Blast From the Past

Wow. I have no idea what just happened.

I finished writing my last blog entry and went upstairs to go to bed. Happy as a clam I was. As usual, as soon as I shut my eyes to try to sleep, a million thoughts started racing through my brain. Like a flash of lightening, a scene from the past started running through my head like a much unwanted movie preview before the main feature.

The guy I'd been making out with minutes before pulls up to let me off in front of my house. A light in the living room is on and this immediately makes me say, "Oh, shit." I'd been late for curfew on numerous occasions and almost always my parents were already in bed. If they weren't actually asleep yet, I'd have a lecture in the morning. But not tonight. Tonight, the light was on.

I walked through the front door to see my father sitting in the chair in the corner of the room. He asked where I'd been and of course, I lied. Making out in the cemetery to Prince's "Darlin' Nikki" was not what I deemed appropriate to tell him at this moment.

Before my brilliant excuse as to why I was thirty minutes late for curfew had even escaped my lips, I found myself flat on my back with my father straddling me and punching me in the face. I can only remember a certain sense of calm as he told me that he was going to kill me. I also recall being really surprised at how fast he was able to throw me from one side of the room to another. It was like being in some sort of time vacuum.

I have flashes of memory of my mother yelling for him to stop and of my oldest sister walking from her room and gritting her teeth and saying, "Dad. Stop it" and turning and walking back down the hall. My sister Inga tackled him and jumped on his back. I remember him throwing her off and telling her that he'd kill her too if she tried to stop him.

I have no idea how long the beating lasted. It seemed like an hour. At one point I remember that my face was turned and laying against the carpet and as he picked me up to toss me around again, my earring caught in the fibers. As I ascended, I felt a burning sensation go through my ear and later discovered that my earring had ripped free of my ear via the skin of my earlobe, not the hole the earring was in.

When whatever caused him to stop, caused him to stop and I realized it was over, I started walking to the back of the house where Inga's room was. Dad said something to me, but all I remember was that..."next time I'll kill you".

As I opened the door to Inga's room, I saw her huddled on her bed in the corner. When she saw me, she began crying even harder than she was already and put her hand over her mouth to stifle her screaming. I panicked and said, "What?! What?!" Choking back tears and screams she told me to look in the mirror. I walked over to the mirror next to her bed and looked but didn't recognize the image. It took a second to register that the mess I was looking at was me. I put my hand over my mouth to muffle a scream.

Both of my eyes were black and swollen almost shut. My nose was crooked and bleeding. Both of my lips were grotesquely swollen and bleeding and I had cuts and scrapes all over my face.

I have no recollection of how I spent the rest of that night except for hearing excerpts of my mother and father's conversation, post-beating. My father kept saying that it would be best if he just left and my mother talked overtime convincing him that we girls needed two parents and that leaving us one parent shy was not the answer.

I spent the next two miserable days at another of my sister's house who'd had the good sense to get knocked-up and married so that she could get the hell out of our house.

What happened after that? Basically nothing. My sister whose house I'd stayed at was pissed as hell and told the Bishop of our church what had happened. I never heard another word. My mother never mentioned it, no one at my church ever mentioned it and it was only spoken about between my sister and I in a whisper until she decided to get the hell out less than a year later when she was seventeen.

So tonight I find myself in bed with tears streaming down my face because this memory is running through my head. I can't figure it out. I honestly thought I'd dealt with all of this. I'll be turning forty at the end of this month and I'm crying about something that happened over half a lifetime ago.

Before I came down to put my thoughts down, I went into my four year old daughter's room and sat on her bed and watched her sleeping for a moment. I whispered softly to her that I love her with all of my heart and that I will always be her greatest defender and protector.

I have suffered at the hands of those who should have loved me and protected me. Those hands taught me to accept abuse and instilled in me a sense of worthlessness.

I went on to marry (escape?) at the ripe old age of eighteen and fell right into the pit my parents had dug for me. I spent fourteen years digging my way out of that pit.

My life is happy now. I am confident and assured in most aspects of my life. I am married to a man who respects me and treats me with compassion and kindness. I have beautiful children for whom I try diligently to parent well. I know I have failed at times, but I keep growing and learning and trying to constantly do better and to be better for them.

But, I wonder...will these wounds ever heal?

Bruiser

During the holiday season last year, I was working at Bath & Body Works. During that time of year, B&BW is to put it mildly, a delicious smelling fire trap of insanity.

For about two months prior to Christmas there were so many boxes of product being delivered to the store that from the back of the counter to the very back of the storage room there was a path carved out that was only one person wide. At times, you had to move boxes to get out the back door. Boxes were stacked to the ceiling and as workers climbed on them to find the products they were looking for, the boxes became rearranged and very precariously re-stacked.

During the craziness one evening, my manager asked me to get on a ladder and get some boxes down from the open loft in the back room. No problem. Up I went. After climbing around the loft looking for a box of size S/M fuzzy lambie slippers, I located my prey and tossed it down to my manager.

Because the storage room was so incredibly stacked from floor to ceiling, the ladder on which I was standing couldn't be opened up to it's full A-frame extent. It was just kinda-sorta opened up as far as it could be between a towering stack of boxes on both sides of it. I grew up on farms and as a kid, had climbed just about anything that could be climbed so this was no big deal.

So, down the ladder I go. Boy did I go. My foot hit the second step of that eight foot ladder, the ladder swayed, and down I went...grabbing boxes of lotions and soaps and anything else that might possibly help break my fall.

Ouch. My wedding ring had caught on the ladder as I was grabbing on for life and immediately began to balloon up and turn strange colors. My ass was throbbing and the inside of my knee was no happy little monkey either.

My manager freaked out and yanked my ring off my finger and sat me down on a chair and repeatedly screeched, "Oh my god! Oh my god! Are you okay?! Oh my god!" Feeling like a complete idiot with tears streaming down my face I replied, "Of course I'm okay. I landed on my nice padded ass!" She insisted that I go home and I insisted that I finish my last hour of work. I stayed.

By the time I got home and peeled off my slacks, my ass cheek, my arm and the inside of my left knee had gigantic purple and blue bruises on them. I looked liked I'd been on the losing team of an ass kicking contest.

I think that was on a Wednesday night and the following Sunday, I was in a car accident and was broadsided on my driver's side door by a truck going fifty-five miles an hour.

After I'd been extracted from my vehicle by The Jaws of Life, I was lowered onto a gurney and put in a neck brace. The paramedics began taking inventory of my injuries. As one of them looked me over, the other one recorded the findings. Evidently my collarbone had been shattered, my hip fractured, my ankle lacerated, I had a knot on my head from hitting the window, etc. As they started the list of "contusions" I heard them say, "Massive contusions on the left buttock, left knee, arm...."

I don't know whether it was the shock that I was in or just the fact that I was too chicken-shit to face the humiliation of having to explain that I actually received THOSE bruises from falling off the second rung of an eight foot ladder a few days before, but I just laid there and kept my mouth shut.

They probably wondered for days, in what position that woman in the car wreck must have been driving, in order to have bruised her ass like that.

Short Story

I used to have a part time job at Bath & Body Works. For those of you who live under a rock and smell bad, Bath & Body Works is a veritable cornucopia of lotions, soaps, perfumes, etc. Not a bad place to work. When you'd make a mess, a least it would smell good.

Working at B&BW required a substantial amount of physical labor. I worked at the store through the Christmas holiday and it was the equivalent to what I can only imagine Santa's workshop is like at the peak of the season. I unloaded literally hundreds of boxes of robes, slippers, soap, lotion, body spray and all manner of foo-fooey products every day.

On my best day, I'm 5'4" tall. Reaching the top shelves of the store was quite a stretch for me and I often had to enlist the help of a ladder in order to accomplish my task.

One day, sans ladder, I was stocking a shelf of Sweet Pea lotion when I heard a voice behind me ask, "Could you reach up and get a bottle of that lotion off the top shelf for me?" Without turning (as I was arduously engaged in my task) I stretched to my full length, reached to the top shelf and replied, "I'm a little short, but I think I can get it!". As I turned to hand the product to the customer, my gaze fell and landed on the midget standing at waist height in front of me.

With my words, "I'm a little short..." blaring through my head, I handed her the Sweet Pea lotion (Sweet Pea for hell's sake!), smiled sheepishly and walked away.

Hello, My Name Is....

Have you ever worn one of those tags? Absolutely useless.

I've had this idea for awhile that we all ought to wear one of those tags, but instead of having our name on it, it should say "Hello, my name is Amy.
I'm an Atheist
I'm against a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage
I have many conservative viewpoints, but I'm a Liberal
I loathe violations of civil rights
It pisses me off that I have to "press 1 for English"
I love vodka, love to swear and love to shake my groove thing

If everyone would wear a tag like this, we could avoid a lot of bullshit. Granted, I have a couple of friends that I wouldn't be friends with had I known some things about them in advance that I know about them now. But for the most part, I choose the people with whom I surround myself based on a few criteria.

By wearing a tag like this at a social gathering, I and those around me could immediately rule out the riff-raff. "Hello, my name is Bubba and I'm an ex-con who likes my beer cold and my women warm" would automatically get ruled out as a potential Scrabble mate.

Besides which, my husband never remembers names. I think he would however remember you if your tag said, "Hello, my name is Sandy and I like cupcakes, 4-wheeling and men who wear any pant size over a 36."

Maybe I would change my tag depending on my particular mood. Sometimes I'm in the mood to meet people with whom I can actually carry on a conversation. Sometimes I just want to meet someone who likes to let down their proverbial hair and throw back a few with me.

At this point in my life, my tag would just read, "Hello, my name is Amy and I'm desperately seeking human contact."

Uh...on second thought...I'll skip that.

Disclaimer

I swear a lot. The more I become fired up about something the more I swear. I suffer no guilt over it. Of course, being who I am, I make every attempt to ensure that I'm in appropriate company while cursing like a sailor. I'm not out to offend anyone. But if I'm in the company of friends, I frequently use filthy words to say what's on my filthy mind.

What's the big deal about swearing anyway? And again, I'm talking about in the context of adult conversation. Let's think about this a minute, shall we?

Take the word "fuck" for instance. It's thought to be one of the top "dirty" words. While growing up in a Mormon household, my family always had Mormon missionaries at our home. These poor kids were forbidden all sorts of things...swearing among them. So, those crafty little geniuses brewed up a clever way of circumventing the system. Instead of saying "fuck", they'd say "flip". So, "It's so fucking hot riding this fucking bicycle in these fucking dark blue slacks all over fucking town," became...you got it...nice and cleaned up: "It's so flippin' hot riding this flippin' bicycle in these flippin' dark blue slacks all over flippin' town." Sounds nice and squeaky clean doesn't it?

So the question is, isn't "flip" then a swear word? If you use a "clean" word in place of a "dirty" word, does it at all alter the actual meaning of what you're trying to convey?

My oldest sister will almost literally go into a convulsive attack when she hears the words "nasty" or "discard". She loathes the sounds of those two words for some odd twisted repressed psycho reason. They are the equivalent of swear words to her. I've been cracked over the head by her on more than one occasion as I've run through the house yelling, "Nasty discard! Nasty discard!"

As a society, a culture, as a whatever, we've assigned meaning to words. In Ireland, if you'd like a banger, you'd like a sausage. In America if you said you'd like to bang 'er, well...you know what you'd like.

It's all just a load of crap. There you go!! Growing up, my mother would bellow, "CRAP" but freak out if we said a swear word. Who dictated that "crap", an altogether icky word in my book, is an okayish borderline word and that "shit" is worthy of a pop on the mouth. Why is it more acceptable to say that "the cow took a crap on my foot" than "the cow took a shit on my foot"? Either way, you've got one hell of a mess.

Anyway...this is my disclaimer. I swear a lot and my blogs will most likely contain profuse amounts of it at times. So there you go. Reader beware.