My mom loved to tell the story of the morning she came to get me from my crib when I was just ten months old, and I looked up at her and said, “I want one now.”

These were my first words.

Ya’ll, I’ve had four children, and I’m here to tell you that if my ten-month old spoke words to me – ANY actual words to me – I would freak the hell out.

This is not natural behavior for babies.

But my 21-years young mom didn’t really know any better, so she simply asked me what exactly I wanted “one” of and gave it to me.

Done. Check.

I wanted a pacifier, by the way.

It was probably my way of saying “Get me the hell out of this crib,” too.

Cribs are a funny thing. They’re meant to be a space where we can place our most treasured humans and feel certain that they will be safe from harm.

But I’m guessing that to some children that barred bed is often less a safe space and more the prison cell it looks like.

That could explain the time I forced my toddler-sized head through those bars and got myself quite stuck, requiring the sawing of said bars in order to get me out.

Bless my mom. She had a LOT going on.

Imagine being 21 and married to a drunk, PLUS mother to a talking dare-devil baby.

That first baby-talking incident must have been the beginning of my sense for the utility of words, whereas the love that I eventually had for words and the almost compulsive need within me to use them to make my way in the world sparked not long after and certainly never left, even if the medium of expression perhaps changed now and then.

I was reading fluently by the time I was three.

No, I don’t think I was exceptionally smart.

I was certainly precocious.

And words just came easily to me.

In my first three years of life, my father dragged my mother and me with him across Mississippi and Tennessee, preaching in small churches but never staying long enough for the truth of his lifestyle to come out. My mom didn’t mind my chattiness. In fact, I think she relished it. It soothed her. I guess I wasn’t the only one who needed a pacifier while in a cage.

I think my father enjoyed my constant flow of words, too. I could charm the socks off the congregation of the church during the welcome dinner, allowing some grace to fall on whatever his state might be at the time – given that his “state” was usually somewhere between edgy and slightly inebriated to barely functional and totally sloshed.

I was pretty handy to have around.

When my brother came along, I became his “words.” For whatever reason, our parents couldn’t understand a word that came out of his mouth until he was about four, so until then they relied solely on me to interpret for him.

Bless.

I remember one day he came running into the living room, babbling desperately to the bewildered adults there, who, of course, turned to me.

For the love.

And yes, I understood perfectly what he was saying and interpreted for them with as much condescension as my seven-year old self could muster, “He wants the clown mask in the top-left corner of his closet.”

Sheesh.

As I grew, I became quite skilled at using my wordsmith superpowers to collaborate with my brother and masterfully distract mom from the reality of our situation. We were the perfect pair. Patton’s dry wit and my dripping sarcasm, along with her ability to take our good-natured, but unrelenting teasing made for constant entertainment in the midst of what was often otherwise a miserable existence – especially for her.

Distraction was good medicine, and words made that possible when not much else was available to us.

But here’s the thing about how words work in the home where the driving force is alcoholism.

You think they work, but they don’t.

Because even though I could wordsmith my way around and through many things, my words never changed my father.

And I had more power over him than anyone else in the house.

I’m not sure why that is.

He certainly had plenty of power over me as well.

But when I was older and dad was working more consistently, if I was with the family when we went out to eat, he asked to eat in the non-smoking section and didn’t order alcohol with his meal.

And he never smoked in the car when I was with him.

These were weird and small, but noticeable boundaries that he started observing when I was maybe ten.

I think my complaints, my obstinance, my unwillingness to just take it from him worked in these areas, insignificant as they were.

And honestly these small victories for me were defeating in many ways because power with great limitations is just… bondage.

It’s funny how I felt so strong about confronting him when it came to his smoking in the car or, later, in the house. I could argue with him for days about what smoking was doing to him. Eventually, by the time I was in college, I even got brave enough to hunt around the house and pull out all his hidden bottles of cheap liquor, pile them in the middle of the kitchen table, and prepare a speech meant to convince him to “finally” face the truth and admit that he was an alcoholic and needed help. My brother and I would do it together, and my body would fill with a very persuasive energy assuring me I had the upper hand this time around.

And it was a lie. Every time.

And the really upending part of this story is that it played on repeat.

For 38 years – until the day my father died.

Well, okay. I’ll cut myself some slack and say that I managed to stop believing my own lie a few months before he died, when I finally realized my words actually held no sway over my father.

Growing up a wordsmith child of an alcoholic makes for a complicated human. Although I am hard-wired to use words to make my way in the world, my childhood experience makes me reticent when futility lurks in the shadows.

And so when words are required to make progress say, in the realm of my own emotional and mental health, I can get quite stuck.

It’s hard to unlearn the things we are absolutely convinced of in childhood.

My brother’s middle child, Henry, who shows the kind of economical wit most grown men never achieve (Don’t tell him I said so.  It’ll go straight to his head, and I just can’t have that.) likes to welcome my wordsmithing family to his Texas home with his charming freckle-faced smirk and a dripping with sarcasm Words, words, words to his mom.

The boy doesn’t yet appreciate what my voice can bring to the table.

And when it comes to the emotional work I’m needing to do, I’m not sure I do either.

My dad had a little red convertible when I was about three or four years old. I can’t imagine how he acquired this car. Seriously. It baffles me when I think about it now knowing what I know about the ongoing financial state my parents were in.

But, oh, how my dad loved this car.

And now that I think about it, maybe the car didn’t belong to him at all…. maybe it was a friend’s, and dad just borrowed it from time-to-time.

Much more likely.

But he sure drove it like he owned it…

his smile exposing the dentures he’d been flashing since the age of 17, and dark, horn-rimmed glasses sitting awkwardly on his small, always too-thin face.

Bless.

Dad loved cars, but he wasn’t educated about cars. He could change a tire (with the help of his children, of course), and he was OBSESSED about checking the oil level, but these were the extent of his mechanical abilities. Really, I think he just liked the feel of a steering wheel in his hands and the long stretch of highway in front of him that spoke of possibility.

Are all addicts dreamers?

Asking for a friend.

Two weeks before he died, weighing all of about 100 lbs, he somehow charmed a car salesman into selling him a used car…completely on credit with no down payment, no income, and ON HOSPICE.

The man wasn’t even well enough to drive.

And never would be.

EVER AGAIN.

For crying out loud.

But in 1973 dad could drive just fine, and that little red convertible made for a sweet ride. Those were the days when seatbelts weren’t a thought in the minds of most drivers, and carseats for toddlers didn’t even exist in the US, so you better believe this four-year-old Evel Knievel wannabe was happy as can be standing on those red leather seats with the smell of the Southern countryside in the air and her long black hair blowing in the wind.

My mom, who didn’t go with us, always had a curious way about her before we left. She made sure to stop me on my way out the door, where she would put her hands on my preschool-sized shoulders and say, “Kaysie, don’t let your Daddy drink while he drives.”

I think my mom, in her desperation as a 23-year old young woman grasping at whatever she thought might give her something solid to hold onto in the chaos of our world, grasped hold of me.

Of course, I’m sure I said “yes ma’am” just as I should and probably skipped on out the door with nary a second thought.

But, yeah, I felt responsible.

Guess what my dad did just as soon as we pulled out of sight of the front door?

That bastard reached under his front seat, pulled out a Pabst Blue Ribbon, popped the tab and started chugging while singing the little song he’d made up just for me, “Kaysie is my little girl… yes, she is, my little girl…”

I kind of loved and really hated that song at the same time.

Driving with that stash of beer under his seat was dad’s signature move. He had a way of hiding things in plain sight with a genius level naiveté.

I don’t know if dad feared that his young daughter would tell his wife he’d been drinking and driving and she’d get all up in arms about it. But he needn’t have worried.

I never told.

And then I was seven when I woke in the middle of the night to the desperate sounds of my mom’s wailing. I ran to the living room where I found her on the floor holding the phone to her ear, sobbing and trying to talk. It took a couple of minutes for me to swallow the panic threatening to choke me and understand that she was so upset because my dad was out of town somewhere and had been arrested for drinking and driving. He was calling from jail and would have to stay the night there.

I sat with her on the floor of our wood-paneled family room while she continued to cry and talk on the phone – you know, the kind of phone that was mounted to the wall and attached to the receiver with a coiled cord…very old school, people.

We spent the rest of the night in their bed, her warm body against mine. She cried, and I lay there nestled up against her.

But I was definitely not the one being comforted.

It’s difficult for me to talk about these moments in time, but my brother and I have been talking about this little project of mine, and he is of the mind that it’s time to take you, the reader, inside the “house” so to speak. To give you a better picture of what life was like inside our little three bedroom on Archwood Street, where I seem to be hovering in these posts of mine.

He’s right.

It’s painful to admit, by the way. I’ve always had a problem letting him be right.

Like, it causes me physical anguish.

Thankfully, I don’t have to do it very often.

But, the truth is, when I write about my life inside the house, my memory is stirred just a bit, and it helps bring to mind important experiences I need to remember as I walk through the journey I am on in therapy.

And, yeah, my therapist is pretty glad I’m doing it, too.

I’ve been learning more about memory as it relates to trauma. I think that my loss of the general facts around so much of my life (which has always frustrated and confused me), including the who, the what and the where, has to do with the state of hypervigilance that I lived in for much of my childhood and adolescence.

The thing is, though, I didn’t know I was hypervigilant.

Being the me that I was, I managed to cover up all that fear and anxiety with a good dose of anger and ego (and maybe some unnecessary risk-taking because, man, that helps)… until the me that I was collapsed around the ripe old age of 19.

For the first time.

And then I bolstered myself up and managed to hold it together quite well for another 15 or so years when I crumbled again.

And so on and so forth.

You get the picture.

I’m trying to stop doing this.

It’s not much fun.

This last crumble – more like a slow descent into hell, really – has been the undoing of all my hard cover-up work. It’s almost like, instead of feeling my big feelings at the time that I experienced them because I just couldn’t for whatever reason, I took out a loan against all my emotional pain… and now that loan is being called in.

It’s one hell of a loan.

And what she asked of me left me broke without the resources to pay that loan back.

There’s something magical about the nature of a childhood experienced outside in the Deep South. The world is lush and wild. Pine trees soar to glorious heights, scattering their needles like a carpet while dropping their cones as if to say, “Here, kid. Let me do you one better. Take this and chuck it right at that boy’s head.”

Magic.

Each year when spring appears, children grow anxious for the grass to turn green. Or at least I did. Because as soon as the grass turned green I was allowed to do away with the limits of shoes and instead move through the world barefoot. I sat on the brown grass as early as March, staring at it, WILLING it to turn green. Alas, my efforts were of no use because even in the South, the grass waited until the proper time to return to life again.

Rude.

One of the wonders of our neighborhood was the “ditch” that ran through it, carving a massive, winding crevice the length of the subdivision. Practically speaking, the purpose of the ditch was probably some sort of water irrigation system. Flood prevention? Maybe? Who knew really. Who cared really. For sure I didn’t. For the purposes of my childhood, the ditch had endless possibilities.

My best guess as to the depth of this ditch is about 100 feet. This means, of course, that it was more likely about 20-25 feet deep. But my 8-year-old self insists on sticking with 100 feet, so let’s split it by a third and go with about 30 feet.

And here’s where it gets really dreamy… the sides from top to bottom were completely covered in kudzu.

Now before you leave here to go look up the word “kudzu” let me do you a favor and go ahead and tell you all about it. Kudzu is a crawling vine found all over the South. It is lush and green and in my mind, it’s beautiful and full of nostalgia. Side note: it is also a major nuisance to all the grownups.

As a child, though, I was quite sure heaven would be covered in kudzu.

Since the ditch was so conveniently clothed in kudzu beauty, it was quite easy for us kids to scale up and down the sides at will – and we did so liberally. The ditch would fill with water after storms, so we’d find something (anything would do – a board, a jug, a random piece of rusty tetanus-producing metal…anything, really), scale down the side, and float down the ditch through the big drainage pipe before climbing back up the kudzu, running up the street and doing the whole thing all over again.

Oh, man. Those were the days.

Another glorious element to the ditch was that the forest in the green belt that it carved through was still largely intact. There were huge trees throughout the neighborhood and many of them surrounded that ditch. Interestingly enough, though, when the ditch was carved out, whoever or whatever carved it didn’t remove some of the larger trees as they went along and instead just left them where they fell. For us this meant that at several places throughout the neighborhood we had fallen trees that made natural “bridges” allowing us to cross over the ditch without having to climb down and then back up again.

And this is where things got really interesting.

Those trees that made our ditch bridges were old and very wide. One tree in particular was so big that it was quite comfortable on a hot summer day to walk across the trunk, find a cozy spot along the middle, stretch out in the shade of the giant tree and the forest all around me and just be.

It was one of my favorite ways to enjoy a summer moment or two. I often went there to be alone. But I also went with my little brother and other kids in the neighborhood. But kids can “just be” for only so long and one day, while we were “just being,” laying across that tree bridge, one of us (okay, it was me) got this brilliant idea to use the bridge as a bravery test.

As I explained the plan, I assured my friends it was totally safe. You know, with the confidence that came with my 8-year-old credentials, and instructed them to just sit on the lowest part of the fallen tree (just about six feet from the bottom of the ditch) and then jump. Easy!

Everyone thought that was a great idea.

Well, of course it was. So we all did it and congratulated ourselves on our amazing bravery until… I interrupted our celebration with, “Wait, though. The bravery test isn’t over yet. Look up.”

And everyone looked up to see that, because the giant tree was on its side and therefore its limbs branched out higher and higher above us, the tree bridge had many levels.

MANY.

And I had a plan to work through them all.

Now, if this were a really great story, it would follow that my friends embraced my challenge (maybe after a necessary rousing speech of some sort on my part), and we accomplished the bravery test with great celebration and bravado together as a band of brothers and sisters with a common purpose. But this was not to be. Instead, they all bailed on me.

And the bravery test just became really, really important to… me.

On some of the particularly difficult days at home, I often escaped by running to the tree bridge – sometimes with my little brother on my heels – climbing up to the next level, and sitting there – sometimes for an hour or more – working up the courage to jump off.

You’d be surprised how high 12, 13, 14 feet can feel to an 8 or 9-year-old. It was scary. And summoning up the courage to leap off the branch to the sandy bottom of the ditch often took much of the time the summer days had to offer.

But I’m not sure I was just searching for the courage needed for the jump.

Many days I found myself running to the tree bridge fueled by some compulsion to discover if, on that particular day, I was brave enough to…

• find a way to comfort my mother when she was faced with yet another day of crushing disappointment in my father’s neglect, abandonment and total disregard for our well being
• go to school wearing someone else’s clothes that most certainly didn’t fit my body and endure the taunting hurled my way from the every-school taunters that would surely come as a result
• meet my father’s exacting standards for performance in every area of my life
• suppress the longings and needs within me that had no place in my home
• protect myself from those who sought to prey upon me as I roamed aimlessly through the neighborhood and surrounding areas attempting to steer clear of home for as much of every day as possible
• carry the weight of responsibility I felt for the welfare of my family while feeling the helplessness that exists within the limitations of childhood.

Somehow, sitting on the tree limbs that extended higher and higher as time went by, with sweaty palms and a racing heart, I found a way to work through the crushing fear and disappointment that life continued to rain down on my family and to summon up courage from within to bring myself to leap off the tree and fall to the ditch below.

Standing solidly after each fall, I could feel a new strength in me that allowed me to brush myself off and move forward toward whatever was facing me.

I just felt…. brave. And it became something I craved. I looked for ways to experience that over and over again. I jumped with my bike using ramps the neighborhood kids and I built together. I jumped from the stairs in the two-story houses of friends. Climbing up to the next step and jumping, then the next, and then the next…and so on. And I spent one summer jumping off the roofs of all the houses in the neighborhood. Don’t ask.

But then one day I went too high.

That day I ran to the bridge to jump not because I was afraid, but because I was angry. I chose one of the highest jump points and planted myself there. It’s funny. That day, like every other day, I remember feeling my sweaty palms and racing heart, but I don’t remember feeling fear. I just remember anger.

And then I jumped.

I can’t say for sure how high the branch I chose was on that fateful day, but my best guess would be about 20 feet from the sandy bottom of the ditch.

It was for real too high.

When I landed, my chin connected with my knees as they buckled underneath me, so that my neck really took the force of the impact. It popped back, and I felt a hot rush go through my neck and into my head. Then I saw a flash of white light before everything went black.

I was alone in the ditch, which was for the best, to be honest. No need to get anyone all riled up and cause alarm that might lead to my mother’s discovery of the tree bridge and my little bravery test antics, thereby destroying the future summer days of all the children in the neighborhood. I also could never risk my reputation as the bravest soul and most solid jumper in the neighborhood. That was for damn sure.

So I stumbled home and soaked my aching tweener joints in a hot bath. No harm, no foul.

Unless you consider the artificial joint I now have in my neck as both harm AND foul.

And here’s the real rub… after that jump I was still really angry.

And I don’t think it was because I didn’t land the jump.

I think it was because jumping was never going to resolve my anger. Or make me brave.

My father was a 5’6″ scrawny little man who somehow managed to tower over my mother, my brother and me both emotionally and physically. Despite the fact that we should have known better, he had this way about him that charmed us and convinced us he was going to change our world (and maybe the rest of the world, too). This is so attractive to a child who desperately wants relationship with her father. One little spark of hope would often be enough to convince me he was changing his ways. But then a sharp turn in the next moment would devastate me… a phone call from a county jail somewhere in Tennessee or Mississippi letting my mother know my father had been arrested for driving under the influence; another month without the resources to buy the basic necessities for a family of four because Dad had spent what little money there was at the local bar; a family “trip” that involved me, my mother and my baby brother hungry and abandoned in a hotel room with no money and no transportation while he sat in a bar somewhere drinking himself into oblivion.

And these kinds of scenarios were repeated ad nauseam.

Anger made a lot of sense. Anger was always right there within my reach. But despite the obvious patterns at work within our family unit that were driven by the behaviors of my father, it was nearly impossible to hold the anger I felt out in front of him. It wasn’t safe to do so, to be sure. But mainly it was because the next time he decided to be charming that little spark of hope would be enough to once again soften my stance. It’s actually embarrassing to admit how long I let him drag me along on this ride.

Hope can beat us up if held for the impossible. And I got the hell beat out of me.

So I became a master at shoving those nasty emotions down deep and out of his sight. I remember the last day he made me cry. I was ten when I vowed he would never make me cry again.

Spoiler alert: This decision has cost me thousands of dollars in therapy.

Those bravery tests were for me a necessary conduit for the emotions that weren’t safe to access…somehow giving me the release, the courage and the confidence I needed to face whatever came my way. But there came a day – that day – when my emotions just got too big for the tree bridge. There wasn’t a way anymore to physically prove to myself that I was capable of handling the feelings churning inside of me. I couldn’t handle the height required to do that.

That was a hard place to be. Honestly, I’m not sure how I managed it.

I don’t think I did.

Because forty plus years and a broken body later, I have discovered that I still need a tree bridge to run to.

In the last few years or so I’ve been on this devastating little journey we’ll call “Bravery Test 2.0.” On this journey I am learning that true courage lies not in the jump to prove I can do pain, but in paying attention to the pain I am already in. And, even harder, to be still with trusted people in the midst of that pain.

So my tree bridge these days looks much different than the tree bridge of my childhood. Mainly, it looks like a whole lot of therapy. And it is a most worthy bravery test.

And if you know me, you know that is really saying something.

Some Post-Easter Reflections

The Problem with Easter, in case you are wondering…

Is this.

I mean, c’mon. Who DOES this to a kid?

And, yes, that’s me.

That’s me holding a hot pink sailor bunny with a chin curtain and a tartan scarf tied around its neck. And you wonder why my lips are pursed.

And, before we move on, can I just say that black patent shoes are all that is wrong with humanity?

Hate.

Like, I feel an actual, physical loathing for them.

I have some big feelings about black patent shoes.

Also, white, fold-over knee socks.

Again, why do we do these things to our children?

But lest you think I’m any better than the rest…

I give you this.

Yes, that’s my precious daughter in fold-over white socks.

Thank GOD, I was able to hold the line on the black patent shoes, though. Whew.

And then there’s this.

I was about ten this particular Easter, I think.

Full-on awkward. And feeling every bit of it.

What I really remember about this Easter, though, is that dress. That dress left an impression in my memory because it was purchased for me as an act of kindness by a woman in our church. She picked me up and took me shopping for it and everything. It was so very kind (and kind of awkward, if I’m being honest… I mean, I was TEN). I remember actually liking the dress pretty well, which is saying something considering I was a regular Scout Finch who considered (ahem, consiDERS) the required wearing of dresses punishment akin to a beating.

But I also remember a deep sense of embarrassment the entire day.

And again on that Easter Sunday when I had to wear it to church.

Instead of gratitude for this gift I had been given, all I could feel was shame because I felt I was wearing something I hadn’t earned. That my family hadn’t earned.

Because I didn’t earn it. My family didn’t earn it.

My father didn’t earn it.

And, you see, that was the problem. In my mind, if I didn’t earn it, if HE didn’t earn it…I didn’t deserve it. Also, I knew for certain that gifts came with strings attached, and those strings were never attached to the kind person who gave the gift, but to my alcoholic father who felt the shame just as strongly as I did. He just couldn’t tolerate it nearly as well as I could.

And this is the problem with Easter.

Easter is all about the ultimate gift with no strings attached.

Much like that Easter Sunday when I was 10, I often feel as if I’m walking around wearing, in the form of salvation, a gift I haven’t earned, one I don’t deserve, or at the very least, one that comes with strings attached.

Deep down, I know the truth. Of course I do. I read about the truth, I talk about the truth, I write about the truth. It’s kind of embarrassing, really. I intentionally speak the truth over my children because I desperately want them to walk in truth, but I struggle to embrace the truth for myself.

I guess that’s not so off the beaten path, actually. In fact, my therapist likes to tell me this on a regular basis. There’s a lot of us out there in the same boat.

I’m kind of starting to believe her.

Especially now that Brené Brown has a Netflix special where she basically says the same thing.

Shame is a powerful thing. Once it attaches itself to you, it’s quite something to detach it. It’s some nasty, sticky stuff, with the ability to slime its way into the innermost crevices within you, making freedom from it feel like an impossibility.

During the Easter season, shame speaks louder to me than usual and says things that are super fun (not) to hear about my worth (lack of) as a child of God.

It’s a problem.

I’m working on it. The more work I do, the greater the battle I see I have ahead of me.

Trauma is a beast.

Recognizing the origin of the problem is though, I think, more than half the battle, so I’m grateful to be able to say that I’m more than halfway there now that I’m more than halfway through my lifetime.

I’m also really, really grateful that hot pink bunnies with chin curtains and tartan scarves are a thing of the past.

And guess what?

So are dresses if I want them to be.

I’ve always found it interesting to listen to my friends talk about their childhood memories because many of them have so many memories connected to people and places. I’ve often felt like the odd one out when we sit together and share our pasts because I can’t recall things like the names of my kindergarten and first grade teachers or the names of any of my friends before the age of seven, the names of any of the friends I had my junior or senior year of high school outside of that one girl in my youth group and the youth group leaders my senior year.

Yeah, that makes me feel weird.

But I do remember the day in second grade when I was in maybe my second or third week of Brownies and learned what poison ivy looked like and what it would do to me if I was to come in contact with it.

I remember that day because I thought those grownups were idiots.

How in the world could a plant do that?

I was sure it couldn’t. So I rallied together a few fellow rebels at the park on the day we were supposed to walk around and just “spy” this so-called malevolent vine and then draw a picture of it in our nature journal (ridiculous assignment, by the way), and instead convinced my compatriots to join me in an act of boldness that would surely prove the adults were feeding us a load of crap.

And rub that so-called poison…

ALL. OVER. OUR. BODIES.

We sure did.

Stupid grownups don’t have a clue.

Of course within a few hours I began to itch. A short time after, a rash began to appear. My left arm and my right leg were particularly bad, for some reason.

The next day, little blisters began to rise up, but what was particularly alarming was the swelling that began in both of those areas. It got so bad that I couldn’t bend my arm or my leg.

My mom flipped out, so upset that the Brownie leaders had us actually LOOKING for poison ivy.

“Why in the world would they have SEVEN YEAR OLDS searching for that stuff?!!”

I’m no fool.

In fact, I continued to be no fool until I was a grown up woman and even then made sure Mom was in a great mood before I told her the truth about that fateful day.

You guys, I ended up getting two rounds of steroid shots and missing two weeks of school over that little stunt.

But I definitely remember it.

And I’ve discovered that if a moment in my childhood and adolescence didn’t come with that kind of a punch, it just didn’t stick.

I guess when you’re busy trying to take care of the needs caused by your alcoholic father, you kind of don’t have a lot of room in your mind for remembering less important things like the name of your kindergarten teacher.

I do remember the name of my second grade teacher, though.

Mrs. Fesmire.

She actually wasn’t my FIRST second grade teacher.

She was my SECOND second grade teacher.

That was fun to say.

We moved back to my hometown of Jackson, Tennessee in October of my second grade year after living in Nashville for two years while my father tried his hand at store manager for JC Penney and then decided he wasn’t well-suited for the job, and somehow thought a traveling salesman was more his style.

I think what was actually more his style was a per diem, total anonymity on the road, and the freedom to sit and drink at any bar he wanted in each town he landed each night.

Anyhoo, back to second grade… moving back to Jackson was a good thing for us. Somehow we were able to buy a little house in a neighborhood with loads of kids, and we were back in town with family.

I started my new school with great anticipation.

But things got off to a rocky start.

Apparently, Mrs. Fesmire had a particular handwriting style she expected all of her students to have mastered by the time they came to her classroom (as second graders, mind you), and I did not have this style mastered. In fact, I didn’t know anything about this style because in Nashville, I learned a completely different handwriting style.

After a few days of instruction (you know, because most seven year olds have amazing dexterity and are able to pick up new handwriting techniques lightning fast), I had yet to reach her level of expectation and so she began to lose patience with me.

One day she began to stand at my side while I practiced, and when I made a mistake she slapped the back of my shoulder.

Hard.

That was a surprise.

That went on for a few days, then she began to keep me in from recess and make me write sentences. And to add insult to injury, she stood over me slapping my arm or shoulder when I made mistakes.

Dolores Umbridge, anyone?

I’m not even kidding.

So this went on for a few weeks. I think I tolerated it for so long only because the kids in the class really rallied around me. I was the new kid, so it felt really good when they became so fiercely loyal and began to try to scheme with me ways I could get eventually get revenge.

I mean, really, those kinds of moments are some of my favorite childhood memories. How weird is that?

Not the teacher-slapping-me moments, to be clear. The kids-rallying-around-me-BECAUSE- the-teacher-was-slapping-me moments.

Important distinction to my neuroses.

But the day finally came when I’d had enough.

Fesmire had had enough, too, I guess, because that day, when I made my usual handwriting mistake, instead of slapping my arm or shoulder, she hit me on the back of the head.

Nope.

Done.

I’m out of here.

The next day I decided I was sick.

And the next day.

And the next.

And my beautiful, savvier-than-she-let-on mother deduced that something was up.

We had a little chat. And the thing was, I trusted my mother. I knew she loved me desperately and wanted to take care of me, but I also had a pretty clear sense that my father sometimes stood in the way. And I also sensed that often she was drained of all that she had because he took it all from her, so she did her best, but her best didn’t always mean that I got what I needed.

But that day she stood up for me.

And I know this because I never remember another problem with Mrs. Fesmire.

We never talked about it. It’s just that I was never hit again.

It always kind of nagged at me that we never talked about it, though. I mean, granted, we had much bigger fish to fry. Still, it was a pretty big fish in my Fry Daddy. But I tucked it down deep with all the things as was my go-to coping style and occasionally told the story as an anecdote at a party that usually made people chuckle uncomfortably while I guffawed, not understanding what the discomfort was about.

Then, a few weeks ago, my brother and I set aside a day while he was visiting with the intention of finally going through boxes of Mom’s things that remained to be sorted since her funeral over a year ago. This was a daunting task, not because of the amount to go through (she had pared down her material things to a very few), but because we knew these particular boxes contained all the memorabilia that she had considered most important from her life – from our lives.

There are many posts to be written about what we found in those boxes, but what is pertinent to this post is this: My mom kept many of the things my brother made or wrote during his elementary school years. Meaningful things, to be sure, but many things. But she only kept one thing from mine.

She kept about a dozen samples of my second grade handwriting.

When I pulled those samples out of the box, my heart started beating fast, and I felt a rush of emotion that I feel washing over me even now as I write this.

She was 27-years old when she went to bat for me that day. A 27-year old young woman drowning awash as she faced life as a mother with two young children with little to no support from a deceiving, foolish, negligent husband (and this is being generous).

And what I thought was to her just something she “took care of” on the list of all the things that had to be taken care of that day was actually just as monumentally meaningful as it was to me.

It carried that all important punch… for both of us.

And it feels really good to know that now.

My Mom had Psalm 46:5 marked in her Bible with “For Kaysie” written next to it for as long as I could remember.

God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.

It comforted me knowing she was believing this for me and praying this for me even though, to be honest, my own faith for believing this as truth was shaky.

I figured, though, that I could afford to be a little shaky with my mom standing in my stead.

Her faith was solid. I took full advantage of the “by proxy” role she was more than happy to play and let her faith it up for me. I did this despite all evidence to the contrary that there was any real truth to her stance, because, God bless her, even though she was a fiery little woman with a big heart and even bigger dreams – especially for her now fully grown children – her life had mostly been one hard knock after another. And, truthfully, my brother and I had often suffered right along with her.

So, as you can imagine, it was hard for me to align myself with her belief system even though, hypocritically, I really did rely on it kind of as an insurance plan.

You know – if my way of thinking about God and reality and things didn’t work out then I would have mom’s to lean into.

And then she died.

And the loss of her – a loss like none other I’ve known – also meant the loss of my proxy.

And suddenly, Psalm 46:5 – yes, the tagline at the top of my shiny new blog – became really problematic for me.

The amount of time I have spent stewing over this verse in the last year is embarrassing. Sometimes I read it and let it wash over me and soothe my grief. Sometimes I read it and fume because very little in my life (or in most lives, for that matter) lines up with what’s being stated here. Oh, the contradiction!

Yes, I can be dramatic. Whatever.

And then, not long ago when we passed the one year mark of Mom’s death, I had a brilliant idea that I’m sure no other person in the history of the world has ever had before me.

I decided to read the verse in the context of the WHOLE PSALM.

Yes, sometimes I’m a really smart idiot.

So I did. I read the whole Psalm.

And, oh my.

And, wait a second.

All of a sudden I realized that verse 5 is not talking about a person . It’s not really referring to me at all.

GASP.

IT’S NOT ABOUT ME?

Actually, silly girl, the Psalmist is referring to the city of God.

He is within HER (the city of God). SHE (the city of God) will not fall. God will help HER (the city of God) at the break of day.

Now, that’s not to say that God isn’t with me and helping me.

I believe He is.

But what I love about this verse of Scripture is that it’s actually sandwiched in between these descriptions of great devastation happening all around the city of God. The earth is giving way, the mountains are falling into the heart of the sea and quaking, nations are in uproar, kingdoms are falling, and so on and so forth.

I mean, we’re talking apocalyptic-type stuff here.

Not to be too dramatic, but sometimes I can relate.

And I’ve decided that this Psalmist is a bit of a crazy psalmist (and kind of reminds me of my therapist – who I adore, by the way) because then at the end of this song about the coming devastation of the world, when all of us are trembling with anxiety and fear and overwhelmed with big feelings about what we cannot control, all of a sudden he brings everything down to almost a whisper that says “Be still, and know that I am God. “

For the love, man.

Does he have any idea how hard that is?

Yeah, he probably does.

Sigh.

I know I should give the guy some credit for starting the whole Psalm off by reminding us that God is our refuge and strength, but the truth is, sometimes, when the world is falling apart around you, it’s really hard to remember this.

And even if you remember He’s got a safe place for you to run to when you’re tired, scared, hurting, overwhelmed and your world is literally melting underneath you, you may have forgotten practically how to get there. Or how to practice being there.

Because it’s very hard to “be still” when the mountains are falling into the heart of sea and the waters roar and foam.

But, in the end, despite all of my wrestling and challenging and foundation-shaking questioning, I think I’ve come to a pretty solid conclusion…I don’t believe that God keeps us from falling or even very often saves us at the break of day, but I DO BELIEVE that He offers us a safe place in Him (the city of God) that WILL NOT FALL where we can go to find help at the break of day…and peace and comfort and rest in the midst of whatever devastation we are facing.

So I feel like Mom was on to something when she wrote “For Kaysie” beside that verse.

I’m owning my tagline.

P. S. As part of my journey in learning to dwell in the “city of God” as my world is crumbling around me (or is noisy, or I’m in physical pain, or just tired, or anxious, etc.), I’ve begun to practice this simple prayer of being from Fr. Richard Rohr that is beautifully described here: https://gravitycenter.com/practice/be-still/