A memoir--a fatal wounding

As my older sister and only sibling Lynda and I were growing up, it was always my mother who tried to get her to help or to be kind to me. Once Lynda babysat for me while our parents went out to dinner. Since mom usually cooked meat and three every night, Lynda and I were so excited about having chicken pot pies for our dinner that night. As she took them out of the oven, one slid off the cookie sheet onto the kitchen floor and was ruined. Lynda said to me, “I dropped your pot pie.” And the funny thing was that I believed her.

Then there was the time that my mom asked Lynda to give me a home permanent. My hair was fine and straight, and curly hair was in style in the late 50s. Both mom and Lynda had naturally curly, wavy hair. Apparently, Lynda left the rods and solution in too long, and the home permanent fried my poor hair into permanent frizzes. My hair was ruined, but nothing could be done, but for me to endure for weeks/months to come. Lynda didn’t say nor act as if she were the least bit sorry.

I remember two incidents where my sister accused me of stealing from her--once when I was in middle school, she tattled to mom and dad that I had stolen an ink pen from her. Still later after she married in college at age 20, I, at 16, went to visit her for a few days. As I was leaving to catch the bus home, her husband had me open up my suitcase, saying that I was stealing the record albums in my suitcase (that my sister had actually loaned me). I was shocked and embarrassed and hurt. Later, I realized that Lynda had told him that I was a thief.

Then there were my eyebrows, which when I was in middle school had begun to grow across the bridge of my nose. One night at the dinner table, my mother asked my sister if she would show me how to pluck them properly. To which Lynda responded that it didn’t matter if I plucked my eyebrows or not, that I “was so ugly that plucking would not help me.”

Here I am in early high school, swimming in a local lake, sans hairstyle, sans makeup, etc. 

What I don’t recall is my parents’ reaction to her hurtful remark. I don’t remember that they said or did anything. I envision silence around the table, almost as if they agreed with her assessment of my looks. The sad thing was that I believed her.

Still later at a country club dance when I was a freshman in high school and my sister a freshman in college, we were both dressed to the 9s for the dance. A young man came to our table where I sat with my parents (Lynda was dancing, and I so wanted to dance.), and he said, “Your other daughter is so pretty.” Then he looked at me and said, “Ooopps!”

You see my sister Lynda looked like my pretty mother, and I--I looked like my father’s family, whom by then my mother decidedly did not like and had voiced her dislike of them quite often. She also thought that the Drawdy women were not pretty women.

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Here's a picture of me at a dance as a freshman in college--circa 1967. I now disagree with my mother: The Drawdy women are pretty women!

The question remains:  Why didn’t my parents--my mother especially--protect me from such blatant cruelty?  Why didn’t she take me aside and tell me that she thought I was pretty? I do not remember her ever contradicting Lynda’s nor the young man's hurtful remarks. I do not remember my mother ever telling me that I was pretty.

Trust the randomness

I've come to realize that I've had way too much fear in my life. That I have been too fearful. Too fearful about a lot of things--about most things. And this fear had made me into a certain kind of person. A person who tried to control/manage/plan too much of her life.

At this point in my life--64 years old--I want to fear nothing. Absolutely nothing--especially not old age, illness, or death. I want to live one day at a time without fear. To me, it's not so much about courage as it's about Trust. I want to let go of the fear and replace it with trust. I want to let go of the illusion of control, make fewer plans each day, and trust the daily flow of my life. Trust that that flow is Divine. And I want to listen to/hear Her voice more often.

Not too long ago, my teenaged students began to repeat a new slang phrase that, I guess, their generation had come up with. They would say often and with conviction, "That's random." According to them, most everything was "random." Immediately, something deep down inside of me objected to that concept.

Where did they get that phrase from and are they still saying it? Is it somehow connected to a movie, to technology or to the computer or to smart phones in particular? Is it one of those slang expressions, like "That's cool!" that my generation came up with, that is here to stay. I hope not. I do not like it. It irks me!

Now as you already know, the word random means "having no specific pattern, purpose, or objective." The teens said it so much about every and any thing--so much so that it began to come across as if they thought/felt that all of life was "random" or without purpose or meaning. Yes, that's what bothered me about that slang expression. It felt to me as if the teens began coming across as even more apathetic than usual because everything to them seemed "random" or with purpose. At times, they would even emphasize it, "That's so random."

I have come to believe not in life's randomness but rather in its synchronicity. I choose to believe that things happen for a reason--all things--the little and the big ones and all those inbetween ones--if we could only tune in to and trust what life is trying to tell us.

To me the word synchronicity means, "a coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related." If we believe that things happen for a reason, we have a different attitude toward life than if we believe that things happen randomly. We respect life more. We respect ourselves and others more. We respect and trust life more.

Trusting the process/the flow of life is so important in our lives today. Trust is more important than ever since things seem more random than ever, perhaps because of technology, such as facebook and smart phones and streaming movies and tv programs, etc.

(Now facebook seems to be the ultimate in randomness. I used to think that I was supposed to read all of the news feed every time I went to facebook. Well, anyone who has 500 "friends" or more knows that that doesn't work or that it could make you go crazy trying to keep up. So now even on facebook, I have to trust the randomness of my seeing what I am supposed to see.)

The expression "That's random" feels so hopeless to me. I choose to believe that this beautiful spider's web reflecting off the morning sunlight outside my window here in front of my desk is not random. But that it is there to teach me something about life. If only to allow me to slow down and to admire its design. If only to remind me of that Walt Whitman poem called "A Noiseless Patient Spider" so that I may reread it.  If only to remind me of the connectivness of all things in our lives. Or of how fast life can get complicated. Or to remind me of how quickly all that we have built can be swept away.

I choose to believe that it is not a random spider's web. I choose to believe that nothing in God's universe is random.

Another memoir--my beginnings

Some people say that before you are born, you get to choose your family. It’s difficult for me to buy this idea because my family of birth had no warmth, no lightness nor laughter in it. Why would I choose such a tense, unhappy environment to grow up in?

(Later in my life when we would go visit my parents for holidays, my second husband would call it going to the house of "doom and gloom." He was right about that, and I can not yet see how my being born into this family helped anyone, least of all me. Maybe I was some small comfort to my parents.)

Perhaps we were in heaven and God said to us, “Who will be born into this family?” And we all could see what it would entail, and everyone of us stood mute. And finally I, with my gift for martyrdom, sighed and said, “I will go.”

Before I was born, there was already tension between my parents. While I was still in the womb, I heard them arguing.  But of course, I was pulled out of my mother’s womb--a warm, safe place--into the chaos of my family, into the darkness of a damaged family, into a family that would never know me.

Later when I was in my 50s and went to a soul reader, she told me that we all come to earth with spirit guides, and then when they are no longer needed, they leave us. She said that my spirit guide was still with me, had never left me!  I was glad to hear that, for I still felt that I needed guidance and protection.

Everyday, I can still strongly feel the little girl Laura within me, and I want to help her feel safe and confident enough to finally grow up and to let go of the past and the spirit guide and to become her own guide. When I get there, perhaps I will no longer be pretending to be grown up!

This is the only family portrait that we had taken--the only picture we have of the four of us. Circa 1958, the interesting thing about this portrait is that the photographer had set me up on a box, so that it appears that at nine years old, I am as tall as my 6' 2" father and my 5' 5" mother (My mother must have been sitting on a box, too!), but you can see from where our waists are in comparison to my father's that mom and I are elevated. Lynda and I were 9 and 13, and we were wearing our new blue poodle skirts!

As far as the four elements go, my father was fire, my mother was water, my sister is also water. And I, I am earth and air.

I choose fire for my father because of his rageful temper. Even when I was the littlest girl, he would lose his patience with me over the littlest things, like helping me with my math homework. He is fire because fire is strong and takes control; it wants to be in charge, and that’s my father to a "t." He wanted to protect and control his wive and daughters. Being an electrical engineer, he thought that he could solve any problem or fix anything, even his family. I imagine that on the job, he came across as self-assured and self-confident, but at home, he was a tyrant.

Once my Uncle Joe, my mother's brother, came to our house for a visit when my sister and I were quite young. I don't know what happened, but in a fiery rage, my father told him never to come back, and he never did. My only memories of Uncle Joe were through a couple pictures, a few postcards, and some art work that he drew--a lovely sailing ship named the Lynda-Laura. Now I wonder how could my mother not see her only brother and sibling for the rest of her life? And why were Lynda and I deprived of an uncle, who seemed to love us?

My father went off to work five days of the week for long hours. He told me that he was an engineer, so for the longest time, I thought that he drove a train! On weekends at home, he would play golf with his business associates or sit in his chair and watch sports on TV. He didn't really interact much with his daughters. There was talk of his having wanted a son. In his big family of origin and in our society at the time, word was that boys were better than girls, that men were superior to women, as were perhaps men who had sons. (Dad seemed to envy his older brother C.F. who had a son, who was himself the first son in the family [Dad was the second son], who was named after his father, and who seemed to be the apple of his mother's and his aunt's eye.)

When I was a little girl, I connected wholeheartedly with my mother. I thought that she protected me, and I thought that I should protect her. A typical 1950s, stay-at-home mother, my mom took care of us kids, kept a spotless house, and cooked dinner every night of the week. Being born and raised in watery Charleston, South Carolina, my mother was like water. One-sixth of the city of Charleston is water. My mother was often trying unsuccessfully to put out my father’s fire, which was miserable for her and for my father. But sometimes her arguing with him caused his fire to spread.

I was often afraid in my house, fearful that my parents would start fighting again. Fighting mostly at night and with my bedroom usually the one nearest to theirs, I would lie awake night after night, hearing their arguing. My mother's voice was soft and muffled. My father's voice was loud and verbally abusive, often bordering on violence. They would fight for years and years about the same things--something my dad had done or not done, about his big family, and later about my sister--never seeming to resolve anything. The next morning the fighting was never mentioned as if it had never happened. That's the way things were in my family. Hush, hush--keep the secrets. But these secrets were nearly killing me.

So my mother was the water element, which is sensitive to a fault. Trust is a big need of the water element, and my mother spent her life looking for someone whom she could trust. For a while, she trusted me, but eventually, I had to let her down, too. So emotional is the water element that the simplest things can get blown out of proportion into big dramatic scenes, which happened often in our home. The water element does not like fire nor air, which eventually caused my mother to alternately boil and freeze.

Like my mother, my sister is also water--though one is salt water and the other is fresh water. My sister was also born in Charleston, South Carolina, which is bordered on its two opposite sides by two tidal rivers, the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. Like the two rivers, my sister Lynda and my mother seemed to be always competing with each other. Was Lynda somehow trying to win my dad's love, approval and affirmation? She did not know that he did not have those things to give.

Charleston is known for its thunder storms and hurricanes. Hurricane Hugo in 1989 was a major threat to the city and its coastal lands. That's about the same year that a major upheaval occurred between Lynda and my parents and me. And so the home of my family had been built on shifting sands and unstable grounds, filled with storms and even hurricanes at times, that threatened to tear us apart, and eventually did.

I, too, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but I never connected to that city. My family had moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, ere I was four years old, and Chattanooga chose me for hers. I am red earth and spring-green grass and trees and mountains and fresh blue air. I love the outdoors, especially the mountains. Because we moved around as I was growing up, I learned to carry my house on my back. I became a turtle. Legend has it that the turtle dove to the bottom of the seas, scooped up some dirt onto its back, and swam up through the seas to create land. I had learned early how fire and water can destroy earth and air, and I had begun to fight back in the only way I knew how, but it was nearly too late. I often felt the weight of the world--of my small world--on my back.

A memoir--forgiving the unforgivable, my sister

My older sister, and only sibling, Lynda, who had as much influence on me as each one of my parents, was like a hawthorn tree with pretty flowers, but more significant for me, were her thorns. Though she was, I never got the chance to see my sister as pretty.

The hawthorn’s thorns are really small razor-tipped branches, one to three inches long, that arise from other branches, or from its trunk.  My sister’s thorns definitely arose from her core. And what I remember most about her were her many barbs to my personhood, which cut to my very soul.

Folklore has it that the hawthorn tree was the source of Jesus’s crown of thorns. Through her many acts of crucifying me, Lynda helped to shape me into who I believed I was required to be--a martyr. It was from her that I picked up the habit of playing the victim later in my life and the habit of not feeling that people liked me.

She was three and a half years old when I was born into the family; she said that she wasn’t allowed to hold me when I was a baby. I imagine my mother sensing, even then, that she could do me harm.

Through all our years together, I do not remember my sister ever playing with me or talking to me or any feeling of love, acceptance, or validation from her.

The only childhood game that I remember playing with Lynda was “who could push whom off the bed” that I shared with her once I reached the age of two. The larger and older by nearly four years, she would always win that “game,” pushing, pushing, pushing me with her long strong legs until I fell hard onto the wooden floor.

All of her life, my sister Lynda pushed me away . . . fast forward about a dozen years, when Lynda went off to college at the University of Kentucky, Mom, Dad, and I drove her to her dorm on campus. I was 14 years old at the time, just starting high school that same month. We were all so proud of Lynda's going off to college! When I went up to hug her good-bye, she literally pushed me away. Stunned and deeply hurt, I walked to the car in a shock of confusion. Though there was usually little to no affection between us, there had been nothing between us that led to such complete rejection. But now I realize, that’s just it, there had been “nothing between us.”

My sister Lynda and me at ages 8 and 4. Isn't that a great Santa Clause?

Now go back to my being about three years old. I recall only one other childhood “game” that my sister Lynda and I played--but this one only once. It was after dinner, and to save on water and electricity, the two of us were in the bathtub together. As I said, I must have been about three years old, and Lynda was almost seven. We were playing in the lukewarm water as children are apt to do.

Suddenly in a playful tone, Lynda got my attention, “Laura, go under water and stay there until I tell you to come up!” “Okay.” As usual, I did what my big sister told me to do. As I scrunched down until my little head and face sunk below the surface of the soap-cloudy water, I could hear Lynda calling loudly to our parents, “Laura’s drowned!  Laura‘s drowned!”  I thought, “What a funny trick!”

Frantically our parents ran into the small yellow and white tiled bathroom, observing me still under the water. Then I ran out of breath and popped up, giggling, but I knew immediately from the looks on their faces that this game was not funny to them.  My father’s voice boomed, “What the hell are you girls up to in here!” and as usual, my mother began to cry.

Lynda and I were both instantly jerked out of the tub. I stared in confusion as my father took off his belt. We were spanked on our wet, naked butts that night. The tension felt suffocating to me; it made my heart hurt because I had disappointed my parents. We didn’t speak as we pulled our pajamas over our still stinging butts and climbed into bed, sleeping on our stomachs.

As was typical in my family, we never spoke of the incident. I now feel that my sister wanted to kill me that night. Since she couldn’t do it literally, she would do it another way--by spending the rest of our years together trying to drown the essence of who I was.

Magical nonthinking--technology--part III

Magical and amazing is the world wide web, and no doubt, it is so helpful in so many ways that I can't even begin to count or to know about. But I do know that it can also be dangerous, damaging, and a time- or life-suck. Some of the things that I mention in these next few posts could/should be incorporated into school curriculums.

But first a humorous story. Now remember that I am in my 60s, and I taught high school English for nearly 40 years. As you can imagine, I have seen a lot of things come and go in our society and in education in the last six decades. When the internet first came out so-to-speak, my initial contact with it was in school.  I remember thinking, "Well, this is too complicated to figure out (Remember we were writing out own programs back then!) so I'll just wait until it goes away!" Instead of it being a culture-changer, I thought that the internet was just another passing phase in our culture and in our education system!

But who could have seen its impact on our culture and who now can see the problems that it creates? Here's the overall problem: the internet came in so fast and got amazing so fast that we as a society have not had time to deal with its negative aspects. We intuit that there are things about it that disturb us, but the ride is going so fast that we hardly have time to think about it, much less to do something about it. We don't have the time, nor do we quite know how to get a handle on it.

  
As usual, my answer to the problems is education. We need to teach ourselves and our youth how to use technology wisely. Wouldn't it be great if Cheatham County would be one of the pioneers in this movement: to teach wisdom, proper safety and manners in the use of technology? My guess is that the more innovative school systems are already doing so.

First, allow me cover the dangerous part of technology: it is simply not safe to check, to talk, to answer, or to text on our phones while we are driving. (I don't even think that the blue tooth is safe if we are focusing on whom we are talking to and on what we are saying.) I am not perfect and have been guilty of doing these things myself. But now what I try to do is literally to throw my phone in the back seat when I get in the car. To emphasize to myself that I'm not even going to answer my phone while I drive. I am only going to focus on driving. And only use my phone when my car is stopped.

Last year, I blogged for some lawyers, and when doing research, I kept coming across news article after news article about distracted driving. Almost all of them had to do with using phones while driving, and most were really tragic stories. Lots of deaths and maiming of drivers, passengers, and other people on the road. Time and again, the authorities could tell that the driver was on the phone, had made a call or texted just seconds before the tragic wreck.

For our teenagers in middle and high school, showing them videos of these tragic accidents caused by using our phones while driving would be effective.  Pictures are powerful and impactful, staying with us much longer than words. But most of all, we parents, we adults, need to model for our young people our decision not to use our phones while we drive. And talk to them about why we are not using them.

One more note: our roads and interstates have gotten more crowded and more challenging to drive on. Most everyone seems to be in such a hurry and particularly irritable. Lots of people are communicating with their phones when driving; they are distracted. So it's even more important that we be driving defensively with hands free and minds focused. 

Ultimately, we parents are our children's and grandchildren's best teachers.  And children are learning really early about technology, so let's start them out on the right road to the safe use of smartphones.  Our children are watching us.

To be continued . . .

A memoir--Marge and Ken, my parents

My mother Mary Laura Marguerite Clark was like a lovely Southern magnolia tree, an ornamental tree of transcendent beauty and a sweet, light fragrance. Like the magnolia’s leaves, her hair was dark, shiny, and curly. Like the tree’s waxy flower, her face and hazel eyes betrayed little emotion.

Raised she was in the sadness, the darkness, the anger and hostility of drinking. Her father drank. Her mother left him, divorced him, and this in the 30s! Divorce--unheard of then. Shame--hush, hush--drinking and fighting and then the divorce--shame--hush, hush. Then more shame--her young brother Joe robbed a grocery store, was sent to the county jail. All of this made Margie more tense, uptight, inflexible, and unavailable.

But don’t talk, don’t tell about such things--keep those dark family secrets. Because Margie is a good girl--a good girl--with a dream of finding a good man to take care of her, to save her. Graduated from high school with a business diploma, she worked as a secretary in the Charleston, South Carolina, Naval Yard, where she met many soldier boys. It was World War II, and they were being shipped out everywhere. A dark haired beauty (often compared to Scarlet O’Hara), Margie had her innocent flirtations with many a young man and wrote many letters to them.

Margie was always slim like the tree's branches--reaching out to the bluest sky of all--to my father’s light blue eyes. She reached up for my father’s protection, for his tall protective illusion--protection from her father and her brother. From her past life.

Known for its strength and perseverance, her magnolia-like personality was growing like a tree, trying to attach its roots into the shifting South Carolina coastal sand. Its shallow roots didn't take hold, but its branches spread, attempting to create a veneer of shade and protection in the tropic heat of an already stormy life. But that magnolia was doomed to topple.

Another storm was coming.

Marge and Ken on their wedding day

My mother’s magnolia roots entwined with the roots of a tall South Carolina loblolly pine, my soldier and farm boy father, E. Kenneth Drawdy.  The second of nine children from a dirt poor family--five boys and four girls.

My mother thought that she had found a big family that would love her, embrace her, make her feel more alive, more secure.

They married. My naval pilot father was immediately shipped to California. On the train all the way across the country, my mother followed for a visit. She returned pregnant with their first daughter, Lynda.

Then the war ended. The tall Southern pine tree came home to his young bride and daughter, went to a naval college called the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, on the G. I. Bill. He studied electrical engineering and played football--was even captain of his team.

Ken was a manly man, who made his big family of origin proud. Intelligent, tall and lanky, and handsome.  A strong man, a take-charge man, who believed in financially supporting his family, but he had a dark side--something there was that was rotten in that tall pine. Something there was that would eat away at him for the rest of his life.

Their second daughter Laura was born the same year and month that he graduated from the Citadel--May, 1949. For a career, Ken had a choice between football and engineering. He chose engineering with the DuPont company.

Thus began a career of moving up the career ladder while moving his wife and daughters constantly around the country--about every other year--about fifteen moves in all.

The roots of the magnolia had entwined with the shallow roots of the pine, and they would keep getting uprooted until they could no longer cling nor hold.

How could this man save my mother, when he couldn’t even save himself? From the dark days ahead.

An outward success in the business and social world. At home a similar scene from Marge's earlier life--deep, dark secrets--shame--hush, hush. Don’t tell anyone. Secrets. Shame--hush, hush now.

We have to look good to the rest of the world. Like a normal family. Yet, we were anything but normal.

It is said that the strength of a tree lies in its ability to bend, and this magnolia and this pine were not trees that would bend. They could only break and break and break. They could only break each other’s hearts.

My memoirs--piecemeal

Hey to my readers--I am writing my memoirs--a few stories at a time--and wanted to utilize my blog to share some of them with you. Most of us like humor, but I'm sorry, there's not going to be a lot of humor in my stories.

In my home of origin, there was no humor or lightness. Everything was so-o-o serious. When I think about my original family, some heaviness still comes over me. That's one of the reasons that I want to write and share my stories: to get them down on paper and out of my system.

Memoirs are memories, and I acknowledge that our memories are selective. Having lived too long with some of my memories interfering with who I truly am, I would like to let go of  "culturally [family] ingrained images, things that are past, old illusions, crumbled myths, fears, and lies." To quote a Sue Monk Kidd book When the Heart Waits that I was reading with my morning coffee.

Ideally, wouldn't it have been better to have released these things at 34, instead of at 64? Yes, but I'm a BIG believer in the expression that "It's never to late." It's never too late to be more free and happier!  At age 34 or even 44, I was not yet in a place to know myself fully.  As a matter of fact, I'm still working on that!

Always the teacher, another purpose in sharing my memoirs is to help younger people than I (and older people than I!) to learn about themselves and to let go of the things that aren't serving them well and to become their authentic selves.

What is an "authentic self"? By my definition, it means asking yourself constantly, "Whose voice am I listening to?" Awareness is the first key to becoming ourselves. So now when something pops in my head about one thing or another, I ask myself, "Who says? Who's talking in my head? Whose voice am I listening to?" Always, I want to find and listen more to my own voice, to my own heart.

My stories are not going to necessarily be in chronological order on my blog because I haven't written them that way nor have I put them in any particular order yet. I'm trusting Spirit to order them in any way that may help someone else. Also they aren't going to be continual on my blog, but they will appear randomly, always under the title, "A memoir."

Here's hoping that some of my stories resonate with you. They will begin with my next post.

(Readers, if you have comments on my posts,  please put them directly on the posts themselves because I'm trying to break my facebook habit, which I'll discuss in depth in my next technological post, Technology--Part III)