was sweeping up the hair from the floor, “Now you can just brush it yourself.” She would no longer brush it for me. I think I would even in that moment have agreed to another permanent like the one that had failed so miserably and sent her to her sewing basket for the shears.

I can still smell a home perm a mile away….

The day before, the permanent had required a couple of hours of me seated on that sticky vinyl chair in our kitchen while she rolled strand after strand in metal-curlers, the kind with bristles meant to grab and hold the hair long enough for the chemicals to alter the makeup of your hair and teach it to curl like those golden locks on Shirley Temple If the rolling of the curlers wasn’t bad enough, the chemicals made my nose burn and my eyes water and the bristles on the curlers pricked my scalp. Then, once the solution had been applied and wiped off my neck and back, I was told to take my daily nap. Whether we slept or not, we “napped” every day so Mom could have time to herself, a practice I appreciated when I had children. Only on this day, because of the perm, I was relegated to a rug on the floor by the washer in our laundry room. I could have no pillow for my head because we didn’t want to ruin a pillow. Were we worried about ruining my head? Also, no pillow meant any attempts to rest my head caused dozens of tiny needles to prick my scalp, but sitting up and trying to read sent rivulets of stinky solution dripping down my neck and back. I would not rest well that afternoon.

Sadly, the perm did not “take.” My hair rebelled. My mother was furious, disgusted, as she yanked curler after curler off only to watch the long brown strands defiantly continue to hang as straight as pencils. She was crying. I was crying. She’d been trying to prepare me to participate in a Girls’ Auxiliary ceremony at our church where her teenage cousin would be “crowned ” a princess. The Girls’ Auxiliary was the church’s alternative to the Girl Scouts, designed to encourage girls to learn Scripture, study the lives of missionaries and participate in ministries like collecting monies for children India and China. To the program’s credit, many of us certainly were inspired by godly women like Lottie Moon. My cousin had completed the requirements for attaining the “Princess” rank and there was to be a ceremony at church. I was tasked with carrying a paper gold crown on a pillow to be placed on her head. Mom wanted me to represent the family well, to look pretty and be a shining example of the next generation of princesses.

But my shock of brown hair refused to do its part. And mom was fed up. She’d gotten the shears out just as her aunt called and offered to come over and help. Her aunt had three daughters, all teens, and somehow managed to fashion a dainty pony tail for the ceremony.

The next day, however, the shears returned and that was all she wrote. My hair would not cover my neck again that year or the next. Not until I learned to brush it myself. I could not for my part, see the point. I didn’t care about my hair being pretty, which may seem ironic, since I was teased incessantly by my father. He was annoyed that I was so attached to my white straw hat, white gloves and white wicker purse, all gifts from grandparents the year before for Easter. He thought I wanted to be “a little lady” because I carried my purse with the gloves inside it and donned my little white straw hat with a yellow ribbon nearly every day for most of that year. I didn’t participate in outdoor activities anymore with my brother or sister that year. I preferred instead to go outside in my hat and carry my purse to sit under my tree and pretend I was somewhere else. It would be years later when I’d realize why I wanted to be anywhere else.

Of course, picture day came soon after the cut.

At the time, I just remember being grateful I could pull that straw hat over my crooked bangs. That afternoon then, while mom was sweeping my hair off of the bathroom floor, and I was supposed to be on my bed for naptime, I pulled the hat down over my ears, shoved my gloves into the purse and snuck out the screen door from the laundry room, careful not to let it creak or slam shut.

I had left a note on my bed that I expected her to find, a note that simply said, “I am running away. Jodi.” Then I went outside and sat under my tree, my back against the trunk, legs stretched out towards the backside of the house, the branches drooping and fingering the ground as the breeze tried to cool the afternoon. Then I waited. I waited for her to find my note and come running frantically out of the laundry room into the carport, searching. I waited for her to scoop me up and hug me and exclaim how relieved she was that I was safe. I waited for her to carry me inside proclaiming she would never let me go, maybe even to bake cookies for me. Just for me.

I waited, and, then, worried she wouldn’t be able to see me under the tree whose branches drooped to the ground, I moved to the sandbox. And waited some more. When the heat got to me, I moved to the back door that led to the laundry room and perched on the steps, clutching my purse, waiting to be found. I’ll never know how long I waited, but eventually I got tired and gave up. Then, slowly so as to not make the screen door squeak, I peered into the laundry room at the ugly rug that still stank of permanent solution. I crept past the opening to the kitchen and found no one, so I crept to the bedroom I shared at the time with my sister. She was asleep on her bed. My brother was asleep across the hall in his bedroom. Even my mother lay sleeping on her bed; drugged by the heat and disappointed by the day.

I guess I was sure Mom must have seen the note and ignored it, so, ever the quick thinker, I crossed my name off and penciled in my sister’s name on it instead, then fell asleep. It would be years before I’d wonder why I hadn’t just crumpled the note up, why it hadn’t dawned on me that my little sister couldn’t read or write at the time. As it turned out, the note was still on my bed when I awoke from the nap, so I folded it up and tucked in into my white wicker purse where I carried it for the rest of the summer.

Of Pakistan, Chewing Gum, Chatty Cathy Dolls & Valiant Efforts

A favorite talisman from Pakistan. I loved how all the different sizes nested one inside the other. I’ve carried this painted wooden toy with me for nearly sixty years now. Cracked and repaired, broken but still beautiful, a cradle of memories.

When I was seven, my brother, who was eight, my sister, who was six, and I got dumped in our grandparents’ laps, a harsh ending to what had begun two years earlier as a grand adventure, meant to last a lifetime.

Once it was announced that Dad had secured a coveted engineering job overseas, we had all been celebrities at one festive send off after another from Springfield, to the unknown and mysterious West Pakistan, (now Pakistan). The biggest Bon Voyage event, where each of us had been presented with brand new suitcases to go with our brand new outfits for the journey to the other side of the earth, reflected how impressed friends, coworkers and neighbors had been when Dad had secured the contract.

That the way to Pakistan involved so many shots for so many illnesses was annoying, but, for me, the memories of those jabs are overshadowed by those of international flights on Pan Am where the pilots brought all the children on the flight into the cockpit and each of us received a souvenir Pan Am flight bag and our own set of pilot’s wings. I remember buying a doll in Tokyo, where I was convinced that I could speak Japanese because I could speak to the sales clerk. I remember arriving in Karachi to be served warm milk and runny eggs and that we slept twenty-four hours before driving to our new home in a walled compound in Northern Pakistan. I remember much about our time in Pakistan, but I do not remember the trip home.

Thoughout the two years we were there, Dad was likely excelling in his work, but, before the contract was completed and we could be posted at yet another overseas project on another continent, Dad was forced to break his contract and return to the states on short notice, with little or no money, no job and much anger.

So, just a few days after boarding a plane for home, the three of us children found ourselves seated in a row on the edge of the bed in a motel halfway between our grandparents’ home in the little town of Waynesville, Missouri, and wherever Dad had found a job. The motel bed was low to the ground; our toes just touched the linoleum and we were each individually toeing the floor and pushing the old bed up and down, causing the box springs to creak softly. Next door, we could hear our parents and grandparents arguing loudly. We did not know then the three of us would not be going to the tiny apartment Dad had managed to find.

I clutched my Chatty Cathy doll. Bless her heart, she’d stayed with me throughout our time overseas in spite of looking like she had mange because my little sister had taken a pair of scissors to her black hair. My sister clutched a stuffed monkey who had a permanent grip on a plastic banana. She had already given up the doll she’d been given, one who giggled when her arms were squeezed, and who likely ended up in another child’s arms, looking like she was just out of the box with that curly, blond hairdo intact. Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind, though, to experiment on her with scissors. Maybe my sister was just more angry at that time than I was.

New Clothes, a Bon Voyage Party, Poufy Hair? Pictures courtesy Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved

“Say goodbye to your children!” my father had hissed moments before all three of us climbed in the back of our grandparents’ sedan. Mom’s eyes were already glazed over though; she wasn’t responding. She had said nothing while my father had been yelling for weeks, it seemed, most recently in the next motel room, in front of her parents, who also were silent. We couldn’t hear any of those angry words at all, only loud voices, then we each flinched as the door to our motel room had swung open and we saw our parents standing there. “Say goodbye!”

Grandma Ree and Grandpa George seemed just as dumbfounded as we were, I think, and were really in no financial position to take on more, but to their credit, they put the three of us into the back of their tiny dark blue sedan anyway. Driving away from that motel, each of us rode silently, wide-eyed, tacitly agreeing it was better not to ask.

His Adventure; Her Nightmare

On our way home from Pakistan, we’d each been wearing a new pair of leather shoes made from a cobbler in Pakistan. Even finding shoes while we were there became an adventure for my father who savored every side trip to a bazaar and whose shopping addiction devoured cameras and jewelry and handmade rugs and carved tables with ivory inlay for playing chess. Being there while the country was at war with India was a nightmare for our mother, though; after my parents ventured to the bazaars, she had nightmares about the children who had been purposely maimed in order to make their begging more lucrative. By the time we left Pakistan, Mom had begun obsessing about keeping the windows covered with foil for nighttime blackouts, long after it was necessary.

The civil engineering position Dad had secured with this company overseas was his dream and meant to last his whole career; he had not planned to have to return to southwest Missouri with his family at all, certainly not as a quitter. This contract was his chance to escape small towns and small minds, and that dream was not meant to die a quick death because his young wife discovered the balm of alcohol and realized that some men could be sweet. Mom, bless her heart, had been thrust into a world she had never contemplated and one she was vastly unprepared to engage, understand or master. Dad, on the other hand, had served overseas in the Air Force and, when he returned, he invested in National Geographic in order to know more about the world he had only tasted in his two years in Puerto Rico. This job had been his chance to immerse himself in adventure and travel.

A small-town girl who had never left Missouri before, Mom continued dutifully each day to don a crisply ironed dress and heels while struggling to learn to oversee servants, like the first one, a “Bearer.” The Pakistani manservant who did not speak any English was in the house all day, and ironed and cooked unrecognizable meals for us. He didn’t last long. A gardener, a “Mali,” was required, if only to keep up appearances in the European-style neighborhoods built by the company that had brought so many engineers and families from all over the world. We knew, though, that walking outside one morning to find the gardener, proudly holding up the cobra he’d caught in the yard where her children played was too much for Mom. She began to unravel. Our father held out, though, and doubled down on social activities, including starting a Boy Scout troop, in hopes Mom would adjust. Instead, she discovered the alcohol that had never been allowed in her home growing up. She found the mathematics of rum, to be precise. One drink made her feel good, two made the barbed wire on the compound walls fade, and four drinks made all the lizards and maimed children and strange men in the house just slip away for hours and hours.

A Church Wednesday Night Meal in Mangla, West Pakistan
Pictures courtesy Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved

We never saw Mom drink, though. We were in bed every night by seven p.m. We never saw her drink and we never saw our father much at all. For the two years we lived in Pakistan, our father kept twelve-hour work days and so our paths did not cross for two years, except on the occasional family shopping outing. During those two years was the only time we had allowances and every few weeks, the family would venture to the compound’s shopping area where we could find a Pakistani furniture store, a European-style restaurant complete with a dessert cart filled with petit-fours, and a toy store, where we were happy to spend our allowances, most often on comic books since there were no Saturday morning cartoons. We had no television at all in our home there, in fact, so by the time we left after two years, we had amassed more than three hundred Archie, Superman and Richie Rich comic books and often participated in a robust trading circle with other neighborhood children. Once, though, we all three saved our allowance to buy a pale blue scooter that we could see high up on a corner shelf in the toy store. We visited that store several times without buying any new toys or comics, simply to be sure no other children had purchased that little scooter high up in the corner. We were struggling not to run or pull on our father’s hand to get to the store when the day for purchase finally arrived. Together, the three of us proudly plunked down our rupees onto the counter and watched, holding our breath, as the store owner pulled the scooter down and dusted it off. When he rolled it around the corner of the counter, however, to present that blue beauty to us, my older brother and I realized that the scooter, heretofore only viewed from afar, was too small for either of us. Only our little sister would be able to enjoy it. There was no going back, however. The store owner was beaming at having sold the toy that had taken up his store’s top shelf for months and our father would have been too embarrassed to halt the purchase. Typical of our relationship, though, my brother and I did not commiserate; we were silent as our feet dragged on the dusty road going home. Our sister stayed on the sidewalks with the scooter but I do not remember her using it very often after that, which only added to our disappointment.

Other than the occasional shopping trip, church and the bowling alley, we did not see our father. Even at those venues, we did not interact with him. Our understanding was that, like the other engineers who worked long hours building that dam, our father was excused from many family activities. When we did participate as a family, like at the bowling alley, the children went off unsupervised mostly, so we still didn’t see our parents unless we were causing a problem. Dad was apparently a minor celebrity at the bowling alley, though, often bowling perfect or near perfect games. Our time there consisted of ordering tuna fish sandwiches and zombies to drink at the adjacent grill and watching, fascinated, as the Pakistani workers reset the pins after each throw of the ball. No automated pin replacement there.

Though I was very young, I remember a lot about when my Father was helping in the beginning years to build Mangla Dam in West Pakistan, now Pakistan (as opposed to East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.) Most of our old photos from that time, however, are lost. I do remember that strange juxtaposition of Western and Pakistani. We attended a British school where I learned some Urdu and to add an “e” in the middle of judgment, (i.e., British spelling) a bowling alley and we enjoyed a wonderful series of public pools. We also explored some historic sites and went to school with children from all over the world, including Pakistan. (See Wikipedia, Mangla Dam and Mangla Dam Memories on Facebook.)

Otherwise, the three of us were on our own outside of school hours. The compound was large with an American side and a European side and a bus that drove around both sides all day. On any particularly boring day, the three of us would simply climb onto the old, repainted school bus and ride down all the streets of both sides of the compound, cooled by the hot wind coming through the open windows and fascinated by what our neighbors might be up to that day. I am still amazed that we were simply allowed to wander at five, six and seven years old. In Pakistan.

The entire adventure seemed a contradiction in terms, characterized for me by the fact that we lived in a compound surrounded by a stone wall with barbed wire and cut glass on the top but where the gates were always open and unguarded.

There was an open gate at the back of our own yard, in fact, and from it, we could see a small village where, we were told, women slapped cow dung onto the walls of the homes to dry to be later used as fuel for the fire. Every day, we could hear the calls to worship; they were haunting and beautiful, a call to an Islamic understanding of God that serenaded us as we walked to our Christian church potluck supper. For some of the year, the dust on the side of the road was a fine and deep silt and we would slide our feet through it as if it were snow; other times, during monsoon season, there seemed to be nothing that was dry.

Unsupervised. In Pakistan. At age 7.

That we were largely unsupervised outside of school hours made sense to someone I guess. Until the injuries began. First, my five-year-old sister got stitches trying to climb up a ladder to dive off of the high dive at the crowded community pool. Then, I nearly drowned just a few feet from my mother in the same pool; another mother noticed me struggling to keep my head above water and grabbed me. Mom was busy chatting. There was a broken arm, then stitches for me. Twice. This time, however, neglect was not the problem. I had become the target of choice for my older brother who gleefully ran his bicycle into mine, causing the pedal to tear into the fleshy part of my lower right leg, leaving white tissue oozing down my shin. He later threw a cutting board at me, just missing my eye socket but also requiring stitches. We may never know if another parent intervened or if our father walking into the living room to see our mother kissing the neighbor, but there came a day when Dad sat all three of us down on the edge of a bed in our shared bedroom to tell us our mother was ill and would be “going away” for six months or more. It had been decided we three would wait for her there, in Pakistan.

That’s when the wailing began. Paid mourners could not have been louder or more dramatic. At the time, we were terrified, but we were also resolute, huddled together eyeing that dark and dangerous chasm that seemed to open up before us. We did not know this man. No way were we letting Mom go quietly. We did not stop crying until Dad returned to the room hours later to tell us we were all going home.

Our relief was short-lived, though; once my father dragged Mom away from that motel, we did not see or hear from our parents for months and months. The timeline is vague for me but I remember attending three schools in second grade. So, once we were settled in my grandparents’ two-bedroom duplex in Waynesville, I took to running away, searching for her. From school, from my grandparents’ home, even from church services, I escaped, watching for unsupervised moments and unlocked doors, taking advantage of crowds and distracted adults, always looking for my mother.

Grandma Ree and Grandpa George. Good people who loved fiercely.
Pictures courtesy of Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved.

More than once, because Grandma Ree was exasperated, I was simply allowed to stay home from school on my grandfather’s day off and we watched cartoons and ate Oreos while he ironed the work shirts he wore driving trucks. Grandpa George seemed to me to be the only adult who was not angry with me; I remain convinced that was because he understood my quest.

Once, after I’d run away from school, the school principal found me. He and a teacher picked me up in a car after they’d driven all over that little town looking for this wayward seven-year-old.

“There, there,” he said, offering me a piece of gum in a green wrapper folded around shiny foil, very much a treat then. Defeated for the moment, I cooperated and got into the old car, only because I’d been wandering for hours and it was getting dark. Offering me a stick of gum, though? Did the adults around me really think that would fix this? I remember looking at him as if he were clueless. It would be years later, though, before I could be proud of that seven-year-old slapping that piece of gum from the principal’s hand in the back of that car, and even longer before I could appreciate the courage it had taken for the three of us to stand up to our father.

We all paid a price, though; we would never have back the mother we had known. When we saw her again, she was subdued, defeated. She had endured shame, therapy, even, we were told later, shock treatments, all because her dream was not his dream. She was not unlike many women of her day, praised for obedience like a child. For the rest of his life, though, my father was on notice. I’m not certain to this day that we accomplished much, but our little rebellion was uncharacteristic of us and I am proud to be able to look back and say that those three little souls refused to go quietly into the darkness.

Boots in the Trunk

Some of the greatest moments in life, I believe, are when you find out you are not the only one who does “that.” You’re not the only kid in class who likes to blow bubbles in her chocolate milk or the only student who questions why you should wear a dress to school on picture day when you hate wearing dresses and no one ever sees your dress because you’re always in the back row for pictures. Once, on a phone interview for a job in Florida, I mentioned that most of my friends “up here in the north” seemed to believe that living in colder climates builds character and people who want to live in warmer places are just lazy. The employer simply said, “Come on down; you’ll find plenty of hardworking folks here; they just happen to like burying their toes in the warm sand.” I remember thinking, “I’ve found my people.”

One of my most affirming moments occurred a few years ago while watching a movie that was set in southern California. A woman was sitting in heavy Los Angeles traffic on her way to work when the road began to shake and seemed to begin rolling. Her first response, once all the motion ceased, was to pop open her trunk and change from her fashionable black pumps into a pair of hiking boots. She evidently kept in her trunk for just such an emergency, or at least the character did. She must have known she’d likely have to walk through streets filled with debris, and the boots were just one of the survival tactics she’d either learned firsthand or been taught. She was prepared.

I remember nothing else now about the movie except that I wondered if she also kept some water and maybe a first aid kit and snacks in her trunk. What I loved was that she wasn’t some hiker out on the Appalachian Trail for weeks; the character must have been created by someone familiar with earthquakes who understood that we never know when or where we’ll need to run for our lives. It would be several years later before I would learn that boots in the trunk was a common response for survivors of trauma and abuse. I don’t know if the woman in the movie was supposed to have grown up with a scoutmaster for a father, or if she was a trauma survivor, but she embraced the boots in the trunk. She didn’t think it was weird.

Boots in the trunk, a “go” bag by the bed…

I was a teen when I realized not everyone slept with a “go bag” next to the bed in case a speedy escape became necessary in the middle of the night. After five decades of being teased by others for it, though, I was especially grateful to finally learn that lots of other trauma survivors sleep with shoes under the bed, a wallet or purse with meds, money and that handy Swiss Army knife by the bed, so that in an emergency, they do not waste precious survival and escape time locating footwear or a flashlight. Finally, I could stop being embarrassed that I preferred to sleep in something I knew I could wear outdoors in case of a fire or an earthquake or tornado. I could stop hiding the fact that I think about not wanting to have to run into the dark barefoot and thus be even more vulnerable in a crisis. My “go bag” has been a reasonable and healthy response to the lessons of my childhood where I was taught to be afraid of the dark and it is also a reflection of a strong instinct to survive. Instead of being embarrassed that I startled so easily, I became proud of my Swiss Army knife and I became grateful for those survival instincts. Plenty of children do not get out.

Escape Artists

I know some people who were abused or whose childhood was traumatic seek vengeance and long to hurt the one hurting them, and even hurt others in an attempt to ease their own pain, but my instinct has always been to escape. When my siblings and I were young, they seemed unaware that following the rules meant escaping the belt or the hair brush. As we grew older and taller, I knew to stay well away from my parents’ and even my siblings’ arguments because they so easily slid into the violent responses we’d seen modeled. I mostly escaped broken bones and stitches by escaping as a child and teen. Later, I applied the same tactics to job losses and failures and broken relationships because I knew when to escape, and how to – most of the time – make an exit before the explosions.

Because I could escape, none of their crazy dust landed on me. I know without a doubt that is one reason I survived and got this far. Too many children who grew up like we did never get very far from the crazy, never get too many steps out the door. Maybe that is because they had not managed to stay arm’s lengths away as children and teens; maybe their scars left them less equipped to walk away when they were old enough; maybe their backpacks were just too heavy to carry another step.

Sadly, few if any adults were able back then to recognize this behavior as a survival technique and, thus, necessary. I once attended a junior high church retreat. Our parents sent us away to every camp and retreat that was offered. My brother and sister hated those camps. In contrast, I eagerly grabbed a bag and hopped into whatever car was taking us away from whatever house we were living in at the time. At that particular junior high retreat, though, the girls’ leader accused me of being like a “wolf.” Because I was being quiet, she accused me of preparing to “pounce, to attack,” when the opportunity arrived. I’m really not sure what kind of attack she thought I was planning. I remember just staring at her while she accused me of cooperating with some kind of evil. She was only half wrong, though, which meant, of course, that she was half right. I wasn’t preparing to pounce, though; I was preparing to escape, trying to figure out when that might be necessary. Sadly, it felt like escape was too often necessary and, after a while, became a way of life.

I wasn’t preparing to pounce, though; I was preparing to escape. Sadly, it felt like escape was too often necessary and, after a while, became a way of life. Photo, 1964.

A counselor once asked me how I had survived the turmoil, upheaval, illnesses and chaos of my home. Since I’d already told her about how often I had simply walked away, I was confused. I know now she wanted me to relate to her how I knew when to get the hell away from my mom or dad or brother or sister or myriad boyfriends. The fact is, in the beginning, I became a girl scout. Well, actually a boy scout. Okay, both. Being a “girl scout” meant being good. Being good meant usually no one noticed me and, if I followed the rules, usually no one would hit me. I would certainly never give them a reason to hit me.

Being a “boy scout” meant being prepared. Since we had moved so many times before I was sixteen, it wasn’t like we didn’t have practice packing. I kept my bag and shoes by the bed because they kept me feeling like I had some power to escape if I needed. I knew when to leave because I was what counselors called “hypervigilant.” I watched folks around me like a hawk. That was what concerned the youth leader at the junior high retreat; she did not recognize the behavior as a survival tactic developed over time in response to threats; it was somehow easier for her to imagine a teen as evil than to consider one of the parents in the church might be a predator, I guess.

Live Like a Refugee

The more I worked to find healing over the years after I finally escaped my family home, the more I found like-minded souls who also seemed to move about more than others. My first husband and I were both nomads when we met. “You Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee” by Tom Petty was the soundtrack of both of our lives at the time. We had both been traveling quite a bit when we separately landed in a writing class and met; even nomads and escape artists settle down for the odd semester. By then, we’d both traveled all over the US and overseas and had both served in the military. We decided to settle down together, to create an alliance, to have each others’ backs; we might have imagined at the time that we’d be more settled, but we found then there were some things about being nomads we still liked and so we promptly moved to California, then to Japan, then to Tennessee, anywhere but where we grew up. So much for no longer being refugees.

Photos by Jodi McCullah. All rights reserved.

Changing Tactics

There came a time, however, when I no longer had the luxury of escape, of running, because our two sons meant there were others I needed to protect and escaping might mean leaving them behind and that was not going to happen. Needing to protect others complicated escape plans, for sure. We taught our boys never to climb up a play structure if they could not make it down without help, to meet up at the back gate if there was ever a fire and we would not let them sleep upstairs until they were big enough to climb out a second story window onto a porch roof and then jump down to safety. Protecting them changed everything. I’d explain it by talking about driving over the huge bridges spanning the Ohio and Missississippi Rivers. We had to drive over both of them at the confluence of the rivers near Cairo, Illinois, every time we went north. Driving over those bridges was frightening enough for me personally but became hellish when I had children and their safety became most important. For myself, to calm my fears as I drove into the monstrous structures crossing those wide and churning rivers, I had developed a bridge survival plan in case the car somehow went into the water: wait for the car to fill up, open the window to swim up and then try to float on the current until I could get to land. With two small children, however, that plan would no longer work. Suddenly, I would need to take two precious little persons with me through that drill and, well, there was not a good time to try to talk to them about that plan and besides, it would most assuredly traumatize them so I prayed extra hard instead that the bridge engineers had done their jobs well and other drivers would keep their distances as we crossed over those bridges.

I still slept with my shoes next to the bed AND I taught my boys as much as possible about safety, but the reality was that escape to survive was no longer always an option. I often still “see death everywhere” as my ex-husband used to say, meaning I am one of those safety-conscious folks that drive some folks crazy. Loving children has helped me learn to stay connected rather than seek escape, though, to find trustworthy people, to ask for help and to allow trustworthy others to help me. Over the years there were a number of folks who definitely helped me when I needed it; reminding myself of their support and encouragement has helped me trust that I can find others and allow them to help, too, if necessary. I needed to learn to choose relationships with trustworthy people and to develop alliances, to stop just trying to survive. I needed to open myself to the possibility that there might be more.

Getting older helped: I started wearing more sensible shoes all the time so boots in the car weren’t major safety concerns anymore!

Why, though?

Watching my responses over the years, though, I know, has perhaps caused some folks who know me to think I’m just paranoid or hypersensitive for no good reason. This blog is, in part, an attempt to explain that behavior to those who do not understand. Writing about what has been in that backpack for so long is also for my tribe, for all those other folks who also were awakened in the night by a touch that taught us to be afraid of touch. We share this because we know “just in case” has come before.

I still struggle to say I am proud of all of this. I wish we were still innocents. I wish we did not know what we know. I wish we had different stories to tell. The things we feared, though, were real for us and we did not have the luxury of going through a day without being hypervigilant, without knowing firsthand that sometimes the unthinkable does happen. Sometimes, for some people, the darkness IS dangerous. To survive then, sometimes you do what you gotta do for the time being and, once it’s safer, you can work on growing, healing and learning other ways to take care of yourself. I am grateful, then, for all of you with boots in your car and a pack slung over your shoulder. Maybe it wasn’t always pretty, but we made it.

Because we were prepared, and we escaped, we can live into new possibilities; we can embrace the reality that the frightening place we came from is not all there is out there. (Photo by Jodi McCullah, 2023. All rights reserved.)

As I was writing this, I wondered why the photo below spoke to me and now I realize it’s because what’s around that corner in Venice promises to be beautful and hopeful and exciting. I celebrate all those survival skills, including learning over time that we will find what we need, AND learning to let ourselves ask for and accept help. Good news: there ARE others who do “that.” We are not alone and there are those who love us anyway. Embrace your backpack then or your boots until you don’t need them, then thank them for getting you this far and go see what’s around that next corner! You’ve got this!

Venice, Italy, 2022, photo by Jodi McCullah. All rights reserved.

Leave me a comment: what was in your survival kit?

What Tolstoy Said….

All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1878

People who are happy are not paying attention. And probably stupid.
Me, 2005 in a seminary class (Yeah, I’m not proud of that.)

We all learn lessons growing up. Some friends tell me today about learning how to hold their own in a fist fight or how to plait hair or how to make a decent pie crust. Those tend to be the friends whose families do not match the same clinical dysfunction criteria mine did. Warning: some of this post might be triggering for readers. Take care of yourself, please.

Little sister, older brother and me in happier times. Circa 1962.

If you looked at my family tree, you’d see the roots are severed. I am grateful, though, that the tree trunk has survived and flowered nonetheless. While I have been cut off from my family of origin for more than a decade, I am so very grateful for my husband, my sons, my granddaughter and my husband’s large extended family. I do not lack for people who care about me; what I was not able to produce for some time, though, was a witness to much of my life before the break with my parents, siblings and extended family. I lacked someone who could pick me out of the class photo (usually one of the taller kids on the back row). Missing was anyone who knew I didn’t usually eat my birthday cake, only the icing, or that I read every biography and autobiography in my elementary school library and that I grieved when I finished books because, for the few hours when I was reading, I was able to wander around in another space and time – one that was not mine. I lacked anyone who could give a witness to any of the reasons why I thought for so long that happy people were not paying attention to the pain in life.

I was surprised to find out how many of my friends thought I was an only child; *they* were surprised to see these pictures of me with siblings.

Can I get a witness?

When asked to describe my family as I was growing up, I’d explain: you could be lying on the braided rug in the living room, devastated, distraught, lost, and sobbing, and every member of my family would step around you at best. Or, at worst, they would chastize you for your selfishness: just look how you are upsetting everyone else by your pain! Not only did we NOT hold onto one another in times of crisis or pain, we denied one another’s right to be in pain. “How long you gonna be a victim?” was what was asked of me by a family member after she’d heard I was in counseling for being assaulted as a teen. I was in my early twenties. I had just remembered the assault that I had blocked out of my consciousness for several years because it was just too painful to remember. I had only just begun counseling and I felt her rebuke keenly. There was evidently no place in our family for that. She, a woman thirty years older and presumably three decades wiser, could not cotton my taking any time to understand and come to terms with what had happened to me. Today, thanks to counselors and learning about trauma, I would be able to put my hand on her arm and reassure her that she would never need to listen to my struggles. I would also explain to her that recovering from trauma requires some reflection, though, and some help understanding what happened and more than a little work to heal. I would assure her I certainly did my part to finish that work – to come home from the journey someone else started me on. I would also plan to be there for her if she ever felt like she could share her own pain.

Sadly, family breaks are more common in my family than not, though, so, when the relationship with my mother’s family was severed, our entire nuclear family was already split from Dad’s people. As an adult, I started a genealogical search only to find I had a great-grandmother living about an hour away by car until I was a teen whom I hadn’t known existed. I asked my parents at the time and was told “We didn’t like her very much.” Later, I found an old family photo with one woman’s face scratched out completely (and she had been sitting next to her twin brother in the photo!). What do you have to do, for goodness, to get completely scratched out of existence? Evidently, severing ties, splitting up was the response of choice for my people.

In the past few years, though, through the magic of the internet, I have been able to reunite with some folks from my childhood. While for some, that can be a hilarious trip down a bumpy old memory lane, for others of us, restablishing connections can be healing and grounding. As a sixty-something woman estranged from her entire family of birth for more than a decade, finding these old friends had been spurred by the need to find folks who could vouch for my previous life.

This, then, is a post about my friends from childhood and teen years reconnecting and discovering how little we knew about each other in spite of how close we thought we were.

I was always jealous of those who stayed close to their friends long after school; I believe now that most of my friendships were more akin to life boats in the midst of stormy seas. Survival was the goal, and perhaps we knew instinctively that two or three strands of rope were stronger than one, so we held onto one another. Once we found ourselves in new oceans, though, we grabbed onto new, different life connections, and let go of the old ones, not because we were inconsiderate or uncaring but out of necessity. No one had time or energy to look back; survival was the priority.

Puzzle Pieces

Trauma, though, can leave fragmented memories. One definition of trauma is that we remember all too well what we cannot forget but struggle to remember all the pieces in between – the rest of the story. I have long been embarrassed at being unable to remember large chunks of my life because I didn’t realize how large was the shadow of trauma and how it can so deeply darken the rest of our lives. The details, so many pieces, seem lost, scattered, in my case, all over the world like a favorite nesting toy. Through more than seventeen moves before I was old enough to leave home, curiously, I have somehow held onto most of a wooden nesting toy from Pakistan, where we lived when I was a child (stories for another post.) Some of the pieces are missing and others have been glued back together; today they serve as an apt metaphor for the struggle to repair and hold together memories of traumatic childhoods.

What’s left of a favorite wooden nesting toy I received when I was a child in Pakistan. We lived there when I seven. Parts of it are missing; they are, no doubt, scattered across the world.

Comparing Notes

Once we reconnected, my friends and I began comparing notes. One childhood friend thought I was an only child though I have two siblings and we are all just a year apart in age. One of us had grown up with an abusive father. She married four times before she got help and stopped getting herself into abusive relationships. Another lived with an older brother who we now realize was a sociopath. She had found not words for when, as a seven-year-old, he had cheated, stole and tried to be sexual with her. Weren’t there rules about that?

That no adult saw all of this meant it continued, and by the time she was eight, he had run her over with a bike causing her to need stitches and hit her in the head with cutting board causing more stitches, and routinely touched her inappropriately. “Just a rowdy boy, right? Just a kid who doesn’t like to lose, wasn’t he? He’ll grow out of that, we are certain.” She grew up searching for an adult – any adult – around her to be the adult and a witness to what she was experiencing. She knows now that her brother simply passed along his own pain.

Healing began when a counselor said, “You were not imagining this. You are hurt, angry because you were betrayed by parents who were supposed to take are of you. You have those feelings because you have a brain and eyes to see. You doubted yourself and what you saw and experienced because you were raised by parents who were overwhelmed by their own pain and shame and guilt; they had nothing to offer you for yours.” A teen aged girl, she wanted her mother to teach her to curl her hair; instead, she watched her mother threaten to cut herself.

While it was happening, though, none of us “knew.” As teens in the late 60’s and early 70’s, we braved new styles together: we traded bell bottoms and hip huggers and together we tried cheap strawberry wine behind the concession stand at the drive-in movies, but we never shared about home. We didn’t “know” even though we saw each other every day at school, ate lunches together, joined cheer club together, and moved around in a pack as if we were attached to each other by velcro. We were all taken aback when we collectively realized that none of us, though fast friends throughout junior high and high school, had ever visited the others’ homes. No sleepovers. No parties together. None of us had ever even met the others’ parents. We didn’t know why, but we all somehow understood one another. Somehow we saw in each other kindred, if broken, spirits, and we found respite in our time together.

High School Dance 1973
We didn’t know how much we didn’t know.

Today, as the three of us somewhat gingerly share our memories, fragments and misunderstandings are beginning to make sense to us. Counselors and social scientists tell us now that we compartmentalised our lives, partly out of shame, partly to protect the others. We never spoke of life at home or after school; we kept those separate. In our defense, we didn’t often know what was going on in our homes wasn’t going on in everyone’s homes. Part of the power of dysfunction is that it simply seems like “that’s how it’s done, so why are you whining?” Or worse, we feared that the pain and chaos and constant crisis of our homes was somehow our own faults and if we’d only be better daughters….

Dysfunction, though, happens in shadows and darkness and thrives on secrecy.

We know now that each of us fought to get out of that darkness once we left those homes and we celebrate our individual efforts to keep our own lives in the light.

“The light came into the world, and people loved darkness more than the light, for their actions are evil. All who do wicked things hate the light for fear their actions will be exposed to the light.”

John 3:19b-20 CEB

What do we do differently?

We learned to encourage the children in our lives because each of us could remember at least one person who had encouraged us. Never underestimate the power of encouraging a child or teen; you may well be the only encouragement they receive.

We refuse to keep secrets. We ask tougher questions. When we see someone sobbing, we approach them gently and ask what we can do. If they don’t know or can’t answer, we sit down with them and wait until they are calmer. We hold sacred space for our own pain and for theirs.

One of the three of us refuses, even when facing family verbal and emotional abuse herself, to walk away completely herself because of a child in the extended family; she doesn’t want the child to feel alone. She knows how important it is for someone to say, “I see you. I see what happened. I see how confusing it must be.”

One of us worked hard to figure out why she kept getting herself into abusive relationships over the years and now she is able to choose healthier relationships and she doesn’t need to hide that relationship from us.

None of our parents paid any attention to where we went or with whom, so we each had resolved to offer our children a healthier childhood, making sure their friends knew us and we knew the parents of their friends.

We also grieve those who did not make it; each of us has family members still hurting, still in the darkness, unable for a variety of reasons to find their way out. We are grateful and we do not take our own growth for granted.

Okay, sharing isn’t always “nice,” but it IS healing.

The tagline on this blog is “Sharing is nice.” That is my witness. Sharing is difficult. Sharing is scary. Sharing is necessary. Sharing is essential. Sharing is healing. Sharing is powerful.

The good news is that we all found healing because we shared. There’s help out there and hope and healing and lots of folks who are called to listen and trained to help us when we share. Make sure you find someone who is trained and, if you don’t feel like you are being heard or they are helping, find someone else.

Several years after my aunt’s rebuke and her impatience with my healing process, I shared with a female friend at church. Sharing with the counselor had helped but the counselor wisely encouraged me to share with a friend. Me sharing, the counselor explained, can also create that sacred space where others find healing, too. That is the power of sharing. Choose someone safe, she said, but share. When we share safely, we create a safe place for ourselves and often for others, a place of healing. Amazingly, pain shared safely dissipates and loses its power over us.

Ask before you share with anyone other than a professional. Be aware that your trauma might trigger theirs. Always ask permission but ask and keep asking until you find someone to listen.

I did share and my friend was lovely and listened and the moment felt healing. The next day, though, her husband dropped by and stunned me when he said, “Mary told me what you told her.” I felt betrayed. How had Mary not known that I would not want others, especially men, to know? How dare she share my story? It was not hers to share.

“You just need to get over it,” he demanded. And suddently there I was again, back home, back where we keep our pain and illness in the dark, back where we keep secrets. I felt my pain rise up and choke me.

This time, however, I was different. This time it was the thought of going back into the darkness that had turned my stomach. “As it happens,” I told him, trying not to vomit, “healing apparently will only happen if I walk through the memory. They tell me I have to share to get well, so I’m gonna.” I was on the verge of apologizing to him for sharing with his wife because it had upset him so much when suddenly he sat down hard and started sobbing. Then he began his own sharing. He’d never talked about being a fighter pilot in VietNam and he desperately needed to tell someone. I don’t remember much of what he shared; what I do remember was being amazed that holding my own space for healing had created space for him. In that moment, he felt safe, too, and he stepped into that space for just a bit. We never talked again about his trauma or mine. Perhaps sharing helped him enough; perhaps he went on to seek more help because he, too, had seen the power of sharing.

Stepping out of the squirrel cage….

Mostly, the friends I reconnected with and I had individually found that, in an unexamined life, pain just gets passed down the line, generation to generation. We all were recipients of pain passed along, never knowing why or where it originated. The effects of trauma will keep rolling back around from generation to generation if no one stops long enough to find some healing and try to get out of that squirrel cage of crazy. Just ignoring the pain, or worse, denying its existence, guarantees the next generation will be expected to hold it, too, and they often have no idea the why or the where of that family trauma.

We may not have been able to protect our own children as well as we might have liked but it was not from lack of trying and we console ourselves by remembering that, because we have reflected, educated ourselves about trauma, shared with counselors, written and prayed, we have at least helped our children to get out of that damn cage. We may have done it clumsily, we may all be still rolling sometimes out of control on the floor after hurtling ourselves out of the cage, but we’re clear. We can take a breath. We can stop, stand back and reflect on that still-spinning wheel and maybe even pray for the family members still running on it. Because we are out, though, because we are talking, because we won’t hide any more, we have a fighting chance to NOT pass that trauma and dysfunction on down the line.

For a recent, well-done example of how trauma not shared can affect us and those around us, consider Tom Hanks’ movie, “A Man Called Otto,” or the book it’s based on, “A Man Called Ove,” by Fredrik Backman.

Category: dysfunction