Extreme Makeover: Chapter 4---Started December 7, 2011

Mom said she had tried to “walk off” her labor pains during the night of December 22^nd of 1949. In those days you stayed in the hospital after having a baby, they didn’t kick you out the very next day.

She told me she didn’t want to ruin John’s 3^rd Christmas. I don’t know how many times she actually told me that. It could have been just once, but it stuck with me and my interpretation, or the beliefs I gleaned from it changed throughout my lifetime. I think it depends on where I was in my life when my mother FIRST told me that as to how I absorbed it and what I felt it meant. At various times throughout my life, however, I interpreted it to mean that she didn’t really want me to come; that my arrival was an inconvenience and that I very clearly took a backseat to my older brother. I remember thinking at some point “He was three!! You mean you couldn’t have delayed a three year old’s Christmas by a few days and bring him a Christmas present of a baby sister? He would never have known his Christmas had been delayed by the birth of his sister.” Lucky for me, it was pretty clear that my brother really liked having a baby sister (at least until I became a really BIG, royal pain in his butt)!!

Anyway, I guess I was determined to come into the world ‘cause she wasn’t able to walk off those labor pains and I was born around seven in the morning on December 23^rd. People have asked me my whole life if I felt cheated because my birthday was so close to Christmas. I have to say honestly, that I never did. I either got MORE presents in two days than most people, or more EXPENSIVE combination presents. Mom also made pretty strong efforts to make sure my birthday was celebrated separately from Christmas, and most years she succeeded.

When I was 8 or 9 months old I was separated from Mom and Dad overnight because I had Roseola (a form of German measles, I think), and a temperature of 106. In those days they wouldn’t let parents stay overnight with their sick babies. This event would likely not have left a huge impact on me (and maybe it really didn’t) had not other events followed later in my childhood. Mom DID frequently tell the story of when they came to get me the next day. I apparently saw them through the window of the nursery and she said my brow furrowed into a deep frown and began to turn red. I looked at them as if to say “How could you do this to me?” began to scream and turned away from them burying my face in the mattress. She reported that she turned to my dad and said something to the effect of “Oh my God, Jack, remember that look on her face!!” I often questioned how much impact such an event could possibly have had on an 8 or 9 month old baby until I held my niece Katherine in my arms when she was about that age. She had so much personality and a well defined temperament already and I realized that leaving her overnight at a hospital, sick with a high fever, would, indeed, cause a response!! A sense of abandonment, perhaps that an infant’s mind could not express except to cry and give her parents that “look.” Still, it appeared that I recuperated quickly and went back to being a pretty happy baby. Mom often said that I was her easiest birth, but that I’d made up for it ever since!! Seems that “look” was just a forewarning of more to come.

Mom also told me (and I’m sure this was said MORE than once), that I was the only one of her children born so fat that I had creases in my thighs. Someone recently tried to tell me that the statement was just one of those things I had heard and so I became convinced I had always been fat. The photos bear out the truth of it, though. I WAS always fat. I never thinned out. I never outgrew my baby fat. After babyhood and the toddler stage, Mom always had to buy my clothes from the “chubby” section. By the time I was 6 or 7 it was already hard for her to just buy clothes for me and bring them home. I perceived this problem as a significant frustration for her, and actually going shopping WITH her was usually NOT a fun and pleasant experience. I translated her frustration into the belief that she thought I was a pain in the ass. I felt to blame for Mom’s frustration. I was unable to become a Brownie or a Girl Scout because Mom couldn’t afford to buy new uniforms and she couldn’t find anyone chubby enough to provide hand-me-downs. So, I was chubby…a word considered to be nicer than “fat.”

I have a “sense,” just a glimmer of a “feeling”, even though my dad was already gone, that I was a pretty content and happy child until age 6 when Mom married my stepfather. Sometime before the marriage, I recall Mom asking the three of us what we would think if she married Don, a man she had apparently been dating off and on. My initial response in my head was “NO WAY.” What did I know at six other than my gut response? Then John spoke and said “whatever makes you happy, Mom.” Seems like that was John’s life, trying to give or do whatever made Mom happy. I, on the other hand, had not even considered Mom’s happiness and didn’t even KNOW why my true, initial response had been negative. That day was the first time I REMEMBER feeling ashamed of myself. It was because I hadn’t considered Mom’s happiness at all. So, after John spoke, I felt terrible and just parroted his words to my mother saying, “yeah, Ma, whatever makes you happy.”

She married him on her birthday in November of 1956 and I turned seven in December. I remember knowing by Christmas of that year that things were not really good in our house. I can’t tell you what specifically made me know or feel that, but I know that it was pretty evident (at least to me) that something was awry. By the following April or May when preparing for my First Communion I have specific memories of wanting to kill my stepfather and of hating my mother for bringing him into our house. I remember studying the things we had to memorize about first communion and to prepare for our first confession before we had the first communion. I remember kneeling on a portable kneeler in our dining room posing for my first communion pictures in my fancy white dress and my veil with my prayer book in hand, pretending to be holy and that I was looking forward to the event.

By this time I had told my protestant neighbor that she wasn’t going to go to heaven. When she objected very strongly I began to think about it. It made no sense. Patty was a good girl. She didn’t talk back to her mother, didn’t hate her mother or dad, didn’t want to kill anybody. It didn’t make sense that she would not go to heaven just because she wasn’t Catholic.

I began to doubt what I was being taught and most certainly did not believe that the little round wafer we were soon to receive was actually the body of Christ. I did not know the word hypocrite then, but that’s how I felt. In my mind, based on my childish understanding, my soul had to be VERY black and filled with mortal sin. Hating one’s mother had to be a mortal sin. Wanting to kill one’s stepfather had to be a mortal sin. Not believing that the wafer was the body of Christ had to be the worst of those sins and I didn’t feel I could tell ANYONE anything about all those feelings, least of all confess them in a confessional. So, when first confession time came I continued to hide my true feelings and confessed to “venial” sins of lying to my mother, stealing change from her purse, talking back to my teacher and other similar things. I was given my penance and said the prayers dutifully, hoping that somehow my soul might be cleared, but knowing there was no way that was going to happen. Thus began the pattern of hiding my true feelings from everyone. I went through the charade of first confession and first communion, received the gifts, endured the party and all the attention, all the while feeling like a “big fat lie.” The cement of bad feelings about myself began to cure and dry in place.

Subsequently, other dynamics of my childhood built more and more cement around that belief that I was bad and unforgivable and I began to believe that God did not love me. I already believed that my mother loved me less than my brother and now I began to believe that there was no way God could love a person like me. I remember when I learned the word hypocrite how often I accused my brother of being one when all the while I knew it was I who was the hypocrite. I attended mass and took communion 6 days a week throughout my grammar school years always feeling like a hypocrite.

I began to act out my anger and hostility and my relationship with my mother deteriorated very quickly into a seriously combative one. Soon it was I who had to keep my mouth shut in our house, not my unreasonable and violent stepfather. I became angrier and angrier as I felt one insult after the other was being piled on top of all that cement that was already pretty thick. Every year Mom had to go see the teacher because my behavior in school was unacceptable. I was mouthy, talked a lot, talked back to my teachers and was combative with other students (in later grammar school years).

I remained “chubby” until 7^th grade when I had an emergency appendectomy. My stepfather never believed I was sick, even after the appendix was removed and the doctor said it had been as big as a softball. When I came home after surgery in Spring of my 7^th grade year, I began to gain weight. I only remember that because I gained it so quickly that the incision spread open in the center and took a very long time to heal. I think I may have weighed about 150 before the surgery. By graduation from 8^th grade a year or so later, I weighed 210 pounds and my weight was a huge bone of contention between me and my mother.

I think Mom had started in on my weight when I was around nine telling me that I needed to lose weight before I started my periods or I might have to battle my weight my whole life. She told me boys wouldn’t like me because I was fat; harped on me to stop running over my shoes…to walk on the insides of my feet; watched everything I ate; told me what I could and couldn’t eat; put me on diets with her; tried everything she could to control what I ate. Thus, I began to “sneak” food and steal change from her purse to buy candy on the way home from school. These habits had kept my weight in the “chunky” clothes and made it impossible for me to wear hand-me-downs which Mom complained about each time she had to buy me new clothes. Most of this stuff resulted in a lot of rebellion on my part and Mom and I fought a lot over those years. It was when I was in 8^th grade that she divorced my stepfather. I even got in a fight with a classmate because she had made a smart-aleck remark about my “parents being divorced.”

I would hear Mom defending herself to my Aunt Joie over the phone telling her that she couldn’t control what I ate and defending other things that she did with us kids. We were forbidden to tell Aunt Joie bad things that we had done and Mom was reluctant to share the bad reports of my behavior at school as well.

By this time fighting with Mom and then going off to sob in my room had become regular household fare. John would often come to comfort me even though he didn’t fully understand my behavior, what I was so angry about or why I couldn’t just shut my mouth. He’s the only other one who remembered what life had been like prior to mom’s second marriage. I spent many nights crying to my father’s picture asking Him why he left me. I cried to God many of those nights too, asking him why he took my dad away. I yelled at God a lot too for taking my dad, ‘cause life would have been so different if he hadn’t and mom would never have married my stepfather. Many nights I begged God to tell me what I had done that was SO bad that he didn’t love me. I couldn’t fathom why I deserved to be so unhappy, fat and not acceptable to my mother and my Aunt Joie. Why was I such a disappointment to them? Why didn’t God love me. I couldn’t figure that out. Later I convinced myself that God was just damned MEAN and I stayed mad at him for many, many years.

I wasn’t mad at God just for myself. I was mad at him for how he allowed so many bad things to happen. We used to get these little red Mission magazines that showed pitiful pictures of starving African children, covered in dirt, with runny noses, skinny as rails with distended bellies from starvation. If God was so good, how could he allow such things to happen to these poor little children? The booklets were designed to encourage people to send their money to support the missions which were trying to help these children. If you contributed a certain amount of money each year you could support a “pagan baby.” That’s what they called them, “pagan babies.” They were pagans, because they didn’t know our God and Jesus. Those magazines only made me hate God all the more. How could they teach me that God was merciful when these things were happening every day to these poor "pagan babies?"

We were fairly poor growing up and I rarely had any money to contribute to the pagan babies. The nuns would make a big fuss over anyone who had so generously supported a pagan baby. I was never able to do that. Once my outlook had become negative (God didn’t love me, Mom didn’t love me, my fat was going to prevent others from loving me and I was an unforgivable sinner and surely would burn in hell), what I saw and heard most was everything that supported those beliefs and caused them to grow stronger and stronger. I often wished I would just DIE. I wished that to stop suffering, but also out of revenge, wanting to punish my mother for my pain.

Don was an alcoholic who had been raised by alcoholics. I have no idea if they were abusive, but I know his mother signed for him to go into the service prior to the age of 18. He was handsome, muscular, physically powerful and had at least one tattoo on an upper arm…maybe on both, I can’t remember. He was clean-shaven, never swore to my memory, LOVED Jackie Gleason, taught me how to parallel park, took us fishing in a little row boat and was totally volatile and unpredictable in terms of his temper. We walked on eggshells whenever he was home whether he was sober or drunk, but especially when he was drinking. He had little tolerance for kids’ antics and tended to discipline violently and in anger. He never beat UP my mother or any of us kids and I recall only one beating with a belt that he gave me on the backs of my legs and butt that resulted in wide welts and bruises going across my legs. He never punched anyone, there were no black eyes (except when he kicked a door in not knowing my Mom was behind it and it knocked her out and cut open her eyebrow). He didn’t call names or berate any of us either. He could just "go off” at the slightest provocation and throw a plate at Mom, or a coffee table, pancakes and batter all over the kitchen, that sort of thing. Regardless, it was darned scary and whenever something began to blow I would scoop up my little sister and run her out of the house so she didn’t have to witness it.

I know very well that my upbringing was way better than some and worse than others. I have since gained perspective on how much worse it COULD have been, but I suffered nearly every day, had little joy in life, was miserable most of the time and my death wish became more and more prominent as I grew older.

After I graduated grade school, I immediately moved to Aunt Joie’s. I lived with her and Uncle Mike from June of 1963 through April or so of 1964, most of my Freshman year in high school. John was a senior at the all boys’ school and I was at one of the three all girls’ Catholic schools all the way out in the South end. We lived in what was called “the Old North End.” At the time we were growing up it was still pretty safe, but it was one of the poor areas of town. We played outside a LOT. We rode our bikes (my brothers rode their brand new skinny-tired racer bikes) and I rode my cousin’s 26 year old fat-tired bike. I roller skated a lot and I DID get shoe skates for skating in a rink. I was a size 8 ½ or 9 at the time, but Mom bought me 10s so I wouldn’t outgrow them. The were big and clunky, but I was able to skate in them and she DID take me to the rink fairly often and I didn’t have to rent the skates.

Anyway, at 210 pounds I moved to Aunt Joie’s. She lived in a small suburb on a one-block dead end street and there was a girl next door named Janet with whom I became friends. I could escape Aunt Joie’s rigidness by going over to Janet's house or going outside to fool around and hang out. Aunt Joie was a teacher and a good one. She encouraged me in school, helped me with homework (but never by doing it FOR me), had my breakfast set out for me every day with my little thyroid pill ready for me to take, had my lunch packed or gave me just enough money to buy lunch and pay for the bus to get to and from school. Since I was the only child there she was able to monitor the quantities of food in the house and cheating on my diet was pretty difficult.

When we lived on the dead-end street, though she had a basement and she stored the family’s famous Lebanese date cookies in old cookie tins with wax paper in between each layer. She had a lot of them down there that particular year and I remember going down fairly often, removing one date cookie and rearranging the others so the missing cookie would not be noticed. Over a period of time, however, the diminished quantity of cookies was caught as the deficit had become pretty obvious. Regardless of the cheating I did manage to sneak in, I lost 60 pounds going from 210 to 140 pounds. When I started high school I had already lost some of that 60 pounds and got measured for my school uniform when I’d probably lost about half of it. Arrival of my uniform was very late and it was almost Christmas by the time it came. It was very big on me. We took the seam in once. Then again, and finally when I’d gotten to 140, a third time. Luckily, we did NOT cut off any of the excess fabric. So, when I started high school I was more of an average size than I had ever been and was relatively slim.

John was a senior and I went to some basketball games when he was the pep band leader. Some of his classmates noticed me and one asked him who that pretty girl was up in the stands. John was very proud. We double dated to the homecoming at his school because I had asked a family friend who was a junior to take a girlfriend of mine to the homecoming (she had asked me a favor to see if I could get a date for her to the homecoming). When I asked Greg if he would take her, he talked to his mother and she suggested instead that he take ME. My girlfriend was pretty miffed and jealous. I remember dancing with Greg while John was dancing with his girlfriend Janet. They were looking our way and laughing. I thought John was making fun of me dancing. Turns out he was laughing in delight because Janet had said something nice about how pretty I was. Greg was a total gentleman (of course…he was a family friend and we were doubling with my brother).

Sometime before deep winter came my Aunt and Uncle moved off of the dead-end street and onto a busy 4 lane street with no sidewalks into a nice ranch home with no basement. I lost my friend from the dead-end street, it was winter and harder to get outside and away from Aunt Joie and there were no kids my age close by. Tensions rose between the two of us and one time we had a huge fight because I felt she had misrepresented something that had taken place to my mom. I felt she had lied to mom. I sobbed for so long that I think I became a bit dehydrated or something because I had “the shivers.” I was not prone to “shivers” or getting “chilled.” They gave me a shot of brandy to warm me up.

The period of time we lived on the dead end street were some of the happiest months of my childhood. While Aunt Joie had pretty rigid ideas, I was the only child there, I had her full attention. She taught me about taking care of myself in a way that Mom hadn’t had time to do. I had terribly callused heels that would crack all the way down into live skin and hurt like mad. She put Vaseline on my feet every night and put socks on my feet before bed. She healed up those cracks and I had no more calluses. She stood behind me once as I was looking in the mirror at myself wearing a new sweater after the weight loss. She took delight in the pride I felt in how pretty I looked in that red sweater.

However, all good things must end, I guess. I missed my siblings a lot even though we saw each other as often as possible, and the tensions with me and Aunt Joie worsened until the time they gave me the brandy. After that episode, my Uncle tried to insist that I had to go home because he couldn't stand to see his wife be hurt by me. Aunt Joie tried to fight him on it, but feeling that I was no longer really wanted and missing my siblings, I insisted on moving back home in April or so of my freshman year, 1964. I was 14.

I immediately met a boy who lived across the alley who later became my “boyfriend” even though nobody knew it. That was all happening at the beginning of my Sophomore year. My first kiss had not been with Paul. It was with a guy named Tom. I really liked Tom and during that Summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years I was caught kissing Tom in between the houses across the alley. The end result of that was that I was forbidden to see Tom OR Paul ever again. It was Summer and both Tom and Paul laid in the grass in the yard next door and listened to the whole tirade my mother laid on me and knew they were now forbidden. Apparently Tom was intimidated by all that, but Paul was not.

Paul used to sneak into the yard next door to my open bedroom window and we would talk. Then, one day my sister and I were out riding our bikes. She was about 6. At the end of the block was a parking lot that we often rode around in. I was just about there and saw Paul cutting diagonally across the parking lot. MaryJo, who knew I was not supposed to associate with Paul, looked up and said “AHA, I caught you.” Just then her tire got stuck in a rut next to the sidewalk and she fell. Paul took off running to her and got to her first. I had to stop my bike and turn around to get to her. By the time I got there, Paul had determined that MaryJo’s leg was broken and somehow knew that we should let the leg dangle as we carried her home. We made a “seat by holding our crossed hands in an “x” formation (his idea too) and carried her home. Mom and I went to the hospital with MaryJo and Paul stayed with Joe. John was away in seminary.

In any case, when we got back with MaryJo in a cast up to her hip (or at least mid thigh), Paul was still there with Joe and thus regained the right to be around me. That’s when he became my “boyfriend” and we fooled around the fall of my sophomore year. I would leave for the early bus and instead stop at his house. His mother had already left for work, so we were able to kiss and neck until the very last bus that would get us to school on time. The kissing and touching was strictly experimental, never went past the clothes and had pretty much zero affect on me erotically. I was a VERY late bloomer when it came to sexual knowledge. I had already begun to gain weight back and remember the winter of my sophomore year when I had just turned fifteen or was about to turn fifteen, having to go sledding with Paul in a skirt because I had no pants that fit.  I wound up falling off of the sled and getting undies packed with snow.  I was mortified. Shortly thereafter, Paul found a blond, blue eyed, thin girl at his co-ed school and broke up with me. My first and last high school boyfriend had come and gone already only to return during my freshman year in college and provide me with a pretty negative sexual encounter.