Life In The 16

I lived in a typical seventies neighborhood, one tri level after another. Mine was the black roof, red shutters, and white siding. All of our mothers stayed home, except for the O’Halloran’s and their mom worked at Burger Chef, which I thought was pretty cool… My mom had a PhD, got it the summer of 1976, and she held herself, and unfortunately, me to a higher standard. My mom was odd. My mom’s first marriage was rough, and I think she held me responsible for the relationship’s demise, as I look like her first husband. I was treated differently. One day she was nice, one day she was mean, and I just tried to ride the waves and not make any. Being with my friends was kind of a reprieve, but they put sand on cookie icing and fed them to me… They made fun of me or excluded me because they had jean shorts and halter tops, but my two hundred dollar short set wasn’t cool… I spent a lot of my days arguing my case to have anything remotely cool only to have it voted down two to one. I did play softball one summer, but practice consisted of “so and so is better than you and you really embarrassed us last game… I don’t think there will be a next summer…” I had to give up cool hairstyles, clothes, and what I really wanted to do for them. I remember being denied the rite of passage to try out for cheerleading, learn that initial rejection and move on from it. However, I had to play that flute that my mother paid so much money for… I spent my years at home appeasing my parents because crossing that line meant fingernails in the wrist, a beating, or something Joan Crawford would do, like destroy my closet on a whim…

Life in the 16 wasn’t an ideal childhood, except for a few moments when my friends showed me kindness and didn’t feed me sand cookies, but it prepared me to settle for less than and not say “shit” even if I had a moutful. I was stepped on as a waitress, asked to leave jobs because, well, the mean girls showed me wrong… It led to a lot of addictions. Food, being one of them. It led me to binge drinking and internet addicitiosn as well, but most of all approval.

What we are taught in those four walls for such a short time, does a lot of damage…