“Aunt
Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly
hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a
dress, she said I wasn't supposed to be doing things that required pants. Aunt
Alexandra's vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea
sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born;
furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father's lonely life." ~
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Poor misunderstood Scout. It’s no
wonder that I related to her so much when I was a child. Little girls might be
made of sugar and spice, but when God was mixing my DNA, He threw in some salt
and vinegar. The fourth girl and youngest child, with three older sisters and
an older brother, I was not a girly-girl, but I wasn’t as bold and
adventuresome as my sister Jackie, so I didn’t exactly fit the tomboy mold
either. She got hurt a lot; I only got hurt once in awhile, like when I
face-planted in the driveway after running my bike into the side of my mom’s
car. I took more risks than I should have as far as riding my bike with no
hands and exploring places I wasn’t supposed to go, but I never swung out
across the road on a rope when a car was approaching. I wasn’t afraid of bugs
or snakes or any animals at all, other than bats and roaches. I wasn’t afraid
of swimming in deep water after taking swimming lessons at age eight, but I was
terrified of heights and the dark and all of the weird monsters and aliens I
read about.
I liked a lot of things that were
not considered “girly”, such as mud and dinosaurs and Hardy Boys books. I was
never good at sports and hated P.E. at school, but I did play baseball and
kickball and sometimes even tackle football with my friends from the
neighborhood. In fact, one day when I was ten, my mom looked out the window
just in time to see me going down, clutching a football, with a swarm of boys
on top of me. She shrieked in horror and I was dragged into the house and treated
to a lecture on why this was now inappropriate because I had Become a Woman
several months before. I was not at all thrilled with the early onset of
puberty and was bored with all of the trendy teen-angst books that the girls at
school were passing around. I thought Nancy Drew was an idiot and preferred
Trixie Belden, and my role model in Little
Women was not prim and proper Meg,
snotty Amy, or shrinking violet Beth, but , of course, the volatile and
unpredictable Jo.
Two of my best friends, Heidi and
Holly, lived across the street and were always wanting to paint my nails and do
my hair. We had fun together and I realize now that I pretty much always got my
way because I was terribly bossy. I would deign to play Barbies as long as I
got to make up the stories, which generally involved transforming Barbie into
someone else, like Laura Ingalls. Great tragedies and disasters inevitably
ensued. Once, Barbie and Ken’s plane crashed on a desert island and they had to
survive by any means necessary, which ultimately included cannibalizing the
other passengers. I was always trying to shock Heidi and Holly but they were
such good sports that they went along with my bizarre imagination and seemed
quite fascinated. I also dragged them along on various bicycling adventures,
many of which did not end well. Imagine being eleven years old and being chased
by two vicious dogs and a gun-toting old lady. Heidi lost her shoes that
day-both of them-as we frantically pedaled away.
I once did an experiment to see if I
could grow my own maggots in a pile of rancid dog food. It worked quite well,
leaving my parents wondering why there was a sudden fly infestation around the
back porch. Then there was my pottery project. My fourth-grade teacher
instilled in me a love for Alabama history, and I decided that I wanted to use
the red clay in the backyard to make pots like the Choctaws did. They turned out
okay, but they cracked so much when they dried that I couldn’t paint them. This
was fine with my mother, since I had already ruined two pairs of pants and
several shirts with the clay. I also loved to collect critters-turtles,
lizards, caterpillars, ants, the occasional grass snake-and this required a lot
of crawling around on the ground. Jeans were a must, but I insisted on the boy
jeans for many years.I didn’t think it was fair that jeans for large little
boys were called “Huskies”, but jeans for large little girls were called “Chubbies”.
I thought husky was a nicer word. My mother did not understand this logic at
all, but she got me the jeans I wanted.
My logic extended to my reading of
literature. If Flicka made a miraculous recovery and she and Ken lived happily
ever after, then why did Gabilan in The
Red Pony have to die? If Rascal the
Raccoon was set free in the wilderness and survived to father many generations
of little Rascals, then why did Bertie in The
Year of the Raccoon end up as “a battered body in a box”? Wilbur the Pig was not slaughtered, yet the
pig in A Day No Pigs Would Die was-in
graphic detail. So why was the book called that? At seven, I had not quite
grasped the concept of irony. Imagine my disappointment when I learned, after
many years of weeping copiously over the demise of Jack the Faithful Old
Bulldog in the “Little House” books, that in real life he was given away when
the Ingalls family settled at Plum Creek! Or my shock and anger when I read the
real story of the Sager orphans,
which was nothing at all as depicted in On
to Oregon. It was a long time before I came to understand what “inspired by
actual events” meant.
According to my family, I was
speaking fluently at thirteen months and reading fluently at three years. Since
I don’t remember not reading, the latter is doubtless true, but I wonder about
the former. Most experts in child development say that the facial muscles have
not matured enough before about fifteen months for a child to say more than a
few words-although they acknowledge that in rare cases, children begin speaking
in clear sentences earlier than that. Thus, if my family is remembering
accurately, it is merely one more freakish thing about me. It also explains why
I thought kindergarten was stupid. I did not voice this opinion at school-in
fact, I rarely spoke at school-but at home I was very vocal in my disdain for
formal education. I wonder to this day if I would have benefited from “unschooling”,
but on this point my parents were firm-I had to go to school. In retrospect,
they were probably right. I would have been too weird to function had I not
been forced into social situations.
My own kids have some of the same
struggles I did, but they handle them with greater grace and humor. Despite
their exceptional intelligence, they are friendly and sociable and relate well
to their peers. To be fair, by the time I was eight or nine, I was reasonably
socially adept, but I always got along better with boys than with girls, even
in high school. Nevertheless, I had plenty of friends of both genders and,
while not particularly “popular”, I was not a complete social outcast. I
learned not to always blurt out the sardonic, witty comments that popped into
my head a hundred times a day, and, by God’s grace and under the loving
instruction of my parents, the compassion that I had for others blossomed
despite the bullying and cruelty that I often faced.
I still find the world a confusing
place at times, and I wonder where I fit. I still seek acceptance even though I
know in my heart that I am accepted
and maybe even lovable. I read and write to try to make sense of things that
seem backwards, sideways, and upside down. I still am the little not-quite-tomboy
in the Husky jeans seeking the caterpillar than will eventually transform into
a butterfly. I am a combination of all the things that made my parents as well
as some things uniquely mine. I am sugar, spice, vinegar, salt, and maybe a
little nutmeg. I am not everything nice, but neither am I everything
terrible. God creates us each from a
recipe that makes us a little different, while at the same time we all have the
desires and qualities that make us the same in our humanity. That’s the beauty
of His design.Unity-and diversity. What a lovely collage we are.
“The world was made up of people putting one foot in front
of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living
it had been doing so for a long time. Harold could no longer pass a stranger
without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique;
and that this was the dilemma of being human.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
