This is the continuation of the series:
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V
Growing into another phase of my personhood is what those years in Jr High and High School brought me. I finally made some friends in High School. Some of them friends of many years duration thereafter. It was an uneven time for me and that teenage nemesis of wanting to fit in and be accepted by your peers was as difficult for me as it was everyone else.
I was 5'10", 145 lbs, and on my way to 6' tall. I was bigger than half of the boys on the basketball team. If someone engaged me in conversation I was usually a willing participant, otherwise I was still really shy and didn't know how to draw others into conversation. So I wasn't petite, blonde, blue eyed nor pretty as the apparent ideal of female teen-hood was at that time. I went to a very large high school, 2500 students. I was not a part of any of the popular groups and really I couldn't quite see what the advantage was to be included in them. Perhaps my way of compensating or maybe I really didn't care. There was some sort of high school fame, I guess. Everyone knew who they were and supposedly everyone was envious of that recognition. Frankly, I mostly didn't want to stand out from the rest of the kids any more than I already did because of my height. However, secretly I thought growing to be 6' tall was an incredibly wonderful thing. I liked very much being tall even with the problems of finding clothes that would fit properly and shoes in the "Oh my God women shouldn't have feet this big" size were really tough to find. So one did have to accept that nothing in the popular teen styles of the time came in a size that I could purchase off the rack or out of a stock shoe store. Sewing, which I absolutely hated, became the major option for me. There is no doubt that I did NOT feel I fit in.
During the years between 15 and 19 I also developed a very deeply spiritual side of me. I studied my church relentlessly and with relative ease because Mormon's are very prolific writers of books on their opinions of what the "true gospel" means and its relevance in the life of members. Certainly some books by those in the General Authority and hierarchy of the church were more highly esteemed and recommended. I was really into it a great deal, although there were these disturbing questions I seemed to have all of the time. Not from a desire to criticize or in any way demean the principles of the faith, but real questions that I felt needed and deserved answers. The more questions I asked, the more defensive and less than forthcoming were the answers. I most certainly was answered, but there were just too many of the answers that did not seem to fit with my understanding of what a "God" would really set as principles to abide by. One of the biggest was the "We are the only true Church" concept. Couldn't possibly be, in my estimation. No church could or should lay claim to that in my view. And the thought that those that followed this church's beliefs were somehow better or more deserving of a place in the many mansions of God's house was totally illogical to me. It seemed to me then that those people who lived a generous, purposeful and good life would be every bit as welcome regardless of their church membership. Those of you raised in religious households can probably see that I was destined to very much not be a fit in this family, this church or any other church for that matter. But I also had a very deep conviction that I was a creation of some creative power in the universe that mattered a great deal to me. At that time and for some years to come I would call that power God.
I loved High School, even with all the problems being an outsider presented, it was still a great experience for me. One of the best experiences was my senior year College Prep English teacher, Mrs. Zarr. I almost didn't get signed up into her class she was so popular and had such a huge reputation as the "best" teacher. It was interesting that Mrs. Zarr was so categorized, because she did not fit the normal perception of those fun, interesting teachers that high school kids like to flock to. She was about 5' tall with dark hair in a typical middle aged style of the late 1950's. She may have been small of frame, but she had a fierceness about her that could be intimidating. She did not allow goofing off or disturbances in her classes. She expected more of you than any other teacher in the school and she would not settle for less. Yes, we would have said she was strict, if not scary. By the time I was a senior in high school, I had plenty of experience writing. It consumed a great deal of my life and times. So I probably was one of the least concerned about the requirement of having to write a 300-500 word essay every week, which brought many groans and complaints from the rest of the class. Mrs. Zarr would give us a range of topics to choose from, and of course my whiny complaint was always I didn't like any of them. I kept my complaints to myself. Being thus so "uninspired" by the choices, I would wait to the last night before it was due and then dash off something far short of brilliant but adequate, in my estimation.
The first 3 essays received the good grades I expected and I gave it very little thought. However, something terrible and frightening happened in week 4. As usual I turned in my last minute dash of words covering one of the acceptable topics. When the papers were returned to us, mine had no grade but was marked with an expressive hand written, in red pencil, " See me!" Holy number two pencils, Bat Man! What in the world would she want to see me about? I knew nothing was plagiarized. I was pretty sure I had checked the spelling and grammar for errors. I will tell you I was a nervous wreck by the end of class. I wanted to slink out the door unnoticed and never come back to class again. I knew it had to be something really bad and I could not even imagine what it would be. I timidly approached her desk as everyone else flew noisily out of the classroom. I handed the paper over to her and said, "Why do you want to see me?"
"This is totally unacceptable work from you," was her firm reply. I asked what was wrong with it, because honestly I couldn't see that it was any worse than the last 3 I had done. "Most of the others in this class have to put some real effort into their work for them to get a good grade. Just because writing comes easy to you, I will not allow you to do less than you are capable of. Write me a new essay to fill this assignment and do not be late completing the assignment due for next week. I expect to see some true effort on your part, not just getting by. If you do not show that you can perform to your capability, I will not hesitate to give you a failing grade." Ouch! She nailed me! And she did what no other teacher in my school years had ever been able to do or ever seemingly tried to do. She made me work for what I expected to get out of that class. Boy howdy! I worked. I never wanted to have a conversation with her like that one ever again. She pushed me, I pushed back, but this time in a most beneficial and productive way. I got good grades and occasional encouraging written remarks on papers after that, but she also quietly did other things. I was shocked one day to see our school newspaper that prominently displayed one of my essays. Imagine! my essay in the school paper! Overwhelming. From time to time the paper had essay contests and although I never entered them personally, I often won prizes for an essay that had been a class assignment. Stern, no nonsense Mrs. Zarr would enter them to the paper, understanding, no doubt, that I was too shy to do such a thing. What a softy! She never ever came across that way when you talked to her in class. She assured me that as advisor to the school paper staff, it was perfectly acceptable for her to do that. I guess I will have to take her at her word.
I didn't leave this relationship with Mrs. Zarr behind when I graduated. When I went off to college the next year, I often wrote to her asking for advice about some English Composition class assignment that I didn't grasp or was having problems with. I also subjected her to unsolicited poetry and essays that I was currently working on in my non-student life. Hers was a valuable opinion to me and I knew that she wouldn't BS me about anything. She was always encouraging in her no frills understated way. A few years later, one of my friends who had a younger sister 2 years behind us in school got to talking about the good old high school days. A group of us went out for pizza one night and the younger sis came along with us. My friend began talking about Mrs. Zarr and had I heard she had moved on to another high school in the city. Oh, of course I had heard, Mrs. Zarr had told me in a letter. What? my friend was plenty surprised that I was corresponding with the esteemed Mrs. Zarr. I explained how I had been sending her my poetry and some of my other writings for her suggestions for a few years now. Just then little sis exclaims, eyes bright with the revelation, "You're the one! Oh my God, you're the one!" Certainly I was totally confused, I had no idea what she meant by "the one". . .the one what? "When I took Mrs. Zarr's class two years after you graduated, she used to read us poems and essays from one of her former students." You could have knocked me over with a ruled yellow legal pad. ME? I asked the younger sister several questions trying to determine if it really was me or perhaps some other student or students equally inspired by her. "Yeah, I remember the poem about the boots and walking through the stream, and on mountain paths. . .something like that. Then there was a story about a Christmas in the late 1800's, and one about. . . ." Yowzer. It was me all right. Funny my reaction to that. At first I was unsettled that she hadn't asked me if she could read them to the classes. But, I am sure she knew I would have said no, they weren't good enough for that. Then I was amazingly proud that she had thought enough of what I was writing to read it to her classes. I was a doggone celebrity and I didn't even know it.
During these years the strains between me and the family became more and more difficult. We had arguments about school, about my questioning the church precepts, about my friends, about my unwillingness to choose a career they wanted me to have as opposed to me knowing the only thing I wanted to do was keep learning everything I could about. . .well. . . about everything I could. At 15 I had a very clear understanding that writing was the driving force in my life. (Best therapy I ever had) I also understood without equivocation that in order to have things to write about with integrity, I needed to go out and experience life. When I had lots of experiences and a lot more schooling, I knew I would have plenty of things to write about. My parents were adamantly opposed to me thinking that I could make a living as a writer. Absolute foolishness in their view. And they never encouraged me to write. A teacher, a nurse, a secretary, an accountant, something like that would be okay. . .and really, my mother was pushing teacher as hard as she could because that was what she had always wanted to do but never had the opportunity. I paid for my own college tuition from what I had saved from years of baby sitting and after school work in a local department store from the age of 14 until high school graduation. I also worked an amazing array of part time jobs all through college to pay those fees. My parents often offered to help me with some of the expenses, but there were too many conditions. I had to live at home. I had to pick from their choice of careers. I had to follow their household rules. None of this seemed too appealing to me. And in truth none of it was anything that I could actually do no matter how hard those jobs I had to take nor how little sleep I got. The personal costs were just too high for me. In the culture that my parents grew up in, it was expected that the girl child would live at home and work or go to school until she got married. WTF? Sounds unreal and unbelievable, I know. I sure wasn't buying it. If you never got married you were supposed to live with your parents forever. Give me a break, please. That sure as heck wasn't going to work for me. I was out of there. And my move out on my own caused a serious and acrimonious break in our family for many years to come.
When I was 15, we were visited by the FBI. Actually I was visited by the FBI. They wanted to know what I knew about my brother and his friends. My brother that ran away from home 5 years before, never to be heard from or seen again. It was stupid. I didn't know a damn thing. That was all that I could tell them. The two guys from the FBI couldn't have been more the stereotype of suits, overcoats and hats. They also didn't seem to believe me that I didn't know anything. Yet I didn't know anything no matter how many times or how many ways they asked me, I just didn't know. Seems brother Kent had met up with a couple of other kids and they had stolen a car and driven it across state lines. That was, and maybe still is a federal offense. Kent was sentenced to a year and a half in Chillicothe, Il prison. Somehow someone that one of the other boys was connected to was someone the FBI was interested in for another crime and they were looking for him. . .surely I knew something. Not hardly. They made me swear I would tell them if my brother ever told me anything about this character. Okay, I guess. It didn't seem likely that such a thing would ever occur. Kent did start to write to us from prison so we had some information from him from time to time. When he was released on parole, mom and dad would not vouch for him, but a Mormon Bishop in Salt Lake did, so he came back to the area for a while. I was working and had my little piles of money in the bank and I knew he would need some clothes, so I bought him a suit, a shirt, a tie, socks and shoes for dress up, and some jeans and t-shirts for kick around. Spent a couple a hundred bucks. . .and that was quite a lot in those days. I was pretty proud that I was able to do this. When we finally met up he was pretty overwhelmed with the clothes, he even had tears in his eyes. So it seemed like I did the right thing to help him get a new start. He visited a few times, but mom and dad wouldn't let him stay with us. And even though I felt a strong sense of responsibility for him and wanted him to do well, I wasn't going to risk him getting back into my heart again either. I was my own person now and no matter how grateful I was that he had let me tag after him all those years when I was little, we couldn't go back to that relationship.
Some months before his parole from prison, I got a letter from a young woman in Texas. Her name was Billy Jo and she was a daughter of my biological mother. She was 27 years old, married with a 2 year old little girl of her own. As she described herself to me she sounded like we would certainly look like sisters. Tall, large frame, brown hair, brown eyes. She was pretty excited that Kent had discovered her in his young travels and hoped it would be okay if she wrote to me. From the things she told me about herself, we seemed to have quite a few things in common. One of the things we had in common was that she had been put up for adoption when she was about 3 or 4 by our mother. And she knew of other half-siblings that were likewise adopted out in the course of our mother's life. Wow was I pissed! My adopted mother had tried to get me to understand all of these years that my poor bio-mother was just too sick to take care of my brother and I. It was just unavoidable and the very best thing for Kent and I. It was not her fault, I shouldn't blame her. It was a very nice and well intentioned try to keep me from hating the woman that birthed me. And I really think my real (adoptive) mother was operating on the information that she had received from the adoption agency, which never had jibed with things I was sure that I knew. Number one with me was always that my bio-mother was not sick. She had never been sick. She was up and around and doing all the things she had always done and she and the boy friends had a pretty active life when we were sent off to be adopted. Hard as she tried, mom could never convince me that the woman had been too ill to take care of us. Now, this letter seemed to confirm what I felt I had always known. When children became too inconvenient to her life, our bio-mother shipped them off to be adopted. This made me unbelievably angry. That's what no adequate birth control methods will do for you. Ten children for God's sake. Ten children, more than three quarters of whom had been shipped off to other families because they were too inconvenient. Sounds harsh doesn't it? And it is for damn sure that everyone of us had a better home and opportunities than we would have had with her. But my anger seethed within. I felt like a damn piece of cheap old furniture that you chuck out to the garbage when you no longer want it in your home. You might guess that self-esteem was a persistent problem for a long, long time.
Mom insisted that I show her the letter and I did. I was pretty curious about this half sister of mine that seemed to have so many things in common with me and I was looking forward to writing to her and finding out more. This letter was the most threatening thing my mother had ever seen. She talked to me a lot about how she did not want me to write to this woman. It would serve no good purpose, it would just upset everything. I really didn't need to know any of these things. She didn't want me to think I would be going off to meet this woman or even write to her. It was too upsetting to the whole family. In fact, in her view, it would destroy our family forever. It was a tough call. I knew that these were her fears and there wasn't much truth in them. But I could see how much it was disturbing her. I gave her this one. It was one clear and present unselfish gift that I could offer her and so I gave it to her. I never wrote to my half-sister, I never met her, I never found out all the things that she knew that I didn't. And this put an absolute end to ever wanting to meet up with my bio-mother again, although that had not been anything that I had strong feelings about doing. I for certain had no desire to ever see her again now. I never did.
[There is a lot more to come, and if there is interest I will continue to share pieces of the story with you as I write "the book." Plenty of startling developments, more experiences than you can guess a young woman would pack into such a few years. Adventures varied and strange, plenty of mistakes and some moments of triumph. . .you will have to look for the continuing stories because they will be intermittent, perhaps one a week or so. (maybe click the subscribe button on my diary, if you wish) so until next time. . .remember nothing is as bad as it seems. . .and get outside in the fresh air and spring sunshine once in a while, will ya?]