God Bless This Mess(20)
But I cared. I wanted to be good!
Still, there was a shirt from Limited Too that I wanted so bad. One shoulder of it was thick and looked like the American flag, and the other shoulder was just a spaghetti strap. It was a kids’ shirt, and I saw a girl wear it to school one day—a girl in an older grade than me—so I begged my mom for it, and she bought it for me. I was so excited. I loved that shirt so much.
I remember walking into my teacher’s wood-paneled classroom that day, with that old stuffy smell of a chalkboard and erasers, and thinking how cool my shirt was. But no sooner did I walk in than my teacher, with her bright red lipstick that was always smeared on her teeth, pulled me out into the hallway, stood me by the mural of the kids of all skin colors and various abilities all playing together, and sternly told me, “Do your fingers.” I placed my fingers over the spaghetti strap, and it was clearly too thin to pass the dress code.
“That shirt is inappropriate,” she said. “Go to the principal’s office. Your mother will have to come and bring you a new shirt.”
It wrecked me. I was good. I didn’t do inappropriate stuff! Inappropriate meant bad. I wasn’t bad!
The principal took one look at my shirt and agreed with my teacher’s assessment. I cried so hard. They made me call my mom to tell her, through tears, what happened, and she drove right over to the school. It’s funny, but my mom, who could be so submissive and vulnerable to my dad, was feisty everywhere else. She came in all mad and upset about what this teacher and this principal had done to her daughter. “She’s in second grade! How is anything inappropriate on a second grader?” she asked. “This is ridiculous.”
Rather than bring a change of clothes and send me back to class to be further humiliated, she took me home.
I never wore that shirt again. Ever. Anywhere. To playdates. To the roller rink. Nowhere.
The older girl wore that shirt to school again on other days. I saw her! But in second grade, I was singled out and shamed for wearing that same shirt.
What was it about me that inspired that kind of negative attention for what I was wearing, which was nothing more than clothes that I loved, when other girls could get away with it just fine?
As I got older, I continued to dress well, and guys gave me attention because of it. I swear the teachers would always check me: “Put your hands down and make sure that skirt is past your fingertips.”
It always was. I did the fingertip check at home. I didn’t want to get in trouble. I wasn’t like, “Let me see if they catch me!” That wasn’t me. But I always got treated as if I was.
By age ten, when life is supposed to start to be all about the coming change into adulthood, and defining who you want to be, and pushing the envelope, I felt pushed more and more into the idea of conformity to avoid any kind of shame or embarrassment.
I desperately wanted to fit in the box, even though I had this deep-down feeling that the box wasn’t meant for me. And that caused me constant conflict, constant friction, internally. My stomach would tie up in knots.
I was anxious all the time. Both Patrick and I had nervous stomachs. We were worrywarts, as my mom liked to put it. Was all my worry a result of the grief I swallowed at such a young age? I mean, I would cry on the way to school. I was so worried something would happen to my mom. I would be scared if she was in the bank too long, or didn’t answer the phone. I kept thinking, What if somebody took my mom?
I’d even say it to her sometimes, and she would say, “Don’t be silly.” It wasn’t silly. I had a constant fear that somebody else I loved was gonna die. The fact that my mom and Aunt LeeLee were around the same age, too, was more proof to my elementary-school mind that it could have been us who got killed.
But I think a big part of my nervous stomach was anxiety brought on by all of this inner conflict.
My mom never brought either of us to a doctor or therapist to do anything about our anxieties. I don’t think anybody ever talked about anxiety disorders back then. But she did say a prayer for us in the car on the way to school every morning. We were both so nervous and anxious about the school day, and she would ask us, “What do I need to pray for y’all about?”
Of course, she did this while she was running late on the way to school, which made me even more nervous and anxious than I already was.
“I’m nervous,” I would say. And she would pray that my nervousness would go away before I walked into school. It didn’t. Only nobody knew, because I would hide it under my smile and my good-girl image. I worried about everything. What if I did my homework wrong? What if I forgot my homework? What if something embarrassing happens? It was upsetting to me that my mom’s prayers didn’t seem to work.
When I think about it, this worrywart feeling goes all the way back to kindergarten, when we were playing tag, and a bunch of us went into this little clubhouse thing, and this one boy looked over at me and said, “Your fly is unzipped!”
That crushed me. I went off in the corner and swung on the swing by myself, embarrassed. I’m twenty-seven years old and still remember this!
I was suffering from an undiagnosed anxiety disorder and never knew it.
*
As I got older I kept praying and praying, asking God to show me what my Big Purpose might be. I would close my eyes tight when I prayed, and you know what popped up? Truly, all the way through my college years? A screen. Like a TV screen. There was nothing on it. Nothing I could see clearly, at least. But it was absolutely a screen of some sort.