Leahpeah : flawed but authentic

I’m not going to talk about being sick because I’m sick of it. All of it. Feeling it. My head. The snot. All of it. So, instead I’m going to tell you a story about when I was 6. When you get done clapping from excitement, I’ll begin.

At one point in 1st grade, I had enough of my hair. It was stringy. It was in my face. It wasn’t blond. It didn’t curl. It didn’t bounce. It was awful. And I just knew that if I had the same cut as a girl in my class, we’ll call her Trixie, that all my problems would be solved. I asked my mom if I could have my hair cut like Trixie but I lived in a world where we had this type of haircut and my sister wanted to live in the pretend log cabin out back and no one was worried about my hair not having curls. So I decided to cut it myself. And, why not? I was good with scissors. I cut perfect valentines in class. My box was the best looking valentine box in the whole class. It had perfect shaped pink, red and white doily hearts around the entire perimeter. Perfect! And, it was my hair! I could cut it if I wanted to and I’d look like Trixie in no time.

Staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, I took a chunk from the right side and gave it a chop. Suddenly, I could see my ear. Almost in its entirety. It was a little shocking because I didn’t remember Trixie’s ear showing quite like that. I considered stopping for a split second, but what would be the point of that? No one at school had only one ear showing! So, to even it up, I took a chop at the left side. I can still hear the sound of the hair sliding coarsely in between the sharpened blades of my mom’s sewing scissors. It fell in scattered patterns around the sink basin, piling up in various places and missing other areas completely. It reminded me of brown snowflakes. There was much more hair than I thought there should be, and my stomach did a little turn.

I looked at myself squarely in the face and took stock if my situation in as fair and un-dramatic way as I possibly could. And then I screamed, threw the scissors in the trash and ran to my room. My sister went first into the bathroom where the scream had come from, saw the hair in the sink and then pounded on the door until I let her see the damage I had done. She didn’t laugh. She just looked. Stared. Deep into the crevasses of my ears and then yelled ‘MOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM’ as loud as I’d ever heard.

I was crying almost inconsolably at this point. I knew that my entire life was ruined. No bouncy hair. Never to be blond and now never to be long enough to bounce. Arrrg, the indignity of it. And not only that but the 1/4 inch stubble above my left eye was itching and I had tiny bits of hair in my eye and mouth.

My mother ‘evened things up’ around the edges of my scalp. Her long-term solution was a hat. Nay, not a hat, but a cap (bottom right corner of the image). It was a lovely cap, stylized after the pioneer women that crossed the plains. Why would any small child in the first grade in 1977 NOT want to wear one? My mom made me two, one white, one a pale green. I hated them but I hated my sad, sad stubble more so I wore them for almost an entire month while my hair grew back in. I wore them to school and to church. I wore them to the grocery store where the older ladies would tap the top of my head and ask why I was wearing such a fun hat. And then my mom or older sibling would launch into a hearty round of Leah Cutting Off All Her Hair. Oh, yes. Fun was had by all. But don’t worry. My hair grew back in just in time for me to be a part of the Diversity Parade.

During the weeklong Health class we learned about our bodies and what was going on with them. Apparently, it was perfectly normal to stink, but letting someone smell the stink or see wetness on your shirt was ghastly. On the first day, we all took turns practicing putting on deodorant with a huge wedge of Old Spice. It was the same one my dad had at home and it was an odd mix of comforting and normal and usual with a definite strain of doing something you shouldn’t, like going through the things behind the mirror in my parent’s bathroom. In retrospect, I’d like to say eeew. 120 kids all using the same stick of deodorant? And shouldn’t the girl’s have had something, oh I don’t know, more girly? Like, something strong enough for a man but made for a 5th grade girl?

On the second day we learned about menstruation. All the boys had been carted out to the other classroom where I just knew they were learning secrets I’d never get to hear. I wondered if they were being shown a poster of their insides and if they were going to need cardboard sticks with cotton balls inside. At home, we had many large boxes of ‘women’s products’ on the year-supply shelves. I had peeked in there before to see what all the fuss was about. I couldn’t figure out what those 10-inch long pads (with no sticky side! And little belts to go with!) had to do with being a woman.

We girls were told about how hair was going to grow in new places on our bodies and that we might want to shave it. One of the teachers brought an extra pair of high heels and let us try them on. Because, you know, that is what a woman does – wears heels.

Some of the more petite girls in my 5th grade class looked adorable while they teetered and giggled and walked back and forth in the too-big-pink pumps, their blond curly locks bouncing up and down. However, being born with one of the last remaining strains of Amazon that still existed, my feet fit those shoes. Barely fit, and my pinkie toe was squashed against the side and it hurt. And it wasn’t cute to see me jerk haltingly while trying to balance my newly expanded height of 5’7′ in front of an entire room of my peers atop tiny 2-inch stilts. And! we had just weighed ourselves, again in front of the entire class, the day before and I was the ONLY girl that weighed over 100 pounds. I was 103. And I thought it was the end of the world. Oh, to be only 96 or 94 like my two best friends. How could they even want to be friends with me anymore? For the life of me, I didn’t know. I accepted that my life of loneliness and isolation due to my great height and obese-ness would be the best a person like me could hope for. I would get four cats and a rocking chair and let my hair turn gray naturally and pile it in a big bun on top of my head and drink herbal tea in the evenings and give the paperboy an extra big Christmas bonus to the tune of $5 for bringing the paper up to the doormat and not tossing it from the street and having it land in the rose bushes where it would scare the cats and I’d have to heave my huge, misshapen body out to retrieve it in completely flat shoes where the neighbors would see me and point and laugh.

Then we learned about our breasts. Only one of the girls in the 5th grade had boobs. And they were already size B. We were all fascinated with her and how her shirts fit her. We (and I mean other girls since I didn’t even own a training bra yet) would stuff toilet paper and socks in their bras and pretend to be Grace with the Big Boobs. I would try to place a well-bound sock in the correct area and arch my back to keep it there but it would just fall to the ground with an embarrassing sound of failure. So, I left it to the petite girls with bouncy blond curls and training bras and tiny feet to play that game and I took out my pocket dictionary and pretended to be more interested in words like ‘precocious’ than boobs. Which, kind of, I really was.

But none of the benefits of having boobs were covered in Health class. Only the downside of BREAST CANCER. It was the dawning of a new era and breast cancer awareness was just coming to the light. And things like breast exams were being shoved down the throats of 5th grade girls. I sat in horror as it was explained that you must do the checks religiously and also all the time and regularly or you would get nodules and not know it and then surely die. I spent time in the shower over the next few weeks trying to figure out which nodules were the bad ones. I found many. And had many restless nights wherein I went through all my belongings and prized possessions and gave them to the most deserving. Oh, I was so selfless in death by breast cancer. I always gave the best stuff to my little brother. Even the girly stuff. Because I figured he deserved it more than the girls who just pretended to be my friend because I was tall enough to reach the Frisbee that landed in the top of the tree branches. All I was to them was a giraffe. But to my little brother, I was a hero with a Benji Poster in the barn. He thought I had coolness dripping out of every pore. Yes, he could have my smurf collection. I bestowed it to him with dignity in an official death scene where I lay in bed at the ripe old age of 10, coughing delicately into a fringed hankie, with dark circles under my eyes and two sunken holes where my nonexistent breasts had once been. It would be a sad, sad day and my parents would rue not letting me build a swimming pool in the back yard that summer that I offered to dig it out myself. They would weep. I would sigh. And that would be that.

When I was 9 years old and in 4th grade, I had very few friends and extra time to study my vocabulary words. This was mostly due to the fact that I didn’t shower or wash my hair unless it was Saturday. I’m not sure what the thinking behind that was. I guess I was under the impression that all the other kids in my class had noses that ceased to smell around Wednesday afternoon at 1:45 when Physical Activity Class began and then picked up again on Monday morning, 8:30 am in Mrs. Birch’s classroom. We had glue. And things to glue together. So, you had to be able to smell or you would miss all that great glueyness.

There were few other kids that were shunned as much as I was in 4th grade. One such sad person was a girl named Tia who constantly picked her nose. I mean, all the time. Her finger was up her nostril like a baby sucks their thumb. Only, she did suck her finger as well. You get the picture.

I didn’t like Tia, and I hated that kids would call after us and say ‘Leah-peah and Tia-booger‘ while tossing small stones, rotting vegetables and used appliances at us, but I didn’t like being alone at recess more, so I would walk with her around the perimeter of the play yard, kicking lone dandelions, staying away from the kickball kids and generally trying to blend in with the fence and the grass while staying just far away from Tia in case she was full and decided to waste one and flicked it in the air but close enough that when the next car fender was lobbed at us I could duck behind her for cover.

I would frequently steal glances over to the monkey bars where only last year I had been included with those kids. Before I stopped showering during the week. Before their noses had started caring. Dumb noses. Before I started wearing a grass-green colored cap to hide my greasy hair every Thursday and Friday. Its color helped me blend in more with the surrounding foliage.

Because I had so few friends, one of my favorite ways to pass recess and lunch was to create families out of tiny buds from the weeds in the south corner by the old swing set. It was a safe area because no one in their right mind would swing on the old swing set unless they were made to by a bully, were new to the school or had recently fallen off the climbing arch and were experiencing a concussion and none of those types of kids were likely to walk over and kick me or throw a handful of dirt in my face. The swing seats were made out of wood that was old and cracked and had faded dark blue splinters of 22 coats of paint just waiting to stick you all over your hind side. I would sit 8 feet away and feel sorry for any sad child that placed their bottom there and tell the entire story to my weed bud family.

‘Oh, look Smelly Sister! Look at how sad that is!. Oooooh. I bet his butt hurts pretty bad right about now. Stinky Mommy, don’t ever let Smelly Sister or Farty Brother near those swings. Not if you love them. Good Grief!’

Good Grief! and Good Night! were my dad’s two favorite sayings. He bellowed the last word with great gusto. When he did it while reading a remarkably strange article in the paper from his favorite chair in the living room, it sounded wonderful to me. When I said it, it sounded like a forest animal had bitten the hand of a dwarf. So I had to practice saying it. A lot. I had more than one teacher tell me it wasn’t appropriate to say either one at school. ‘Take that ugly, green cap off, stinky, and stop yelping like a hound dog just run over by a mixer truck!’ I would slowly remove the cap from my flat, greasy, lifeless hair and hold it behind my back, head slung low, and think about ways to fit Good Night! in a sentence with heliotrope, obtuse, Mississippi and linoleum, all words I found fascinating. ‘Can you believe the heliotropes on the linoleum in that Mississippi kitchen? Good Grief!, Stinky, it’s obtuse!’ I would say to my mom later and she would shake her head and ask me to pass over the chedderella cheese plate to go with her tomato soup.