Fresh Air?

 If you can't tell by what you have read so far.  We moved a lot and I still move a lot.  I think somewhere in my mother's mind, it was what was supposed to happen.  She was an air force brat and that was what she had to do as she grew up. My father was an officer in the air force so it just continued into her adult life. Honestly, it never went away.  It wasn't until I was an adult myself into my 30s that I understood that Mom was moving to search.  She was always looking for something better to make her happy.  

My dad, Bud (not to be confused with my father-Dick) was an only child who loved the outdoors.  He had spent most of his adult life living in Houston but wanted more.  More space, more views, more time,.... just more. So while I was in the thick of invisible in the middle school years, my parents bought acreage about half way between Houston and San Antonio.  I think they were "bitten" when our neighbors who had acreage and a weekend home outside of Moulton, TX invited us.  The amount of time we spent there was not insignificant.  We would walk, explore, swim in "tanks", catch grasshoppers and appreciate beautiful sunrises and sunsets.  I think there were poker games, card games and fireflies.

So during those years, we too would traverse on the weekends.  It was about a two hours drive each way and we would work to clear land, make an abandoned farm house habitable, work work work, eat really good food, listen to country music, work some more.  When people meet me, they are usually surprised to know that I lived on a farm for four years and took weekend residence for a couple of years before that.  The house was primitive at best with one working spigot stuck out of a wall, inches of dust and dirt in the attic, absolutely nothing close to air conditioning (not even ceiling fans), complete with an outhouse. While my dad was away one weekend, my mom thought she would surprise my dad and have us kids (aka slave labor) clean out the house.  So here we were, 4 brothers and me, shoveling (literally) dirt out of an old farm house and sweeping and spraying a garden hose and sweeping and shoveling and spraying water all weekend. Maybe it was even a holiday weekend because I felt like the "fun" never ended.  When we blew our nose in the evening it came out black.  Farm house had no bathroom (yet) and maybe two bedrooms? Who could tell what was supposed to be a bedroom, etc. We later learned that my dad had intended on burning it to the ground.  Even though it wasn't fun work, I am glad we did it.  That experience and living in that house is part of me.  

Fast forward a few years complete with a bathroom and a kitchen sink and Mom and Bud decide that we will move out there.  "We" is actually my younger brother Matt, and myself.  My parents would commute back and forth over the weekends and "we" would live in this house built the beginning of the 1900s with a stranger and attend a new school where were knew ONE person.  Matt would start 7th grade and I would start 9th.  This was moving from a suburban neighborhood where I graduated from eighth grade with a class of 300+ students to attending a high school where the class size was perhaps 25 and everyone there had known each other since birth.  The counselor was also the principal.  We had to argue with him that there was no need for me to take Homemaking as all the girls did because I had already taken two years of Homemaking.  So, here I am in a town where I know no one and immediately placed into a situation where I am only with boys and not making friends that way.  I was the first girl in Moulton High School to ever take Agriculture and I know I wasn't the last. 

Let's just stop here and let that sink in.  New small town (population about 1000), new micro small high school, no friends, living with my younger brother (let's keep in mind my role when he was in kindergarten) and a stranger, not even taking all my classes with the other girls almost all of whom had been together since kindergarten or sooner.  There was also the prevalence of the Catholic Church across the street; most of the town's inhabitants were of German or Czech descent and Roman Catholic.  I was none of these things.

Invisible in the Middle

 When you are stuck in the middle of something, oftentimes one feels as if there is nothing to do or change.  Maybe that's why I am an INTJ because from the middle you can watch, soak it in, learn and think.  You might not be able to act but there is certainly time to judge.

As a middle child, I still see and feel this primarily in reflective moments.  As an educator with more than 20 years experience, I can pinpoint birth order with some accuracy.  

Nineteen seventy-nine was a fairly pivotal year in our family.  In late August or September, my Mom was introduced to Bud.  Finances had been getting more challenging and Mom told me she had actually considered prostitution to help put groceries on the table.  She did a wonderful job of shielding us from that stress. Yes, I did wear second hand clothing but I didn't understand that money was tight.  I actually thought that everyone wore someone else's castoffs. Maybe this was where I first learned the value of thriftiness.  I was ever the saver child.  At one point in time (maybe early 1976 or 1975) my best friend Julie-Anne and her Mom (and her Mom's gay lover) took us to California for a vacation.  I remember Julie-Anne's mother telling me that I was told that I couldn't spend any of my savings on anyone other than myself.  That was hard for me and is still a challenge.  

Mom had been dating a man named Charles that took us fishing early one morning.  He seemed okay but there was something that made me uncomfortable.  One night, while asleep in our house on Sheridan, I woke to see him standing in my doorway staring at me.  He didn't touch me or walk in, he just stood and stared, making me quite uncomfortable.  It was about this time she met Bud and from my recollection of our conversations was that she had two marriage proposals: one from Charles and one from Bud.  She was so desperate to get out of this hole that she knew she had to consider.  She had only known Bud 3-4 months before they married.  God must have been truly guiding her because I shudder to think of what life would have been like with a man that stares at a 9 year old while she sleeps. She and Bud married in December of 1976 and remained married until her death in 2016, just shy of 40 years.

So we moved again, into Bud's suburban home in the the SugarLand area.  It was a four bedroom, 2 bath house in a neighborhood.  I made friends with a lot of kids.  There were Lisa and Craig across the street, Martha diagonally across, Kim down the street, and Monica a few streets over to name a few.  I started babysitting for $1 and hour and swam on the swim team in the summers.  It was good.  I started fourth grade at Meadows Elementary School and later graduated to SugarLand Junior High. I had unique friendships with the friends listed above.  Martha and her brother were an immigrant family from Columbia.  I think I was with her when we watch Prince Charles marry Lady Diana.  Craig was my first strong crush but he didn't reciprocate.  Craig was a year younger and his sister 2 years younger than Craig but I hung out and played with primarily Lisa.  Kim down the street was my first exposure to the Catholic Church and what I would later desire for my own family to look like.  Her mother was a stay at home mom who was an amazing cook and decorated beautiful cakes.  I still make a recipe I found in Lillian's (Kim's mother) collection of recipes.  Kim was also a year younger so when I started Sugar Land Junior High, things changed.  Monica and I became close friends throughout swim team and junior high.  

When Mom married Bud, timing was excellent for me and probably my younger brother Matt, too.  Our father had seen us perhaps 4 times since my parents separated then divorced.  It was good to have a strong male influence in our life and Bud was STRONG!  Bud insisted that we answer with "Yes, Ma'am, No, Ma'am, Yes, Sir and No, sir".  He was a former Marine who served in Korea. Bud had 3 older children of his own, we would see his two sons on the weekends. Their ages are wrapped around Rick's and my age. We were in sorry need of a male influence but Rick, as a 13 year old, wasn't so savvy to have some militant man telling him how to behave and live.  Things got touchy and Rick rebelled in a few different ways including some theft, running away, throwing parties behind my parents back, etc.  

Middle school, oh those years. How I would wish I could swallow them away!  There are always things about middle school.  I had some fun and made some friends but no friends I am still in touch with.  As a matter of fact, I don't have any friends from my youth.  That's another story for another day.  Monica and I did everything together, until we didn't.  We spent most weekends together.  I would travel with Monica and her Mom and sister and sleep in a tent at the Bluegrass Festival in Kerrville a few summers.  I learned how to French Braid with Monica and her sister.  She and I dressed the same, both had brown hair and brown eyes and roughly had the same intellect or perhaps she was smarter.  I struggled with Science and Bud tried to help me but I think that was the beginning of the end of my academic career in science. Ugh, I loathed it.  At SugarLand Junior High, there were crushes, Sadie Hawkins dances, roller skating, parties.  At the end of eighth grade, maybe seventh, Monica had a party and invited all the popular kids.  I wasn't invited.  I can't imagine how my mom felt seeing her child hurt by the actions of her best friend.  I wasn't popular enough.  When Monica's sister later figured out that I wasn't invited, I watched her slug her sister hard and yell, "you don't do that to your best friend."

I guess truly, like a lot of kids in Middle School I just didn't know where I fit in.  Here I was again, feeling alone. My mother was busy with work, my brothers were at an age where hitting on your sister seemed like something you should do.  I recall hopping off the junior high bus, the high school bus right behind us and hearing Rick and his best friends yelling out the window, "Missy's got big titties." I don't for the record but was sufficiently embarrassed in front of all the kids who rode my bus.  I began to feel more invisible.  Mom and Bud would get home from work and I would approach them to tell them something and the response I got was, "Traffic was terrible, I have had a rough day. Not until I have had a drink." Bud had a beautiful champion Labrador Retriever named Duke who on many occasions would come into the house and pee on my quilt and dust ruffle.  I think he was claiming me as his.  This meant, however, that I was washing my quilt and dust ruffle a lot with no help.  In the meantime I was sharing a bathroom with two brothers, one of who sleepwalked and peed all over the place and yes, I often clean it up.  In the summer to earn money, Mom would let me clean the house. She would then question the job I did by running her fingers over the shelves to see if there was still dust.  This was all, mind you, before I was even 13 years old.  There were loaded pistols on either side of my parents bed; I was expected to move those pistols to dust.  My mother kept her perfume bottles on a wicker paper plate holder. While trying to clean her bathroom, one of her perfumes feel over and dumped out more than half.  I got in trouble for that with a lot of yelling and shaming when she returned from work. I still hate the smell of that perfume.  

I was just invisible.