Chronologically, I am 53 years. Inwardly, I can't guess my age. I feel like a baby.
I hate the game Chutes and Ladders. It is my least favorite game in the world but I still keep falling down chutes and starting over again. Falling and starting over, over and over again.
Every time I think "I know the truth," my life is torn apart. Broken dishes, broken dishes. Everything smashed to bits as I look the same but am rising from flames having to be reborn, reborn, reborn.
I remember her, some 30 years ago. We are standing on the driveway in the warm sunshine, my baby son and me. I adore him, and I finally have a purpose in life. I am beaming at him toddle, and I sigh with satisfaction. I got it all figured out. I know what deep pure happiness is. I am a 21 year old mother, a cookie-baking, in the church choir, singing Episcopalian with a baby, and I get to stay home with him! I get to have more children! I am happy to the point of being smug as I watch my child, my son, my reason for being.
That devoted young mother, me, could not imagine in her wildest dreams what the future would hold.
I am not sure the young me would recognize me at 53. It's been a crazy, bumpy ride and never, ever, would I have imagined it. Never ever did I expect who I have become.
I got thrown out of my cookie baking, super mommy world when violence in the home drove me to an escape plan. I was forced to be a leader for the first time in my life, very strange for an invisible nothing girl, very difficult. I hatched a plan of escape and stuck to it, skimming money from my own tips and depositing them in my secret bank account before I got home. I was the Captain, the Keeper of the Flames, the Sheepdog that gave unconditional love, and a safe perimeter in which my children could be free, free from fear, and learn to make choices. We sang, we danced, we had adventures inside circles as large as I could make them.
Always with me, there was One Chance to Learn On. There has to be a chance for a child to learn not to do something or learn to do something before they get whipped. They should never be whipped in fact, but if there has been a rule clearly explained to them and they break that rule, there must be a consequence. Hurting a child, terrifying a child, that sick thud of nausea and fear when you hear your sisters or brothers being whipped with a belt, sometimes knowing your next. Be quiet. Be very quiet, quieter than a mouse, and be helpful, helpful as a busy, invisible bee and watch your big sisters to know what to say and do so nobody gets whipped. Little mouse, hiding in the closet, would not recognize herself in me, would never imagine the fire and fight, the fortitude and doggedness that would be required of us in her future. Cinderella mouse never imagined the spotlight.
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