Getting in the holiday spirit

I'm sharing some shots of nature-based ornaments that were on the tree in the Peaks of Otter Lodge.

The other day, a friend told me he just wasn’t in the Christmas spirit yet. Even though lights and trees and other decorations seem to have spilled out onto the landscape within the last week or so, he’s just not there yet.

I’m not quite there yet, either. I think part of it has to do with the differences in planning and decorating that have occurred since I was a child.

When I was a child, stores didn’t usually put up Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving. When I went with my parents to Lynchburg to shop in December, part of the pleasure was to walk along the sidewalks and look at each store’s window displays.

Each store had something different—angel figures or a Santa Claus or trees. If the display had a moving part—like a Santa that waved his hand—that made it even more fun.

And I would start to get excited.

We always had a live pine tree that my father set up in the living room. It would go up about a week before Christmas. Putting the lights on was the first hurdle. Back then, if one light on a strand went out, they all went out. Someone would have to check each one to find the burned out light.

Then came the ornaments and finally the crowning touch—icicles. I loved the sight of the silver strands hanging from the tree.

Then the time crawled by until Christmas Day.

How things have changed. Whether they’ve changed for the better depends on your perspective.

Christmas decorations show up in the stores after Halloween. Christmas music starts playing on the radio before Thanksgiving. The effect on me is that I start feeling behind before December even gets here.

I haven’t started shopping! Should we put the tree up this weekend? What about outside decorations? Everyone has their decorations up except me!

Once I start participating a little in the season, at my own pace, I begin to feel less panicked. I remind myself that I don’t have to do everything that everyone else does to prepare for the holidays.

I haven’t finished my shopping, but I have done some. And it was all online. Shopping online takes away a lot of my stress about shopping. I just don’t like getting in the crowded stores if I can help it.

We’ll probably put up our tree this weekend. Larry and I put up pre-lit artificial trees. The lights are LED, so they don’t get so hot like the big bulbs would.

No icicles. Little kitties might eat them. And they seem irritating now, with the static electricity that makes them stick to everything.

Christmas movies also get me in the holiday spirit. Larry loves “White Christmas” with Bing Crosby, and we check the listings to make sure we can watch it at least once during the holidays. We also like some of the Hallmark Channel’s movies. I always watch out for “A Dog Named Christmas” and “November Christmas.”

We have our favorite Christmas music, too. Larry likes the older pop songs the best. I like the carols best. We both like listening to the CDs of Susan Boyle, Josh Groban, and James Taylor. I listen to them as I drive, a way I can include celebration in the day.

And then there are the parades. The Altavista Christmas Parade is tonight. I’ll be taking pictures for the paper. The Rustburg Christmas Parade (Rustburg is our county seat) is Dec. 14, and I’ll be there, too. By then, I will be excited.

My Christmas spirit has grown quieter as I’ve gotten older. I listen to the words of the songs more closely. I meditate more on what the meaning behind the celebration is for me. I think about all the holidays people celebrate this month.

 Times have changed. That’s normal and that’s OK. But do you know something that hasn’t changed? I still have a hard time falling asleep on Christmas Eve.

Has the way you feel about the holidays changed as you’ve gotten older? If so, how?

Asking the question, Who am I?

"Hidden clover" 

Asking myself the question, who am I, is not new for me. I have often wondered who I am in relation to mental illness. Would I be the same person if I didn’t have OCD? How would I be different if I didn’t have depression? Am I who I am partly because of the mental illness?

I am asking myself the question with a new concern now.

Since my mother’s suicide attempt a month ago, I’ve been flooded with all kinds of memories from my childhood and young adulthood.

Therapy over the years made me aware of my unhealthy childhood. And I made great strides in moving away from negative beliefs about myself. In many ways, I thrived.

But I stayed in a toxic relationship with my mother because I believed I had to. And I never fully faced what my childhood had been like and how much the anger and resentment I had stemmed from that.

My mother’s actions and the aftereffects a month ago tipped me over.

I’ve had to face the fact that I had a lousy childhood. There’s no longer any way I can dress it up and make it look reasonably OK for the rest of the world. It’s time for me to be honest about it with myself and with others.

And I have to look at myself and figure out how much of this past junk I’m still carrying around with me.

With the help of my psychiatrist, I’ve realized that my way of being in the world and my way of handling relationships were heavily influenced and shaped by my mother.

I’ve worked on this before, but now I am especially mindful about the ways I may be carrying on the habits learned from an abusive past.

So now that I know without a doubt that my mother’s influence was and continues to be toxic to me, how do I answer that question—who am I?

As I am apt to do in any new situation, I’ve been reading a lot. One helpful work I came across in my search was an article called “You Carry theCure In Your Own Heart,” by AndrewVachss. The article was first published in 1994 in Parade Magazine.

Vachss is an author and an attorney who works with children and youth.

Here is a passage from that article:

“If you are a victim of emotional abuse, there can be no self-help until you learn to self-reference. That means developing your own standards, deciding for yourself what "goodness" really is. Adopting the abuser's calculated labels—"You're crazy. You're ungrateful. It didn't happen the way you say"—only continues the cycle.”

This new journey of re-understanding of who I am is a difficult process for me, harder than it ever was before.

Meditation, reading, and writing in my journal have become very important ways to become aware of who I am without my mother, without the belief system that she started me on as a child. I want to be aware of what my values are, what my core beliefs are.

I keep telling myself, “I can do this. I am not alone.”

And I’m not alone. I know there are others who have gone before me who have overcome similar obstacles. I know there are those struggling with the same sorts of issues. I know there are people cheering me on. I believe there is a presence of Spirit—God, Creator—that I don’t understand but am becoming more aware of.

I pray. I meditate. I read. I write. I knit. I laugh with my husband. I hold my cat. I follow my doctor’s instructions and take the medication that helps enable me to do what I need to do.

And I find out who I am.

Music from the past

Last week while I was down in the basement organizing, I found some things I thought I had lost forever.

I thought I had lost my first piano book and the program from my first piano recital. But I found both.

When I was a little girl, I started picking out tunes on our Kurtzmann upright piano. I remember playing “Jesus Loves Me.”

Surprisingly, my mother discouraged my playing. She didn’t want me to play by ear. She wanted me to play by note. She herself could play by ear, but she hadn’t taken lessons long enough to learn a lot and regretted that.

I remember waiting until she went outside to do something like hang out the laundry. I’d run to the piano and plink out a song until she came back in. I thought I was doing this in secret. I found out years later that she, of course, heard me but didn’t say anything.

She talked with a local piano teacher. I was 5 years old, and this teacher usually waited to begin lessons once a child started school. But she said she’d see what I could learn.

So I started lessons. And I kept taking them until I was 12, when I started organ lessons for a year.

I had to write out the letters for each of the notes. 

My teacher wrote her instructions for me right on the book. A circle meant to practice the piece. She marked through it once it was played well enough to move on.

I had to memorize this one. I also had to memorize my piece for the recital.

A week shy of my sixth birthday, I played in my first recital. I played a song called “Voice of My Heart.” I don’t have that sheet music anymore, but I can still play a little of it by ear.

I did a Google search but couldn’t find the song. I don’t know the composer or anything about it.

Me on our front porch before we left the house for the recital. I remember I hated having to wear socks with sandals.

Some of the songs the other piano students played that evening in May 1969 were these:

“Hi Lili Hilo”

“Gentle On My Mind”

“Love Is Blue”

“Clair de Lune”

Mozart’s “Concerto in C Major”

“Beach Ball Boogie”

“Star Dust”

“Alice Blue Gown”

Lovely music from the past. I’m so glad I found a reminder.

Do you play a musical instrument? Which ones?

Barbara and the importance of encouraging words

"Blue Sky and Autumn Leaves"

When I was growing up, my best friends were twins who lived two miles from me. Their parents farmed, too, and ran a store.

We visited back and forth. We mostly played outdoors, making up games. Often, when I was visiting them, we played board games like Monopoly and Life under the trees in their front yard. Their mother, Barbara, would pop a grocery-sized paper bag full of popcorn and bring it out to us to eat as we played.

Even when I was a child, Barbara talked with me like she cared what I had to say. She seemed eager to hear about what I was doing and thinking.

When I grew up and moved away, she was one of the people that I always wanted to see when I visited my parents in the old community.

Barbara died this past week. She was 84 years old.

I haven’t seen Barbara a lot in the past years, but whenever I did, we caught up on our lives and she showed me that same kind, listening ear.

Three years ago, when I had been working at my newspaper job for less than a year, I received a card from Barbara. She had seen my work in The Union Star, a sister paper of the newspaper that I work for.

Here is part of what she wrote to me:

“For some time I have been seeing your name in “The Union Star” and wondered if it could be “our” Tina. Then (my daughter) told me you were at the Supervisors’ meeting and it answered my question. . . . I just wanted you to know how happy I am for you as I know you always wanted to be a journalist. I can remember a lot of years ago, and I don’t know where we were, but you said how very much you liked putting words together. . . . I just had to tell you how very proud I am of you.”

I felt so encouraged by her words. I was surprised that she had remembered something I had said so long ago. I was so pleased that she was proud of me.

That is what I will remember about Barbara: her kind and encouraging ways and words.

We all need people in our lives who are interested in what we’re doing, who listen to us, who encourage us in what we want to do.

Barbara was one of those people in my life.

When my father died over 16 years ago, I received a sympathy card from Barbara and her husband. In that card, she wrote, “The world is a better place for having (your father) for a little while.”

The world is a better place for having you, Barbara, too.

Who is someone in your life who has been especially encouraging to you?

Family and time

My father when he was about 3 years old. He was outside the home he was born in.

In his life story that he wrote before he died, my father noted that he was “one of nine children” of his parents. His oldest sister died of pneumonia when she was four years old, he wrote, but the rest of the siblings lived to be 60 or over.

He never knew his oldest sister because she died before he was born. He was the sixth of the nine children, and he grew up with two older brothers, two older sisters, two younger brothers and one younger sister.

On Sunday, I received word that his younger sister had died. Only one of the nine is still living, my father’s youngest brother.

I’ve been thinking about my extended family.

My father’s family was quiet but friendly. When I was a child, I preferred visiting with my mother’s family because there were cousins around my age to play with. On my father’s side, I was the youngest grandchild. The cousin closest in age to me was about six years older, but she did play with me when she was younger.

I remember how we got together at Christmas every year, usually at the house of one of my uncles. He worked for Dr. Pepper, so we always drank Dr. Pepper when we visited him.

I remember as a child staying with my aunt, the one who just died, when my brother had to be in the hospital for a few days. She and her family lived in Lynchburg. I liked walking up and down the city street with my cousin and playing in their backyard.

By the time I grew up and moved away to go to school, the family get-togethers were fewer. Gradually, I saw family at the reunions that I occasionally attended or at funerals.

I’m been thinking about the passage of time, how those family gatherings were so long ago. I’ve been thinking about my grandparents, raising their children on a farm, tragically losing one daughter at such a young age.

I suspect that many of you have similar stories of family, of growing up with aunts and uncles and cousins, of losing family members with the passage of time.

It’s the way life works. I know that.

But it still makes me sad.

I have a large extended family. How about you? Did you have a lot of aunts, uncles and cousins growing up?

Random 5: A look back at back to school

It’s the time of year when children and teens and adults are returning to school. I’ve been thinking about my own school experiences and remembering how excited I always was to start a new year or a new semester.

So my Random 5 this week is about back to school.

I’m joining with Nancy of A Rural Journal in her Random 5 Friday, where, as Nancy says, “you can share 5 random facts about you, your day, your pets, your kids, whatever!”

My first grade picture. My mother made the dress I'm wearing.

One

I started school when I was six years old. Kindergarten wasn’t available in public school when I was a child, and my parents didn’t send me to private kindergarten. But I learned my numbers, the alphabet, my colors, etc. at home.

Two

I went to school for 21 years straight: first through 12^th grades plus four years of college plus five years of graduate school, where I got my master’s in English and worked on (but never finished) my doctorate in English.

Three

I was excited to start elementary school. I rode bus number 41 the first day of school and sat beside a neighbor girl who was in about the seventh grade. She seemed so grown up to me, and I couldn’t imagine ever being that old.

Four

For the most part, I loved school and hated to miss a day. I had perfect attendance in sixth grade and in my senior year of high school.

But in first grade, I missed two weeks of school: one week for the chicken pox and one week for the mumps. This was before vaccines were developed for those diseases.

Me on my family's sofa in our living room when I was in first grade. I had the mumps, and my family teased me about my plump cheeks. 

Five

The year I started school, 1969, was the first year of total integration in my county’s schools. I didn’t know this at the time because my parents never mentioned it to me. I’m glad they didn’t. I’m glad I was able to go to school with children of different races and think nothing was odd about it.

Did you enjoy school when you were a child? Do you ever wish you could go back to school?

Snippet of a memoir: Waiting rooms

Part of this post was first published on this blog on Feb. 15, 2012. My post on Monday about OCD and health stirred up some memories that I wanted to share, and what I had written over a year ago was a starting point.

When I was a child and teenager, I spent a lot of time waiting.

Some of this waiting happened in actual waiting rooms, places of calm in the midst of the sadness and fear of hospitals.

I was surrounded by sickness growing up. I’m the youngest of three, with two older brothers. My oldest brother is 11 years older than me. My next oldest brother is two years older.

My next oldest brother was born with spina bifada and clubfeet. As a result, he had to have multiple surgeries as a child and spent a lot of time in the hospital.

My father had a major stroke when he was 54. I was 12 at the time. His speech and movement were badly affected, and he had to retire from his job as a rural letter carrier for the post office. Later that same year, he suffered a blood clot in one of his kidneys and almost died before the kidney was removed.

My mother also had her share of illnesses and hospital visits.

So the waiting rooms in the hospitals in the nearby city were very familiar to me.

The nicest one was a large room that had real furniture, like you’d find in a private home. Chair railings ran along the wall. Paintings covered the walls.

There were volunteers stationed at a counter, and they helped visitors find their way around the hospital and answered general questions. They were usually women who wore pink-jacket “uniforms.” They were called “Pink Ladies.”

Though people came and went, there was a hush over the room. No one spoke loudly or laughed or cried where you could hear. It was like being in a church.

When I was 7 or 8 years old, when my brother was ill quite a bit, my parents would leave me in the waiting room while they went up to be with him. In those days, at that hospital, children under 12 were not allowed to visit patients.

I always had a book with me, and I would sit in one of the nice green armchairs, my always-present purse tucked up against me, and read. Sometimes I would look up and stare at the paintings or the signs on the wall and on the swinging doors that went back into the main part of the hospital.

One night, I wasn’t kept waiting downstairs. I was allowed to go up to my brother’s hospital room.

My mother came down to the waiting room and led me back through the swinging doors into the part of the hospital that was usually forbidden to me.

I don’t remember what she told me at the time, if anything. But I had heard enough talk to know that my brother was very sick.

I remember walking into my brother’s room. He was lying in bed. He was very pale. He lay as if exhausted. He didn’t look at me.

My mother lightly pushed me towards the bed.

I stared at my brother. But I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything.

I stood there for probably just a couple of minutes, and then my mother took me back downstairs.

Years later, my mother told me that the doctors were afraid that my brother wouldn’t live through surgery scheduled for the next day. So permission was granted for me to go to his room to see him. As my mother put it, the nurses “looked the other way” as she led me to his room.

My brother made it through the surgery fine.

Remember the concerns I expressed in my post about OCD and self-doubts about health?

It has become clear to me that I have a difficult time believing I’m sick “enough,” injured “enough,” because I’ve seen a lot of illness in others, especially family members.

I was the lucky child. I didn’t have physical disabilities. I didn’t have serious illnesses. I was the one fortunate enough to be waiting in the waiting room.

It’s not an earth-shattering realization, and I don’t want to start complaining about my every pain. I’m grateful for my overall good health.

Of course, for all my good physical health, even as a child I was beginning to show signs of mental illnesses: OCD and depression.

Those illnesses were more hidden, though. Less talked about.

Perhaps some of us who have dealt with low self-esteem, perhaps as a part of depression, have this way of thinking: other people are worth concern. We’re not.

That’s not a healthy way of thinking. All of us are worthy of concern from others and ourselves. It’s OK to ask for help from others. It’s OK to express our pain and sadness.

And what a blessing it is to know that someone is listening. Thank you, my dear blogging friends, for listening.

Being a child with OCD and depression

Me in sixth grade.

If you’re of a certain age, you probably grew up before bicycle helmets were the norm. You probably sped around your neighborhood or along country driveways on your bike, not wearing a helmet, spinning the wheels, taking sharp turns that kicked up the dust. I was one of those kids.

My brothers and I grew up in the country, on a farm, with woods to play in and barbed wire fences to climb under. My mother knew we were somewhere on the farm, but she didn’t always know exactly where we were.

It’s a wonder we lived to grow up.

Have you ever said that, thinking of the scrapes you got into as a child?

Of course, a lot of children did get hurt. I’m all for bicycle helmets and any measure that keeps kids safe and unharmed. I’m glad that we know more now about safety and are willing to do things like put helmets on our kids before they get on a bike.

I’m glad, too, that we know more about mental health today than when I was a child. We have a long way to go to overcome stigma and to ensure that everyone who needs help has a way to get help. But more information is more readily available now than even just a few years ago.

For the past few days, I’ve been asking myself, how did I live to grow up? Not physically, but mentally.

I sorted through lots of papers last week, putting away things in file folders. I found a folder in my file cabinet that contained old health records of mine.

Years ago, I had to provide my employer a copy of my childhood vaccination records. Along with the shot record, the pediatrician’s office sent me a copy of all of my records.

I looked through them last week for the first time in years. A lot of the doctors’ writing is unintelligible, but a record of my visits from babyhood on was there.

On June 17, 1975, I was 12 years old. I was seen for a routine visit. In the nurse’s notes, it states, “Feels tired always—not sleeping well.” The doctor noted, “tired and waking up crying.” He ordered blood work and, I think (the handwriting is not clear), urinalysis and TB test.

Nothing else is noted.

The next entry is for June 12, 1981. I was 18 years old. I was seen for my college physical.

I remember being 12. I remember how the dark dread of depression had descended on me in the springtime of that year. I didn’t understand why I felt so bad, so hopeless, so unhappy.

I thought perhaps it was because I was a bad person and needed to be “saved.” At the revival at my church that May, I tried to get saved, but the prayer I prayed didn’t seem good enough. I found myself praying over and over, trying to get the words right, trying to get my thoughts in line with the words, just right. If I got it wrong, I had to do it over.

Prayers could also keep my family safe, I believed. But God couldn’t hear my prayers if I had sin between me and him. So I had to pray for forgiveness, and then pray a certain way for protection. Over and over.

Any thought that was bad had to be confessed, and I didn’t know who to confess to except my mother. Thinking of something bad was just as wrong as doing it, I believed. If I even thought I had a bad thought, I had to confess it to my mother.

I was also washing my hands a lot. I couldn’t seem to get them clean enough. As soon as I washed them, they became contaminated again, and I had to wash them again. If I spread contamination and someone got sick from it, it would be my fault.

Yes, I had OCD and depression. I was consumed by them.

My parents knew something was wrong. But professional intervention for my mental problems stopped with that visit with the pediatrician in 1975.

I got help for my mental health when I was in my 20s. When the psychiatrist diagnosed me with OCD and depression in 1990, she called me “high functioning.”

How did I end up high functioning? How did I live to grow up?

I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers yet.

Life was different in 1975. My parents made certain choices based on who they were at the time, based in part on how they were raised.

I hope I’m past the blame stage.

What I choose to focus on now is helping to break down the stigma surrounding mental illness. I want to help educate others about OCD, depression and other mental illnesses. I want to help encourage others to get help.

There’s no need for anyone to live like it’s 1975.

Random 5 Friday: I remember a lot of things

I’m linking up with Nancy’s A Rural Journal for Random 5 Friday. Today I’m sharing five random facts about my childhood.

1. I am the youngest of three children. I have two older brothers. Though my immediate family was small, I have a large extended family. My father was the sixth of nine children, my mother the third of ten. Their parents also had large families. So I have many first cousins, first cousins once removed, second cousins, and on and on.

2. I grew up on a farm in central Virginia. When I was very small, we had beef cows, milk cows, pigs and chickens. I remember my mother making butter, gathering eggs and pasteurizing the milk in a small pasteurizer on the kitchen counter. I also remember the milk tasting like green onions if the cows had eaten the wild plants.

3. I didn’t learn to ride a bicycle until I was about 8 years old. My father was a rural mail carrier, and he bought a blue bike from one of his mail customers. He brought it home and called me out on the front porch to look at it. The next day, my second oldest brother taught me how to ride it.

4. I loved jewelry even as a child. In the baby picture above, I’m wearing a cross necklace and a baby ring. I still have both pieces of jewelry. I was allowed to get my ears pierced right before my twelfth birthday. I had it done at a local department store. The piecing was free if you bought the 14 karat gold earrings, which were eight dollars.

5. I was a bookworm as a child (still am). I especially loved mysteries and devoured Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books. I loved going to the public library in Rustburg, the small village and county seat about six miles from the farm. Sometimes when my mother had her hair done in Rustburg, my brother and I were allowed to walk to the library from the beauty shop, and she would pick us up when she was finished.

Thank you for joining me on my walk down memory lane! If you’d like to join the Random 5 Friday link, go to A Rural Journal.

Please share one fact about your childhood in the comments section. I would love to read about you!