Out of the Shadows: A Memoir

PART 1

1

The Early Years

Daddy, wait for me. We were at church and going to the educational building down the hill. I wanted to keep up with my daddy. I looked down and saw his footsteps in the mud and matched mine in his, my feet pointed slightly outward just as his were. This man was so special to me. He was my hero.

One day, we were going to the store together. Boy, was I lucky, as it was just the two of us. That’s saying something, since there were five children in my family. I was next to the youngest. When Daddy was paying, the man behind the counter commented that I was a cute little boy. Daddy just beamed and patted me on the head.

Wait, I thought, I’m not a boy. I’m your little girl. Did he have any idea how that made me feel? Did Daddy know how much I idolized him and wanted more than anything to please him? Not long after this incident, Daddy didn’t seem to think of me as his special one in the family anymore. It seemed that all of a sudden Douglas, my younger brother, had taken that special place of number one in Daddy’s life. We all knew that he was Daddy’s pet.

What had I done wrong? Was it because I wasn’t a boy? From that day on, I never felt accepted for who I was. There were even times when I was in the bathroom by myself and tried to urinate using an empty toilet paper roll, pretending to be a boy.

My sense of rejection began at a very early age—at five or six. I don’t remember exactly when. From that moment, I never felt loved, nor did I feel worthy of love. Why didn’t my hero, whom I loved so much, not love me anymore? I was sure he would rather that I be a boy.

When school started, those feelings went along with me. I was an outcast; I never felt a part of anything, nor can I remember having friends. But somewhere deep within me I had a longing to be accepted and loved for who I was. Unfortunately, I felt I had to earn that love. I would do anything to be accepted and liked. Thus a performance-oriented love search began.

Many children do things to get attention: get good grades, be good at sports, etc. Well, there is another way to get attention, albeit negative attention: act up. At one point in elementary school, I found the other misfits, and we acted up, driving the teachers crazy. In sixth grade, I took the route of becoming the teacher’s pet; he filled the father role that was lost to me. I became a straight-A student, and he gave me special attention.

Meanwhile, at home, things were pretty bad. It wasn’t just my own unhappiness. Mom and Dad had five children in seven years. Mom was nineteen when the first of us was born and twenty-six at number five. She had married my father at eighteen, hoping to leave an unhappy home herself. She met him when he was in New Orleans attending the New Orleans Baptist Seminary. He had felt called to be in the ministry and was going to the seminary. She wanted to become a missionary. He was twenty-seven; she was seventeen. My grandmother used to joke that my father was teaching my mom. They got married right after she graduated from high school.

All those babies, responsibilities, and just trying to survive took quite a toll on their lives. My father did some preaching as we grew up, but he never had a full-time church job— just short periods, since he’d always have another a full-time job. For a time, Dad tried to preach every weekend at a church forty minutes away. It was there, while listening to him preach one Sunday morning, that I asked Jesus Christ to come into my life. I was ten. Douglas did too.

But that part of our life was a farce, since Mom had really lost it. She had been drinking for a while, getting her booze from men at work who would it off. At times Mom would mix her drinking with the numerous drugs she had been prescribed. One time Dad gathered up all of her drugs in a shoebox and hid them. It was so bad that she overdosed once and had to be taken to have her stomach pumped at the hospital.

It seemed our lives were falling apart around us. Dad still worked full time and tried hard to keep the family together. Mom worked full time too. Mom did all the laundry, and Dad did the cooking. On weekends, when Mom did the laundry, she would go outside and hang up the clothes while falling-down drunk. This didn’t affect me as much as my older siblings. Eric, the oldest, was ashamed. He found his way of escaping by becoming totally engrossed in Boy Scouts. He stayed in Scouts for years and withdrew from the rest of the family. He remains so to this day.

Afraid that I would tell Dad, Mom offered me some of the beer so that I wouldn’t tell. I want to add a note about my first taste of beer, or whatever it was, since my mom told me she never drank beer. It was booze of some sort, but you don’t give such things to a child. My mom was so broken, and it makes me cry as I write about this. But life goes on, albeit in strange ways indeed.

Our family was so full of it. Peter, who was the brother older than me, got into a lot trouble. He vandalized one of the local schools with some friends—if you want to call them that. He also ran away several times. Briana ended up in the local mental hospital at age thirteen. Poor Briana. She’d had a lot of things dumped on her. She tried so hard to take up the slack and keep the house clean. I’m amazed that our family actually lived through the many things thrown at us. It was like some crazy movie.

Our home life centered on TV. We would gather around it and vegetate as much as we could in those days, when more wholesome stuff was available. Mom would lie on the sofa, and one of us kids would claim the spot beneath her. This sounds crazy, but she would lie on her side with her legs bent, and one of us would claim that spot. She formed a sort of pillow. I loved when I got that spot.

This is all I can remember of Mom in my growing-up years. She was a very mixed-up person, unable to cope with life. Who can deal with things when life is falling apart? But Dad tried with all his might to pull it together.

Back at school, I found a spot where I thrived. Our music teacher in the sixth grade had planned a musical with all the sixth-graders, which was one or two classes. This musical included a mistress of ceremonies (MC) and her helper. I was the MC, and I absolutely loved it. I became that person.

I’d had a role in a Halloween play in another school a year or two before—as the head witch. (There were three of us.) The poor teacher! At the last minute, I decided that we three witches could do better, so I jazzed up the lines. Don’t ask me what the lines were; I don’t remember. But I sure do remember how mad that teacher was. I remember that musical vividly, since I had the starring role. At one point, I lost my program, but I pulled it off with flying colors by blaming my sidekick—and by adlibbing. The poor assistant got the brunt of a lot of things. Afterward, my brother said his classmates asked if I was that mean at home.

How would things have turned out differently for me if this outlet—this talent—had been fostered? It never happened, because my parents had too many things consuming their lives and energy. In the fifth grade, I wanted to take piano lessons, but of course I couldn’t. I can’t blame them. It’s amazing they’re even alive with all that was happening.

I found attention in another way. I started developing physically at a very young age. I have a family movie from when I was nine years old, and it was quite evident that I had a bust line and hips even then. My brothers used to call me BB for Big Butt, and it wasn’t long before BB applied to another part of my anatomy. Poor Briana, who was four years older, was flat-chested for a long time, and my nickname rubbed salt in her wounds.

2

New Developments

I was approaching junior high school, which was in town. The boys were just getting interested in girls at this point, and there I was wearing a C-cup bra at the age of twelve. I had discovered a new way to get attention: my body. It was pretty heady stuff, and I had no one to guide me in it. My mom, love her though I did, was falling apart.

I found myself letting boys feel me up. But it didn’t make me feel good on the inside. I felt dirty, but I also felt I needed the attention. It also felt good physically, which created a vicious cycle.

A man came to our school and talked about the Lord. He was very different from what I had been exposed to in church. He seemed to really care about people. He invited everyone to come to his