The Door Girl, Part 41

Did I miss her? God, yes. She could’ve slain millions of people with her bare hands and I would have loved her still. But she never came back to me to love. And that was her choice.

As an adult, I had to learn to accept that. Everyone has many doors they can walk through. And sometimes the darkest doors overgrown with weeds are exactly the door we need to walk through to gain our humanity.

We are human. We want things to be pretty.  But life is dirty and messy. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we become what we were created to be, and that is authentic, powerful warriors.

I will tell you a little story, however, that I keep in my back pocket when I am feeling low on my love supply.

I was 9-years old and we were living with Tommy the child molester. I walked through the back alley to the corner store where they sold chick-o-sticks in giant plastic containers for only five cents a piece. I bought two and a coke. Back in those days, coke came in glass bottles. As I was walking out of the door, I tripped over the brick holding it open. My mouth was bleeding. Oh my God, my teeth were covered in blood. The store owner ran out and carried me in his arms to my mother.

Tommy ran to take me and I kicked him as hard as I could. I can remember it like it happened yesterday. She said something to the effect of, “No. She only wants me.”

And that summed it up. I only wanted her. In that moment, she showed me love and I have kept it with me all of my life.

That door I tripped through, the threshold, the brick…in a back alley of Detroit. It was ugly. But it was my beautiful. Because in that moment, I knew I was loved.

And so, I guess if I had anything to say to you, dear reader, it would be, “Don’t be afraid of the ugly doors and the broken places. Don’t be afraid to die in order to be brought back to life.” Life is there on the other side of that door.

The Door Girl, Part 40

As a child, I had to act in survival mode, and I recognize that I often still operate out of this place of fear. It’s a place of mistrust because it is the belief that the Universe/God won’t provide and She always does.

I felt abandoned. Alone. And I was alone.

Am I asking you to feel sorry for me? Hell no.

Because my dis-ease is what makes me glow.

This madness, these demons, they make me restless until my hands shake and I know I have to wring the words  from them.

It’s time. The craze will make you insane or make you raw and genuine.

Am I looking for a shoulder to cry on?

No. I have worked hard to wear my big girl pants.

So, is it wanting you to feel sorry for me I tell you my own story? No.

But. There is a single reason why I write.  

Because I am a survivor. I’m an overcomer.

The Door Girl, Part 39

I would always let her back in, my mother. No matter what she did or who she did it with, she was my mother.

It was late one night and we were living in Detroit. On Florida street, if my memory serves me well. It was dark and all I could see was the glow of the streetlights reflecting off the wet pavement. I sat in the backseat like a pet. I was my mother’s pet. 

I tried not to touch her too much because I had seen the ways that cats got under their masters' feet and then began to annoy them. They wished they’d never shown the cat any damn attention in the first place. I would not make that mistake. 

I was well-educated on the behaviors that suited my mother. Stay out of her fucking way. And if she touched you, stay as still as possible because a miracle is currently taking place and you don’t want to screw it up. I never wanted to surprise her when she stroked my hair, so I sat like her toy and let her do whatever she wanted to me. I didn’t care if I was like a bag she threw in the backseat as she drove down the back alley. 

I just cared that I was her toy.

The Door Girl, Part 38

I can remember that day vividly. We had been at the neighbor’s house who had a big inflatable pool in her backyard. We spent a lot of time there.

                  She was high as a kite. I watched her climb in to the pool with all of her clothes on. She was wearing a flimsy navy blue top with a full length skirt. She was stunning and elegant.

I watched her lower herself slowly in to the pool. The sun was an endless fire that day. I watched the look on her face and you would’ve sworn she had died and gone to Honolulu. With a drink in her hand and her body saturated with pool water, she became someone else. I don’t think my mother was ever happier than when she was not herself.

Again, from her journal:

Because that’s the thing. I’m happiest when I’m not myself. When I escape and hide behind whatever I can…I guess I never learned that lesson—to be a big girl and face my problems.

The Door Girl, Part 37

So, what was the unspeakable thing I did? This crime I committed that I likened to a suicide of the soul?

I became someone I wasn’t. I lived inauthentically. And when it’s all said and done, that is my goal—to be me.

To live as though you are someone else is the greatest crime one could ever commit. Just think of the art we are not seeing, the words we are not reading, the songs we are not hearing because people aren’t living authentically. It is, in fact, a suicide of the soul to prostitute your life to the highest bidder. I refuse to be that girl anymore.

This was found in my mother's journal:

What gets people is the damn monotony of the everyday—wake up, fill in the blanks, go to bed. It is those fill-in-the-blanks that get me. I feel lost. I don’t know what to do with myself that has any value. And so I sleep. I get high. I drink. I have sex with random men. I break things.

And so, I know it’s better for everyone if I just sleep. I take whatever pills I can find and whatever weed I can smoke and I just sleep and hide from my child. Because the best thing for her is when I am asleep.

It's like Ernest Hemingway says, "I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"

I don’t want to be this way. The mediocrity of life and the fear of failure paralyzes me.

Sometimes, I just want to get in my car and drive…

The Door Girl, Part 36

I have been given beauty for ashes. When we buried one of our sweet babies, the preacher, said, “The seed that goes in to the ground bears much fruit” (John 12:24). It brought me to tears. I didn’t want to bury my baby in the ground. But what I wanted and what I got were very different things. What I didn’t understand at the time is that graces come later.

The gifts I’ve been given are remarkable. Grace, humility, compassion. My baby that I never once held in my arms bore so much fruit in my life and consequently, in to the lives of others. We planted a peach tree for them. This year was the fullest it’s ever been. Each summer I am reminded that something always needs to die in order to come back to life.

The Door Girl, Part 34

Here is what you are asking yourselves right now. Did the little girl survive? Did she get married and have children? Go on to have a successful life? And the answers are oh so many.

I did have children. Six beautiful children. I have loved fiercely and suffered pain that feels unbearable at times.

But I know I'm not alone. I know there are others out there who have suffered like me, even if it is the secrets that we keep.

I have experienced joy unabounded.

My life...my life has been reckless at times. I have been foolish. I have gone mad. Literally. I have died and come back to life. I have fallen in love with the Universe, God, whatever you prefer to call It. 

Mark 5:41

And he took the damsel by the hand, and said to her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say to you, arise. I'm crazy, confused, beautiful. So at the end of the day when you ask me if I came out okay, I give a resounding, "Yes!!" with a smile on my face because I am a survivor. My life is art. It is imperfect because all of art is. If my life were a hand-knit scarf, you would be able to detect all of the blemishes in it, but the scarf would still be beautiful and provide what it was meant to give: warmth.

The Door Girl, Part 35

Here is what you are asking yourselves right now. Did the little girl survive? Did she get married and have children? Go on to have a successful life? And the answers are oh so many.

I did have children. Six beautiful children. I have loved fiercely and suffered pain that feels unbearable at times.

But I know I'm not alone. I know there are others out there who have suffered like me, even if it is the secrets that we keep.

I have experienced joy unabounded.

My life...my life has been reckless at times. I have been foolish. I have gone mad. Literally. I have died and come back to life. I have fallen in love with the Universe, God, whatever you prefer to call It. 

Mark 5:41

And he took the damsel by the hand, and said to her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say to you, arise. I'm crazy, confused, beautiful. So at the end of the day when you ask me if I came out okay, I give a resounding, "Yes!!" with a smile on my face because I am a survivor. My life is art. It is imperfect because all of art is. If my life were a hand-knit scarf, you would be able to detect all of the blemishes in it, but the scarf would still be beautiful and provide what it was meant to give: warmth.

The Door Girl, Part 33

She was drinking food through a straw and unable to get to the bathroom by herself by then. I was soaking her feet, brushing her hair, holding her to sleep. She woke up coughing in the night with no relief except for codeine cough syrup. And yet, she found the joy in sneezing.

Grandma’s trailer had been dingy from the outside, but the inside was immaculate. She had one of those old radios that looks like it’s a dresser and she only played classical music. Because of this, I thought she was rich. She lived in poverty, but she found the joy in the simplest of things: piano, cold coffee, serrated grapefruit spoons, hot tea and sneezing. She smoked cigarettes, but not pot.

However, she did grow it in the backyard when my mom and aunt were younger because she said she didn’t want her kids buying shit off the streets. Gigi was classy like that.

In a day when divorce, was a scarlet “D,” she was a single, working woman. She wore high heels every day and waited at the bus stop. She never talked about Grandpa that much except to say that he had had a metal plate in his head and “wasn’t quite right.”

I wanted to grow up to be just like Gigi. In between fishing and fantasizing about conquering the lake, I listened to classical music and learned to play “Nadia’s Theme” on the piano.

We had everything and nothing. I told myself that I was a warrior and that nothing would have that much power over me. Not even my own mother. 

The Door Girl, Part 32

I am roughly 10. I am sound asleep in my room. All of a sudden she comes tearing in and flips the lights on.

“I lost my fucking drugs,” she screams. Before I know it, the opening part of the headboard is sliding across my forehead like a sailboat over placid water.

She doesn’t find her drugs. I am bleeding. She leaves the room.

        The next morning, she wakes me for school and seeing the gash gasps, “Shit. You’re not going to school looking like that today.” And so I stay home until my head heals and we can go back to playing pretend like we always do without ruining our good family name.

My grandma was my refuge during those years before foster care. Gigi, we called her. Her last name was Graham, so it only made sense. She did not, however, find the humor in it when we started calling her “Grandma G-String,” because she was too high-class for bullshit like that.

Gigi was diagnosed with Parkinson’s shortly after she retired for her job at the county clerk’s office. Everything shook, including her lips. We put food on a spoon and scraped it below her top teeth to just get something in her mouth to eat.

One day we were sitting there and I sneezed.

“Excuse me!” I laughed.

“I’ll never understand why people try to hold their sneezes in. It’s one of the greatest joys in life,” she quipped.

The Door Girl, Part 31

There were two doors. One was narrow and jagged. The other was round and open. My mother chose to go through the open door. It hurt her like hell, it ripped her wide open, but she knew it was the only way to survive. Do I approve of it? Do I think she did the right thing? I’ll never know, because the life I had and didn’t have with her are all I knew. It’s impossible to imagine what my life would have been like with her presence.

        I know I’m strong, however. I have been to hell and back again a thousand times. Day upon day. And I continue to rise from the ashes. Clumsily, yes. I am constantly losing my way and finding it back once again. But I walk through the round, open door as well. I am exactly like my mother and not a thing like her at all. I like to believe the thing on the other side of my windowsill looks different than hers did. I know it’s different in fact. Her door took her to men, drugs, alcohol and the point of madness. I discovered these truths in her journals--what she had been doing all this time she had disappeared.

        My door must be different. And I’ll tell you a secret. I’m deathly afraid that it’s not. And yet, I walk through the door, shaking and scared. I listen to the universe and follow it. I allow it to gently guide me by my jittering hands. I follow it in the dark like a lantern and see nothing around me but stark branches. But I follow.

         

The Door Girl, Part 30

She mailed me her journal after my stay at the psych ward. Maybe it was to help me understand. Maybe it was to remind me that she was still alive despite the absence of me. Maybe it was to hurt me. I don’t know why she sent it, but as I read the entries, my heart ached for her. My mother was not a monster, but she was mentally ill. My mother did the best she could and the best she could was all she had to give.

July 2, 1974

The thing is, I’m happiest when I’m not me. When I escape and hide behind whatever I can. I guess I never learned that lesson—to be a big girl and face my problems. I think what gets people is the monotony of the everyday. I wake up, make coffee, take care of my child, set my timer for fifteen minute increments just to make it through to bedtime. And during those fifteen minute increments, I feel lost. I don’t know what to do with myself that has any value. And so I sleep. I get high. I drink. I break things. And after, I feel so bad that Junie has witnessed yet another breakdown, but I can’t help the madness. It’s clawing at me to get out and all I know to do is shatter glass.

The Door Girl, Part 29

The words in my head, the voices, they were quiet at first. They blew through my mind like tumbleweeds on an almost windless night. They didn’t disrupt things.

        But then they grew louder and larger and started to damage my soul.

        They had to be given life, and by life, I mean voice. And that is why I write.

        Because the voices never die. Writing is a lonely profession, but the inside of a writer’s mind is filled with the most vivid colors, people with a million stories unto themselves; it’s the playground that never sleeps.

        But God, sometimes, I wish it would. This is what I was talking about earlier—the haunting and begging for attention, waking me in the middle of the night like a small child for a drink of water. The words are restless, and so I am restless.

        I breathe. Listen. And let you drink this healing balm from my aching hands.

The Door Girl, Part 28

Words are like flowers; when you put them together properly, you can create a work of art.

        I used them to escape the jail I had created for myself. I used them like a dying man pushes his morphine button. They were my escape—my pain killers, and I used them in large quantities.

        Bleeding to death by ink is a fantastic thing. The pain, the fear, the voices and the shadows where they lurk--it all gets washed away with a  pen in my hand.

        It was difficult to write on anything at the mental hospital because writing utensils were seen as weapons (again, understandable). So they gave me short, stubby pencils like you use at the library. But I took it anyway because it calmed me more than the Ativan I begged for.

        I wrote my way to crazy. And that is to say, I wrote my way to sanity. Yes, restored mental health. Which fully includes the crazy and the ugly. Those are the parts that make us beautiful and evolve in to more lovely human beings.

        I wrote until I realized that life is never as black and white as it looks on paper, even though I had hand-crafted every detail. For the first time, I realized that I was in control of everything and nothing. I was invincible with all the fragility of a flower.

The Door Girl, Part 27

My mother was always hot and cold. Always a contradiction. Fire and ice. I blazed with her and froze to death with her, as long as I could stay close. We were a raging fire and a frozen marsh in the tundra, where it’s always too cold for anything to grow.

        That’s how my mother would remain for days, but all of a sudden, the clouds would lift and I would see the embers start to twinkle inside of her. The Magic Woman was coming to life. And she would be lit ablaze, everything around her smoky and on fire. She was lightning in a five-foot-two-inch body.

        And me, well…I just loved to watch her burn.

The Door Girl, Part 26

I am ten-years old and our church is having a revival. I am in fifth grade. We watch videos of dead babies in the streets and people disappearing mid-walk with a friend. The song from the video is “You’ve been left behind.”

I get home from school and the house is empty. Logically, I know that my mother is at work, but all I can think about is that song. And I know that I have been left behind. That all the good people were taken, my mother along with them, and I did not make the cut.

My mother comes home and plops her purse down on the table. “Hey kiddo, good day?”

“Uh-huh,” I say, my heart beating a million miles a minute. “Hey ma?”

“Yes?”
“What if I don’t believe in God or any of that stuff they teach at church?” I ask her fearing for my life.

“Baby,” she says calmly, “you just gotta fake it till ya make it. That’s what you do in this life.”

And I did it well. Until, I didn’t.        

The Door Girl, Part 25

While I was in the hospital, Aunt Cassie came to visit me. My grandmother had since died. She said she had a note my mother had sent when I was in high school and she wanted me to have it. The letter read:

        Dear Cassie, You may hate me because I jumped ship. I left my child behind because I didn’t know how else to do it. Do you know what kind of people leave their children behind? No, it is not the selfish ones. It is the broken down and destitute.

        I couldn’t hurt my daughter anymore. I was who I was. I was a falling-apart parent. Do you know how difficult it is to give something you’ve never been given?

        So, I gave her a life without me. And even though it hurt her, I know it truly served her well. I taught her that life is not black and white. We live in shades of gray. Life is never what we think it will be or should be.

        I remember that little girl and how strong and brave she was. I am sure she has become the beautiful young woman I imagine. I know that she will have used the wild card I dealt her and use it to sky rocket.”

I took the letter and I shredded it in my shaking hands. Tears spilled down and I never knew a person could hold that much water inside.

The Door Girl, Part 24

The thing about being in a psych ward is that you are all united in your suffering. It is for different reasons, but suffering is suffering, nonetheless.

        “Do you get a lot of people like me here?” I asked one of the nurses. She was slightly overweight and had quite a mean exterior.

        “People like what?” She asked gruffly.

        “Crazy people,” I answered, full of shame.

        “Honey,” she wrapped her arms around me, “you aren’t crazy. You’re just going through a tough time in your life and you needed to take a break. You’re one of the strong ones because you knew you needed it. Remember that.”

        I believe in kindness to strangers and that you get in what you put out. She squeezed me firmly and looked in to my eyes with such kindness, my heart knew that she had seen me and she knew me. And a hundred more like me who just needed a fucking break.

The Door Girl, Part 23

This is a fictional piece blended with bits of life I've picked up along the way. I thank you for sharing in my words!
Sitting in a hard metal chair to fill out all of the forms, I stare at the glass and the metal sign affixed to it that reads, “Mental Ward.” And the only words in my head are, “Are you fucking happy now?” To everyone who had ever hurt me, pushed me, left me. There I was in a mental hospital.

        Did you know that you aren’t allowed to have plastic knives (understandable) or plastic forks in a mental ward? Do you know how hard it is to spread cream cheese on a bagel with a plastic spoon? I never did master the art. Thankfully, I wasn’t there long enough to figure it out.

        The people at the hospital were fascinating to me. Paul, for example, wore the same t-shirt every day with a Pokemon design on it. It was stained with ketchup and mustard all over it, but he wore it with pride. I commented on it one day and he told me that he had designed it himself.

        Then there was Gary who had one leg and was in a wheelchair. I got his plate and took him to his seat one day, without saying a word, without taking away his dignity. And Gary, who never said a word to anyone, nodded at me, straight-faced and I thought I was flying over the moon.

        I met a teenage homeschooler there who always kept to herself and was very pretty in a natural beauty sort of way. We smiled at each other half-heartedly in the hallways. She started sitting by me during meals. One day I asked her why she was there and she very bluntly confessed, “I tried to kill myself with a steak knife in front of my mother in the kitchen.” And my heart ached for her because I knew what it felt like to want to disappear.

The Door Girl, Part 23

Sitting in a hard metal chair to fill out all of the forms, I stare at the glass and the metal sign affixed to it that reads, “Mental Ward.” And the only words in my head are, “Are you fucking happy now?” To everyone who had ever hurt me, pushed me, left me. There I was in a mental hospital.

        Did you know that you aren’t allowed to have plastic knives (understandable) or plastic forks in a mental ward? Do you know how hard it is to spread cream cheese on a bagel with a plastic spoon? I never did master the art. Thankfully, I wasn’t there long enough to figure it out.

        The people at the hospital were fascinating to me. Paul, for example, wore the same t-shirt every day with a Pokemon design on it. It was stained with ketchup and mustard all over it, but he wore it with pride. I commented on it one day and he told me that he had designed it himself.

        Then there was Gary who had one leg and was in a wheelchair. I got his plate and took him to his seat one day, without saying a word, without taking away his dignity. And Gary, who never said a word to anyone, nodded at me, straight-faced and I thought I was flying over the moon.

        I met a teenage homeschooler there who always kept to herself and was very pretty in a natural beauty sort of way. We smiled at each other half-heartedly in the hallways. She started sitting by me during meals. One day I asked her why she was there and she very bluntly confessed, “I tried to kill myself with a steak knife in front of my mother in the kitchen.” And my heart ached for her because I knew what it felt like to want to disappear.

The Door Girl, Part 22

This, as all of Door Girl, is a fictional piece of writing with bits of truth woven in to the fabric of it. Thank you for reading.

Part 22

Even though I was getting everything I thought I wanted, my heart was slowly dying more and more.

I didn’t realize it, but the 23-year old I had become was a collage of all those people from her childhood. The little girl watching Tom and Jerry. The middle schooler who was abandoned at thirteen. The kneeling girl in rice. The girl who could never, ever be good enough no matter how hard she tried.

There were Sunday mornings for church, school functions, mommy and me groups, potato salads…all of it. I did all of it. Because I still believed in the fantasy that the kidnapper could fall in love with me, flaws and all. That the people who bore down on me and saw all of my scars would be won over by how amazingly well I could do everything just right.

The vines, the damn vines, were multiplying and there was nothing I could do to stop it. The roots had voices that whispered in my veins, “You are your mother. Leave. Pull that car in the garage and shut the doors. Your wrists are beautiful and the knives are sharp.” The voices wouldn’t stop so I checked myself in a mental hospital.

Why did it seem like all the sane people were on the inside and all the insane were locked out?

The Door Girl, Part 21

I began to get burns all around my neck to the point that I could hardly turn my head. I couldn’t bend my arms or take a shower without taking an 800 Motrin just to endure the pain. My skin looked like someone had poured acid on it. I was burning as though I was on fire. The voice inside of me was being choked to death and I couldn’t breathe. My body was set on fire and literally burned me from head to toe—like lye soap in foster care.

I tried diet. I tried allergy testing. I took shots. The burning progressed to the point of debilitating fatigue.

One day, while talking to a psychologist friend, he asked, “Junie, what’s burning inside of you that you can’t speak?” I held my head in my hands and cried.

“Everything,” I sobbed, “all of it. I’m just so tired.”

If I had a nickel for every time some well-meaning individual says, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would buy myself a unicycle, just for the fun of it. Just because that saying is a joke and so is riding a unicycle, unless unicycles are your thing, and it they are, that’s totally cool.

It’s just that…everything doesn’t happen for a reason. Sometimes life is just senseless. And the truth is that people can’t stomach living in a senseless world, so they make up stupid things like that to say.

Can’t anyone just say, “I’m sorry. Life is shitty sometimes.” No, because it scares them. But to the person going through the shit, anything besides that is just condescending.

To, my advice: just don’t say it (and if you’re going to say shit like that, just say it in your head).

The Door Girl, Part 21

I began to get burns all around my neck to the point that I could hardly turn my head. I couldn’t bend my arms or take a shower without taking an 800 Motrin just to endure the pain. My skin looked like someone had poured acid on it. I was burning as though I was on fire. The voice inside of me was being choked to death and I couldn’t breathe. My body was set on fire and literally burned me from head to toe—like lye soap in foster care.

I tried diet. I tried allergy testing. I took shots. The burning progressed to the point of debilitating fatigue.

One day, while talking to a psychologist friend, he asked, “Junie, what’s burning inside of you that you can’t speak?” I held my head in my hands and cried.

“Everything,” I sobbed, “all of it. I’m just so tired.”

If I had a nickel for every time some well-meaning individual says, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would buy myself a unicycle, just for the fun of it. Just because that saying is a joke and so is riding a unicycle, unless unicycles are your thing, and it they are, that’s totally cool.

It’s just that…everything doesn’t happen for a reason. Sometimes life is just senseless. And the truth is that people can’t stomach living in a senseless world, so they make up stupid things like that to say.

Can’t anyone just say, “I’m sorry. Life is shitty sometimes.” No, because it scares them. But to the person going through the shit, anything besides that is just condescending.

To, my advice: just don’t say it (and if you’re going to say shit like that, just say it in your head).

The Door Girl, Part 20

Part 20

After foster care, I did what I could to become a responsible citizen. I promised myself I would never be like my mother. I worked three jobs, and took fully loaded semesters at school. Through the good fortune of befriending my Linguistics professor, I started teaching the English language to those who hadn’t yet learned it but needed to. I taught classes at a college, I taught in Myanmar, South of China. I spent time in Italy. I learned to speak another language. I rode my bike through the mountains and swam in the Mediterranean Sea.

Have you ever burned your legs in the Mediterranean Sea? The salt is healing for your wounds and I had a million I didn’t even realize until I stepped foot in to those healing waters. I sat on a rock and let the water wash over every last one.

But my insides were broken. I was damaged and as I laid my head down in the water and tasted the salt on my lips, I wished that I could drink it in like a healing elixir. Something to make all of those jagged little edges smooth—the way rocks are whittled down and crafted over time.

        Italy was a healing balm—a place of respite. I stood on the Alps on the Italy-Switzerland border and listened to the gentle whisper that the Bible speaks of. I heard it. I’ve heard it a time or two since, but I don’t think as loudly as I did that day. The only thing I felt, heard, saw and knew was that I was alive and my life was a work or art in the making.

I graduated with honors in English. I was becoming the girl that no one expected me to become having grown up the way I did. I did my hair and make-up perfectly and I dressed modestly. I smiled broadly and became the girl people question how she turned out as well as she did coming from her type of background. And that made me feel good. Because I was what people refer to as trailer trash. And I was a survivor. And the perfection was burning me from the outside in.

The Door Girl, Part 19

Capabilities of love, I didn't have--I was an anomaly. Like someone born without a foot or a hand; it doesn't happen often, but it does happen

 And unfortunate or not, the way the dice was rolled, my heart was pulled out at a very young age. 

I became the tin man and was afraid I might rust if I shed a tear. 

A few months after I moved in with Lucy, I became a ward of the state. I was moved to foster care and given lye soap to wash with which burned by body from head to toe. 

Have you been to foster care? It was one of the most horrific experiences of my life, to say the least. Being shifted around like a pet that everyone wants and then decides they were looking for something a little better, a little more malleable.

In my dreams, I woud fantasize about being kidnapped. At first the kidnapper would hate me and plan to kill me. But I would win them over with how charming I was. And they would parent me and adore me the way every child deserves to be.

Instead I was placed with chain-smoking Sheila and truck-driving Joe. They had three other foster children younger than me. Two were black and one was white. "Mama and Papa" would threaten to make me sleep in the hay loft with the animals if I talked out of turn.

The other orphans were lavished with attention and bought gifts. I was made to love them. To smother them with affection and if I didn't, I paid the price. 

One day, that very thing happened. I didn't move fast enough getting a sippy cup filled. 

Sheila quietly and very calmly requested, "Please go get the bag of rice out of the pantry.
And so I did.
"Now pour it on the floor."
And I did.
"Now kneel on the rice."
And I did.

I stayed there for what felt like hours. Nothing could win them over. The tin man could not captivate her captors, no matter how deeply she let the rice grind in to her knees.

The Door Girl, Part 18

https://www.superstock.com/stock-photos-images/4260-20452733

That was the second time that I was taught that people never stay.  Including myself. If everyone was going to leave, I had learned that I should be the first to go.

The bond we had at the trailer park, the late nights, all of it...it was gone, a dream.

So please don't judge me later in the story (because I judge myself and you very may well) that walking away was a learned behavior.  Like using a fork when you eat or brushing your teeth in the morning. 

As people came and went, I remembered the story of Sarah in the Old Testament of the Bible. She was warned not to turn back to see her old city or she would be turned to salt. But what did she do? She turned around and was turned in to a pillar of salt. 

I learned to laugh at her and how soft she had been to do such a thing. I would never be like Sarah; I would never love something so much that I would allow it to hurt me.

Twice had been enough and the wisteria clogging up my heart was in full bloom.

I am a hydrangea!

My hydrangea plant looks like it's dying. I wonder if it needs more water than your average plant.

Isn't it funny how certain types of plants need particular amounts of water, more or less sunlight, etc.?

People are like plants. We are all diffeernt requiring different amounts of nourishment. But it's expected that as human beings we should all require the same things. My guess is that hydrangeas necessitate a differing level of nourishment. Unlike, say, a butterfly bush which needs very little care.

Then the plants have the luxury of being categorcially assigned. Wouldn't it be refreshing to know what "zone" you are in?

Instead, it's a lot of figuring things out for oneself. It's a lot of being self-aware and always doing the hard work to stay nourished...because I'm one of the high maintenance plants.

I thrive in areas with dark. moist soil and gentle rains and quiet. I grow in places where the sun glows warm, but not too hot, mind you.

The kicker: I googled hydrangeas as I was writing this. Hydrangeas:

-Are best planted in areas with afternoon shade or the sun will scorch the leaves.
-Must be planted in moist, rich soil.
-Need to be watered deeeply--they need a lot more than other plants to establish a strong root system.

I am a hydrangea and I never even knew it.

The night I saw the sky for the first time...

The Door Girl, Part 17

Days that should have been filled with mediocrity never were-and honestly, I think I liked it that way. I didn't know any other way.

Aunt Cassie let us do things none of the other adults did. Probably because she was busy smoking pot all day and grieving the loss of her beloved.

Regardless, my comrades and I slept in sleeping bags in the back of her station wagon. We never had to check in from morning until the streetlights came on at night. We caught frogs. We had impromptu Halloween parties. In a way, my life was magical.

One day, and now, I can laugh at it, Aunt Cassie picked me up from school with my mattress strapped to the top of the car and asked me where my 13-year old self would like to live. She didn't have any money so she had to move in with my grandma (they didn't have room for me).

So I said, "Lucy." Just as casually as I would answer "Fries," if you asked me what I wanted at McDonald's. I was used to this shit by now. Lucy was my friend at school and apparently her mother had no problem with my mattress being dropped off at their house, because I never heard a word about it.

So, there I was at Lucy's without ever having said goodbye to my trailer park family. "People come, people go, " my mother would always say, so I never got my panties in a bunch.

That was the second time it was engrained in to me that people were transient. They came, they went. And this time, it was time for me to go.

Chalk Drawings....