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.