mexico

when i went to brewbaker primary school in montgomery, my mom was still a stay-at-home-mom. she always wanted to be a teacher but she never had the money or means to go to college when she was younger, so she got involved at brewbaker as much as she could. she was a substitute teacher sometimes (which was really awkward when she was the substitute in my class) and she was really involved with the PTA. there was a tiny little office in a back hallway of the school and a few days a week she would spend the day in that office, doing things for the PTA like making a monthly newsletter, making bulletin boards, and making copies for teachers. sometimes another woman would volunteer to help my mom. she had three daughters and they all looked exactly alike even though they were different ages. they all dressed identically every day and had the biggest, worst, hair-sprayed 90's bangs in the world. the youngest daughter (i can't remember their names) was a few years younger than me. one day after school when we were waiting for our moms to finish doing whatever they were doing, i took the youngest daughter into this closet in the back of the tiny office. it was a pretty big closet with lots of shelves filled with different colored paper and supplies for the bulletin boards my mom made. she'd cut out little shapes from construction paper- teddy bears, hearts, dinosaurs- and had them all organized in little plastic bins. in the back of the closet there was a locked door. i had no idea what the door led to, but looking back i'm sure it either connected to the next room or was just more closet. anyway, i took the youngest of the three girls into the closet and showed her the locked door. i told her that the door led to mexico and if we could find the key, we could open it and go on vacation. i have no idea where i came up with this. i guess a couple years before that my parents went to mexico for a conference with my dad's job and so i thought that was a really cool and exotic place, but i don't know why i decided it was behind the locked door in the closet. at first this whole mexico scheme was just sort of a test to see if the little girl would believe me. but after a few weeks of talking to her about mexico and trying to open the door, i started to believe it myself. we looked all over the place for keys. i found some old keys around the house and brought them to school to try on the door. she found one on the playground. we tried them all and, of course, none of them opened the door. i even asked my mom if she had a key for the door (she didn't). eventually they started using the little PTA office for something else so my mom stopped working in there and the other little girl and i no longer had access to the closet, so we had to stop our search for keys and attempts to open the door. i was about 7 that year and up until the time i was 12 or so, any time anyone mentioned mexico, i would automatically think of that closet because, somehow, i'd convinced myself that mexico was behind that door.

kindergarten

when we moved to montgomery, alabama from south carolina, it was the middle of august. i was just starting kindergarten but when we arrived in montgomery, school had already been in session for a few days. my first day of school at brewbaker primary school, it took several hours to get me all registered and everything so by the time i made it to my classroom, everyone was getting ready for nap time. i was not happy. i had just left my best friend and this great house in south carolina and there i was in this new school and they were taking naps. everyone else had been in school for a few days already so they were all adjusted to the routine and each other so i walked in as the new kid and felt so out of place.

things eventually got better. my teacher's name was mrs. booker. she was a beautiful black woman who was always dressed so nicely. she wore pretty silk scarves and really neat jewelry and always had her nails manicured. i really liked her. this was about 1990 so whitney houston was really popular and i remember in the afternoons right before school was over, she would have us all sit in a circle on the floor and we listened to whitney houston records and mrs. booker would sing along sometimes and she had such a nice, pleasant voice.

there was a first grade class next to ours and it was taught by a woman named mrs. turnipseed. she was mean. all day long we could hear her yelling at the children in her class. she would say things like, "YOU MAKE ME SICK TO MY STOMACH!" and "YOU ALL BETTER SHUT UP!" she was a tall, thin woman with frizzy, curly red hair and she wore bright red lipstick. she always had this crazy scowl on her face and i'm sure she's one of those people that ended up killing her ex-husband or something like that. she was just crazy. i mean, sane people don't scream at 7-year-olds all day.

i made a lot of friends at my new school. there was a cute little blonde boy named micah and i had such a big crush on him. he always put his little red and blue mat beside mine at nap time and we would hold hands the whole time. one time i even kissed him and mrs. booker saw and wouldn't let us sleep next to each other anymore. after that my friend lisa slept next to me. i remember her being sort of trailer-park and she wore hot pink cowboy boots with fringe on them. she was really fun to be around though, so we were buddies. we could never fall asleep during nap time so most of the time we would whisper to each other. there was a big bookcase beside where we slept. one day lisa noticed that the clear varnish was chipped in one corner of the bookcase so she started peeling it off. she had long fingernails and she would scratch the edge of the varnish up with her nails and we would take turns peeling off strips of it. we both knew we probably shouldn't have been doing this, but we were bored and once we started, we didn't want to stop. we would peel off more and more each day and shove the scraps behind the bookcase. at one point we were able to peel the varnish off in the shape of an elephant and we were so excited about this. my mom came to eat lunch with me at school one day and when she walked me back to my classroom, i pulled her by the hand over to the bookcase to show her the elephant. she just kind of looked at me weird. about a week later, mrs. booker was sweeping the floor after nap time and went to sweep behind the bookcase and out came all the strips of peeled-off varnish. she immediately looked at lisa and i and we both pointed at each other and said, "SHE DID IT!" we were in big trouble. my mom was always at school, volunteering to help teachers make copies and things like that, so mrs. booker asked her to come to the classroom after school that day so they could discuss the varnish elephant situation. i knew i would be in trouble if i admitted that i did it and that it wasn't just lisa, so i denied it over and over. i remember my mom and mrs. booker sitting beside me, saying they knew i did it. i had shown it to my mom and told her that i did it. but i had never gotten in trouble for anything before so i was terrified and would never admit it. i just sat there and cried and felt so guilty. i had to sleep beside mrs. booker's desk during nap time after that.

despite the varnish elephant, mrs. booker really liked me. i was smart. i was the only one in the class that knew how to read and i was only 6 years old. she would have me read stories to the rest of the class sometimes and i was so proud of myself because everyone was so impressed. at the end of every school year, mrs. booker would choose the most outstanding student in her class and give him or her a special gift. that year, she chose me. we had a big ceremony at the end of the school year and everyone's parents came. she announced that i was the most outstanding student and had me come forward and she gave me a little gold ring with a T on it. it was real gold and the only jewelery i had ever been given and i loved it so much. i wore it every day until it didn't fit on my finger anymore. my parents were so proud of me when mrs. booker announced me as the most outstanding. my mom cried and my dad took us all out to dinner after the ceremony to celebrate.

neighbors

when we lived in south carolina, we lived in a really lovely brick house with blue shutters in a neighborhood called irongate on a cul de sac called annandale court. i loved that house. it had a nice living room in the front with a big window and huge, white built-in bookshelves. my mom painted the walls a pale yellow and we would spend sunny days on the yellow floral sofa reading books and just talking. there was a big rocking chair that my mom would sit in and i would climb up into her lap and she would rub my back really softly until i fell asleep. this is still one of the most comforting things to me and the best way to make me fall asleep.

when i think of the kitchen in that house, i immediately think of my maternal grandmother, who i called granny. she was fancy. well...she thought she was fancy. she saw herself as this southern belle who must always be surrounded by fine things and have her hair perfectly done and nails immaculate. she never had money, but somehow she always looked and acted like she did. she loved flowers but could never afford them, so she made beautiful silk flowers by hand and arranged them in large vases all over her home. she had crystal dishes on tables in each room filled with lemon candies. she was always serious and very particular about everything. she would come to visit us about twice a year and we had a special robe and slippers for her when she came and we always made sure to only serve her absolutely burnt toast for breakfast every morning along with black coffee, which was all she would ever eat before lunchtime. even though she was never the warm, cartoon version of a grandmother, she was an excellent baker and i remember many times in our little brick house in south carolina, standing on a kitchen chair, watching my grandmother make her legendary poundcake. she was one of those old, stern ladies who believed that children should be seen and not heard so i never really got a chance to be close to her, but i appreciated how she always got what she wanted, no matter what. and she somehow made a dollar strech into ten dollars without anyone ever noticing.

we had some unusual neighbors in south carolina. next door to us were the wybarks. yes. wybark. pronounced like why-bark. the father of the family was in the military and never at home, so i don't remember much about him. i don't remember much about the mother, either, except that she ignored her children most of the time and when she wasn't ignoring them, she was standing on their front porch, yelling their names and trying to figure out where they were. there were two children in the wybark family- jessica, who was about my brother's age (around 7 or 8), and daniel, who was closer to my age (5). jessica had the most atrocious, sort, boyish haircut ever that she had given herself with some scissors they had lying around the house. daniel was extremely hyperactive and could often be seen running around our cul de sac in his sister's hot pink one-piece bathing suit. both of the children would walk into neighbors' houses unannounced and uninvited. it wasn't unusual to walk into our kitchen to see daniel, dressed in jessica's bathing suit in front of our open refrigerator, drinking orange juice directly out of the carton. both of the wybark children had a weird fascination with electrical things. they had these little battery-powered 4-wheelers that they were constantly pluggin into the outlet in their basement to recharge the batteries (daniel pronounced batteries like "berries"). they had a really nice pool in their backyard that my brother and i weren't allowed to swim in because they always had a radio plugged in and placed inches from the edge of the pool. needless to say, we avoided these weirdos as much as possible.

there was a single mom that lived in the house behind ours and she had a son named adam o'vera (i can't remember his mom's name). my mom really wanted my brother and i to make friends, so she dragged us to adam o'vera's (we called him adam o.) house to hang out with him. my brother and i hated adam o. he was a snobby mama's boy with black hair that his mother combed down flat to his head with hair gel. she had set up an indian style teepee on their back deck for him to play in, but he never really went outside because he hated to get dirty. he was obsessed with legos and had this crazy fixation on keeping all of them meticulously organized in these big, clear plastic tubs with white lids. he would assemble giant battleships and airplanes out of legos and had them displayed in his bedroom like trophies. once when my brother was trying to play a card game with adam o. i opened one of the boxes of legos and started to play with them. adam o. looked over and noticed i was touching his precious toys and lost it. he ran over, snatched the legos out of my hand and told me i was never allowed to come back to his house again. i remember thinking, "fine with me..."

we only lived in south carolina for two years. my mom cried nearly every day we lived there, so my dad got a job in alabama to appease her. my dad has told me before that taking this job was his last big effort to save their marriage. he loved his job in south carolina, was successful, and made more money than he could make anywhere in alabama with what he was doing (sales). but he did it for my mom and for the sake of our family. even though my dad made this big saccrifice for my mom, she was still disappointed because we weren't moving to birmingham, her home town. we moved to montgomery, about an hour and a half drive south of birmingham. it just wasn't good enough for her.

moving from charleston was sort of sad for me. i really liked our house and my dance class and especially my best friend libby. i remember when libby and her family came over to our house to say goodbye the night before we moved back to alabama. i stood in our driveway and watched them drive away in their big, blue minivan with fake wood paneling on the sides. i saw libby's teary face pressed against the window in the backseat and steve waving from the driver's seat. i never saw them again.

libby

charleston, south carolina was where i made my first real friend.

when we moved there, my mom wanted me to take dance classes, which is ridiculous for a 5-year-old, but i suppose it was all part of her idea that i was going to be the perfect, dainty little daughter she always wanted. charleston has an airforce base, so a lot of the people that live there have come from all over the place and a lot of the other girls in my dance class were from military families. one of these girls was libby herbst. she was a tiny, elfish little girl with a round face and short, light brown hair with bangs straight across her forehead and freckles sprinkled across her cheeks and over the bridge of her nose. she giggled constantly and had the sweetest, most cheerful voice. we became friends immediately. neither of us was very good at dancing but we would stand next to each other in class and laugh at our many mistakes but try so hard to get it all right.

occasionally after dance class, we would go to the herbst's tiny house on the airforce base. libby had the most enormous collection of my little ponies that i had ever seen and i was so jealous. she had so many of them that she didn't really care about them. she would color on their faces with crayons, cut their brightly-colored manes with her little orange safety scissors, and leave them strewn all over the floor of her bedroom. i have always been incredibly organized and meticulous with everything. i mean...i organized my crayons in their box by color. so, to see all of the my little ponies being treated so carelessly absolutely horrified me. my little ponies were relatively expensive, so my parents only allowed me to have two. one of them was pale blue with a neon green and red mane and tail and the other was lavender and light pink. they were my prized posessions. when i went to libby's house and we went into her bedroom, i would always compulsively start to organize her ponies. i lined them up in a neat row on the carpet up against a wall and i combed their manes and tails with a little purple plastic glittery comb. i knew that it was weird for me to be organizing someone else's toys, but the best part was that libby didn't mind. she just sat beside me on the floor and watched while i meticulously groomed her crayon-smeared plastic horses and we talked about whatever it is that 5-year-olds talk about for hours.

it wasn't just libby's toys that i was jealous of. she had The World's Greatest Dad. steve. he was handsome and fit. he ran and cycled in races. he wore an imaculate airforce uniform to work every day. he was funny and warm and charming and i wished that he were my dad every time i saw him. i remember one afternoon after i had finished my pony grooming routine at libby's house, her dad came in and asked if we wanted to bake some cookies with him. this was the greatest question i had ever been asked. we ran to the kitchen where steve helped us each tie a little apron around us. he pulled two tall wooden kitchen chairs up to the counter. and we baked. it was messy and silly and funny and delicious. we baked two different types of cookies and it took all afternoon and it was one of the best afternoons of my little life. he let us pour in all the ingredients into the big green, ceramic bowl and mix them with a huge wooden spoon. we spilled things and laughed and ate way too many cookies.
steve was everything my dad wasn't. steve knew how to really laugh. he knew how to shrug off things like an entire 5-pound bag of flour exploding all over the kitchen floor. he knew how to relax and just being around him made everyone else in the room at ease. my dad would not and could not ever be anything even remotely like steve. although he has mellowed out considerably over the past two decades, my dad is rigid, aggressive, and, frankly, sort of difficult to be around in general. but one of the most important things i've learned in life is that people, all people, will have qualities that i don't like. and no matter how much i'd like them to be different, i can't change them. so instead of comparing my dad to steve or anyone to anybody else, i've learned that it's better to like people in spite of (and sometimes because of) their imperfections. i liked libby's mess of a pony collection because it made me value my pristine pair of ponies so much more. i liked her charming father because he made me appreciate the fact that i am more like him than my own dad.

maybe this is why i've always sort of favored people who seem like a work in progress.

i mean...i could never scrub all the crayon marks off libby's ponies or restore their manes to their silky, synthetic perfection, but i could at least help them be their best and love them, flaws and all.

charleston

when i was about 4 and a half years old, my dad's sales job offered him a promotion if he left alabama and moved to charleston, south carolina. my brother and i were too young to really care where we lived, so it was fine with us. my dad has lived all over the southeast, so he wasn't opposed to a change of scenery, especially if it meant making more money. my mom, on the other hand, was not interested. she was 37 years old and had never lived anywhere besides birmingham, alabama. to her, birmingham had everything that was comfortable and desireable for her and her family, so why leave? where my dad saw a great opportunity, my mom saw an unnecessary, devastating change in our lives. but, my dad, the perpetual salesman, convinced my mom that we should go. he told her it would only be for a few years and charleston is a great town and it's really not that far from alabama at all. so, she agreed. the company my dad worked for sent over a shoddy moving company to pack up our stuff, load it up, and drive it to south carolina. my mom cried the entire time and fretted over every dish and every knick-nack that the movers wrapped in paper and packed into boxes. she did not want to leave.

it's really easy to see now that this was the beginning of the end for my parents' marriage. i think my mom wasn't willing to give another place a try. birmingham was all she'd ever known and it was comfortable for her. there was no risk involved in staying there. it would be easy. predictable. familiar. so she decided before we even left alabama that she wasn't going to like charleston. so she didn't. at the same time, my dad wasn't really prepared to take no for an answer. he knew that charleston would be great, that he would love his job, and that my brother and i would be fine wherever we went. i think, in his mind, my mom would see how nice it was there and that she'd learn to like it. even if he was right that the rest of us would be fine and that my mom would be fine too if she would give charleston a chance, he ignored the fact that she was so devastated to leave. he paid no attention to her tears and didn't really try to understand why it was such a hard transition for her to accept. it could've all turned out so differently if they were both willing to see the situation for what it was, but i suppose that neither of them was strong enough to do that.

to me, birmingham only consisted of our house and our street. my life was nothing but chasing fireflies in our front yard and running through the sprinklers in the summer and going swimming in our backyard pool and playing on the tire swing at preschool with my "boyfriend," tyler payne. the highlight of my week was walking with my brother and my dad to the little convenience store down the street, getting a mickey mouse-shaped popsicle, and eating it while sitting on this huge, gray rock (we called it Big Rock) that was in the yard of the fire station on the corner of our street.

even though i was just a little kid, i loved everything about charleston. when we moved into our new house, i was so excited about my new bedroom. my mother had insisted that my room be painted the exact same shade of pink that my bedroom in birmingham had been, with the exact same white wallpaper border with drawings of little girls in bonnets pushing dolls in baby carriages. the best thing about my room, though, was the closet. it was huge. it was really more like two closets put together with two huge doors. the day that we moved in, i piled up all the pillows from my bed and all of my stuffed animals into the floor of the closet(s), crawled on top of the soft, cottony mound, and shut the closet door. i remember being so comfortable and content and excited about this new place that was still filled with all of my familiar things.

charleston is an adorably quaint town. the streets are lined with enormous hundred-year-old trees with whispy gray spanish moss hanging from the limbs. there were tons of tall, pastel-colored houses with white trim and front porches with rocking chairs on them. everyone in charleston was obsessed with the civil war. there were daily civil war reinactments. there were huge plantations everywhere with big collumns and enormous yards with the greenest grass i have ever seen. there was a huge outdoor market downtown that i loved to go to. there was always a group of big, round black women weaving straw baskets and sweating in the swealtering south carolina humidity. i remember one table at the market with a tall old man with a white beard and straw hat standing behind it. the table had a green plaid tablecloth on it and a little round basket filled with genuine civil war bullets. there was another little basket next to it filled with indian arrowheads.

our house was built on land that had, at one point, been underwater. when it rained, our backyard would flood and my brother and i would walk outside and squish our fingers through the puddles. if we were really lucky and if we searched hard enough, we would find tiny little sharks' teeth burried in the mud.

holidays

when i was growing up, we always spent holidays with my dad's pseudo-italian parents, his brother, and his brother's horrendous wife and three daughters. i never really understood why we bothered, because it was obvious that none of us enjoyed spending time with these people. they are loud. the worst kind of loud. the kind of loud where everyone is fighting, literally fighting, for a chance to speak next. my brother, mother, and i never participated in these conversations/competitions, so we spent all family functions sitting quietly off to the side, occasionally glancing at each other to roll our eyes or dramatically check our watches, as if to silently say, "WHEN ARE WE GETTING THE HELL OUT OF HERE?!"

my dad's brother, greg, always has a very stern look on his face, like life is so frustrating and he is so stressed out that the thought of smiling or even being completely neutral and emotionless is simply out of the question. when i was younger, he had a thick, dark moustache and i never remember seeing him wear anything besides a crisp, plain white button-down shirt, khaki pants, a brown braided leather belt around his thin waist, and perpetually polished brown dress shoes. he's always rushing around, frantically doing things like checking food in the oven or taking out the garbage. his wife, kathy, is this short, oddly-shaped woman with big, fluffy hair. she cakes her makeup on so thickly that you can see it settling in the fine lines on her face and cracking like a broken porcelain doll. she has worn the exact same strong, overly-sweet perfume forever and applies so much that you can practically see wavy cartoon scent lines radiating around her like a warm apple pie in a jughead comic. she always looks sort of glazed-over, like she's taken 5 too many mood-stabilizers and maybe a few shots of brandy. i don't think i've ever really heard her say a full sentence. she's a giggler. she laughs at everything, funny or not and her laugh is tight and strained and awkward and it makes me cringe just thinking of it. she has two modes, really. she's either giggling uncomfortably at nothing or pretending to listen and nodding with a feigned concerned look on her face.

greg and kathy have three daughters. well, technically they have two and greg has joanna. joanna is his daughter from his first marriage and, for no real reason at all, the favorite of the family. joanna could do no wrong, even when she does. she is attractive, but in a kind of weird way. she has olive skin and soft, curly, light-brown hair. she is petite with a pretty face, although i'm not really sure why it's pretty. her nose is too large for her face, her cheekbones are a bit too prominent, and her lips are strangely-shaped. but, of course, despite her imperfections, joanna somehow always appears flawless. when i was little i was always fascinated by her. she is very close in age to lisa, my sister, and i always envied my other two cousins because they were so close to joanna and she spent so much time with them.
angela is greg and kathy's oldest daughter. growing up, she was a spoiled brat with an annoying, nasal southern drawl. the word "daddy" came out more like "diddy" and she was always whining, "diddy, i want ___." and she always got what she wanted. maria is angela's younger sister. she is the baby of the family in every sense of the word and has never really done anything for herself.

our cousins were always very different from my brother and i. they were noisy and demanding. they cried all the time and they were constantly chewing doublemint gum. on the othe hand, my brother and i were quiet and polite and weren't even allowed to have chewing gum. one christmas when i was about 5, we all got toy musical instruments for christmas gifts. i had a tiny plastic piano, one of my cousins had a battery-powered guitar that lit up and played pre-set songs, and my brother had this weird organ/keyboard. we decided to put on a little show for the rest of the family. while my brother and i quietly and carefully played our little instruments, our cousin freaked out on her guitar and got so into it that her doublemint fell out of her mouth and immediately got tangled in her long brown hair. my aunt dove at my cousin, practically tackling her, and they both wailed and screamed and cried until they finally just cut the gum out of her hair. the whole time this hysteria was going on, my brother and i just continued to play our instruments. the show must go on, i suppose.

and then there were my grandparents. when i was little, my grandmother, maw maw, always had dark, dyed, reddish-brown hair that was curled and teased and hairsprayed into a round, helmet-like shape around her head. when she went out in the rain, she would carefully cover her head in a plastic rain bonnet that tied under her chin with a little strip of pink fabric. my grandmother was a cold woman. she didn't hug me. she never read me a story or baked cookies with me or took me shopping or snuck me $20 bills when my parents weren't watching. she just sort of looked at me skeptically and told me not to touch anything in their immaculately clean house. in their formal living room there was a tall, pedastal-like table with a small, white marble tabletop the size of a dinner plate. on top of the table was a bronze bowl filled with two large bunches of champagne-colored plastic grapes. i loved those grapes. they were hollow and rubbery and i could not walk past the table and resist the urge to reach into the bowl and squeeze one of them. this aggravated my grandmother to no end and as soon as i would begin to step toward the tall marble table she would shout at me to leave her grapes alone, that they weren't a toy, they're for decoration, and i was not allowed to touch them. this, of course, made me want to play with them even more. i remember one time when i was walking down the hallway on the way to the bathroom, i glanced into the living room and saw the grapes, taunting me from their fancy little perch on top of the table. i crept over to the bowl, reached in, squeezed a grape, and was horrified when it broke off of its plastic stem. i felt so guilty that i brought the broken grape to my grandmother, placed it in her spidery hand with manicured, glossy-red nails, and told her how sorry i was. she just scowled at me.

my grandfather. paw paw. he was a round, bald man, even when i was 4 years old. he had a broad, full laugh and a warm smile. he sat in a tattered brown recliner all the time and i would climb up into his lap and he would talk to me in a weird baby-talk voice that i could never really decide was annoying or just really hilarious. so i just laughed with him. he was such a sweet man and i think he was the only man in the world that was nice enough to love my grandmother. he took care of her and that was his greatest and proudest achievement in life.

since my grandparents were so paranoid about their grandchildren wrecking their house or breaking their ceramic angel figurines or getting crayon marks on my grandmother's favorite pale pink tufted sofa, they sent us all to the basment as soon as we arrived. it was a huge concrete room with a big round table, paw paw's tool bench, an ancient stationary bike, and clotheslines stretched from one wall to the other. paw paw would go to the dollar store and stock up on things like cheap crayons and coloring books and playing cards. before we arrived, he would arrange the items neatly on the table for us and i was always really excited to open the fresh boxes of crayons each time. my brother, my cousins, and i spent hours in that basement, playing hide and seek and my dad's old rock 'em sock 'em robots game that had miraculously appeared on the big round table one christmas. when i was about 10 years old, paw paw taught us to play poker- 5 card stud. and, somehow, i was really good at it. i have no idea how to play it anymore, but i will never forget how paw paw looked at me when i beat him 4 times in a row and he hadn't let me win once.

even though we spent hundreds of holidays in that house, they all sort of blend together in my mind because they were always the same, especially christmas. paw paw had the worst fake christmas tree known to man. it looked like a green pole with big green pipe-cleaners stuck into it. the only ornaments he had were a billion gold spheres and the chirping bird. the chirping bird was the bane of my dad's existence. it was a little plastic bird with feathers glued all over it and some sort of motion sensor inside, so that every time someone walked past the christmas tree, it let out a high-pitched, ear-splitting chirp. this was hilarious to paw paw and no matter how much everyone begged him to give us just one christmas without the bird, he refused. besides the bird, there were several other christmas traditions. like the suspenders. my dad, uncle greg, and paw paw always wore the most hideous, red suspenders with santa claus faces all over them every christmas. last year was my first christmas without paw paw and the only gift my dad gave me was paw paw's santa suspenders and his matching santa tie that had a little button you could press that played jingle bells.

every christmas, my grandparents always gave my cousins and i the exact same gift but slightly different colors or versions and my brother usually got something weird and random and unrelated. my mom and my aunt kathy always got identical gifts and so did my dad and uncle greg. it was always sort of a race to see who could open their gift first because as soon as one of us did, we all knew what we were getting. it was almost always terrible clothes that they bought from JC penney because they had a lifetime discount card since paw paw worked there for 20 years. the gifts were always wrapped in plain white complimentary gift boxes with the jc penney logo on them and a cheap stick-on bow. and, for some reason, paw paw insisted on putting a million pieces of scotch tape on the seams of each box so that any time anyone wanted to open a gift, my dad or uncle would whip out a pocket knife and saw through each piece of tape.

the first christmas i can remember was my 4th christmas and we all got sleeping bags. my brother's had the ghostbusters on it and mine had lady lovelylocks. i didn't and still don't have any idea who lady lovelylocks is and, frankly would've preferred the ghostbusters. but my sleeping bag had a picture of a blonde princess in a long, sparkly pink gown, and she was surrounded by birds. even though i had never heard of lady lovelylocks, there were birds on it so i loved it. it was soft and fluffy and i spread it out on the living room floor and pretended to fall asleep on it.

after opening gifts we would always have dessert. each year someone would make an enormous batch of these horribly dry and bitter italian cookies covered in a frosting that had the consistency of elmer's glue. they are disgusting but, for some reason, every year i would eat at least one, maybe just to remind myself how gross they are. besides the cookies there were always at least 3 betty crocker cakes, huge trays of candy and pre-packaged cookies, and always a horrible fruitcake that nobody every touched besides paw paw. i always thought it was really strange that everyone brought so many desserts but nobody ever really wanted any. it was just how it was. a few years ago there was only one small plate of the gross italian cookies, a spice cake, a fruitcake, and a small bowl of peanut m & m's and something just felt wrong. the following year the entire table was covered with desserts again and things felt more normal.

age 4

all things considered, i had a really good childhood.

mom stayed at home with my brother and i until i was in 5th grade and she really was a great mom for those years. she loves children and she really did (does) love my brother and i so much. she was always thinking of fun things for us to do. there were many afternoons where she would take the big blanket off her and my dad's bed, throw it over the kitchen table, and my brother would i would crawl under the table into our "fort" and listen to books on cassette and eat big bowls of fresh green grapes and laugh at absolutely everything and nothing.

about once a week, my mom would put on one of her favorite records as loudly as possible and take my brother and i into the laundry room for what she called a "crazy morning." we would spin around in circles until we couldn't stand up and my mom would sing along with the music until we all fell on the floor in a cackling heap. i think it was my mother's way of telling us, "today is going to be a fun day." and it almost always was. she would always make our eggs just the way we liked them (scrambled with cheese, of course), she never let us get bored, she encouraged us to learn things and read books and laugh and sing and just be kids. my mother has changed a lot over the years and isn't the woman she was when we lived in that little brown brick house in birmingham, but during the years that really mattered the most, she was wonderful and i am so grateful to her for giving me such a good start and helping me appreciate little things like a good baked potato or a really shiny penney. my mom would look at a cardboard tube from an empty roll of paper towels and instead of thinking "garbage" she would think "kaleidoscope," give me some crayons, a rubber band, and some waxed paper and in a few minutes, it really would, somehow, be a kaleidoscope.

we had a lot of tea parties. adam and i would dress up in a combination of our "church clothes" and our parents' cast-off hand-me-downs, and my mom would serve us kool-aid or apple juice out of my pink plastic teapot and use cookie cutters to make us finger sandwiches shaped like butterflies and dinosaurs. a few of these tea parties have been captured on film. in a video from one particular tea party, i got up from my chair, clomping through the kitchen in my mother's high heels that barely stayed on my little feet, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out an individually-wrapped slice of cheese. i brought it back to the table, unwrapped it, and ate it along with my dinner mints and mixed nuts. the best part of this scene on the video is that my mom is laughing hysterically the entire time and i am oblivious as to why chowing on a kraft single at a tea party could possibly be funny to anyone. not too long after this tea party, we had a really fancy one with our friend jessica, the daughter of one of my mother's friends, linda. we really dressed up this time. i wore a blue striped dress and white tights and a floppy straw hat and a hot pink feather boa that i pulled out of my big bag of dress-up clothes. adam wore our mom's bright red blazer over his superman pajamas and his black oxford shoes. jessica, on the other hand, came wearing her genuinely nice easter dress, a white fake fur stole, and bright pink lipstick. best of all, she spoke in a really bad english accent the whole day, which amazed me. my mom got out the good china dishes and a pretty white table cloth and served us at the dining room table. she got little white petit fours with tiny piny roses on top from a nearby bakery and told us to call her madam since she would be serving us for the afternoon. i remember feeling like this was all too much, that my mom wasn't "madam," she was mommy, and that i'd much rather be eating a single slice of cheese and apple juice than petit fours and actual tea. i suppose i've never really been cut out for things like fancy teacups on decliate saucers and food that's meant to be eaten in one bite. while jessica spoke in her put-on accent, demanding, "madam, i will have some more tea now," i was spilling mine down the front of my dress. at one point, i leaned forward to reach for another mint and slipped off the high-backed dining chair, falling to the fluffy beige carpet with my hot pink boa trailing behind me.

growing up, i spent a lot more time with my mother than with my father. aside from the fact that my dad was at work all day when my mom stayed home, he traveled a lot for work, as well. on top of that, he had a really bad temper and i was, frankly, sort of afraid of him. my mother had taught me from the beginning that if you're upset about something, there is no reason to raise your voice; just state, calmly, what you are feeling and try to come to a resolution. my dad, on the other hand, was a shouter. he would get angry at the drop of a hat and every word would come out in this booming yell that immediately brought tears to my eyes. i learned really quickly that i do not like being shouted at, ever. so i spent a lot of time avoiding my dad and playing quietly in my bedroom by myself. when i was about 4 years old, i had a little yellow plastic piggy bank with a black rubber stopper in the bottom. i kept a handful of loose change that i'd found lying around inside the bank and every now and then i would pull out the rubber stopper, pour the contents out on the carpet, and count how much i had. i vividly remember one sunday before church i was counting my coins. i was all dressed and ready for church and it was almost time to leave and i was just passing the time while i waited for the rest of my family to be ready to go. my dad came storming down the hallway, saw my pennies strewn out on the carpet and my church clothes getting wrinkled. he jerked me up by my scrawny little arm, whacked me far too hard on the rear end, picked up my pennies and put them in his pocket, and yelled at me to never make a mess like that again. i have never been so terrified.

that same year, my half-sister lisa left. she and my dad had always had a difficult relationship, but i have never really known or understood why. even as a little kid, though, i could tell that she was sad about something. she just always had this really vacant look in her eyes and it seemed like she would cry at any moment. but i loved her so much. our birthdays were just a couple of weeks apart, so for the first few years of my life, a birthday, to me, meant a big cake with both of our names written on it in swirly yellow icing and birthday cards with phrases like "the best little sister" written in her messy cursive. i remember the last time i saw her. we were in the parking lot outside of the department store where she worked. she kneeled down and gave me a hug. she had this really big 80's hairdo with enormous, hair-sprayed bangs and it smelled clean, like shampoo and hair gel. and she wore this really sweet-smelling perfume that would linger on my clothes after she'd been around. she looked me in the eye and i saw that she was crying but i didn't know why and i didn't know what to say. she told me goodbye and that she loved me. she got in her car and my mom and i got back in ours and i didn't see her again after that. nobody would ever give me any explanation as to where she went and why she was gone and i still don't really know what happened. all i know is that i spent the next 18 years of my life desperately trying to contact her and she rejected me so harshly. and i cry, still, every time i think about how much it hurt to see the words "return to sender" written in that same messy cursive on the outside of the purple birthday card envelopes i'd painstakingly addressed to her with my favorite sparkly pencil. i know that nobody ever told me why she left because i probably wouldn't have understood. but, no matter what, i will never believe that she had a good reason to, not only ignore me, but to outright reject 4-year-old me. i am the most forgiving person that i know, but i don't think that i will ever be capable of forgiving her.

beginning

i guess the best place to start any story is in the beginning.

i was born in brookwood hospital in birmingham, alabama on wednesday, october 25th, 1985 at 7:46 AM. i've always thought that i was born early in the morning because maybe i knew that it would be my favorite time of day. i've always loved the quietness of early morning- the way everything feels sleepy and hazy and undisturbed, with a touch of uncertainty about how things will turn out. which, i suppose, is a pretty good way to think of my early-morning birth as well.

things were simpler when i was born. my parents lived on a quiet street in a cute little neighborhood called old mill trace. all of the neighbors were young couples with young children, just like them. the house was a small, brown brick house with three tiny bedrooms. the kitchen was dark and cramped with yellow vinyl floors and a big window opening up to the huge, tree-filled back yard in which my parents had a swimming pool installed a couple years after i was born. my room was decorated in a peter rabit theme and there was a huge, fabric, rabbit-shaped wall-hanging right above my crib. the rabbit was light brown and wore a blue jacket with big, white plastic buttons and had a stuffed carrot tucked into his jacket pocket. i vaguely remember waking up from naps, standing up in my crib, taking the carrot out of the rabbit's pocket, and chewing on the end of it, pretending it was real.

my brother, adam, was three years old when i was born and my dad had a daughter from a previous marriage named lisa who was fifteen. she visited our house on the weekends and made everything tense but was so calm and gentle and fun when she would play dolls with me in my little bedroom. my brother disliked me from the day i was born. before i showed up, he was the tiny king of the castle with tons of beautiful, curly blonde hair and the most contagious giggle i have ever heard. then i came along and his whole little world shifted. i'm not sure he's ever forgiven me for that, really. he never quite knew how to share.

when i was about 3 years old, my crib and peter rabbit were replaced with a white metal daybed with a trundle underneath that i slept on until i was in third grade. i always liked that making up my bed really only consisted of pushing the trundle underneath the daybed and making sure none of my stuffed animals got stuck in the wheels. the daybed had an off-white eyelet lace bedspread and at least a million throw pillows (i still use one of the pillowcases with an eyelet ruffle on it every night). my mom always had this idea that i would be one of those charming, delicate little girls that loved wearing frilly dresses and keeping my shoes clean and surrounding myself in lace and anything pink, but i never have been. my parents bought me tons of girly, cutesy toys when i was young, but all i really wanted to do was walk around our driveway, picking up little pebbles and collecting them under the white plastic seat of my bright pink big-wheel bike. there's an old videotape somewhere that shows me, about two or three years old, wearing a little white shirt with tiny blue stripes and a pink embroidered telephone on the chest, tucked into some matching blue shorts. i have these bouncy, chin-length ringlets held out of my face with a little white barette shaped like a bird. in the video, i pop open the seat of my big-wheel and pull out a handful of pebbles and show my mom my collection. she tells me i should try counting them so one by one i drop the pebbles back into the big wheel, counting, "one, two, five, twelveteen..."i get lost somewhere between four and ten, give up, drop the rest of the pebbles back into their hiding place, jump on my big wheel, and fly down the driveway with my curls wiggling in the breeze. i've always liked that scene because i think it sort of sums me up in a lot of ways. i just sort of want to hold onto the things i love and not worry about things like numbers or counting in order; i'm happier to coast down inclined driveways, screaming "WHHEEEEE!!!" as loud as i can, hearing my precious pebbles clattering underneath my seat and the impossibly loud alabama cicadas chirping in the background.