Of Boots and Bullying

There was one of those Q&A memes going around the other week that said to "focus on your senior year of high school" and then answer the questions.  They were things like "What kind of car did you drive?" or "Where did you work?"  One question asked what your favorite shoes were, and I wrote "All of them" because hi, have you met me?  But that got me thinking about shoes in high school, even now, weeks later.

Yeehaw, bitches!

My love affair with shoes started eons ago, long before high school (my first pair of leather cowboy boots were red; I was five years old and I wore them to stomp on spiders at my dad's farmhouse).  But by the time I reached high school, I was starting to earn money here and there from work, babysitting, etc.  And I (very slowly) learned how to (very slowly) save up money from those things and my allowance and whatever else came my way.  And even though I knew my mother wouldn't approve, I started to use that money to buy my own shoes from a women's shoe store at the mall (THE mall, we only had the one).



With my heart pounding, I walked into the mall store with, y'know, grown-ups shopping -- I still remember it had mustard-colored walls and unflattering fluorescent lighting.  Then, just as now, I hit the sale and clearance section first.  I may love shoes, but I'm also a cheap bitch and don't like spending a ton of money on a single pair of shoes; my cut off seems to be fifty dollars..  And at age 16, fifty bucks was a lot of money, period, let alone on one purchase.  And I found them.  And they were still on sale.  And in my size.  It was love at first sight between me and a pair of knee-high, black leather, stiletto-heeled boots.  I shelled out my hard-earned cash, and I was even tempted to put them on right there in the store and wear them around the mall.  But I didn't.

A li'l something like this

I did go home and try to hide their existence from my mother for as long as possible.  That probably lasted a day, maybe two.  And she was not happy with my purchase.  My mother was far from a prude when it came to how I dressed in high school.  She was all for figure-flattering outfits and things, including some that were borderline trashy (and I wore anyway).  But black leather CFM boots were a line she wasn't willing to cross for her 16-year-old daughter.  But more than that, she objected to the amount of money I spent.

She flat-out told me I couldn't wear them (though I don't recall her saying that I had to return them).  And I naturally asked (read:  "whined"), "Why?"  It was my money, wasn't it?  They were just shoes (boots), weren't they?  Where's the problem?

My mother was unable to articulate the world's hypersexualization of teenage girls, the sexual connotation that boots have due mostly to the patriarchy, the fetishes associated with black leather.  And in the back of my mind, there was a slight tug that the boots were somehow "inappropriate," but all the facts on the surface said it wasn't any big deal.

So I wore them.  I even wore them to school one fine fall day, below my plaid Catholic school girl skirt, and garnered more than one disconcerted look from some teachers, but not a one of them said anything directly to me.  As they weren't sandals or tennis shoes, I was still complying with our dress code.

Somewhere in this same time period, I saved up my allowance and bought another pair of knee-high leather boots.  These, however, were flats (gasp!) and made of suede instead of regular leather.  They had a large kind of patchwork pattern on them made of jewel-toned suede squares -- emerald, magenta, black, and dark teal.  They laced all the way up the back.  They were the kind of boots that would look awesome at a ren fair or with a Robin Hood outfit.  I had plans to wear them with my costume for madrigal singing.

Imagine these 4 pairs of boots had a beautiful 1990s baby

Later that year, we were on a school trip for an acting competition with events like improv, choral reading, one acts, solo interp, duo interp, etc.  A group of about twenty of us arts/theatre students, freshmen through seniors, were there together competing in events against other schools.  I was probably a junior.  I wore the jewel-toned jester boots over my jeans and was feeling pretty fabulous.

And every now and then that morning, I would feel a tug at the back of my leg.  But when I would glance behind me, no one was there.  And it wasn't happening all the time -- just intermittently, and I couldn't find the rhyme, reason, or pattern as to why or when.  I felt it when going up the bleachers in the auditorium for the morning announcements/introductions.  I felt it when sitting at the lunch tables in the cafeteria with my classmates.

And somewhere in the early afternoon I discovered the culprit: a fellow student, one of my own group (so another theatre person) had tied the laces of my boots (because they laced up the back, remember?) together.  At the back.  But not so tightly or close together that I couldn't walk outright.  I still had a couple of inches to spare; hence, why I only felt the tug during certain activities.

And I no longer felt fabulous.

Instead, I felt crushed, embarrassed, defeated.  Had they been tied together all morning? How did he do it without me noticing?  Did everyone know except me?  Were they all secretly (or sometimes not so secretly) laughing at me?  I was humiliated and a little betrayed.  Even though I wasn't close friends with my fellow performers, we had at least had that arts-theatre-not-a-jock bond in common and were from the same school, traveling together, competing with each other against the other schools.  But I was still ostracized and bullied by the very people you would think would understand what that feels like.

And even typing it out now, the fact that someone tied my shoelaces together in a public place, is humiliating and upsetting, and it happened nearly thirty years ago.

I cried in the bathroom at that strange, out of town school and tried to go on about my day, seeing the other events and trying desperately not to feel self-conscious about my choice in shoes (boots) -- and failing miserably.  I didn't confront my classmates or the particular "suspect."  I didn't tell a soul, and I've never told the story until now.  I don't think I ever wore those suede boots again.  A year or two later, post-high school, I went looking for them (having conveniently forgotten about this incident), and they had disappeared.

They Say You Can't Go Home Again

I say why would you want to?

I often have recurring dreams of the house and neighborhood in which I grew up.  In the dreams, I'm usually coming back to the house or subdivision after having been away for quite some time (just like in real life).  But in the dreams, the roads are longer and more desolate.  The house is quite a bit bigger, similar to how my little eight-year-old self might have seen it.  It's almost always night, and sometimes there are large dogs involved.

It doesn't take a Freudian scholar to analyze the messages my subconscious is sending to me.  My brain replays the images of my youth, distorting them to show the fear and sometimes abject terror I felt growing up.  The anxiety and anger is there, too; I often wake up feeling irrationally angry.  In the dream I may have been screaming in anger and throwing punches, things I was never able to do when I lived at #6 Tompkins Drive.  Of course, even in the dreams the punches are unsatisfying; the anger feels impotent.

I feel I should insert a disclaimer here:  there are people who fared far worse than I growing up.  Compared to them, I'm sure my childhood looks like middle-class paradise.

I haven't had these dreams in quite some time -- crap, I'm even getting teary-eyed just writing about them -- but lately I've been haunted by the fact that I did go back one time and snap some photographs of my childhood home.  My father's family has long since left #6.  There were no people to visit, just blank places to stare at.  The fact that I did go back and take photographs is disturbing to my mind because I can't quite remember which memories are real (from my childhood), real (from the return trip), or just recollections of my vivid (and disturbing) dreams.  Perhaps seeing the photographs will help me clear up the confusion.

I had planned, I think, on posting the photos on my old blog (really old, like that site doesn't even exist anymore), but just never got around to it -- which translates into, "It's too heavy to deal with, so I'll put it off."  So I decided to look back at those pictures, post them here with perhaps some small descriptions attached, and maybe lay to rest a few ghosts, though certainly not all.

Imagine my surprise when, just now as writing this (and multitasking, as usual), I brought out the external hard drive, looked through my files from that Thanksgiving road trip, and found one.
Just one photograph of the house in question.  None of the roads leading up to it, the signs of the subdivision, not even the fence or the yard of the house.  Just one lone picture of an innocuous ranch-style house.

I don't know whether to cry or vomit or both.  I was actually looking forward to a small bit of catharsis by seeing and attempting to describe things that hold so much negativity for me.  I was really looking forward to clearing up in my brain what was real and what was false.  But now I can't.  It's just the same Swiss cheese muddle it was before.

I think the fact that I took only one picture is somewhat telling.  I took over seventy pictures on that road trip -- of me, of my dog, of the apartment building I grew up in, even a couple of my old high school.  But the house in which I spent seven years of hell?  Just one plain photograph.

Still I suppose I can tell you about that one photograph:

The house is now a light beige color (as shown).  When we moved in, it was a delightful light peach color.  Not a pink house, but my little girl heart thought it was close enough.  Within a few weeks, my stepmother demanded that it be repainted.  Something about light-colored houses getting too hot; I don't really know.  So they picked out a new color, and sometimes I'd get to help paint.  The new color?  A dark, I'm-not-getting-enough-water-so-my-stool-is-really-hard brown.  The house looked like a giant glob of mud.

See the window on the far left?  That window was home to one of my greatest achievements as a former food-hoarder.  I used to hoard food for years, sticking snacks and crackers and cookies in various drawers and coat pockets.  My dad and stepmother could never quite figure out why my bedroom had a near-constant infestation of ants.  I used to spend hours watching the ants eat the poison they put out, but that's another story.  One winter I managed to sneak a frozen fudge bar (or fudgesicle, if you will) all the way from the kitchen freezer down the hall to my bedroom on the corner of the house there.  When my stepmother came in to inspect my room (as she did after every time that I had to clean it), she looked in, judging as usual.  My heart pounded in my chest because the fudgesicle was stored in that window between glass and the storm window on the outside (so it would stay cold, of course).  The thick wooden window frame (maybe two inches wide all the way around) kept my fudgesicle hidden from view.  When she left, I enjoyed my tasty frozen victory and said a silent "fuck you."

And that's all she wrote:  that is where this particular post, originally started sometime in 2013, ends.  And I think that's where I'll leave it for now.  For more on houses, monsters, and childhood terrors, see "The Long Road Home."

Queen of Denial

My last teaching gig did not end well.  So much so, that even my therapist has said that I've been going through post-traumatic stress disorder since it ended.  My first semester back teaching after that I was a nervous mess.

Anyway, I was filling out some employment paperwork, making sure all my teaching gigs were listed, and they needed the name of the principal of said PTSD teaching gig.

And I absolutely could NOT remember.  I could picture her (and her very dour expression) in my mind's eye , but I could not remember her name for the life of me.  I actually had to Google the school and look over its webpages to find her name. 

So that's healing, right?  Completely blocking out the name of horrible person means I'm moving on?  Eh, probably not.

It's also ironic as we have similar first names.