Some days are filled with contrasts that keep you from mulling anything, you go from event to situation to more incoming information, past, present and future…
This ride at times seems to be moving at super fast speeds, going so quick it is hard to process one thing before the next hits. That was yesterday.
I had a mission to talk to the Detective to help get a ball rolling, but he will not play catch with me. I sit, holding my ball…while life seems to be passing so quickly. Another week has gone by and he appears too busy to return my call.
To him I may be more work or I am not as important as what he has going on…however he knows not what I know. I feel myself bumping into a silent wall of rebuff.
The information grows like a weed out of control and I am losing my faith or trust that even when alerted he will be unable to pull or eradicate this weed that is poisoning the innocent…it seems that the garden is getting overrun while no one is looking.
I have to have faith that it is all perfectly perfect, that it is going at the pace it should, even if not my speed.
While I can’t gain his attention, I seem to forever bump into people who I feel are feeding the weed. It seems so exasperating, like a poor cosmic joke, to see them everywhere and the Detective is nowhere to be found.
Oh and the normalcy is worn like a costume.
Letting all that go, I attended a speech given by the Author of the book, The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls. She lived her first 17 years in abject poverty, and went on to become a journalist living on Park Avenue in New York City, while her parents remained homeless.
She spoke to the freshman class at Michigan Tech, and a few of us from off the street, eager to hear her speak.
Her rough life taught her many lessons you can’t learn on easy street, and in writing it forced her to be with the reality of her life. She learned about her self and respected herself more for telling her truth, than when she was hiding it from people around her.
What I found that was different between us, is that as a child she could not hide her ‘shameful’ life situation. In her town everyone knew they were the poorest family, her clothes and body odor too obvious to hide, and so she wore her label everywhere and was treated appallingly in high school.
Her very dysfunctional poor lifestyle was hard to not see.
And in my case, my outward appearance wasn’t too bad, poor but we did have running water and flushing toilets, although no shower until I was in middle school…just a sauna lit twice a week. And there was a dirt-poor girl who lived less than a mile from us, who was poorer. A two room shack more or less…
Anyway, Jeanette could not hide what shamed her, and I didn’t know the shame that followed me where every I went, I was ‘HIS daughter’ A story was spoken when I left the room or before I arrived, unbeknownst to me.
I have often wondered what my childhood would have been like had I known that my father was a pedophile, how would I have walked into places and out of them, knowing who I truly was?
I know that I was always treated like the daughter of a pedophile, yet I was spared because I didn’t know. I felt I was just a girl from a poor large apostolic family. I didn’t know that underneath me was incest, abuse…
I walked with confidence and not with mortifying shame.
The mortifying shame came when I was 46. And then I knew what the people of the church knew and yet not one approached me even then. But, then they started to overtly treat me like a pariah.
It seemed odd to me that once my truth was out they then began to treat me differently. It still puzzles me…we all know the truth and now they keep me at arms length, they turned down isles to escape me…
The only thing changed is I openly walked my truth…and they now did not know what to do or how to talk to me.
Isn’t it interesting that it was easier to be with me when I was not walking my truth, than it was for them when I was?
Just yesterday it came to me that it is much easier to be with people who are walking step by step with their truth, than to be with folks who want to tuck a huge part of their lives under a rug. I can’t be with a half person.
So, Jeanette and I are the same, we both had rough childhoods, the difference is she knew it and I did not.
Her father carried a dream of one day building them a glass castle, and she believed in his dream.
My father never had a dream for me.
