More Childhood Memories

My Mom said I was a real monkey as a small child. We had a piano and apparently I liked to climb to the top of it…it was one of the tall pianos. I also learned how to go across the monkey bars quite young and I still remember sitting on the top of them. They were wooden monkey bars and I was upset that we couldn’t take them with us when we moved to Christiansburg while I was in Kindergarten. I was a very happy child. I loved playing outside and playing with other children. I enjoyed drawing and had quite a talent for it. I was constantly singing songs that I would make up on the spot and my parents say I have always been the most affectionate of all their children. I was also the girliest girl in my family. I loved playing with Barbies and talking about boys. My brother spotted me kissing a little boy on the cheek on the school bus. I still catch grief about that. I believed in romantic fairy tales and happily ever after. My dream was to get married and raise bunches of kids. Somewhere in between all the diapers and homework, I was also anticipating romantic moonlit walks after glorious masquerade balls.

My siblings were ruthless in their incessant teasing about what a sissy I was. It was not cool to be girly in my family despite the ratio of 5 girls to 2 boys. In hindsight, it was quite odd. My mother is not the Barbie type. She didn’t like to dress up and she didn’t wear much make-up or style her hair. She was a little bit granola and I became aware of her fashion faux-pas by the ripe old age of four. The eighties were all about clothes and we were a hand-me-down family. We used to get large garbage bags full of clothing from families in our church. It was like shopping to us since we never went to a store to buy anything new. I always hoped that there would be something fabulous to fit me, but generally we just wore what we could. I am still grateful for a few friends who were bigger than me and had a little style!

I have a vivid recollection of being in the third grade and going into the restroom. While I was in the stall, some other girls from my class came in and one girl was making fun of another girl because her socks didn’t match her outfit. I was painfully aware that I didn’t have the right clothes. You would think that girl would have grown up to be all snobby, but now she is one of the nicest people I know. It affects the way I feel about dressing my own daughter for school. I don’t want her to feel ashamed of the way she dresses like I did.

I tried to hide the way I really felt inside all through elementary school. I pretended to hate boys and for years I wouldn’t wear a dress or skirt to anything other than church. I was athletic and a fast runner and very competitive. I was also a good gymnast. My dad seemed to be impressed by athletic endeavors and so all of us kids tried to excel in sports. My mom was impressed by intellectual or creative endeavors and so we all took art pretty seriously. I was a bookworm. I loved reading and got lost in many a good book. I also enjoy bike riding along the street and saving my pennies to buy candy from the gas station at the end of our street. We lived in an excellent neighborhood with lots of other kids. It had a ballfield and a creek just through the woods in front of our house. I was protected from pretty much everything and my parents taught me independence and good values from the cradle on up.