Subway Wrappers and Wood Chips (CW semester one draft)

I brushed the once perfectly formed curls; now white girl Afro status, from my hazel eyes. I was six, skin as white as the bathroom walls, with bony knees that liked to knock together when I ran down stairs. My mother wasn’t home. She was waiting tables at an all you can eat buffet only found in southern towns called Western Sizzlin. At the time she was waiting on old men chomping on buttered rolls by day and attending local college classes by night. That left my father to entertain us on the weekends. My outfits rarely matched and he had no clue what to do with my wild locks. He just brushed his back and out, letting the hair add height to his already 6’3 stature.

I fumbled around under my bed, a space no man should ever travel. It was like a vacuum, sucking up every thing in its wake. Shoes, candy wrappers, bobby pins, missing socks, half-dressed Barbies. I was searching for my white Keds, the ultimate 90’s accessory. I ran my fingers around the laces for a bit and decided to give up. I left the white, tattered strings in some impossible knot. I didn’t want to ask my father to help tie my shoes. I was embarrassed. My mother always did that weird rabbit hole and the tree little number in the mornings before school to help me learn how to tie them on my own. Now, I couldn’t remember which part came first, last or where my fingers were supposed to loop or tie. So I gave up, letting the shoes slide up and down my heel the remainder of the day leaving blisters.

I threw my curls into a messy ponytail, the only thing I knew to do with it. My mother always had a matching bow for every outfit in my closet. Not today. She was escorting rib eyes twenty minutes down the pothole-infested freeway and I was going to the park. My older sister called down the hallway at me. I didn’t make out what she was yelling, but I guessed we were about to throw ourselves in the red car and leave.

Kim was older, taller, a tom-boy and louder than me. She could do things like dribble a basketball and build things with her hands with my father. They bonded like that. They would sit and just put things together, shoot hoops and be rough. I don’t think dad knew what to do with me early on. I liked pom-poms, hair bows and wanted nothing to do with things like dirt or mud pies. Kim could fly her dinosaur kite with ease, my father smiling up into the June sun with pride. Then there was me. My Barbie kite flapping on the thirsty Arkansan soil like a fish out of water. That’s how I felt most of the time.

We hopped in the cramped back seat, Kim reminding me to buckle the seat belt I was conveniently squashing with my 60-pound rear. It was 1996 and the windows in the red car were still manual, making my father pump his freckled, sun-kissed arms hard and fast to get any air flow to our flushed faces.  As we hit freeway, the wind was thrashing our hair around so hard that it was slapping us in the face. I looked over at Kim and smiled. We both began to laugh because we couldn’t hear a word each other was trying to  say. So we began to just pretend like we were having a conversation. It was as if we were in the bottom of our neighbor’s pool again, pretending to have an underwater tea party. Our mouths were moving in an exaggerated way, making us look like those apes dad took us to see last Saturday afternoon at the local zoo.

My head was now resting on the back window as I peeked through one eyelid to see our destination. The tires hit some gravel pieces as we pulled up to park benches and faded seesaws. The park. Our park. Kim ran ahead onto the grass, hopping onto the swings. She kicked her head back and forth violently, propelling her board straight bangs to the sky. I staggered behind, head down and in search for roly-poly’s.

“Go play, kid.” My slender father slumped on a bench to watch us through his biking sunglasses. Kim ran around in her grass-stained cut off shorts and Winnie the pooh t-shirt, hollering for me to come on, come on, come on. I didn’t want to swing or run across that wobbly wooden bridge that scared the crap out of me. I wanted to search for roly-poly’s and sit in the grass. I followed her for a while, eventually plopping myself down to empty my shoes. Wood chips. I hated those wood chips. How did they always manage to get in there anyway?

I peered over through my furrowed brow to see dad hunched over in the red car grabbing our sandwiches. The lunch of all lunches. Subway sandwiches and Capri sun pouches. My mother would have packed a full- blown picnic, probably involving heart shaped jelly sandwiches and napkins with sweet notes scribbled on the back. I half-smiled picturing my father preparing that sort of lunch.  My father was quick and efficient like subway sandwiches. No time for nonsense or ignorance. He was a computer programmer, focused on solutions and data. I didn’t understand him yet and all he knew to do at the time was to ruffle my hair and call me kiddo.

We sat in the grass, unwrapping our deli deliciousness and watching moms in high-waisted jeans push their snotty children on the swings. Kim was of course inhaling her lunch like the space under my bed does Barbie shoes. She wanted to be done already to go run around some more in those stupid wood chips. I looked to my father and let out a quiet enough giggle so he wouldn’t hear me. The bread crumbs from his sandwich were having a party in his curly strawberry blonde beard hairs. He didn’t seem to care or notice. Things were always getting in his beard, especially vanilla ice cream. My mother would always look over at him, chin dripping with melted vanilla and gasp, ”Joseph Todd! Look at the mess you’re making!” He would just laugh, making the mess worse.

It was windy already, the wind getting worse even though the sun was getting higher and brighter in the summer sky. We kept having to hold our napkins and wrappers down with random parts of our body, still trying to stuff our faces. Our attempts of restraining them with our elbows eventually failed. All napkins and wrappers went up in the sky further and higher than that stupid Barbie kite I had ever did.

I crawled on my knees at first, grasping at the air in vein. Kim was running full throttle towards the plastic bag then veering off to the playground forgetting about it. It was just my father and I. Chasing subway wrappers. His legs were long like the tree trunks in our backyard and lean from biking miles and miles of pavement every morning before the earth woke up. His arms reached up and snatched his Bull’s ball cap from his scalp. He was now swiping at the wrappers, like somehow the red angry Bull glaring on the front of his hat would help his cause.

My Keds took me up and down, up and down. I was wailing my arms and maneuvering my scrawny legs around toddlers picking their noses and eating rocks while their mothers flapped their tongues to other mothers about K-mart sales and Huggies. My index finger grazed the corner of a wrapper just enough for me to cup my hand together around it like I was holding grains of sand, trying not to let even one grain slip away. I don’t know why I didn’t just let the wrapper go and hop onto one of those rusted park toys and move on. I ran back to where my father was still chasing flying napkins with his hat. I held the Subway wrapper high over my head like an Olympic athlete on their Country’s victory lap.

“Daddy! Daddy! Look! I caught the wrapper!” I hollered, still flapping towards him like a wild goose. He turned around and looked at me through his dark glasses. I couldn’t see whether his eyes were smiling or even possibly looking straight past me to somewhere else. Then he smiled through his facial hair, took the wrapper from my tight grip and took it to the nearest park trashcan.

We walked to find Kim, probably swinging like a wild ape on the monkey bars somewhere. As we walked in silence my father ruffled my curly knob head and I knew what he meant. On the way back to our blue-gray house I looked to my father’s rear view mirror, catching him watching his youngest daughter. He smiled with his eyes, letting them wrinkle in the corners like they did when Kim flew her dinosaur kite, looking into the sunlight. I smiled back and he knew what I meant. I wasn’t chasing Subway wrappers that day and neither was he. We both knew that.

Why I Write. (Creative Nonfiction semester one)

                                                            Why I Write

Why do I write? I write for many things and sometimes many people. Mostly, I write to take everything built up in my heart and to purge it. Joy, sorrow, revenge, peace, every single raw emotion that is simply taking up too much space. Sometimes it isn’t merely a feeling; I purge people too. I write their stories or the pain I felt for them or because of them and then I let it go. I let them go and everything they ever made me feel about life, love or my worth.

I remember being a kid, knees shoved all the way up to my chest in my father’s jet-black mustang. The engine was loud but the melodies of Billy Joel were louder. As the music moved through my curls and pumped into my veins, I began to write on the windows fogged by the warm rain. I wrote my name, maybe also something about a boy in my 5^th grade class. I think his name was Bobby. What a boring name for a boy to like. When I wrote, I could see the world more clearly and people could see just a quick glimpse of the tiny girl in the black mustang. I realized I liked that.

I write to see the world and the world to see just enough of me to make them wonder. I write for myself and the occasional passer-by who decides to look over just at the right moment at a stop-light. I write for moments. Moments of pain or persecution. Moments of happiness. Moments of birth. I write because tearing shreds of my carpet would in no way make my father, hooked up to some poison disguised as medicine, hurt less. I write because my mother is far away, sometimes sad and I can’t hug her neck. I write because of the new life my sister brought through child baring pain, demonstrating the painful but beautiful suffering of my family. I write because of the love forbidden and the love I took a bite of anyway.  I write because a cup of joe can’t fix everything, even though on a Monday morning it sometimes feels that it does.

I write because speaking makes my face red and my hands shake. The keyboard could care less if I’m socially impaired. The ink in my pen doesn’t seem to mind that I would rather fill the lines of paper than the air with small talk. I write because sometimes a twenty-mile run still isn’t enough to let it all seep out. I write because at times my entire mind is a battlefield and the only weapon worth my time is a pencil.

I don’t remember the exact moment when I decided I wanted to be a writer. Was it in the jet black mustang with my full-bearded father, or the moment I saw him, facial hair falling out all over his pillow from disease? Was it in sixth grade when I was forced to write some “book” and use “imagination” and got in trouble for making all of my characters die in the end out of spite? Or was it the moment I experienced true pain and jotted down scribblings on my bedroom mirror, frizzy-haired and fourteen years of age? I think it was a compilation of all of it. I needed an outlet. A place to put all of those moments I didn’t want to recall anymore; a place to put all the moments I wanted to keep forever.

I believe it is impossible for any writer to pinpoint an exact moment in time they decided to write and why. As writers we do not discover writing; it discovers us. It finds us in our own mess and in our successes. It finds us in bed when we’re screaming into our pillows. It finds us when we’re driving down a flat highway, windows down and hand moving with the wind. Why do I write? I write because sometimes experiencing life once isn’t enough for me. I want to feel it, hear it and taste it all again. For me, writing does that.  I write to die and sometimes live again.

The Stepmom Chronicles: Cross The Line.

    The rain began to make it's home in my frizzy locks as I hurried to fill as many balloons with water from the hose as possible before the downpour. My hands were soaked from popped balloons as my fingers fumbled around in the 9 o'clock darkness, trying to work just enough to tie those blasted dime-sized balloons shut.
     I threw the most recent water-filled balloon into the bucket and ran onto the porch.
     Snagging a limp bag of Popsicles, I walked through the bedroom door to three rambunctious boys, jumping and bright eyed to the contents I carried.
      "Britney, I have a scratch," I hear.
      I bent over, hands still cold from carrying the treats that now dripped down the boys' mouths to their fresh pajamas.
      Kissing the scratch that you could barely see, even squinting and two centimeters away, my six year old's smile jumped from his soft porcelain face to mine.

In that moment, still soaked with rain, my knees on the lego-infested carpet, I realized; I am a mother.

As a step parent, you are always trying to stay on the balance beam, keeping your weight equal on both sides of your limbs.

"Am I leaning too much to the left? No wait, to the right?"
You're wobbling so much from thinking too hard, you don't even know which side to lean into.

Stop.

Dear step mom, stop caring about "the line."
The only line between you and your step children, is the one you make.

Every family is different, as is every step-parent to child relationship.
You may not want to kiss boo-boos.
You may not want to teach them to tie their shoes or wipe their noses.
You may want to kiss every single scrape, cut, owie your step child gets from crashing their bike on your steep driveway.
You may want to hold their hand and kiss their chocolate-covered faces.

The relationship you have with your step child is yours and yours alone.

You will be told you are over stepping your boundaries.
You will be told you are too involved or not involved enough.
You will never make everyone happy, just like a biological parent- you have to figure out how you want to be a parent.

Yes, you are a parent.
Yes, you are a mother.
Yes, you are a father.

DNA has never been what defines someone as a parent.
Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.

When you're kissing microscopic boo boos, folding sheets, cooking dinner, filling up 300 water balloons for just 5 minutes of giggles...remember, you are just as much of a parent if they had come straight from your blood line.

Screw "the line."
Cross it.
Hopscotch all over that line.

Do not be afraid to love your step children fiercely.
Do not be afraid to cross boundaries to show them you're not just an extra.
Do not be afraid to bounce them in your lap, to call them your own.
Do not be afraid to be a parent and a good one.

Put the step in step parent by being the stepping stones for your children to greater, lovelier, greater things.

Take Ownership.
Cross. The. Line.