Rooted: Childhood

photo credit:  Broken Piggy Bank

My word for 2012 is Rooted.  But before we talk about that, I need to tell you some stories.  The first one is about my childhood. Here’s the first story in the Rooted series, Rooted: Childhood.

I so wish that I could say I have roots that run deep and wide and long.  One would think that I did.  I grew up in a small Alabama town where everyone knew everyone’s name.  My dad graduated as the valedictorian of his class there.  My grandmother worked at the cotton mill and she still lives there with my grandpa.  My family moved back there after my sister was born and before I started first grade.  I lived there until I went to college.  Having grown up in one place for all of my school age childhood, you would think that the foundation was firm.

Mom and Dad built a new home on old family land, and they were young and proud of it.  It was small, with the tiniest kitchen you’ve ever been in.  But the bedrooms were giant, and as kids, we didn’t know any different.  My parents were private, and being out in the country all alone is just what they wanted.  My dad could yell obscenities  outside and get away with it, even though our not so close by neighbor often heard him and called my grandmother to tell her of it.  On the other side of our land lived my dad’s sister and her husband and daughter, and I have no idea what she thought of dad’s yelling and cursing.  Perhaps she was used to the idea because my grandfather was known for his short temper too.

In elementary school, I made friends, but I was incredibly shy, and if my parents were worried about it, I never knew it.  Even though I had friends, I wasn’t like the other children, involved in lots of activities and building roots in the childhood activities they participated in.  My social life consisted of little other than my time at school.

I grew up with these kids from 1st grade and up to 9th grade.  In middle school, I was on the dance team, was a basketball cheerleader, and was in the band from 6th grade up.  In the 9th grade though, there was a great stink, and when I try to remember details about it, my memory and the details are foggy.  My small Southern town lived on football. The football coach was great at coaching, but he was also my health teacher that year, and he was not so great at teaching.  I don’t know if he liked me or hated my dad, but he liked to pick on me that’s for certain.

He was the first person I remember that purposefully tried to make me feel insecure and took glee in tearing me down.  I was still painfully shy, and he would call me out.  I probably had panic attacks that year and was terrified to go to class.  A couple of incidents stand out in my mind.  We were learning to do CPR, and I forgot and wore a skirt to school one day.  He purposefully made sure it was “my turn” to go to the front of class, kneel on the floor, and perform CPR in. my. skirt.  I don’t know if it was the same day but we were learning to take our pulses, and of course, he called on me as he always did.  I said, “200 bpm.”  He thought that was a joke.  That no one could live and breathe with a heart beating that fast, but mine was and did every day of his class.  He took it himself and had to back pedal in his statement to the class.  With all of this, at the end of year, a stink arose to get him out of our school.  I don’t know what is real, but I’ve been told my dad had something to do with it after what Coach had done to me all year.  When my dad died, he came to the visitation and shook my hand.  He looked like he’d seen some hard times since those days.

Either way, I transferred high schools, and never went back to the friends I’d grown up with all those years.  I tried to stay friends with them, but it didn’t take long before it was obvious that I wasn’t part of them any more.  And like that my roots were gone.  I never really knew how far removed I was from them until I began to reconnect on Facebook and felt so isolated and disengaged.  I was not a Cordova girl anymore.

The past few years the roots I had have slowly withered and died.  Stay tuned: next time, another angle of childhood.

Rooted: Earliest memories

Rooted: Going to Church

Rooted: Church Membership and Baptism

Rooted: Starting middle school

These series of posts are inspired by this post by Flower Patch Farmgirl.  I found her blog via Chatting with the Sky.