Posts tagged Growing up
Eight

My daughter’s teeth stand in a crooked row. Her two cuspids rise above the rest, turned diagonally like twisted fence posts. The uneven spaces in between her teeth make a crooked grin, but she smiles wide anyway. She laughs with her mouth open, and her blue eyes disappear for that moment as joy swallows up her whole face. Sometimes she talks too loudly, not yet having learned a girl’s acceptable volume, not knowing to hide her enthusiasm.

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Bloody Mary

I filled a new Lisa Frank notebook with blank templates of MASH. Mansion, apartment, shack, house; ten kids, twenty, zero, one. I asked my mother to get me a case of Mountain Dew to share. I’d finally been invited to a sleepover with the older girls. I braced myself for something far different from the sleepovers I’d had thus far with my best friend, Courtney.

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Shore of Sky

The Sunday after Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel called me to say that, by law, they could not keep her ashes any longer, I marched into parish office of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and demanded of the receptionist, “How does one become Catholic?” I was directed to a Filipino woman, a parishioner-catechist, who smirked at me with detached affection, just like my mother used to. She told me her name was Grace, to which I replied, “well, that’s a good sign.”

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Four Falls

A warm-hearted pack rat through and through, I knew she probably hadn’t donated the boxes in my former bedroom, nicknamed the hobbit hole. (Much like Paul was the Walrus, I am the Hobbit.) Crammed with what I kindly labeled childhood trauma — lighten the truth with a little humor, no? — the boxes held SAT prep books and enough plaid uniform skirts to choke not only the horse, but the whole Kentucky Derby.

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First Day at the Dungeon

I sat on the floor in Medusa’s interview room, taking the submissive posture my coworker had shown me a few hours earlier: kneeling with my legs spread apart, hands on my thighs, palms turned upward. I was dressed in a tiny plaid skirt no actual schoolgirl would wear, a white crop top, and a pink dog collar. When I’d interviewed for the position of “professional submissive” a week earlier, the manager had emphasized that submissives must wear collars at all times, and I didn’t have the money or courage to step into a fetish store and buy a real one. So here I was in a scratchy, cheap band of fabric with a bulky plastic buckle, its weight around my neck a reminder that I didn’t belong here.

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Losing Rosebud: The Memoir of a Miscarriage

She was dead before I met her so I’m not sure how much of our meeting I should believe. I was at the deli counter at Kroger when she found me, far away at the crossroads of Main and Court streets in Luray, Virginia, at what used to be the second stoplight in town. She introduced herself as Rosebud (which should have been my first clue), and she winked as she said, but you can call me Rosie, and I knew right then and there that I’d believe anything she had to say.

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Becomings

I grew up a devout Catholic. My faith and the pursuit of knowledge—of Truth—meant everything to me. I wanted to know, so I threw myself into everything—prayer, reading the Bible—all in the pursuit of Truth. I had a vision of St. Francis of Assisi showing me around heaven and it brought me to tears. This was my Path. Then, the moment after the Bishop confirmed me in my Faith, a voice rolled through me, shaking me to my core: “This is not your way, go find your way!”

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