If You Could Change Anything

 

 

I go through cycles of wishing I could change things in the past.

Sometimes I’m so overwhelmed by some of the mistakes I’ve made, I wish I could do that time over, and perhaps be a bit more cautious or take a moment to think a little longer before I took any action.

I still feel all of the embarrassment of having made those mistakes, even decades later. In remembering some things – especially in the middle of the night – the feelings I had at the time come rushing back as if I’d only just done them.

Sometimes it’s not something I’ve done; it’s something I wish I’d done. There were things done to me by others that I wish I’d spoken up about at the time. It might have caused someone else to get into trouble, but that might have been better for my life.

Sometimes I think about how I worried about speaking up because I was afraid it would cause a rift in the family, and everyone would blame me. I shudder to think about being hated by the people I loved the most.

I’ve never done or said anything intentionally to hurt anyone. What I have done is said or done things that were clumsy, and ended up being hurtful. That’s what’s so baffling. 

When I should have spoken up and didn’t, it was because I was afraid of others being angry with me, or getting retribution, yet I’ve managed to make clumsy statements that have at times made others angry with me, and have embarrassed me for the rest of my life.

I’ve been told people reach a certain age where they don’t worry about speaking their mind. I don’t know what that age that is. Maybe it’s not an age, but a level of maturity that, so far, I haven’t achieved.

There are other do-overs I would wish for myself. Those are when others have done or said something deeply hurtful to me.  I wish I could have confronted those people.

I’m sure sometimes it was something the other person didn’t think was all that, only a momentary criticism, or a frustration at me being me.

Some of those times were people doing what I can only believe were intentionally hurtful things .

There are times I should have just walked away, discarded someone from my life. But I didn’t, hopeful that things would change. Things never changed, and those people left my life anyway. But by then, damage had been done, regrets accumulated.

If I had the chance to go back, I definitely would. Imagine being able to make a different decision that would save a world of hurt in my life!

But then you wouldn’t be who you are today, some would say.

Looking at who I am today, I can honestly say I could live without some past embarrassment. I could be happy not lying awake replaying certain episodes of my life. And I can definitely see how avoiding certain situations would mean that other unfortunate situations would never have happened. Perhaps I’d be a better person without some of those experiences.

I’ve been told, “Well, you just start from today and do better.” Mm-hmm.

Sometimes this is difficult, not because I don’t want to change, but because I don’t think people will believe that I have.

I’m not the person I was at 11. I wish I’d been feistier then.

I’m not the person I was at 16. I wish I’d been less shy then.

I’m not the person I was at 19. I wish I’d felt more worthy of respect then.

I’m not the person I was at 21. I wish I’d been able to stand up for myself then.

I’m not the person I was at 25. I wish I hadn’t cared so much about finally belonging to a group of friends. They didn’t turn out to be friends, anyway.

I wish seeing people get away with things I never could, seeing them not be judged for doing a wrong that was far worse than things I was chastised for hadn’t made me so angry. It wasted a lot of time on anger in my life.

But I’m not any of those people now. Of course, the real me is someone that very, very few people are aware of. I sometimes wonder: If you knew who I really was, would you hate me? Or would you think I was kind of cool?

I don’t suppose it matters. I’ve been called a liar for telling the truth. And I’ve been given a pass for saying nothing when I should have spoken up.

I think part of the problem is that I’m angry with myself for understanding what it is people want me to say and saying that instead of what I should have, just to keep the peace. And every time I determine never to do that again, I find myself falling into the same trap.

I sometimes think I’m driven by the desire not to be hated.

So often I have been made to feel like the fifth wheel.  I don’t want to bother people. I don’t want to be where I’m not wanted. When people tell me no, I assume they're not interested, ever, so I don't ask again. And I still struggle to feel like I’m wanted anywhere.

It’s not poor, poor pitiful me. I’ve felt uncomfortable in so many situations, felt, “they really don’t want me to be here,” as if I were intruding, even if I was invited. It's not being comfortable in my own skin.

Maybe it’s just part and parcel of being an introvert. Maybe I just wish I could be the me I wanted to be.

I know whenever I talk with someone about getting my writing out there and they tell me I need to sell my ideas to people, I need to market my ideas, I’m filled with such dread because I don’t know how to do that, that I’ve been brought to tears by the very thought of it. I suppose I don’t deserve to be a famous author if I don’t have the guts to do those things, even if I don’t have the first idea how to do them.

Marketing requires a level of extroversion I can’t even fake.

Put me on a stage, give me a guitar and a microphone and tell me to sing. Piece of cake.

Give me a stage and a script and ask me to play a part. No problem. I’m more comfortable on a stage than anywhere else in the world.

Ask me to walk up to a stranger and ask for their time. I have no idea how. The level of fear that involves is more than I care to admit.

Even making a phone call takes twice as much time to rehearse as it takes to actually do.

But it’s who I am. If I appear confident and relaxed, try to find out what character I’m playing, because there’s nothing of that in me.

I do keep trying to be more accepting of me. It would be nice to really believe that if someone invites me somewhere, they actually want me there, and that I can do this without screwing up. But it’s a difficult journey. A lifelong journey.

And if I could go back and fix things, I certainly would.

Fasteners

 

 

In the 1950s and 60s – and probably for centuries before that – anyone playing with dolls had the opportunity to learn how to use a variety of fasteners.

Of course, they learned to use them on their own clothing and shoes, but, especially with the advent of Barbie, fasteners on a much smaller scale appeared and gave them some rigorous training in tiny fine motor skills.

Barbie’s dresses either zipped (a 2-3 inch zipper with about a ¼ inch zipper pull), snapped or buttoned with buttons the size of snaps, and button holes to match. Ken’s trousers had an even shorter zipper. Dresses almost always had a hook-and-eye closure at the top of the zipper to keep it from unzipping, and Barbie’s cardigan and pullover sweater set had tiny pearl beads that buttoned through thread loops.

Snaps and buttons were generally the closures on larger dolls’ clothes, often because they were actually infant hand-me-downs – at least in our house, since I was the last baby and they wouldn't be used again.

Doll shoes offered a unique opportunity to learn to tie shoelaces that were about 1/3 the length of a child’s shoelace, if that. And some shoes buckled, as did children’s sandals. Practice on a micro scale made operating fasteners on people clothes a piece of cake.

There was no Velcro.

Nowadays there’s seldom anything but Velcro.

The American Girl Doll, which is a very nice size doll (18 inches tall), whose clothes would be far easier to manipulate than Barbie’s, is Velcro paradise. The only other fasteners I’ve seen on those dolls are zippers on her jeans, a buckle on a belt from the ‘90s (I can’t swear that zippers or buckles are still used on anything of hers) and on one occasion I found snaps to close a “button front” shirt. But that may have been a home-made outfit. Doll sneakers still have laces, though.

And it seems to be the way of things in doll life that Velcro is the closure of choice, just as it has replaced buckles on people shoes and a few other items.

As an Occupational Therapist for over 30 years, I worked in schools with special needs children. Some had physical challenges, while others had mental, sensory or visual-perceptual ones. At the beginning of that career, I would’ve welcomed Velcro. The only place it was at the time was on their hand or foot braces, if they had them.

Part of my job was to teach some of these children how to put on socks, foot/leg braces and shoes. While some had issues that precluded them putting on their own braces, I did teach them how to put on their socks and then the shoes over the braces, a more difficult task than putting shoes on unbraced feet.

Once a child was able to get that far, I took on shoelace tying. There are a few different ways to learn to tie shoelaces. When I started out, I only knew the way I’d been taught, but I quickly learned other ways to get the job done, and I let the kids decide which way worked best for them.

I did have the occasional parent who looked at their child’s age rather than their physical abilities when insisting on my teaching them a particular skill. Of course, there was also no reason why the parent couldn’t teach a skill at home if they were so insistent.

“How would I do that?” one parent asked.

“How did you teach your other kids? Do the same thing,” I replied. I had to keep my face palm in my head.

One mother of twins was constantly telling me that I wasn’t doing enough for one of her sons. Of course, despite them being twins, one was much more capable than the other. She berated me at an IEP meeting because shoelace tying wasn’t one of the objectives for the less capable twin, even though his brother had mastered that skill the year before. I told her I considered it important to learn to put his shoes on before we tackled tying laces.

I also suggested Velcro closures for his shoes – they had recently become available on children’s shoes at that point. She acted like I’d slapped her. She told me in no uncertain terms she would not get Velcro closure shoes for her son because it would make him look – and here she used the R-word. Actually,  no one would have noticed his shoes.

I was wearing shoes with Velcro closures at the time she said that. I looked at my shoes, then back at her, but she missed my point.

I also at times had to teach some children how to buckle shoes. That wasn’t as easy as one might think, since often the buckle is out of the line of sight while being buckled.

Coat zippers were another challenge. Getting the two sides attached at hip level or sometimes lower, is difficult, and sometimes the coats are too bulky to allow for the bottom to be pulled up to waist level. Getting the one side all the way into the slot on the other side is also difficult, so it is a great accomplishment when it finally happens.

Generally, when learning coat zipping, the children would practice it with the coat on a table. Sometimes they would pull the coat over their head afterwards so they didn’t have to try zipping it while it was on them.

I have a few coats myself that have reverse zippers (the kind that zip normally, but also unzip from the bottom for more comfort when sitting) that I find difficult to attach because of the reverse zip component. Or maybe because they're right-handed zippers and I'm left-handed.

Perhaps the most difficult thing I ever had to fasten was my school uniform blouses in high school. Some designer decided it would be cute to make school blouses that buttoned up the back. Given the fact that I had to go to school earlier in high school than in elementary school, and I’m simply not a 6 a.m. kind of person, that was not going to work for me. (And my maid simply wouldn't touch buttons!)

As a lefty, I have a history of needing to adapt things to my needs. The blouses were no different. I buttoned all of my blouses up except for the top button, and they hung in my closet that way, so that I could pull them over my head and button the top button very easily once the blouse was on. I then had to beg my mother to leave them buttoned that way when she did the laundry. Since they were that wonder material known then as “perma-press” she didn’t need to iron them, so my blouses were permanently buttoned through my high school years.

One thing I never understood was that, although most of my shoes had laces while I was growing up, the laces seldom came undone. I didn’t know about double knotting, so they were simply tied and stayed that way.

As an adult, however, my laces have frequently come undone. The round type often seen in men’s dress shoes – and a few of my own shoes – simply refuse to stay tied. I don’t know how my father managed to keep his tied, but I have had to resort to flat laces, since double knotting doesn’t work for round laces, either.

Of course, as an OT, I learned about many types of shoe laces, from the round and flat varieties I’ve just mentioned to elastic laces and alternate-closure laces.

Although I usually worked with children in schools, a couple of summers I worked with adults in rehabilitation. One gentleman with whom I’d worked a few days earlier was sitting on a chair with his shoes untied. He’d had a stroke, so he had one non-functional arm. I stopped to ask if he needed help with his shoelaces, and he said his therapist was getting elastic laces for him.

He and I had a rapport such that I could joke with him and he wouldn’t be offended. I quipped, “What, you mean you can’t tie your laces with one hand?”

He laughed and said he bet I couldn’t either. I said I bet I could.

Now at this stage in life – I was in my mid-30s – I had never tried such a thing. I had no idea whether or not I could tie shoe laces with one hand. And he called my bluff.

“Okay, let’s see you do it,” he said.

“Which hand?” I asked. If I was going to fail, it would be huge.

Once he ascertained that I was left-handed, he told me to use my right hand.

So, I sat down, untied my shoelace, and proceeded to tie it with one hand. It took a bit longer, and I couldn’t get the laces as tight as if I’d used two hands, but I’d done it. The man was duly impressed, but then suspected I’d lied about being left handed, so insisted that I tie the other shoe with the other hand. So I did. And that, my friends, is my stupid people trick.

The man was thrilled that I could do that and wanted to know where I’d learned it. I told him I’d never done it before, and figured it out just then. He told everyone.

Being able to tie one handed or double knot hasn’t kept me from modernizing my shoe wardrobe. I’ve never been very good at keeping slip on shoes from slipping off. As a nod to laziness, I’ve tried Sketchers hands-free shoes, which are pretty good, as well as the shoes that have elastic laces with a slider to tighten them. I also discovered that stretchy shoe laces and metal closures to go on the ends of them can be had through Amazon. They work well for regular lace-up shoes if you don’t want to have to tie them. While there’s no little bow at the top, things like that don’t concern me.

I don’t expect to forget how to tie my shoelaces any time soon, so a little time-saving – especially at the airport where I have to remove my shoes to go through TSA – is a good thing.

Not Ice, and Other Stories

 

 

When I was a wee small child, I got a lot of things wrong.

Until I was about seven or eight, I had recurring ear infections, so I don’t know whether or not that played a role, causing me to mishear things. It sounds logical, so I’m sticking with it.

My oldest brother has always been amused by things I say, and several people in my adult life have suggested I try stand-up comedy.

The thing is, I don’t actually know how to write comedy. I just know that sometimes the things I misinterpret, or just the way I say something makes other people laugh. I don’t think it would work if I tried to do it on purpose.

Part of the reason some things happened was my total failure to ask questions when I didn’t understand something.

Why, you might ask? It wasn’t shyness or fear of being laughed at (I was laughed at quite a bit growing up). It was simply that for most of my early childhood, when I asked my mother, “Why?” about anything, she would reply with, “Because I’m your mother, and I said so.”

So I knew the answer. It didn’t solve anything for me, but it taught me to not bother asking.

When I was small, we had a very silly way of interrupting my mother when she was talking to another adult. Now, the three of us knew that interrupting adult conversations was a huge no-no, but in an emergency – and what isn’t an emergency to a child? – I would stand quietly for a few seconds and then, if they didn’t stop to pay attention to me, I’d say, “Excuse me, Mother, but the house is on fire.”

Granted, I thought that was the craziest thing in the world to say, and tremendously funny when I was three or four. But of course, I didn’t ask, “Because I’m your mother and I said so.”

There actually was a history to that one. My eldest brother came running in excitedly once when he was small, saying, “Mother, Mother, Mother!” while she was having a conversation. She excused herself from the adult conversation and turned to my brother and said, “You do not interrupt when adults are having a conversation. I don’t care what’s going on. If the house is on fire, you say, ‘Excuse me, Mother, but the house is on fire,' and then wait.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized how ridiculous that statement was, and she and her friend both had difficulty keeping a straight face. But she solemnly went on. “Now, what do you want?”

It turned out that whatever it was my brother thought was such an emergency wasn’t for an adult. But because of that, he told my other brother when he was old enough to interrupt that that’s how it was done, and the two of them passed it on to me. They didn’t pass on the entire story, only what you had to say to my mother in order to interrupt. I was in school before I learned the whole story.

Another thing I was told as a child was to look up and down before crossing the street. This was the single most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. But again, “I’m your mother…” kept my questions unasked.

Common sense told me to look in both directions before crossing the street. But up and down? Why? Were there helicopters and submarines just waiting beyond my peripheral vision to kill me?

However, an obedient child, I dutifully looked at the sky and the ground before I crossed the street, while secretly looking to my left and right so I wouldn’t be hit by a car.

My mother thought I was being silly or a smart Alek or whatever she thought, but her complete lack of curiosity as to why I would do such a thing is a marvel. Maybe by the third child mothers are worn out with trying to understand their kids. Or maybe I was just too weird, and she didn’t want to go there.

Prayers were another fun place for misheard words. Being Catholic, we had a whole repertoire of formal prayers from which to choose. Somehow, The Lord’s Prayer I learned without a glitch. The Hail Mary had a word I wasn’t familiar with (womb) so I thought everyone was saying, “And blessed is the fruit of thy wound, Jesus.” How Jesus was considered a wound was anyone’s guess. I assumed it was something to do with the wounds from being on the cross, since that’s the only way he was pictured in school. But what he had to do with fruit, I didn’t get until several years later.

The Hail Holy Queen had several wrong words in my version. I would pray, “Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry poor vanished (banished) children of Eve, To thee to we send up our sides (sighs) mourning (I thought it was morning, though) and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then most gracious advocate, thy knives of mercy toward us (thine eyes), and after this, our exile, show unto us the fruit of thy wound, Jesus.” It didn’t strike me as terribly odd, since prayers had lots of old fashioned words, so I just thought it was more of the same. Besides, so much was in Latin in those days, it could’ve been something Latin.

Then there was the Pledge of Allegiance, which I got mostly right. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for witches stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Since I didn’t understand half the words, putting witches into the mix was perfectly normal. There had been witch trials, after all.

But the best was a sign I saw at the bottom of the church parking lot, stapled to the telephone pole. I saw it every Sunday on the way to church. I had only recently learned to read, but I could only see the top line to read from a distance. While the parking lot also doubled as our recess yard in school (people who attended schools with real, actual playgrounds shudder that we played on a sloping lot of asphalt) we weren’t allowed to go close to the road, and the sign was right beside the road.

I was proud of my reading skills, but what I read made no sense to me. At the top of the sign were the letters N-O-T-I-C-E. Now, I only knew three and four letter words so far when I saw that sign. So, one fine Sunday morning I said, “Not Ice. What does that mean?” My parents didn’t know what I was talking about, so I pointed to the sign. “It says, ‘Not Ice.’ That doesn’t make any sense. What does it mean?”

My mother started to laugh, and it was several minutes before she had herself under enough control to teach me a new word: Notice.

Now, in our family, whenever something doesn’t make any sense, someone is bound to say, “Not ice, huh?”

I’ve had friends who have asked if we laughed constantly when I was growing up. No, I was a rather serious child, actually. They couldn’t believe these things happened without gales of laughter.

The end of childhood didn’t end my occasional failure to understand.

I had a rather untalented teacher in high school chemistry. She was essentially a warm body with a science degree, but chemistry wasn’t it. The only way she could explain anything to do with chemistry was word for word out of the book.

Can you put it another way? She could not. Unfortunately, not all of us could understand the concepts quite the way the authors of the book wrote them.

When the time came for our first exam, more than half of the class failed the exam. This was a class that now would be classified college prep or AP. The students in this class were not ones who were used to failing anything. Ever.

We reviewed the questions, and one in particular had people asking repeatedly for her to explain the concept. She did, using the same words over and over.

I have been convinced throughout most of my life that I have a short-circuit somewhere in my brain between my understanding of some things and my conscious mind. Either that or I’m possessed by demons.

This situation intervened just at that moment in class.

I raised my hand and asked, “Do you mean – ” and I launched into a 5 minute explanation of whatever concept was escaping my classmates. I used totally different words than the teacher had, actually saying it a different way. All around me I heard, “Oh, now I get it!” and “Is that what she meant?” The lights had come on. My teacher’s face lit up like the understanding of her students.

“Yes! Yes, that’s it!” she replied.

I wrinkled my face and said, “I don’t understand that.”

How I managed to not get sent to the principal’s office or at the very least kicked out of class, I don’t know. I wasn’t being a smart Alek. I truly didn’t understand any of what I’d just said. It was as if an alien was speaking through me. I guess my totally mystified look was the only thing that kept the teacher from sending me out. Instead, she angrily told the girl in front of me to explain back to me what I’d just said.

To this day I can’t do chemistry.  The closest I can come is a cooking recipe, but how it works is complete magic. Mine is not a chemically-oriented mind. I’m convinced my chemistry teacher ruined me for that science, and if I’d had a competent teacher, I might have actually understood the subject. Or not.

I had a similar experience regarding electricity. A friend was trying to explain how electricity works, and try as he might, he couldn’t impart that wisdom to me. He explained in several different ways. I finally explained it back, and he told me I was right. Again, I told him it didn’t make any sense.

He was exasperated and had run out of different ways to explain it. Someone who lived in the same house he did happened to come in and heard our discussion. That person then explained it to me, and I somehow understood what he was saying. His words weren’t that different, but enough that I got the concept. The second person was English, and my friend insisted that the only reason I understood was the accent.

Of course, then my friend followed up by saying, “Picture the wire like a faucet. Water runs through the faucet. Electrons do the same in a wire.  At that point (mind, I was an adult, if you consider someone in their 20s an adult) I picked up a wire, closed one eye and squinted at the end of the wire.

“Where’s the hole?”

I never did manage to live that one down. But my friend got to see firsthand how my brain short-circuit works. And while it’s frustrating to me, it certainly provides my friends with a certain level of amusement.