Erasing Faith(2)

Still not frightened, little one?

Open your eyes, then. See the monster you’ve invited into your bed. You can hide under your covers all you like — I’ll hide under there with you. I’m your childhood nightmare, come out to play.

I won’t leave footprints to follow or fingerprints to trace. I’m no Sasquatch you can track through the wilderness, no monster you can spy swimming at the bottom of a deep loch. My calling cards are far more subtle.

A crooked smile. A smoldering look. A broken heart.

I don’t play fair — I don’t believe in it. Life isn’t fair. Why should I be?

What big eyes you have, the little girl says to the wolf.

All the better to see you — your every soft spot, your every weakness. I’m going to exploit them all.

What big ears you have.

All the better to hear you — your closest-guarded secrets, your innermost thoughts.

What big teeth you have.

Yes, baby. And I’m about to eat your heart out.





Chapter Two: FAITH


LIKE A DREAM



Good things come to those who wait.

Everything happens for a reason.

It’s not about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.

Everyone knew these phrases.

They were everywhere you looked — doodled in the diaries of hopeful young girls. Emblazoned on taped-up college dorm posters. Framed on the walls of doctor’s office waiting rooms. Re-blogged infinite times on social media sites.

They weren’t called clichés for nothing.

In a society where “cool” and “cynical” seemed to go hand in hand, these platitudes often induced heavy eye-rolling from the majority of my jaded generation. To most, they were nothing more than pretty, empty words.

But that wasn’t me — never had been.

I wasn’t cool. Not unduly sophisticated, or plagued by a self-inflated sense of worth.

See, I was the loser who actually thought that happy endings existed for everyone in this life. The girl who believed in random acts of kindness and the power of love. The idiot who trusted that reaching for the moon was worth it because, even if you missed, you’d still land among the stars — or so I’d been assured by my Pinterest and Tumblr feeds.

Maybe I was naive. Maybe I was an innocent with wide eyes and a foolish heart. Maybe I really did live up to my name, putting blind faith in things I shouldn’t. But I loved those stupid, vacuous, absurd clichés. They were oddly comforting in this life of mine, where the only constant was change and the only thing consistent was utter inconsistency.

I grew up in a crazy family.

I loved them to pieces, don’t get me wrong. But the Morrissey clan was nuts. Totally, completely, certifiably insane.

First, there were my parents — two 1960s throwbacks who’d never quite stopped being hippies.

Products of their generation, they didn’t believe in corporal punishment, discipline, or any kind of rule-system. Rebellion was welcomed — encouraged, even. For my eighth birthday, I received a pair of platform white go-go boots; for my twelfth, they bought me a hookah; for my eighteenth, they supplied my party with three kegs. Despite their graying hair, they both had a penchant for stocking their wardrobes with far too much tie-dye, they listened almost exclusively to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, and Jimmy Hendrix, and they were often caught making out in the kitchen like handsy teenagers — much to the mortification of their six children.

Yes, you heard that right. Six children.

And, as the baby of the family, you can bet your ass that I wasn’t the only one who wound up with a flower-power-generation name. From oldest to youngest, my three sisters were called Saffron, Meadow, and Rain. My two older brothers were partly spared this humiliation, given that male hippie names were a little harder to get away with if you wanted your son to survive grade school unscathed. My brother Dylan was the namesake of a particular favorite, famous folk hero my parents adored in their youth. And let’s just say, Lennon’s childhood bedroom was top-to-bottom Beatles lyrics for a reason.

I got lucky, I suppose. Maybe by the time they popped me out, my parents had given up on the truly Looney-Tunes names at the top of their list and decided to pick something a bit more reasonable. I felt justified in making that assumption, given the fact that my license didn’t read “Starshine Love Morrissey” but instead, “Faith Moon Morrissey.”

Still a hippie name, but at least passably normal.

On the contrary, there was nothing even remotely normal about being the youngest of six siblings in a house with very little parental guidance. My entire childhood was spent playing one everlasting game of catch-up.

My three sisters were eleven, nine, and seven years older than me, which meant that by the time I was formulating basic two-word sentences, even the youngest of them was filling out her training bra and gossiping about potential boyfriends. My interests — which mainly included teething and tinker toys — didn’t exactly leave us with a lot of common ground. I suffered through a decade of hand-me-down clothing and absent parenting, waiting for years to get older, to grow bigger. Praying for the day that things would finally change. And they did, eventually — just not in the way I’d been expecting.

I wasn’t welcomed into the Ya-Ya Sisterhood with open arms. My sisters didn’t become my friends; they became three more mother-figures whose “sage” advice I may’ve needed but rarely heeded.