Bloggermedown

Sunday, September 03, 2006

I always wanted to look like Laura Petrie

"Blog" The Movie

Dedicated to my Son, who thinks he wants to know more about me.


I first recall wishing myself into womanhood around ten years old, I wished to grow up to look exactly like Laura Petrie. Without the crying and apron.

Whenever I tell this story to someone under forty-five they always ask, "Who is that?". The "Dick Van Dyke Show" with Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie, his wife.

She wore cool clothes (had boobs) and went to the hairdresser. Had a cool house and kooky friends. Life was good.

I found myself wearing padded bras and short tight clothes as I reached my teens. I hated being between two worlds. I knew lots of stuff, but I learned a few things I didn't really want to know by dressing like that.

My Mother thought I was nice looking, but dressed like a loose woman, my Father was ashamed that he could not control my behavior.

Mom had a nice "Church boy" nine years my senior picked out for me and he was all for it. I think he might have been the one who put the thought in her head.

His Mom and my Mom were always scheming up reasons for me to see him. One day I finally had enough and wrote him a letter telling him "There are plenty of fish in the sea". Guess I always felt I had a flair for writing. Maybe not the most tactful. If you can say obsession then you know this guy, I ended up married to him when I was thirty. Don't ask, that comes later.

My real flirtation with womanhood began my freshman year of High School. Our High school had just begun split sessions, with the baby boom and all, we had outgrown our high school and another was being built.

Until the new school was built, seniors and juniors went to school at seven and got out at twelve, sophomores and freshman went twelve to five.

If you think I was not ecstatic to be going to High School and sleeping in until who knows when, after years of getting up at the crack of dawn to go to a place I could barely tolerate. Then it's been too long since you were a teenager to remember how it feels to sleep in and not wake up feeling every joint aching.

To top it off, this my friend was the virgin class of freshman attending high school. Until now freshman were still in junior high.

In a way we were robbed of being the freshman in a junior high school. We were all waiting to laugh at the seventh graders still wondering what had happened to recess. Instead we were the ones being laughed at, teased and tormented by the seniors and juniors as they left for the day and the sophomores because they could.

I am part of a very large family. Eight kids, Mom and Dad. With limited resources available, we all went to work as soon as we could so we could have the extras all kids want cars, clothes and entertainment.

My first job was at an "old folks home" or to be PC, (politically correct) retirement home. I made a buck sixty an hour because that was minimum wage in 1971. Jobs for teenagers are always grunt work and my job was no different. I worked in the kitchen, did the dishes, served the meals and mopped the floors. My boss's name was Flossie. She was probably in her forties or fifties. She might have been thirty, I realize now that at sixteen everyone is old if they aren't a kid.

Flossie had big hair, teased to the max and gray. She had a big smile and a real interest in doing her job right. I think she liked taking care of people and she ran the kitchen like a boot camp for wayward teen girls.

This of course was not my dream job but choices were limited and my older sister Lizzie worked there. So Mom could drop us off and pick us up at the same time. Mom was always wearing herself thin like that. Taking me to school choir practice, debate tournaments and juggling everybody elses needs too.

I don't know why I think this is funny, but between getting Dad to work, kids to school, meals on the table and dropping off and picking up kids everywhere, she got a ticket for speeding. When she came to pick us up from work that day she was crying and you could tell this was a really good cry. She got a ticket.

Now we all know speeding tickets happen, but for her it was probably the price of the house payment. I saw some old papers that showed fifty-dollars a month on the house payment. The whole note was for five thousand for a house and six acres. They bought it about a month after I was born.

When you here folks saying they live pay check to pay check, it may not hit home for you like it does me. Cause I think of how my Mom cried when she got that ticket and wonder what it really cost her.

High School.....Who am I?

High School for everyone is a defining moment. It's when you begin to make choices for yourself and define who you are. I was always a good girl because Lizzie was so bad. I didn't think my Mom could handle two bad girls.

I always had an easier time in school than my sister. Lizzie was always a bit pudgy and I was always thin. Lizzie wasn't much for studying and had a much stronger need to fit in than I did. I didn't mind skirting the borders of all kinds of groups and I was accepted by most of them on some level.

I hung out behind the school and in the parking lot smoking cigarettes and what not with the rebels and I went to beer parties with the cheerleaders. I acted in school plays, sang in the acapella choir and was on the debate team. Lizzie ran wild and flunked out.

Growing up with Lizzie made me very glad I didn't have a girl when I became a Mom. The things she did made me feel bad as a sister and I can't imagine how our parents felt. Helpless, out of control and sad. Parents want the best for their kids, more than they have.

Lizzie had a lot of influence on my choices, good and bad. She was two years older than me but she was only a year ahead of me in school because one school year she ran away with a grown man to Arkansas.

I spent most of my freshman year trying to avoid being associated with her. My after school activities ceased when she ran away. I went to work and then went with my Mom to every place Lizzie had ever taken me looking for her.

I would sit in the car and Mom would go to the door asking some boys parents if they had seen her and then she would talk to the boy. I don't think she believed any of them and with good reason, but I didn't know where she was either.

Being older she had a girlfriend with a car and money. She was just as bad as Lizzie, but her Mom had died when she was young and her Dad had money, so she got away with a lot more.

Her name was Bert. Short for Beatrice I guess. Each day she would pick us up for school, early. We would cruise hang outs where bad boys went, they smoked and talked and I sat in the back seat waiting to get to school. I didn't want to ride the bus and I didn't want to hang out with them either.

Once Bert commented that I should never pluck my eyebrows cause they were great and it was such a pain. Bert's eyebrows seemed to be missing, drawn on in an effort to try and hide the ugly truth. She had no eyebrows.
Shortly after that I took a good look at my eyebrows, decided they weren't perfect and promptly plucked them. It was a pain in so many ways. I didn't keep doing it.

It was definitely worth the fit Bert and Lizzie's had when they saw me. It didn't look bad. They just treated me like a child and I didn't want to be seen that way. Pain in the butt kid sister who had to go along for the ride to make things look better. I had to keep my mouth shut about where we went and what we did. I had no voice.

Once and only once, we double dated. Lizzie set it up and talked me into it. A blind date for me just some guys she knew. They seemed pretty old for us really but I don't think I ever knew their ages. I don't remember their names. I remember the date consisted of them picking us up at our house and then driving straight to their house. Guess they weren't school boys with a place of their own. I was skirted into what I guess was a party room and my sister went with the other brother somewhere.

The room was painted completely black and had luminescent flowers painted on it with black lights and pillows all over the floor. First thing my date did was light up and offer me a beer. I declined both, so I sat there while he toked and drank and tried to talk to me. I guess he could see he wasn't getting anywhere with this approach, he asked if I wanted to watch T.V., so we did. At least the light from the television was better than the black lights.

About half an hour later big brother comes out and slaps little bro on the back, my date gets up and leaves and then I watch television some more with big brother. I didn't say a word to him. Still haven't seen my sister since we got there and I could hear weird sounds coming out of the next room. I didn't want to think about what was going on and I guess I have developed that skill as a coping mechanism in my life and it comes back to bite me in the butt every time.

I have to say, I was a bit naive. I kinda knew stuff but not really. Everything I learned about sex I learned from my big sister and she didn't say much. She just ran away a lot. Snuck out whenever she could and came home with hickeys everywhere.

Mom must have given up on having the talk with me after seeing what Lizzie was doing.

I remember when Lizzie ran away to Arkansas. My Mom had the cops out and they just said, "There isn't much we can do. Check with her friends."

My Dad was totally appalled that his good name and dirty laundry were getting hung out to dry in front of God and the world. He wanted to send her to reform school if she ever came back.

When she came back, she finally called and Mom sent money for a bus ticket she had no shoes in the middle of winter. I don't know what happened to her shoes. Maybe she ran away from the guy she ran away with. She had a good story to tell though, a different one for whoever listened. Something about being held captive, I think.

She went to the Doctor when she got back. When she was finally home to stay for a while, she was taking a bath and talking to me and she was covered with hickeys. She said she left with this guy cause he was crippled and reminded her of our brother who died from complications of Spina Bifida when he was sixteen.

His death affected us all. We each took something from him, to carry for the rest of our lives. Some smiles, some sadness.

John Robert

John Robert was an angel on earth. He came to this world in March of 1949. Our parents were both twenty-eight, he was their second son.

Robert was born in the front seat of a borrowed 1934 Nash. They were on their way to the doctors house about forty-five miles away. Guess nobody ever told my Mom second baby's come faster than the first or maybe it just took to long for my Dad to run over to the neighbors across the field to borrow the car. Mom loved telling the story. She said, "Dad never stopped the car and I just caught him in my arms. When we got to the doctors house I never even got out of the car. Doc Sally and his wife and nurse came right out to the car. The nurse took the baby in to clean him up and the doctor took care of me right there in the car. When they brought the John Robert back out, we turned around and went back home." Only Maylonnie, the youngest was born in a hospital in 1962. All the rest of us were born right there in Doc Sally's house or close to it.

They were proud parents. John Robert had hair as red as can be with a light complexion and lots of freckles. He got that from both his grandmothers. He was a happy baby to here mom tell it, then when he was about two or three months old he stopped kicking his legs around and slowly started losing more and more motor functions as he grew. She said they took him all the way to California to a clinic to have him looked at thinking it was polio, it wasn't. I used to think California meant the state but it wasn't it was California, Missouri. Then they took him to the teaching hospital in Kansas City, still no hope and they told her he wouldn't live to be two or three years old.

This was not what she wanted to hear. She told me they even took him to the Mayo Clinic, but I don't know where that was. They finally told her that his spine had not grown all the way together when he was born and fluid was building up inside his brain and enlarging his head and putting his nervous system out of commission. Which is why he would never walk and would eventually be totally paralyzed.

Regrets.....

Oh yeah, I have them. I just don't think about them a lot. Gotta keep moving forward in this life. Now I am not so sure I will regret this. Telling parts of my life story. Could be too much information for you my son and for my family. I love and respect my family and it's kinda ugly to tell other the bad parts of someones life and I sem to be remembering those things most.

Wanna know something funny? Lizzie has been married to the same man and has four children with him for thirty years. My record for marriage is seven years, that took two tries and still didn't work. it's still a record for any relationship I have ever had. So Lizzie didn't do so bad. There is something to be said for a person who can stick it out through thick and thin. she would tell you it's been thin alot, but they stuck it out.