DetroitAlabama

I found a bracelet in my old jewelry box in my storage unit. It is leather with the word CHRIS and two mushrooms tooled on either side. It is from 1979. I know this because on the inside, in blue pen, I wrote Chris + Chris. He was my crush in 8th grade. I remember wearing matching, baby blue, crew neck sweaters. He was my first kiss down by the creek.

I have been spending a lot of time in my storage unit in an attempt to Feng Shui magic it. There is also a photo I found of me in preschool, sitting on my teachers lap, with a haircut that made me look like a boy, in white t-shirt with bright red, block letters that spelled CHRIS. My battered teddy bear wears it now to cover his love holes.

I spent 18 years as Chris. Chrissy if you were my parents or my grandma. No one else was allowed to add the extra s and y. It was a term reserved for familial affection. But something happened when I went to college. I purposefully decided to show up with a new identity, CHRISTINE. It makes sense. I had left home in May and was taken in by my boyfriend’s parents. He broke up with me on the 4th of July. I continued to live there for two more months while he dated another girl with my ten speed as my only source of freedom. I would fly down the hill, three miles, to get to work. I would spend the evenings, alone in my room, exercising to Jane Fonda tapes. In September his dad took me to college with $600 in my pocket. I had walked through fire, I was a new person, I needed a new name.

On November 20th, 1983, a month or so after school started we would all be in the community room huddled around the tv, to watch the ABC broadcast of “The Day After”, about nuclear war, with 100 million other Americans. During this show a commercial for new movie base on the Stephen King novel “Christine” would come on with the trailer; “She is seductive. She is passionate. She is possessive. She is pure evil. She is Christine. Body by Plymouth. Soul by Satan.”

I was from Plymouth, MI. The entire room erupted in laughter pointing at me. I was okay with it. Don’t fuck with me is basically what it was saying and that is exactly how I felt. Christine became my coat of armor.

My freshman year of college was probably one of the hardest of my life. I was full on into this huge transition of living life on my own with no support network. I had a raging eating disorder, a fucked up self esteem where getting straight A’s was the only option AND I had to figure out how to pay for college to make sure I was never beholden to my dad ever again. I was under an enormous amount of pressure and I was starting to crack. By the end of my freshman year I had a mini nervous breakdown and I decided to take off to New York and accept a position as a nanny. I needed to make money and I needed to escape where no one knew me. During this stint I started to deal with my bulimia and I came back to college the following January with a new sense of resolve. I was learning I could do really, really hard things. I was learning that Christine was resilient and that her coat of armor was needed to protect her.

This persona served me well until it didn’t. The bulimia gave way to alcohol use disorder and the ego was strongly in control of propping up a perception of this strong, independent, doesn’t take any shit, person. My good friend nicknamed me DETROIT. The word does not evoke any positives. It was exactly because I was so tough and didn’t take anyone’s shit. I was fearless in not such a great way and alcohol emboldened me.

Sobriety has given me the gift of recovery. Recovery is a noun, which I think is weird because it is a process and one which you never actually finish. I will always be on this journey of recovery. It is a beautiful place to be. A place where you can slowly peel back all the layers and and learn to sit with yourself in the present without a need to escape or run away. There is no end goal.

Right now I am actively trying to recover this little girl that was once named Chris. To dismantle all this armor. To sit with her and just be. To love her.

I left her so long ago. She was shy and kind and inquisitive and loved to read and write plays her sisters would never perform in. She loved to bake and craft and sing and dance. She was deeply loved by imperfect people in a family where the other shoe was always dropping; unpredictably and beyond her control. And so she did, she tried to control it. She binged and purged, she thought about suicide, she drank to wash the feelings away and she gave herself a different name to act as protection. She has been quietly and patiently waiting for me to find her again. To give her permission to be soft and gentle and vulnerable and okay with not knowing what the future will hold. She is me and I was once called Chris…

I am 100 days sober and while that is a very big deal and a huge accomplishment, it is not the story. It is a side note to a much larger narrative.

My dad was an alcoholic and very abusive to my mother. I was the oldest and high school was especially hard on me. One spring night, my senior year, he came raging into my bedroom toppling my bed over, with me in it. I instinctively ran out the door, scared to death. I didn’t know it then but I had just left home for good.

I HATED him. I never wanted to have anything to do with him ever again.

But he persisted.

He would just show up at my college dorm because he was “passing through”, one- hundred and fifty miles from home. And then there were all the cards that he would send, signed in his chicken scrawl, XOXO Dad.

I worked my way through college and refused any help from him. After I graduated, I decided to move to California to be with my boyfriend. My dad bought me a mustang as a graduation present and offered to drive me across country. Somehow he got me to agree and every afternoon we would stop at some random bar and have a margarita. The one in KS is especially memorable. A Friday afternoon, a country bar with cowboys and Budweiser and a margarita that ended up in the microwave because the bartender had made it too frozen.

And that is how it began. My adult relationship with my dad. Sitting in bars drinking and talking. About everything.

I got to know my dad. His humor and grace. His kindness and generosity. His sadness and pain. His anger and his deep love. This outrageous contradiction of beauty that was my dad. And I forgave him.

There are so many memories and It seems like it was a much bigger part of my life, but in reality it was only a twelve year window. And it would end on the evening of September 23rd, 2000.

I had taken my dad on a trip to Scotland. It was a belated Father’s Day present. We had spent the day touring Edinburgh and after finishing dinner we headed back to the hotel bar. Per usual, he joked with the bartender before we settled in for one of our conversations. He told me the secret nicknames that he had for me and my sisters: the miracle baby, the birthday baby, The Allstate baby and the anniversary baby. They all corresponded to major life events when my mom got pregnant. Only I was different. The Miracle baby. My mom had had three miscarriages and was left with only 1/2 an ovary before she had me. I opened the floodgates to four daughters.

At one point he turned to me and confessed that he, had, had a pretty good life and he could go at any time and it would be ok. It was almost as if he knew; a prophecy.

The next morning we were in a head on collision and my dad, Cameron John McLean died in St. Andrew’s, Scotland; the land of golf and whiskey, his two favorite pastimes. The police collected all of our belongings and I would receive a report a few days later. My dad had never been to Scotland, he was born and raised in Detroit Michigan. Ironically that police station in Scotland was based on Detroit Rd. Crazy, it still gives me chill bumps. I believe it was a sign letting me know that he was okay. It was as if he had somehow orchestrated a perfect ending.

So here I am, 54 years old and 100 days sober. I will never have those same type of moments with my own children because I decided I no longer want the legacy of alcohol and it’s destruction in my life.

Next week will be 19 years since our accident and despite the fact that my dad was the root cause of so much pain and trauma in my life, I still desperately miss him. But the contradiction is that I also know he would have been so proud of me. He probably would of sent me a card congratulating me on my sobriety, something he could never quite grasp, signed with a big XOXO, DAD.

So here is the lesson for me in all of this:

We can still DEEPLY, DEEPLY LOVE, the ones that hurt us the most.

They make us who we are.

I pulled out my old diaries. I was looking for proof. Documentation that my memories were real. I found it.

On October 19th, 1993 I wrote; “Alcoholism is a constant concern, I even went to an AA meeting in May”

I didn’t remember the meeting, I did remember knowing, even then, that alcohol had power over me. I was 28, living in LA, recently divorced from Grant. I even remember going to dinner with Grant around this time and not drinking and telling him my fear.

I found more proof. Either in the words or in the handwriting, the unfinished sentences, the wines stains on the paper. So much life lived. Drinking.

26 years later my daughter would call me drunk. It stung. The truth. I was no longer doing it in secret. There was no more hiding. No more late nights with me and my trusty bottle of wine alone with my thoughts. I was busted, like a teenager sneaking in a window, thinking I was invisible.

I knew this day was drawing near. I had a foreshadowing when I read my son’s text to a girl he was “in love” with last summer. He confided that his mom had a drinking problem. Damn it. Here it was said out loud to the world.

Two months before I was hungover and I confessed to my husband that I knew I needed to stop. That I was going to stop. I just didn’t know when. But I knew the how. I had been secretly watching. Other people. They would post about it on Facebook and I was envious. I didn’t see how I could possible get there.

That next morning I awoke hazy and the night before came seething back into focus. I was mortified. I didn’t really think. Instead I quickly messaged one of the people I had been watching on Facebook, she replied almost instantly. Next I plunked down $800 for Sobriety school. I calculated I would make that up in 53 days. That was all the thought I put into it. I had to do it and do it fast. Otherwise I would chicken out or rationalize or God knows what excuse I would come up with.

I knew about this, excuses. I had seen their insidious nature of always being at the ready, always there waiting to be put into action. My mom was a pro. My dad never even bothered with them.

I still had time. I still had a fighting chance. To begin anew, to change the story for my kids. The story that never was changed for me and that still fucks with me and my sisters. The story about alcoholism and rage and domestic violence and shame and guilt and keeping secrets.

I went back upstairs, my son was in bed. I woke him up and called his sister in. I was very emotional. I told them I was sorry. I promised that I would stop. I told them I didn’t exactly know how, that I would probably fall down along the way but that I was going to stop. I don’t know if they believed me, I am not sure I believed me.

I had almost a whole week before the school was going to start. I went to the bookstore and bought every resource the school recommended. I really don’t remember much about those first few days. How I got through them. I just knew if I could, I would be okay.

And I am. I am ok. I am actually more than okay even though my sleeping patterns are a little messed up. But I can bring my kid his forgotten toothbrush to his friend’s house at 10pm AFTER going to the monthly neighborhood women’s wine night because I drank Ginger Beer. And I can read a book and remember what I read. And better yet, I can remember everything my husband promised he said he would do after a late night conversation. wink… wink…

At 54 I can begin anew. Again. And it feels amazing. To do something I never thought I could. To be here, in this moment. Right here. Writing. With soda water and a splash of Cranberry.

So I went to church a week ago. St. Andrew’s Episcopal. It is Anglo-Catholic. I cried. My whole adult life I cry when I go to a service that is Catholic or close to it. For my first 13 years this was my life.

This is the post that has been lurking inside me. This is the one that makes me cry when I think about writing it.

You are a little girl, maybe 5 or 6. You lay in bed and are awakened by her cries.

You are a little girl, maybe 7 or 8 and you are comforting your 3 little sisters. The one you share a room with; you climb into her bed. When you feel particularly brave you race across the hall to the little ones.

You lay in bed pulling the covers up over your head, trying to not hear the terror your mom is experiencing, praying to God. You are a good little Catholic girl.

No one listens.

Where is God? Why is he not hearing me? This is all so wrong and he should be hearing me.

I am a little, little girl, no older than nine. But the weight of the world feels like it is on my shoulders. Where is God?

This was one of my favorite books when I was a girl. This too is a story about 4 sisters.  A loosely biographical account by Louisa May Alcott. Each one unique and different. Trauma and disappointment because life is complicated

But this is a different story. It is about the influence that domestic violence has on a four little girls. It is not something that is easy to talk about let alone write about.

So to pick up from last time. My mom tried to leave two times in my first 15 months of life. And then she would become pregnant with my sister and she would never try to leave again.

I learned much later in life that my dad called me the “miracle” baby because mom my had at least 3 miscarriages before she had me and multiple surgeries. My mom had lots of “women” problems which probably means endometriosis and fibroids. The story goes that she only had half an ovary left when she finally conceived me. And then she would have 3 more daughters, perfectly spaced 2.5- 2.75 years apart. All with rhyming names. I don’t know if the half an ovary part is folklore or truth. I might be able to ask my two remaining aunts but I doubt they would know the intimate details.

I do know this. After my mom passed, we were cleaning out the perfectly organized, jam packed closets and I found all the paper prescriptions and the vials of DES that she took so she could conceive me. I told you she had perfectly manicured collections. It was her testament to her difficulty to have a child. It was weird being that child. Aha, so this is how I got here….

Therefore, to have three more girls after so much of a struggle seemed like a true blessing. I do know we were wanted. We were loved. But we were not protected. We should have never been witness to the things we saw and the toll it took on our relationships is irreversible.

Isolation is one of the trademarks of Domestic Violence. My grandparents lived less than a mile from my home. They lived three blocks from my school. While I have fond memories of stopping by my grandma’s home on the way home from school, when she would have a pie in the oven and made me scraps of the crust filled with cinnamon and sugar, they never came to our home.

Sometimes my grandpa would be in our neighborhood because he did some handyman work for a lady down the street and he would drop off a box a Dunkin’ Donuts.

I can’t imagine living so close to Stella or Sam and their families and not feeling welcome there.

Domestic Violence shatters relationships.

I already wrote a post about what is was like to be that little girl in the bedroom, sheets pulled up over your head, listening, praying to God. But it is too hard to post yet.

Next time, Marie. My amazing grandmother. One of my anchors.

My teens were my toughest. I was so angry with my mom, I could not understand why she had stayed. My sisters and I had begged her to leave for as long as we had understood, that what was happening, was not normal.  We also begged her to stop smoking cigarettes. She was a nervous wreck. Always damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Silently suffering and waiting for the next time.  Because as much as he promised, there was always a next time. You just never knew when that would be.  So of course she smoked cigarettes, it was her crutch, her coping mechanism.

The other thing about my mom is that she always kept busy. Always immersing herself into projects. She preserved everything. This is different than “kept” everything. I think she was deeply sentimental. All the things she kept were perfectly organized. They were a snapshot of her life. All these things that she could go back to and look at and recapture a feeling from that moment in time.  There were a million, different, little collections that she worked on. I think these were also a part of her coping mechanism. Her collections represented “Moments of Happiness”.

For example; she became an usher at the Fisher Theater in her early twenties.  She kept every single program from every single show she ever went to. Organized in a box by date, sometimes with notes. So every time she had to add a new program, over the 40 years plus that she was an usher, she would look back and relive a memory.

I keep lots of things but they are scattered everywhere, they are in a sort of, semi, quasi organized manner. Instead I stumble upon them. Which is what works for me.

So I have kept all of the programs from the nine years of going to see the Nutcracker, a Christmas tradition for Stella and me but I have no idea where they are. She may not have inspired in me the fastidious need to organize my memories, but she did instill in me the love of the theater. Starting at the age of 9 or 10, she would take me as a  sub to the Fischer if one of her friends couldn’t go.  I would wear a white, silk blouse, black skirt,  black hose and heels. We would walk in to this grand, beautiful, art deco building. It was magnificent. After everyone was seated, we could sit in any of the seats not taken. I would see amazing musicals; West Side Story, Oklahoma, South Pacific and the King and I, up front in some of the best seats in the house. It was so magical .

Because of her fastidious need to preserve memories, one of my prized possessions are the photo albums of my childhood. There is so much thought and love poured into them. Despite all the pain, we were still this little family that had all the happy moments too; Birthdays, Easter, Christmas, summers in the backyard pool, jumping off the tire swing into a pile of leaves in the fall and winters on the sleds in the street or ice skating on the pond dad would build in the back yard.  Pictures of a normal childhood.

Over the many years looking over and over again at this album there were would be times I would see a picture and not have the memory so I would ask my mom about it.

The first series of pictures that stood out was when I was 15 months old. It was my first trip on a plane, we were headed to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It is just me and my mom the whole trip. Beautiful candid snapshots; we are on the plane, on the beach and at her friend’s home. She had left him. He convinced her to come back, I don’t know the details of the story. I do know the very next pictures in the album feature this adorable full breed, French Standard Poodle that I lovingly called Bobo.

After years of occasionally going through the album I stumbled upon another picture, I must have been 3 to 4 months old. She is beautiful carrying me in one arm and a suitcase in the other. My grandma took this picture as we were walking into her home. I asked my mom about it. It was the first time she left him, to seek refuge at her parents.

Domestic Violence is so tricky. In the 60’s with a little baby girl, if he tells you he is sorry and he will change… you believe him. She also loved him. This flawed human being of a man. My dad. I loved him too.  This beautifully preserved album of my childhood holds a testament to one woman’s struggle. She did try to leave.

I did not realize blog posts had tag lines. The one from the theme I chose was Random Thoughts. These are anything but random thoughts. These are things I have been thinking about daily, forever.So I stole my tagline from a podcast I listened to on January 1st. From Roseann Cash no less. Thick skin and an Open Heart. Her entire podcast spoke to me. She validated in me my desire to write this blog. She spoke about being believed. About childhood trauma, about how it takes a toll on your life. To be very clear I was not sexually assaulted when I was a child. But I did grow up with a father who was devastatingly violent to my mom. I was a witness to countless acts of utter brutality and it is the unspoken truth inside of me that has made me want to start this blog.

And then a friend of mine posted on FB about being a teacher and how some kids cannot wait to get back to school. The break was an unsafe place to be. I was that kid once.

I was in 8th grade. It was our first Christmas in our new home. I finally got up the courage to call the cops on my dad. He was beating the shit out of my mom and I could not take it anymore. They came to the door. No one believed me. My dad closed the door. He did not touch me. But he threw out every single Christmas present onto the lawn to be ruined in the snow. I had come from a Catholic school to a suburban school and clothes were everything. I could not go back to school without new clothes. So I tried to fake a temperature. He caught me. He made me go back to school with nothing new to show. As if I was not worthy. Thick skin was starting to grow.

I was the oldest of 4 girls. It was the first time I went up against him. I don’t think he expected it. It would set the stage. I would still pretend everything was okay but I was determined to get the hell out. The devastation that domestic violence puts upon a family is for a lifetime.

So this is what I really started this blog for. To bear my soul. About my childhood.

I always liked that song. It’s pretty catchy. But never, ever in a million years did I think I would live in the south. NEVER. Especially Alabama.

I have collard greens with Conecuh sausage and black eyed peas on the stove for New Year’s day. I say Y’all and I yell Roll Tide. February 2nd will be 16th anniversary of the drive from Dallas to, the neighborhood of Forest Park, Birmingham, Alabama. I have lived in three houses in the same neighborhood. And you will never, ever get me to leave. Unless I can buy a home on the coast of Northern California. But unfortunately, I don’t think that will ever be a reality.

I have never lived in any one city longer, I have never had roots deeper. I love it here, my soul feels happy and well nourished. This is where I have raised my kids, pushed them on the swings at Triangle Park, taken them to tot time at the library, watched my son play little league baseball for ten years at Avondale Park and my daughter be in the same Girl Scout troop since she was five.  This is where you run into old neighbors at Duckpin bowling or go to coffee with a mom you started tot time with. Where friends you made when your kids were in preschool still come over to watch the game. Only now,  you are just as avid an Alabama fan.   

When I turned 30 I wrote in my diary, (I have always had one), my top ten goals for my life. One of them was that I wanted to live in a place that either was a small town or felt like a small town, a place where you knew people, where you belonged. I had been living in Los Angles for 9 years and had  just moved to Houston. It would take another 8 years to get me to Birmingham.

 I did not methodically plan out my next 5 or ten years, I just put a mental wish out into the world. I wrote out loud what my heart was yearning for. I didn’t think I would ever have kids, let alone meet a husband within that first year.

At 38 years old, on January 22nd, just shy of my one year anniversary, I would met Dave. We worked in the same building. I had just bought and opened a franchise of a dating service after leaving HealthSouth within 4 months, the reason I was transferred here. But I owned a house. I had no where else to go. So I decided to do something crazy. And it transformed my life forever.

 I was dating guys ten years younger, drinking too much wine; a lost soul trying to find her place and Alabama rescued me.  She claimed me for one of her own. Northern roots and all. She gracefully provided me the fertile soil. A place to call home.

 

I believe we are shaped by the places we live. A geography and the people that inhabit that place have a profound impact on our lives.

I am so defined as a human being by both places. The city of Detroit borders Canada and the state of Alabama touches the Gulf of Mexico. I grew up as a kid in one and raised my kids in the other.

I love them both fiercely. They are my anchors. There were lots of places in between; Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas… But I never belonged to any of those, I was just passing through, collecting some of the best friends one would ever want to have in their back pocket.

Detroit- This is were you came in the industrial age if you were an immigrant. This is where you made a name for yourself if you ran a dairy union. This is where you were able to provide a good life and build a new home for your family if you worked the line and retired from Cadillac. This is the background of three of my grandparents. The industrial era Detroit, where you could make it, if you worked hard. Catholicism was the king religion. This was the stock I started from.

What made me different than my parents, was 1964, the year I was born and the era I grew up in. We moved from our duplex to big old house when I was around 5. We lived there for a year before I would start first grade at the public school a few blocks away. I still have my CHRIS t-shirt from preschool at the Presbyterian school. It fits my old Teddy bear.

I have vivid memories of my first few weeks at the public school, of making a Telephone and a House with my address and phone number on them. And then suddenly I was plucked out and into a new school. The Catholic School, the one my mom went to.

And then I met my teacher. I adored her. She was kind and she kept her class in line. I remember one day my mom was the lunch lady and I was not allowed to go to lunch because I had tried to help a friend with an answer on her test. I was cheating.

Mrs. Duncan was also black. But at 6 years old, I only saw her as my teacher. I loved her and I respected her. The impact she had on me as a young child that would help how I saw the world was profound.

We eventually had to leave Detroit because it became too violent.

Meaning my sisters and I were at the park three block away and some boys decided to show us their knives. We ran home, probably screaming the whole way. The world had changed, Detroit had changed. It was dangerous now and my parents had no choice but to leave.

But I lived in city of Detroit until 1978. I was thirteen when we moved. And the city had been integrating for a long time. It was very comfortable to me to be in an environment of mixed races and cultures at the Catholic School my mom went to. It was what I knew.

Next Time… ALABAMA

Ok, here I am. Not sure what I am doing, feel way to old to do this. But I need a place to write all the stuff I want to and not be worried that Jane’s mom is going to see it. I assume nothing. This will probably be just a journal to myself and that is okay. But I hope it’s not. I will be 54 in about ten days. Your are supposed to have it together at 54 but no one ever has it together. We are always struggling. Questioning things we said, navigating relationships, learning how to be comfortable at a new age of life.

So here I am, nervous, but ready to try something new. Something I have always wanted to do.