God Bless This Mess(8)

Just to be clear: My mom didn’t make me wear those girlie outfits. I wanted to look like the perfect little girl, from the perfect family, with the perfect smile. In fact, I wanted more than that. I wanted to be the good girl, too. I worked hard in school, and was the teacher’s pet. I always sat up straight and paid attention in church. As I got a little older, I even carried a notebook into church so I could take notes on the sermons.

I believed it was okay for those two sides of myself to exist simultaneously. But sometimes society’s old ideas of what a little girl should be are so strong that our truest selves are only expressed in what we imagine in our make-believe fantasy lives.

For example, my mom would buy me Barbies, and later American Girl dolls. She wasn’t one of those moms who would get down on the floor and play dolls with me, though. I was left to play on my own. Which means I was left to my own imagination—and I think that was a really good thing.

Looking back, it strikes me that I never bothered to include a man in my imaginary doll worlds. Other girls I knew wanted to set up a wedding between Barbie and Ken every time they played. I didn’t.

I rarely liked playing dolls with my friends because they didn’t follow the storyline in my head. There was always a storyline, almost like a play, with a beginning, middle, and end. My mom worked from home during that time, and soap operas would be on during the day. The TV was always on. And that’s how I did my dolls and Barbies. There was always a continuing storyline—only I can’t recall ever including a man in any of those elaborate stories.

With my American Girl dolls later on, I was always playing the role of Mom—a single mom, mind you—and homeschool teacher. I took it so seriously, it was like method acting or something. I would get on the Internet to find printable worksheets, and give each doll a separate school folder. I drew up whole lesson plans. In my story I had adopted all these kids from around the world. I didn’t have a husband, and there were no romantic relationships in any of this. I just didn’t think about it at the time. My Barbies didn’t have boyfriends. None of them. I had bride Barbies dressed in beautiful wedding dresses, but they weren’t getting married to a man. They would just have the celebration.

How crazy is it that I grew up to become a girl known for looking for love—and marriage—on TV?

I know this sounds weird, but whenever I found out that my much-older sister or my babysitters had a boyfriend, it made me sad. I didn’t understand why they needed a boyfriend.

My mom and dad showed affection to each other sometimes. So it wasn’t that I didn’t see any love in our house or anything like that. I just didn’t think about having a boyfriend, or my dolls having a boyfriend, because I did not care. And when I did think about it, I was like, “That is waaaaaay in the future.” Most of the time, if anybody asked me about it, I would tell them I was planning to marry myself. That sounded like way more fun, and a lot less of a hassle.

In my earliest years I didn’t see the supposedly very southern ideal of marrying a man as some sort of ultimate achievement. It didn’t seem like a fairy tale come true to me. Even as I got older, say third or fourth grade, I remained a fiercely independent thinker.

I think I got some of my spirited, independent girl-power sentiment from watching Ellen and Oprah after school every day. There was something about the way those women would talk to people and get them to open up about their lives that I just loved, whether it was Ellen’s way of being funny, joking around with her guests and dancing with her audience—just for fun, just because it feels good—or Oprah’s ability to cut right to the heart of the matter and bring tears to everyone’s eyes. These women were in charge. They were stars. They didn’t need a man beside ’em to run those shows. They were the bosses themselves, and I loved that.

I didn’t just like watching them. A part of me dreamed about being a talk show host. Even back then, I loved talking to people, including perfect strangers. I liked learning about other people’s lives, especially when they were excited to tell me about something they were really good at or passionate about.

There were days when me and my best friend, Olivia, would go into the bathroom and play talk show all afternoon. Olivia and I were like twins in some ways. We were born three months apart, our moms were best friends, and we spent so much time together that we spoke our own language when we were little. So imagining we were going to be talk show hosts together was easy, and we used the bathroom because it was the only room in the house with anything close to a curtain on a stage. We’d work it all out and then perform for each other, taking turns sitting on the toilet seat as the studio audience. We would practice all day, and when her mom came to pick her up we’d announce ourselves and pull the shower curtain back and then stand up on the edge of the tub, cracking jokes and doing interviews like we were on TV.

Given my attraction to being the host, the boss, the single mom and homeschooler with a classroom full of adopted kids, I guess you could say I was an independent thinker at a young age. But I would rarely express those independent thoughts of mine anywhere outside our home, because, like I said, outside our home I wanted to be perfect. And being perfect meant fitting into a certain box that a good Christian southern girl was supposed to stay in.

There was this one time, though, I think in second grade, when my lack of dreaming about attention from boys caught up with me. This boy who really liked me approached me outside school on Valentine’s Day, on the sidewalk, at the drop-off line where everyone’s moms dropped us off for the day. Right where everyone could see. And he handed me a stuffed teddy bear and said “Happy Valentine’s Day!” and I just about died. I was so embarrassed!