God Bless This Mess(10)

I had no idea that that’s what happens when you try to mix watercolors together.

I was shocked. I looked over at everyone else’s really simple, pretty, basic pastel eggs, and could not believe how ugly mine looked. But before I could even ask my teacher what I’d done wrong and learn how to color an egg with watercolors without turning it brown, two of my very best friends saw what I’d done and started making fun of me. They were so loud about it that suddenly everyone was laughing at my puke-colored egg. I was so embarrassed, and so sad.

My egg didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to on the first try, and I might have been okay with it if I’d been given a minute to learn what I’d done wrong and maybe try it again. But when those girls started to make fun of it and didn’t stop, I was upset. It got so bad that my teacher had to step in to get them to stop laughing and acting so mean and try to calm me down. It crushed me.

Honestly, I think I could have accepted that my egg looked rotten if my friends hadn’t judged me and made such a big deal about it in front of everybody in that classroom. But once that happened, I was done.

I don’t mean I was just done for the day, or done painting Easter eggs in school. I mean that after that happened, I didn’t want to be creative anymore. I pretty much stopped coloring and drawing from that day forward. I didn’t even doodle in my notebooks. I would still do coloring books sometimes, mostly at home, because I thought I was still good at that. But as far as being creative in any sort of a public way, in competitions, in front of my peers? I just stopped.

I wanted this egg to be really special, and creative, and different from the average egg—and I failed. And the lesson I took away from that wasn’t “Try again, you’ll do better next time.” The lesson was “Don’t go outside the lines, Hannah. You’re good at staying in the lines. Stay there.”

Looking back, it was a lot like all of those times I’d taken some big, crazy risk on the playground and landed flat on my face. The lesson I learned was the same: Stop taking risks. Stay inside the lines. I took that criticism to heart in a big way, thinking, Okay, other people do know better than me.

I was too young to understand the deeper psychological impact of that moment, of course, but I for sure took it to heart. From that point forward, I would stay inside the lines, stay in the box, more and more every year. Especially whenever any kind of potential for public humiliation existed. I’d learned my lesson: in the box, I did well, but when I stepped out of the box, I didn’t.

I think of the drawings that never happened. The coloring books I never filled. Because of that one incident, I never learned how to paint.

I never related my decision-making process at that time to the egg incident, but now that I look back on it, it seems crystal clear.

For example, I thought volleyball looked really fun, but I never even tried it. I convinced myself that I couldn’t take it up because I didn’t know if I was any good at it. I stuck with dance because I was good at dance. Not the best, but good enough. It made my mom happy. I knew what I was doing in dance. But volleyball? I was scared to even try because I didn’t want to be bad at something. I wanted to look good and be good—for my parents, for my teachers, and in front of my friends.

That same way of thinking would keep me from trying new things, again and again, in all sorts of subtle ways. I became more timid. I made myself stay in my lane. In my box. Inside the lines.

Why was it so important to me that others didn’t see me make mistakes? Why did my desire to be seen as the perfect little good girl outside my home matter so much back then that I would let one incident shut me down?

Why does it still matter so much to me?

The thing I’ve come to realize is that maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the fact that my home life wasn’t the kind of “perfect” I wanted and needed it to be.





Chapter 4


Sweet Home Alabama


The one place I was always happy, no matter what else was happening in my life, was in the sunshine. At the beach, especially. We didn’t go very often as a family because it was a four-hour drive to get to the shore. My parents said it got too hard to take me when I was a baby, because every time we went I would wind up with some kind of diaper rash or bladder infection from the sand, or the water, or something. So they stopped going to the beach, and instead they built us a pool in our backyard.

It was beautiful. It felt like we had our own personal country club right outside our back door—which is pretty amazing, considering that both of my parents grew up poor.

*

My mom grew up in a real small town. I’m talking a no-stoplight town, on a mountain, where everybody knew everybody, in a community where the church was basically her extended family. Only the church she went to wasn’t the Loving God–type church that so many of us think of today when we think of a place of worship. Her church was a Southern Methodist church with sermons full of fire and brimstone, where she was taught to be “God fearing,” as if she should feel guilt and shame for every little bad thought she had or misdeed she’d ever done. But my mom was a hellion. She was like one of the rebellious kids in the movie Footloose, just cutting loose and trying to have fun no matter what the adults said.

She was just eighteen years old when she first met and fell in love with my dad.

Eighteen. She was just a kid.