God Bless This Mess(7)

For me it seems like I have to learn things again and again and again. Sometimes—as with this particular lesson—it can take me twenty years to finally get it. Which makes me wonder: What lessons am I learning right now that won’t make sense to me till I’m forty-six? And what other lessons from my childhood do I still need to learn something from?

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I was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in September 1994, but I was raised in the town of Northport. I usually don’t bother telling anybody that last part, unless they’re from Tuscaloosa and know where Northport is. Northport is a small suburb. Not one-stoplight small, but a pretty typical Friday Night Lights kind of town, where football is everything and taking pride in your southern roots is just a given.

I didn’t grow up in a neighborhood setting like most of my friends and schoolmates, though. Even though the city limit of Tuscaloosa was literally just across the street from my parents’ house, we lived on seven acres, down a long driveway on a hilly property that could seem like it was in the middle of nowhere sometimes, in the shadow of a big ol’ water tower. It was the kind of place where me and my friends and cousins could go outside and play Survivor all day, walking into the woods with a backpack full of Band-Aids and gummies, and pretend we were out in the wild. We’d sing Destiny’s Child’s “I’m a Survivor” while we picked up walking sticks we found on the ground and purposefully tried to get lost.

We tried to build bridges over the creek, and pretended we were being chased by monsters, like the make-believe Wampus cats my dad told me were out there hiding between the trees. (I think I believed Wampus cats were a real thing until I was fourteen years old.)

We were always scraping our knees and falling off our bikes, too, as we tried to ride them down the bumpy hills, all “Look! No hands!” That makes me sound like I was a tomboy, but I was just playing outside like everybody else did. I was fearless when I was young.

Unfortunately, Grace was not my middle name, and most of my fearless adventures ended up with fractured bones. I think I’d broken my wrists five times by the time I was in middle school. I swear I got hurt doing everything. I fell off a trampoline and broke my arm and my foot. I attempted to do this trapeze thing when I was in first grade, trying to imitate the acrobats I’d seen at the circus, only to come off the swing at its highest point, falling facedown on the concrete slab at the base. I hit so hard, I left a big chunk of chin on the concrete. There was so much blood, my mom passed out when she saw me. I guess I didn’t “stick the landing” like I had anticipated. I broke both wrists when I hit the ground, and thank goodness for that, or I might’ve broken my neck. As it was, I suffered a concussion and got eighteen stitches in my face from that fall. You can still see the scar if you look really hard at some pictures of me, even though my mother had the surgeon try to fix me up right. I’m probably the youngest person to ever get a face-lift, as we always joke.

I broke my arm again at the Superskate on my birthday not long after that. Another time, I tried to get up to the top of a really tall slide by climbing up the support poles underneath it instead of using the ladder, and I fell off and broke my tailbone (though we wouldn’t know that until later). My mom told me to brush it off and made me go to softball practice right afterward. She didn’t take me to the hospital until I wouldn’t stop crying about it all night.

I’m not sure why I was so fearless when I was little. But every time I got injured, it brought me attention. The first attention, with two broken wrists and a Band-Aid across half my face, I didn’t want. But after that? I kind of liked that I got doted on, and it was cool to get friends to sign my casts—until the casts started to stink. That was not cool. But the fear of getting hurt made me less and less inclined to take those risks, because every time I took a risk, on a trampoline or even just skipping down the sidewalk sometimes, I ended up in a whole lot of pain. It was a lot for a little body to handle. (The trauma of those injuries has been long-lasting, by the way. I see a masseuse and a physical therapist today, and both of them have said that working on my body is more like working on a race-car driver than a former beauty queen!)

I suppose I could have spun it around like I did with my dimples, and looked at my scars as positive things: “Good experience.” “Toughening me up.” “Teaching me lessons about how to climb and jump and swing and bounce on the trampoline better the next time.” But I didn’t. I just slowed my enthusiasm down and started focusing on less dangerous activities. Part of that was easy to do, since my mother wasn’t a fan of my pursuing sports. Playing in the yard? Fine. She was happy I did that. But she wasn’t a fan of softball, even though I loved it, because, she said, it was too “butch.” (Her word, not mine!) So instead I did the thing she encouraged me to do: dance. She put me in dance classes starting when I was four years old, and I loved it—at first, at least. I loved the little outfits, and standing in front of the mirror, and learning new steps and routines. And it made my mom so happy to see me in the recitals.

The thing is, even while I was still in my tomboy stage, I was also the girliest girl imaginable. And isn’t that okay? The only reason these two sides of myself seemed contradictory is that as a society we start slowly sending messages out that you have to choose who you are going to be—the class clown, the athlete, the southern belle, the nerd—and when you are forced to make that choice, you lose parts of who you really are. That’s a message I wish I’d heard more as a little girl—that we can be more than one thing. It was totally okay for me to be playing Survivor and having my mom dress me in sparkly costumes and put bows in my hair!