Get Me Out of Here (21 page)

As always, it boiled down to the same questions: If things had been different, who would I be? Beneath all the facades and distortions and faulty coping mechanisms, who was I?

I remembered the moment when Melissa was born. I recalled the sinking feeling of utter disappointment when the obstetrician announced I'd had a girl. I'd played the game, going along with it, ashamed of the disappointment I didn't dare admit. I'd bought the little dresses, the dolls, and the pink fuzzy animals. As much as I had hated being a girl, I had vowed not to pass that legacy on. But I had been afraid that I'd never be able to love this infant in the same way I loved my son.

I had been wrong. The little girl captured my heart. Dr. Padgett had once speculated that the event that brought me to the hospital and therapy in the first place was watching Melissa grow past infancy. Perhaps seeing Melissa proudly wearing dresses at the age I had forsworn them, happily feminine at the age when I was ashamed of my girlhood had triggered something within me. Something I had yearned for but had missed.

Maybe it was a positive sign. Maybe, someday, I could be as content and comfortable with myself as Melissa. Maybe, buried beneath it all, was a little girl who desperately wanted to be a little girl.

I sighed.
If only Dr. Padgett had been my father
.

Over the next week or so I spent hours reflecting on the past, rummaging through dusty boxes in the basement to find old photographs, mementos, anything that might stir my memory and help me revisit my childhood. I fished through old letters and junk mail, mountains of programs for special events. I'd always chided Tim for being a pack rat, but seeing all this detritus forced me to admit I wasn't much better.

Finally I found a small, white box, partly smashed by the other boxes stacked on top. Although it was labeled “Baby Pictures,” I found few of them. As the fifth of five children, my parents, like most, had lost the urge to memorialize my every step, crawl, and silly face.

Nearly all of the pictures in the box were studio portraits, an annual ritual for my parents. Me at one year old. At two years old. At three years old. I'd been wearing dresses in all of them, since I couldn't refuse them. Baby-fine curls of dark, downy hair crowned my head. Little pudgy elbows peeked out from frilly sleeves.

I'd been an attractive child, with almost a porcelain china-doll quality.

Nonetheless, these weren't portraits I'd want hanging on my wall. I wasn't smiling in any of them. My lower lip protruded as if I were on the verge of tears; my face was strained. Tiny lines furrowed my forehead, a creased knot of worry gathered between my brows. By the three-year-old portrait, these distress marks seemed permanent. My clear, blue eyes were open wide with an unmistakable terror and inconsolable sadness.

I'd seen these pictures before, but I had never paid much attention to the child's expressions. The photos served as veritable proof that my early childhood was indeed as painful as I had been admitting.

I moved on to another box, this one filled with mementos from my grade school years. A chronicle of annual family expeditions to destinations across the country. Unlike my early childhood, these events were well-documented. I had to chuckle as I looked at the wardrobes of the time. I was at least smiling in these pictures, the ear-to-ear goofy grin of a dyed-in-the-wool class clown.

At first glance a stranger would see a happy, healthy, all-American family: the seven of us all together, scenes of national parks and landmarks in the background. Of the children I was the smallest one, scrawny, built straight up and down, clad in the same getup as my brothers. In those days I had been frequently mistaken for a boy. It thrilled me and mortified my mother.

I came upon a slew of pictures from my early adolescent days. I had abandoned the plaids and settled on a simple wardrobe. A white T-shirt and a pair of Levi's, the James Dean look. My mother, at her wit's end, afraid what people would think, attempted to lure me into more feminine attire. She purchased bags of flowery girlish clothing at the local mall. But they remained buried in my closet untouched, tags still attached.

The last box contained a folder of writing projects from fifth-grade English. Reading through them, I was struck by the extent of my writing style and vocabulary.

Soon, however, another pattern emerged. I told every creative-writing story in first person, and every single first-person character was male.

A sick feeling lumped in my stomach as I forced myself to read on, stunned by my clearly disturbed writing patterns. How could my teachers have read these essays and not been convinced I was emotionally disturbed?

The Rambunctious Rebels

Rachel M
.

Grade 5

“Speed up the steak, Gertrude,” I called. “They'll be coming any minute now!” It was the day the Frontens were coming over. Mr. and Mrs. Fronten were coming for the night
.

“I wonder how in heaven they got a babysitter for those ten monsters of theirs?” I added. “Why don't we have children? Well, I'll ask them if we should adopt a few.”

Dingdong. The doorbell rang. The door opened, and Mrs. Fronten walked in. Then Mr. Fronten walked in. I was about to shut the door when I got a horrifying surprise. In walked Mary Anne, John, Joe, Jim, Sue, Mary Beth, Tim, Bob, Barbara, and David
.

“Get the aspirin, Gertrude,” I whispered in my wife's ear. “I'll need it!”

The experience then started
.

“Bobby, what's this?” Jim held up a five-hundred-dollar vase. Then Jim got angry and crashed the vase against the wall and then started to knock down and break all of my lamps. (Jim was known to get hysterical.) Then all the kids joined him in the destruction
.

“Arrrgh,” I cried. “Out I say! Leave, all of you!”

The parents exited with two kids' collars in each of their hands. I gave Jim and Bob a swift kick out the door. The rest of the kids left quickly
.

Ten thousand dollars worth of property, destroyed
.

The End

Then there was this excerpt from an autobiographical essay, “My family's funniest moments”—kernels of family folklore as they had been told to me.

I hated everybody when I was two weeks to one year old. I wouldn't stop crying, and I wouldn't set foot in anyone else's house. I would sit in the doorway until we went home
.

Packed with violence, conflict, and male self-identity, the pictures and the essays told the stark story. How could no one have noticed? How could no one have cared? The pain of those years revisited me, my eyes blurred with tears as I shuffled through them again and again in numb shock.

I brought several stories and pictures into the next session, reading and showing them to Dr. Padgett as he listened intently.

When I was done, I looked up into his saddened eyes.

“How did they let this go on, Dr. Padgett? How could they have just ignored it like nothing was happening? How could they?” My voice was breaking with tears.

He didn't have an answer to that one. How could I have expected one? I didn't have one either.

“You know,” I continued, flooded with memories, “I got straight Fs in behavior. Straight Fs! My teachers used to write novels on the back of my report cards. I never got in trouble at home for it. Never! My mom would tell me she wasn't going to show it to my dad, just sign it herself. Do you really think my dad went for years without seeing a report card? God, Dr. Padgett! I used to think it was so cool that I didn't get in trouble. Now I look at it, and I can't believe they just sat back and let it go by. If your daughter would have been getting those kinds of grades, those kind of comments, would you just let it go by?”

“No, I wouldn't,” he said gently.

“This is horrible! I was a completely rotten kid, disturbed as hell. It's so obvious now, and they didn't do a thing!”

I expounded on a host of recollections, tears streaming down my cheeks. The time my father hung over the fence at a third-grade softball game, screaming at me when I'd strike out or drop the ball. He yelled instructions that I was far too embarrassed and upset to follow. The other parents stared at him in shocked disgust, making me even more ashamed.

After the game I told him I didn't want him to come to any more games. He hadn't fought my request or even questioned it. For the next nine years, through Catholic league ball and high school varsity sports, through tournaments and championship games, all the other players looked up to the bleachers to see their cheering parents.

Mine never showed their faces again.

I rode my bike to practices and hitched a ride to games with someone else's parents. The orphan athlete.

For years I'd been convinced that this had been my doing, the result of a shamefully disrespectful ultimatum uttered by an eight-year-old after a particularly humiliating softball game.

“God, Dr. Padgett,” I cried. “That was fucked up! They completely ignored
years
of my life, something very important to me. People used to kid around that I didn't have parents at all. None of the other parents acted like that. And you know what? He never ever apologized for treating me that way, and my mom went right along with it.

“Would you have taken me literally, a little kid, and just quit going to games after that?”

“No, I wouldn't,” he said. “Then again, I never would have humiliated you to make you want to ban me in the first place.”

Memories like waves of raining bombs. Each one landed on me with a blast and a shudder. In high school I'd discovered Mogen David, also known as Mad Dog, a cheap but potent wine popular with teenagers. I had my first taste during the summer after my junior year. It had a nasty bite to it, but it gave me a warmth inside I'd never felt before.

During my senior year I'd been involved in theatrical productions, and I'd sneaked backstage with the props and lighting crews, taking swigs off the bottle of Mad Dog in between sets at weeknight rehearsals, getting high enough to forget my lines or to slur them at times. I'd drive home on these school nights, loaded to the gills. I deluded myself that a stick of Dentyne would somehow cover it up, although I was staggering and had wine spills on my clothing.

They never noticed. Or at least they never spoke a word about it.

I'd get drunker and drunker. They still said and did nothing. They mentioned it just once when I'd come home one night so drunk I'd thrown up in a flowerpot in front of the house. Even then there'd been no chastisement—just a few remarks about my killer hangover being punishment enough.

Back then I'd thought all of it was cool. My parents had been cool. As long as I kept to myself at home, did not openly disagree, followed the house rules, and showed up by curfew, it didn't matter what I did. Raising hell at school, getting loaded, getting high, screwing around—anything was fair play as long as I was a Stepford Child at home.

I'd solved that dilemma by simply never being home.

“They didn't give a shit, you know that?” I cried hysterically. “They just didn't give a shit. I was fucking up my whole life. I was crying for help, screaming for help, and they never did a goddamned thing. As long as my grades were top-notch, as long as I brought home the trophies and ribbons and plaques, they didn't give a shit what else happened. As long as I was gone, out of their hair.

“I used to think they were so proud of me. I really thought I was earning a place in their heart. But you know what, Dr. Padgett? They didn't give a shit about me. They only cared about how everything reflected on them. I could have ended up dead; I could have ended up pregnant; I could have ended up anything, and they wouldn't have given a shit about how much it might have hurt me. Only that it would look bad on them. Spoil the image of the perfect fucking all-American family!”

It was impossible to continue. I was so choked by tears that I could barely catch my breath to manage the words.

Dr. Padgett took over. “It hurts, I know,” he said, kindness in his eyes and voice. “They didn't care as much as you thought they did. They didn't love you as much as you thought they did. In many, many ways you raised yourself, Rachel.”

“And fucked up my life!” I nearly screamed. “I could've been anything in the world. But I took the easiest route I could. Skipped half my classes in college because I was hungover or high or so exhausted from sleeping around that I couldn't make it.

“
Now
look at me. I'm pretending to be an accountant, but I hardly have any clients. I'm a loser, Dr. Padgett. I've blown my whole life. What if I would have tried back then? What could I have been?”

“You raised yourself as best you could, Rachel. It's amazing what you accomplished under the circumstances. You could have been a high school dropout. You could have killed yourself years ago. You could be in prison now. You could have completely given up.

“But you never did. You kept on trying, and what you managed to accomplish is almost a miracle. You graduated from college and got that degree. You're married, and you've stuck with that. You're a good mother, and no matter how much hell you've been through, you've never walked away from those responsibilities.”

“But I blew it, Dr. Padgett! Can't you see that? I'll bet
you
showed up to all
your
classes; I'll bet your kids have. Everybody else buckled down and tried to learn something. But I wasted the biggest opportunity of my life, getting stoned, getting drunk, and getting laid, like it was some kind of game.”

“You had no other choice, Rachel. You
had
to do those things. There was too much going on inside of you that you couldn't handle. The drinking, the drugs, the sex, they were all ways of coping. Faulty ways? Yes. Self-destructive? Yes. But you were compelled to do those things.”

“I was sick, right? Are you going to pawn off all this shit on the borderline personality disorder again? I can't buy that. I wasn't a kid anymore, Dr. Padgett. And sick or not, disturbed or not, I am responsible for what I did. I can't lay it all on BPD.”

“You were responsible for what you did, Rachel. You've already paid the price. You danced on the edge, and it's a miracle you survived. But you did. You could have died, but you didn't. If you'd have committed a crime, you might be in prison. But you've already paid for all of your actions. You've borne the consequences and driven yourself into the ground with them.