God Bless This Mess(9)

It felt like everybody stopped and looked right at us, like the whole world stopped moving and the cars all came to a screeching halt. And without even thinking, I threw that teddy bear on the ground and said, “No!” I ran inside as fast as I could to hide in the classroom and get on with my day, hoping and praying that everyone would forget about what just happened. Especially him.

The classroom was usually a comforting place for me—mainly because I could be the “good girl” there. I could get the As. I could make the best projects, all on my own. (Although my parents were very involved in my schooling, they were sticklers about me doing all my work myself. That allowed me to feel really good when I got an A, knowing that nobody else did the work for me.) My teachers always loved me because I smiled all the time and tried to be helpful. And I felt confident I could win whatever contests came up, too. I was sure of it. Because if I thought I couldn’t win, I would do my best to avoid competing in the first place.

Winning mattered to me because it felt good, on both the inside and the outside.

But not winning? Messing up? Looking bad in front of other kids and adults? That hurt me.

For some reason, that hurt me really bad.





Chapter 3


Stay Inside the Lines


I mentioned that my parents wanted me to do my school projects myself, and wouldn’t do the work for me or even help me much the way some other parents clearly did with their kids. But what they would do is buy me pretty much anything I wanted or needed to get those projects done—including all the brand-new crayons I could get my hands on. I don’t know what this says about me, but I loved crayons. Not just any crayons, but specifically the Crayola crayons that came in the big box of sixty-four. I loved all the colors, and their waxy smell and just-right shape. They had to have the tips, though. I couldn’t stand it when they got worn down. The idea of sharpening them? Trying to use them when they weren’t perfect, like when they turned into a little nub with the paper torn off? Ew. No. They just weren’t the same as those brand-new, right-out-of-the-box crayons.

So my parents would buy me a new box of sixty-four Crayola crayons probably every two weeks—until we found the giant boxes of a hundred and twenty Crayola crayons at Walmart one day. That made me really excited, just dreaming about putting all of those colors into my coloring books and artwork. They started buying me new sets every couple of weeks as part of my mom’s regular shopping trips.

I can’t even tell you how proud it made me to always have the best crayons at Huntington Place Elementary School.

My dad, the hairstylist, the creative one in the family, sat me down one night when I was very young and taught me how to color in a way I never forgot. “Make a hard, dark line of the color just perfectly inside the line,” he told me, “almost like a template to make sure that you don’t go outside the line—because you cannot go outside the line.”

I took that to heart.

I went above and beyond to get it just right when coloring the inside of any picture, too. I’d color the pictures in until there was no white space left at all. None. That’s not easy to do with crayons, but that’s what I did, because I thought that’s what looked right. It took a lot more effort, but it was so much more precise. And perfect. And beautiful.

For some reason, my entire life, I have been drawn to beautiful things. Beautiful paintings, beautiful homes, beautiful scenery, beautiful fabrics and clothes, curtains and bedding—it doesn’t matter what it is. If it’s beautiful, I’m drawn to it. And learning to color gave me the ability to create something beautiful all by myself, which I just thought was the greatest thing ever.

When my first-grade teacher started holding coloring contests for every holiday, I entered those contests. And I won. I did the best coloring of a Thanksgiving turkey, and then I did the best Christmas coloring, and Valentine’s coloring. I won a lot of coloring contests!

I loved that feeling. I loved the attention I got for winning. I also felt tremendous pride: the pride of working hard and getting recognized for putting the effort in to make something beautiful. It was so different from the kind of attention that made me uncomfortable, because it was the first time, really, that it was for something I was doing. And I wanted to keep winning.

I wanted to move beyond just coloring in other people’s drawings, and learn how to draw myself. So I got my mom to buy me some teach-yourself-how-to-draw books, and I learned how to draw a dog, real easy, starting with six circles. Then a ballerina, with a tutu and a ballet bun. I started doodling in the pages of my notebooks and drawing every chance I got.

Then Easter came around, and my teacher decided to change things up. Instead of a coloring contest on paper, she decided to hold an Easter-egg-coloring contest in the classroom, using watercolor paints—something I’d never been shown how to use.

I was excited to jump right into it. We’d been taught all about the primary colors and how they blend—like mixing blue and yellow gives you green, and mixing red and blue gives you purple. I was convinced that I could make the prettiest egg of them all by mixing the colors just like we’d been taught. Plus, I had dyed eggs at home, and I’d watched my mom create tie-dye looks, mixing different colors by dipping the egg directly into the dyes to blend colors. I came up with a whole design idea in my head that would have all sorts of pretty colors from top to bottom, and I mixed my dyes and paints and got to work—and my egg turned this pukey greenish-brown color.