Some things you might not know about me

I was an odd child. From the moment I was born; I was odd. The cord was wrapped, not once, but twice around my neck, “the devil tried to kill you, he didn’t want you to be born.” Mom comments. “Mom, that seems dramatic, why would the devil care about me?”I emphasize me, half hoping she had a good answer, “Well honey,” she replied unvarnished, “it’s because God has a plan for your life. ” My mother told me, her doctor pulled her aside after she gave birth and said, “you don’t know how close you came to losing your baby, just this very day a baby was stillborn because the cord was wrapped and didn’t make it.”  

On the same day I swallowed some of my own poo I , it’s called Meconium and some babies pass it while still in their mothers womb, that was me. I passed it and then ingested it. I had apparently, been in fetal distress. Most normal babies have their first bowel movement after they arrive, they wait, like any reasonable human would. Italians do it differently, bowel movements are very important to us.

I used to try to sleep with my sneakers on my feet. One night I got away with it, mom didn’t notice. I had a sense of victory and accomplishment, it was like I never needed to do anything big again. It’s no wonder I haven’t succeeded much in life, I don’t set the bar that high.

Then there was the flea collection; I only had it after the snail collection didn’t work out. I couldn’t figure out why in the morning there were no snails in the fish tank. I made them a nice home, filled little lids with water for sustenance, but they just wouldn’t stay. I loved snails, the mustard yellow shells with contrasting coffee-colored stripes swirling around like the brick road in the wizard of Oz, gave me a sort of thrill. So, I took up flea collecting. We were not the type of family that took our animals to the vets for things like flea medicine so we had plenty of fleas and plenty of pregnant animals. We had many litters born in our bathroom closet. My mother would say, “now, don’t touch them because the mother might reject them if they smell you.” She knew everything about everything. I knew nothing about anything. so i listened, I was very obedient and I never touched the babies until their eyes were open. but those fleas…

I kept the fleas in a photo album; the sort where the page is sticky and the plastic peels up from the page so it makes a distinct ripping sound. I didn’t have photos; I had fleas. I had fleas in their different stages of life: the egg, the larva and the mature flea and then the over eater, which was slightly orange. I was strangely proud of my collection and would look through it often. I like to think I really appreciated science and was preparing for my prestigious position as a researcher or biologist; but no, that didn’t happen. I also started collecting dead butterflies, I had two. The reason i stopped was because while camping, my dad in his overzealous support for my collections, found a beautiful yellow tiger swallowtail with lacy, black-edged wings. It had a leg missing making it easy prey for Dad’s enthusiasm. He put it into my album, while it was alive! I was devastated, i didn’t speak to him for the rest of the day. I decided that was the end of my butterfly collection, I should stick to fleas.  I had a coin collection, a rock collection and a hamster collection. I call it a hamster collection, because I had so many of them, just not all at the same time. This is what would happen – at night time those little rascals would get going on their wheels. The cheap plastic wheels squeaked incessantly, I was sound sensitive. Back then we didn’t know what that was, everyone just thought I was a terrible human begin because I shouted all day long for people to ‘be quiet’. Sound sensitivity is a real thing, and I had it, I had a visceral reaction which looked like a break down upon hearing certain sounds. I could not tolerate high pitch sounds, like my mother whistling, squeals and screams; low repetitious sounds like snoring, dogs barking; chainsaws and of course hamster wheels in the middle of the night.  I would get out of bed, eyes closed and move the cover of the hamster cage about an inch. I knew the wheel would stop. Every hamster I had escaped to live in my closet in that same manner. I would leave bits of food and little caps full of water at the entrance of my closet door, I’m not sure why I was so compassionate, because when my sister left for a week to go to Bermuda and asked me to feed her birds, I forgot and she found them both dead on the bottom of the cage when she returned.

For some reason I liked to collect things. I still like to collect things, but now my collections are more sophisticated; books, shoes and decorative pillows with precisely the same passion, but far more costly.

I also kept a jar of urine under my bed. I meant to get rid of it, but forgot about it for a long time. I finally “found” it one day while cleaning, it had mold growing in it. The urine was my own of course.  I was maybe 7 or 8, I had been too lazy to get out of bed to go to the bathroom and too curious and creative to not pee in an empty jar I had hanging around.

I had a lot of nick names, and you’re probably beginning to know why. My sisters called me Book Tooth, because my teeth, which were and are far too big, opened up like a book. Teddy Washburn was another name they liked and Rev. Rev was my name for many years, in fact, they never used the name Kim with any regularity until I was well past my teen years. It was on account of my crying which sounded like an engine revving up that got me my name. My Dad liked to refer to me as Sally Jesse because of the bright red glasses I had chosen in fourth grade, these reminded my family of the famous talk show host; only, I was about 30 years younger so I really wasn’t trying to copy her, I just liked the red ones. I still like red and yellow and bright annoying colors that are gaudy and hateful to my mother and sisters. Helen Keller was my mother’s favorite nickname for me, she would always use it around dinner when I would circle the table picking food off other people’s plates. She never scolded me, or told me no, she just called me Helen Keller, “here comes Helen Keller” she’d say. No wonder I’m struggle with my distinctive self.  

I loved scissors. I would cut everything and anything I could get my hands on: paper, rugs, the cats whiskers. I was a cutter before anyone knew what cutters were. First, I cut my hair when I was upset, my bangs would get shorter and shorter and my mother knew I was stressed. As I got into my teen years and struggled with depression, I began to cut my arms, legs and face. That didn’t last too long. We were also poor, but i didn’t know it. I mean we had a house, but it was rented, still I considered us more fortunate than friends with apartments; and, it was my mom’s boyfriend that rented to us. Sometimes I think she paid him in supper. We frequently had our phone line cut because we didn’t pay the bill. I was on reduced lunch and free lunch so I guess I assume we didn’t have much money, I just didn’t really care. I never seemed to have socks, one time in a creative stroke of insight I thought it might be a sound and reasonable idea to wrap my feet in toilet paper rather than going to school without any socks. Did I think people wouldn’t notice? Mom noticed, “Kim, you can’t go to school like that, the school will call social services on me.”

When I began to show breast “buds” I was concerned about it. I don’t know why, but I didn’t like them. I think the most commonsense reason was I had no training bra, so my newly developing “nipples “would rub up against the fabric on my shirt and it was uncomfortable; I taped them down with band-aids, but not before picking at them until they bled, hoping I would ward off adulthood. It’s really no surprise I didn’t have many friends. Other normal kids seem to be able to deal with these things. in normal ways and rejected those who couldn’t, but it made me a really sensitive and tender person.

One of my only friends through elementary school was an Indian girl named Sumita. In the eyes of the all the other children she may have been the only one even a little odder than I was; she towered over us all by 5 or 6 inches. She had long, skinny legs and her pants were always too short. She would get overly excited and grab my arm and jump up and down. One time at the lunch table she sneezed and a long slimy booger came flying out of her nose and was just hanging over her lunch, no one knew what to do; the kids screamed and scattered in every direction like a herd of antelope at the sound of a lion. The one thing I did right in elementary school happened at this exact moment. I got up from the table, as windless and undisturbed as a warm summer evening, retrieved a napkin and handed it to her as if I had rehearsed the scene a dozen times beforehand. I always felt good about that. It was truly one of my more courageous acts in life. Even now, thinking back, I can’t believe I thought so quickly, my mother must have been praying that day.

There was one boy who liked me, Sean Waite. He had a head full of messy blonde hair and always wore a leather jacket that was far too big for him.  One day in the lunch line he asked me to be his girlfriend, I had the wits to turn down the diamond ring and four one dollar bills he handed me, “I found this in my mother’s jewelry box”, he said sheepishly, Was he asking me out or proposing I’ll never know, “um I think you better put it back.” I said and turned to get my brown plastic tray. Even though I was weird I had good morals.

At outdoor recess while all the kids were playing four squares with that big red ball and hanging on the monkey bars or running around playing tag. I was under the picnic table digging in the dirt for old beads left over from summer camp. I definitely had a bead collection. Sometimes someone would join me for about ten minutes and then they would move on, bored by the reward of a dusty bead; caked with dirt and grime. But not me, week after week, I was there; under that table looking for those beads. I was devoted committed to finding those beads, i was hyper focused. Of course, now I know that’s a classic trait of ADD.

I’d like to say that I outgrew these strange aspects of my personality, and to some extent I suppose I did. But not everything strangeness about me has dissipated. I have extreme anxiety; one time I thought I had worms. I was in my twenties. I couldn’t sleep for days. I was so depressed and afraid. I would lie awake imagining them crawling around in my stomach. I remember laying on my mother’s couch lifeless, despondent , feeling like my life was over. I was too afraid to even go to the doctor and surely this was not an emergency room visit. I didn’t know what to do. “I’m worried about you honey, what’s going on with you?” My mother stared at me; lying listless on the couch, “I think your fine, this is an attack, maybe you need a little deliverance?”   I couldn’t even bring myself to say what I was so afraid of. I was afraid to say the word, “Worms” that is what anxiety does to me. I probably did need some deliverance, now that I think about it.   I ended up bringing the concern to my gynecologist, Doctor Hockler. I had waiting patiently, weighing the consequences, for him to ask if i had any other concerns.With legs spread and tears welling up, I whispered, “I think I have worms.” Why was I crying, was it fear of worms, or shame and ridiculousness of my outlandish suspicion. In the most pragmatic of ways, as if he was asked this sort of thing daily, he said, “Well, just poop in a bag and send in the sample; we’ll check it out for you, but I don’t think you need to worry about that, then chuckling he added, “that’s one time it’s better to be the patient than the technician.” I disagreed, but smiled and nodded. The reason I thought I might have worms, was a conversation the week before with some friends, we were talking about worms over a big plate of sushi and the next day in the shower I thought I felt something in my rear end. It turned out to be hemorrhoids. Anyhow, my blessed mother like the saint that she was, took the paper bag full of my stool over to Dr. Hochler’s office. It was fine.

I was alone, but not really lonely. I entertained myself with quirky, unexpected escapades. To this day, I don’t need a lot of company, my people-needs are low on the introversion/extroversion scale. I like my own company. I am a risk taker in some ways, but curled up in a tight little ball in other ways. When it comes to creativity, I’ll try just about anything, handmade pasta, taking a fine art class, or painting a room an outlandish shade of yellow ochre. I like to try new things. but when it comes to physical danger, I’m in a fetal position, white knuckling anything from a roller coaster to driving in the snow. I’m coming to terms with the reality that I’m afraid of pain and death, but seem to welcome failure and isolation due to my odd disposition. Therefore, I am just the sort of person who lines up at a Billy graham crusade or attends an exotic religious congregation like Beit Techiya. I’m into innovation. I’m a dissident, I’m the one wearing sneakers to bed, band aids on boobs, and toilet paper socks.

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