My Shell Has Cracked
(Written August 16, 2012)
People that have assumed to know me fifty years don’t really know me. I am not talking acquaintances but true friends and family. I’ve never pretended to be someone I wasn’t but until recently I haven’t embraced who I always have been. I often feel as if I lived in an egg. The yolk being me, the soul of my existence, the shell represented my protection from the world and the truth.
I’ve had friends and family joke and sometimes become angry about my private world. They resent my desire to live behind locks and not having to trust no one. My home has been my fortress the “yolk” the only true place I can be me.
I know I am a good person; I love people and have wanted to do nothing but help and encourage. I feel I have reached out to many in these 50-years and was only able to help them because of what I have kept within the yolk.
I didn’t become afraid overnight, it was a gradual thing. My earliest memory of fear and feeling apprehensive was at the age of six. There were many triggers as I sit here and reflect back.
I remember a conversation with my mother shortly before I started first grade. We were sitting on the front porch and this is what I was told. (Shirley you start school tomorrow, if you ever get off the bus and there’s a “strange man” here and I say “Shirley your momma called and wants you to go home, I want you go to Mrs. Stovall’s and wait for me”). I didn’t understand, but it was on my mind every afternoon as my feet stepped off that hot bus. Even at that young age I sensed I should be afraid of something.
Throughout my childhood there was a small photo of a little boy that hung in our living room. I remember asking my mother hundreds of times who he was, I was often told he was little boy she once knew. He remained a mystery until I was thirteen. I learned that I was not an only child as always believed.
My mother had four other children prior to me. These children’s father was a very dangerous man and she was always afraid he was going to come and take me. He was the “strange man” she had warned me about at the age of six.
The earliest fears I had were compounded by my REALITY.
I was always being protected from someone that was “coming” however the one that was hurting me was already there. I was molested by a neighbor from the age of six until eleven years old. I was always afraid as a child.
Daddy was always working at his service station or in the soybean fields. A couple times a week Momma would walk with my cousin and fish or go to another neighbor’s house to visit. I would stay because I had wonderful little grandmother at home that was blind and deaf. He would watch for my mother to leave and within 5-minutes and he would be walking in the back door. I would often look across the garden and see him standing in the shade. I would see him at night looking in our windows and would tell daddy “Someone” was outside in hopes that he would be caught but never was. I was threatened that if I told anyone he would hurt not only my grandmother but my parents. I lived in fear but functioned. It became who I was.
Now as an adult, I can see where I displayed signs that something was wrong. I cried when summer vacation would start, I slept with my parents until I was 12 years old, I would play sick when Momma wanted “us” to go visit next door, when I was home alone I insisted on the front door and back door to be left wide open. I know that sounds strange but my rationale was that whatever door he walked in I was going to run out the other… but of course I could NEVER had left my grandmother.
This has affected every area of my life, some positive and some negative. It placed an unwanted filter on my life and I was unable to truly experience all life had to offer both good and bad.
Today I celebrate not only the turning of FIFTY years old but the celebration of survival on many levels.
There are two reasons an egg cracks. Either it is piped by the new life that is about to spring forth or the life inside rots and explodes. The yolk serves but one purpose and that is to feed the embryo inside. It took me 40+ years to come to the realization that I was not the yolk it merely provided me the nourishment that brought me to where I am now.
My shell was not as hard as I thought… consider my egg piped!!