So, if I had to pick one or two isolated events that forever sealed in my little girl's head that I was not good enough to dare to live my dreams it would be these:
Gymnastics was my first love. I spent five years gracefully tumbling and expressing my authentic self in a gymnasium, or an a grass straightaway. I recall one practice when my mother came in to watch me. On this day, my coach kept requesting that I do the same vault exercise, over and over again. I became emotional and teary eyed in the process and I now believe that this must have been around the same time when I stopped showing up. For a year, my mother would drop me off at practice and I would simply ditch it. I would head up to the playground and spend the hour playing on Lincoln's logs. Amazingly, the gym never called her to find out where I was.
However, a few years earlier, it was quite traumatic when my mother left me outside of the local church for hours after my catechism class let out. I remember sitting on the church steps and waiting and waiting and waiting. Meanwhile, the sun set and the parking lot emptied. And there I was - not even ten-years-old, alone and waiting. Fortunately, I had learned how to make collect telephone calls. So, I called home and my father assured me that she was on her way.
As for my dad, let's see... there was the time when I played the tattle-tale on my big brother and ran to dad to share that I had been called a "bitch." It was the wrong day and time to mess with my father and after hearing my brother lie about the act, my father turned his repressed anger on me. He took out a paint stirrer and beat me with it. Something died in me on this day. I remember swearing off him and his name in my diary that night.
However, there was also the time when he caught me playing with a neighborhood friend in the local hills. At the time, I was grounded so I should have been at home but I had made up some excuse so I could play outside. I was eleven years old and wearing a pair of my friend's dangly earrings. "What are you, a whore?" he snorted as he pulled an earring out of my ear and shuffled me home for another meeting with his black, leather strap.
Oh, childhood how I don't miss thee!
