My Story, Chapter 2

Connie/Connie Jean, Chapter 2

This song appropriately represents my entire childhood, in fact, young adulthood, too.  It will be difficult, at best, to talk about my childhood without reference to how my sister fit in, but I will try.  My sister was born when I was 3, so I will skip right to when I was 5 and started kindergarten.

I've generally figured that the stress caused by my sister's birth with a birth defect caused a lot of the problems in our family.  But, I am very ADD, and it is possible I was always Add and that was also a contributing factor.  I know I had a serious case of separation anxiety in kindergarten, which is not uncommon according to my research.  These were the days before public kindergarten and I attended at the Episcopal Church in downtown Lake Worth (FL).  My mother, and a few other mother's, shared driving us on different days.  I remember being ordered to just hang my head out the window, if I thought I was going to throw up.  I'd get so upset that my mother stopped sending me on Wednesdays because that was field trip day and it just wasn't worth the effort to get me and keep me in the car.

But then I went to 1st grade and that was wonderful because I had a nice teacher and I learned to read- which I did every night for most of my life!  Mother started taking us to the library for books, which was great, as she loved to read, too.  And from then on, I took a flashlight to bed, snuck under the covers with my current book, and I'd read all night long.  

My sleep problems began before then, just not sure exactly when- sometime between the ages of 3 on.  Eventually, my sister and I were sharing a bedroom, and we could hear the yelling.  I don't remember dad ever hitting mother, but- (insert sister's story) .  Well, mother was in charge of discipline and if she decided you needed to be punished, she'd send you to the bedroom room to wait until Dad got home.  I'd hide as quietly as I could in the very back of the closet, covered in blankets and stuffed animals or whatever I could find to be invisible.  Sometimes, she'd forget and just call us for dinner as if nothing had happened.  Other times- well, Dad had a belt and he used it.  It was very scary!!  When we were little it was less me that got beaten, but as we got older, it was more me that got the belt.    I remember the time, as I was a teenager, that I thought Dad was going to kill me.  The look in his eyes!!!  Mother must have thought so, too, as that was the one time she pulled him off of me.

You never knew when Mother would decide to send you to your room.  One day a certain behavior would have you sent to your room, and on a different day, the same behavior would get you rewarded with a bowl of ice cream.  There was no way to "be good", when the definition of good behavior changed from minute to minute.

In 2nd grade I got the meanest teacher.  She just loved to pick on me and accuse me of things I didn't do.  And Mother always believed the teacher.  Never once did she defend me.  All the way thru elementary school, I got "needs improvement" in "plays well with others".  

My cousins were my only real friends.  Kathy and I were pretty much inseparable, and usually it would be me, Kathy and Chris (Christine).  We really were mean to my sister, as she was just too young to play with us.  We didn't mean to hurt her feelings.  Sometimes, we'd camp in a tent in the yard between the houses and my sister would get to camp out with cousin Robbie.  But as they got older, the parents decided that girls and boys couldn't stay in the same tent and things changed.  But, by then, Chris, Kathy and I were drifting apart, too, as they were a year younger than myself and started making new friends in high school.

In high school, "plays well with others" didn't count so much.  I loved to learn and I started making good grades.  I still didn't have friends, hardly at all, but school was no longer a bad place to be.  If you were halfway bright in S. FL schools, in the 1960's, you were expected to grow up to be an astronaut.  So- I was pushed thru all the math and science the school had to offer.  No one asked me what I wanted, that was just the way it was.  But then, no one ever wanted my opinion on anything.  Especially, at home, I kept my mouth shut!