Strabismus? As soon as I got home, I looked up the term. I’m going to have to send you to a strabismus expert.” “There isn’t a prism insert big enough to correct this. Afraid of being run over, demolished, and obliterated by the hate and disregard that had lived in Mama and lived on in them. And still ashamed of my fear and my weakness, ashamed I wasn’t strong enough to carry my siblings away with me when I left. Mile-high moxie, ruthless disregard of authority, and freedom of a kind I’d left behind, left behind and sometimes longed for.Īfraid. Mama distrusted authority and instilled that distrust in all her children. She took off to avoid questions she didn’t want to answer from people paid to ask those kinds of questions: social workers, doctors, school counselors and law enforcement officers. Only the twins had the same father: a man my Stepdad tried to kill one night with a bottle opener.Īfter that night, she never lived in the same place for more than a year or so. ![]() Not welcome, not wanted, no room for any of us.īorn to a woman who had to parcel out love to her nine children. Two years old on my trike, twenty blocks gone. “Were you ever hit in the head?” my ophthalmologist asked.įingernails in my arms hang on, hang on. S - my initial from Real Dad - was long gone. Also, the first initial of my adopted last name, and the official surname on my birth certificate, not the name I was born with but the name of my stepdad. E was the initial of my son’s first and last names. E was easy, the top letter on the chart and one I knew well. They looked like Celtic runes or the Cherokee syllabary. “Read the letters on the chart for me, please.” I was the woman who always showed up too early and waited out front in her car, the woman who claimed a seat closest to the plane gate two hours ahead of the flight. Immediately convinced I was late, I’d grab my purse, eyeglasses and keys, and head for the door. I couldn’t deal with everyday space and time. ![]() Turned the overhead reading light on and zoned out.ĭistance. ![]() I slid the porthole cover shut as soon as I sat down. Didn’t care about seeing a carpet of clouds. Never looked out the window with pleasure, even on planes. I rode the brake, gulped fear, heart pounding. On mountainous roads I’d ask someone else to take the wheel, lie down on the back seat or crouch on the floorboards. Could never tell how far my own car was from the one just ahead. Somehow missed the dip that signified a driveway entrance or exit. Didn’t get a driver’s license until I was twenty-four and had totaled two cars by the age of forty-eight, uncertain of where I was in space. I’d always been a turtle behind the wheel, slow and steady.
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