Role Models

by Anna

"Who Are You?" My mother asked angrily as she looked intensely into my eyes. I was in the first grade. I felt stunned. I stood still, trying to be perfect. I always tried to be perfect with her. Maybe if I was sweet enough she would love me. Maybe if I didn't slouch, she'd approve of me. Perhaps my hair wasn't brushed enough. I had wavy hair that just would not be tamed.

My mother sometimes rolled my hair so that it turned out like Shirley Temple. It embarrassed me to go to school like that. I had freckles that covered my nose. My eyes turned down a bit. I had hazel eyes that were both brown and green. The brown in my eyes made a star around my pupils. My mother thought that this was odd. My skin was so light that it burned easily in the sun. I was a withdrawn, shy child, an embarrassment to my mother. I sometimes tried to be more outward, but inside, a timid child withdrew into the shadows.

No matter what I did, my mother refused to love me.

My cousin Sheila was outward and beautiful. My mother used to say that she wanted me to be more like Sheila. She would say, "Why can't you be in the "in" crowd like Sheila. I had two friends in elementary school. My mother did not approve of them. They were not popular. They were more like me.

When my cousin Sheila became a teenager she got in trouble with drugs and she became a prostitute. She moved to Washington, D.C. My mother no longer wanted me to be like Sheila.

When she was two years old, Sheila had been adopted by my Aunt Teresa and Uncle Phil. She used to come over and spend the night with us whenever my Uncle Phil would chase her around their house with a knife.

Sheila later did a search for her biological mother and found out that her mother had been a prostitute in Washington, D.C. Sheila and seven of her siblings were adopted out. I am not sure what became of Sheila. The last person she talked to was my Aunt Donna. Donna said that Sheila told her that she had cancer and did not know how much longer she would live. I wonder about her now.

I need to stop writing now. I feel so weird. I need to get through this.

OK, I can write again now. I always had just a few close friends. I don't think that I was the type of child to be in the "in" crowd, whatever that is.

My mother once told me that she wanted me to be more like my sister Laura. Laura kept her side of the room clean, she was good in math, she was moved up in grades because she was so intelligent. I didn't feel jealous of Laura though because the look in Laura's eyes when she was pushed by my parents and her teachers was so tortured.

When my sister Laura was put into a mental hospital, one of the psychologists said that he wanted us children to try to pick role models to learn from and to be like. He said that we should not try to be like our mother or father. "Don't be like my mother." That phrase kept going through my mind over and over again. The psychologist said to not be like my mother.

My Aunt Teresa weighed 300 pounds and she seemed afraid a lot. After she divorced my Uncle Phil, she became a nurse. My Aunt Donna was slim and pretty. She raised Morgan horses with my Uncle Ed. Donna worked in the government in Washington, D.C. She was always trying to make jokes at family gatherings. I tried to be like her, but I could never be as outward as she was.

One time I saw my Uncle Ed massaging Donna's head and Donna was crying. My Uncle Ed said that Donna had a lot of horrible migraine headaches. Uncle Ed worked as a blacksmith, shoeing horses. My Aunt Donna had met him when she took one of her horses to him to get it shod.

I watched the nuns at the school I went to. One of them was young and acted like we were all her children. I liked the way that she smiled at me. Unlike the other nuns, she didn't walk around with a frown on her face most of the time. She took us girls in her class to the house that the nuns lived in. She showed us around and talked to us about what it was like to be a nun. She said that she had to give up all of her worldly money and possessions, but that she didn't miss it. As a grown up I have had a problem with seeing the importance of money and possessions. They just don't seem to mean anything to me. I keep working on that. I work and I make money because it's the adult thing to do. Paying the bills is important and I keep having to remind myself of that. I have an affirmation script about money that I have to read sometimes, or I will never even think about money and why it is important in the world for now. I am way more interested in doing something that I feel has purpose in my life, than in the money that I will make. I guess that there is merit to this, but in the world the way that it is, I need to accept the reality of money.

One of the nuns, Sister Marie, was a bad role model for me. She was my teacher in the seventh grade. She used to hit us children with a ruler until whelps came up on our hands. One time my friend Mary and I were in the back of the class talking and I lost track of where Sister Marie was. All of a sudden Sister Marie came up behind us and she smacked me and Mary's heads together. Everything went dark for me for a little while, I felt horribly dizzy, and then I came out of it. Mary almost fell to the floor. We never talked during class again.

While Sister Marie was my teacher, the eighth graders went on a roller skating trip. The seventh grade was supposed to go too, but the teachers changed their mind and decided that just the eighth graders would go. My brother Chris let me go with him anyway. He was in the eighth grade. While I was at the roller rink a small boy fell in front of me. Instead of running over the boy, I fell and broke my wrist. The doctor who put a cast on my wrist said that the bone had been broken in a way that it would probably never really mend correctly. When the cast came off, my wrist was still a bit crooked. Sister Marie made me come to the front of the class. She grabbed my arm and showed the whole class my wrist. She said, "See, this is what God does to children when they don't obey the rules." I looked at the faces of the other children in the class, and no-one was laughing. They all looked like they felt sorry for me. I felt mortified.

The year after I had Sister Marie as a teacher, she was put into a mental hospital. While she was our teacher, so many parents signed a petition to get her out that the school had no choice but to get rid of her. Sister Marie would stand in front of our class and tell us that we would all go to hell. She said that even if us girls touched a boy by mistake, we would go to hell. If we thought an unclean thought, we would go to hell. If we saw ourselves naked in the mirror, we would go to hell. I definitely did not want to be like Sister Marie. In my heart, while Marie was talking, I was with the other nun, the one who had loved me. I tried to feel myself as a child of the other nun. It helped me to get through the year with Sister Marie.

About nine years ago as I was visiting my parents in Colorado, my mother and I were in her living room talking. I started talking about something that my mother did not approve of. What I was saying seemed very simple and innocent to me, and I could not imagine what she was so angry about. She said, "Why do you talk like that. Why can't you just be normal? None of the other women in our family talk like you. Why can't you be more like them? Why can't you be more like me?" I turned to my mother and I said, "I don't want to be like you, I want to be myself." I don't know where the courage came for me to say something like that. I never talk back to my mother like that. My mother looked very shocked and then she said, "I am the way that everyone should be." It was then that I began to realize that there was something wrong with my mother.

Why didn't my mother ever like the real me? Why did she always want me to be like someone else? When I was a child I had a self. I knew who I was better then, than at any other time of my life. Now, when I feel myself being really me, I try to hold onto it. I have worked on this for a long time. I wish that I could be my real self more often. Sometimes I find myself slipping into trying to be more like some other people, when I should be trying to be more like myself.

I can feel the real "me" surfacing from just writing this. It feels timid, shy, but willing to come out into the light now. This is me. I like Walt Disney movies, I love folk music, art and nature. There's a feeling to me that is just mine. There is a self inside of me that has not been totally driven out by my mother or anyone else. No-one can dim this self in me completely. I have a right to myself. I have the right to be me.

Response from Dr. DeFoore

Thanks for this story, Anna. Your process and your words will help a lot of people who read this. The process of finding and becoming your authentic, real self is so very important, and your writing makes that very clear and personal.