You Are Only A Girl

You Are Only A Girl

We moved from the army housing to University Apartments, these were a huge step up. They even had a swimming pool!

It wasn’t long before I noticed major discrepancies between the way my brother and I were treated. The most obvious to a little child were gifts; my brother’s birthday was a month and a half earlier than mine so the differences were obvious. Dad would buy Big Wheels and Bicycles for my brother and I would get these hollow plastic baby dolls. How I hated those dolls. I wanted a bicycle too! But when I asked, pointing out that at the time my brother had 5 bicycles and 3 big wheels, dads response was that he wouldn’t have enough money to go my brother a new bike if he got me one. One year my dad got my brother 2 bikes (?) one was a girl’s, and since he didn’t want it anyway, it became “my” bike. I loved it; it had a banana seat and fringes from the handlebars and could really go.

Presents from New Zealand were weird like that too. I’d get nightgowns several sizes to small (as if they had remembered I was the younger sibling instead of the older) and my brother got toys. I asked my mom if we could ask them for something else or tell them my size, but the answer was always “no”. So all presents from relatives were worthless, or “it was the thought that counts”.

No matter how hard times got, I felt that we were in this together, that we would get through it and there would be reward at the end. Mom made me believe this and I believed it with all my heart, that this difficulty was temporary and things would be all right in the end.

Things slowly got better, I started getting stuffed animals and dinosaurs and horses in lieu of the plastic baby dolls, and I actually started to get closer to equal things at times, like Lego sets. Dad would phone though and spend ½ an hour talking to us, 25 minutes for my brother and 5 minutes for me. That’s the first I remember starting to get panic attacks about not being loved. Mom was making up for the Boy Without a Father; Dad was dong the same, and I were left in the surf with no one.

We ended up getting those… you know, Big Brothers and Big Sisters things. My Big Sister, Debbie, would bring presents for both kids, my brother and I and my brother’s one Tim would only bring stuff for him. I tried to talk to my mom and I got the “Never Mind” so I talked to Debbie about it when I next saw her. She said she liked buying us both presents cause she thought kids were cute. So I went to Tim and explained the inequality and he said that he had no obligation to get me anything because he only had a contract to be the Big Brother of my brother about it and he wouldn’t be getting me anything. EVERYTHING worked that way. My brother was getting fucking rose petals showered on him like he was the emperor of fucking China.

Debbie’s roommate had a fiancé that was a child psychologist. He’d drag me out of class and we’d do role-play with puppets or look at optical illusions, or play with a dollhouse. I’d pull all the people out of the doll house and replace with dinosaurs, Dad was the t rex of course. The females were herbivores. I’ll bet he got some interesting notes.

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Trial One

The Gesture Sketch

The blank page is intimidating like a canvas with fresh Gesso on it, waiting for its first mark. But there is no still life set up, no collection of reference photos, nothing tangible to work with, no direction.

People tell me I need to write about my pain. Psychologists, friends of my parents, doctors. I've written about it in articles, forum posts, in chats and social networking sites. I've been told I help people somehow. I want to do this but I don’t want to sound whiny and I don’t want to be preachy. I don’t want to come off as weak and set myself up for an attack. People want a book. I don’t know how I can do this without feedback though. The latest forum thread is moving slowly, so I thought I might try a blog. I don’t think that writing is my forte though, I have no rhythm, and my short-term memory is, well… short.

I have this collage to work with… life, family, important people, pain. Horses. The green of the sun shining through June leaves. The resounding splash of a breaching humpback whale. The exquisite pain of my fractured skull during a flare-up. I don’t have to write about everything.

***

It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t care about them or to someone who is ambivalent what it is about horses. I’ve been horse crazy since the first time I saw one close up, my mom took us to the University Farms in Penn State, and there was this enormous white horse in the barn reaching over for treats. His eyes were so brown and beautiful and his lips were so velvety and wriggley in my little hand as he took the slice of apple. I must have been 5 or so, I didn’t come up much past his knees.

I think something clicked in my brain, that something was just right, and that was the start of it. The triple-heartbeat thump of the canter, the flagging of the main and tail, the resonating of their breath as they galloped along in the movies… I didn’t have chances to be around horses, but I felt deeply in my heart that my fascination and love would prevail.

There was no money when I was a kid, so everything was Out Of The Question. I remember driving by the dance school and catching a glimpse of the other girls my age in ballet class, and not understanding why the dance classes weren’t too expensive for them but they were for me.

“It’s too expensive” became one of my mom’s chantras that lasted into my adulthood, along with “Never Mind” and “It doesn’t matter” and “Take a Tylenol and go to bed.” Things were never discussed or explained, and there was never any compensation or reasoning. You had to be careful about what you asked too because mom’s mind was like a minefield of danger, say or ask the wrong thing and you could get grounded. She was born in England and grew up in New Zealand and had this odd collection of colloquialisms that she would pull out when she was feeling passive aggressive, and there was no way you could explain that you didn’t know what the Hell she was talking about, she would say there is no way you didn’t know her obscure 1950’s New Zealand slang and not understanding was also grounds for punishment. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My brother and I were born in New Zealand too, but at the time we lived in Pennsylvania, USA. That meant there was no extended family to turn to. When we were very young it wasn’t really a problem but as we got older the tension increased exponentially.

I have a few snapshot memories of New Zealand: being held by my grandmother for a family portrait, the orange and green checker wallpaper in my bedroom, having terrible eczema and having some kind of fluid that stung like hell when it was applied.

***

We moved to Pennsylvania, USA for my dad’s school, or something. We lived in these tiny duplexes which were actually ex-army housing, they were too delapitated for the military. My earliest memories of North America were here, snapshot memories of everyone sitting around the table eating corn but me: since I was allergic, flies buzzing on the door screen trying to get in or out, dust “fairies” in the beams of sunlight, climbing the apple tree across the street by the playground, the bully Ronnie that lived up the street that I would have to try and avoid- he was retarded or something and his parents didn’t watch him very well. There was a couple from India that would give us chocolate Easter bunnies at Easter time, and downhill from us was my mom’s Panamanian friend Mariza. She had two boys, about 12 or 13 and they would come over and take our food and sometimes we wouldn’t have anything to eat. I don’ know why my mom didn’t do anything about that.

There were scary memories too, dad would get into these really scary rages and shout and threaten. There was a side table next to the sofa that was my safe place to hide when he was like that, a stained wooden table with lathed legs. I remember this because once dad went out of his mind and he lifted the table from above me and it went up, up, up into the air, from my perspective it was like it went 50 feet into the air then it came crashing down and one of the legs broke and the stark white of the unstained wood surprised me- it looked like a broken bone. That was the last memory I had of our dad living with us.