Queen of the Single Wide...Open Spaces

My childhood was not similar to most. My mother was divorced when I was three years old. My biological father disappeared and we found ourselves living in a house with holes in the floor and no heating and air conditioning in Lovelady, TX. Shortly after her divorce my Mom met the man I call my Daddy. He worked on a ranch called the Lazy P at the time, they got married about a year after they met and my Dad decided that he wanted to start and run an alligator farm. So, he and my uncle bought some property in Sugartown, Louisiana, put a couple of trailers on it and commenced to building these giant, tin, UFO shaped bins. This was maybe a year after my parents got married.

I remember that when we moved to the trailer it was right after a hurricane had come through the region, which basically made the property into a giant slush pit of mud. My mom, my Dad, my brother and I were all piled into my Dad's tiny pickup. We parked on the dirt road about half a mile away from our used trailer/new home. My mom donned some very stylish white knee high shrimping boots and slogged through the mud with my brother and I on her hip. The inside of the trailer was filthy, so we got down to work scrubbing the thing from top to bottom. There was a lot of dirt, someone else's dirty dishes still in the sink and a lovely pair of size 14 leopard print thong underwear in the bedroom.

I was sitting next to my BF yesterday on our ride back from his home in Pensacola and we were discussing all of this and for the first time I caught myself wondering what she must have been thinking standing there in this absolute squalor after just having escaped the house with no heat and air, here she was again. I know that my mom loves my dad. I have marveled at how strong their love actually is since I was old enough to know what love is. What I haven't thought about, what is new to me is this: There must have been doubt in her mind. She must have thought that she had dug herself into another hole of poverty. Another crappy hand, house, job (she was working at WalMart at the time.) How heartbreaking to try so hard to make things work. Did it cross her mind, standing there with someone else's size 14 underwear, that maybe love wasn't enough?

But, it was and this is how I know: She pulled those underwear out of the closet with her bright yellow plastic gloves a look of complete disgust on her face. My dad was standing behind her staring at the underwear with an equivalent look of total horror, but then...then, then...they started to laugh. Until tears were streaming down their faces and my brother and I were laughing too and we were a little patched together family just full of joy and hope and wonderful new beginnings in a used trailer that was stuck in the mud.

This is my family. We laugh in the face of underwear.

Mentor Me

I recently signed up with a program to be a mentor/big sister/friend to an effervescent, toootally hip 13 year old. Now, this young lady’s parents are both crack addicts, they have been in and out of her life…well, her whole life. She has been bounced back forth between her grandmother and her mother. Her father makes occasional appearances as well.

So, yesterday was our first sort of “bonding” time. We went and got ice cream. She was amazed by the number of toppings at Cold Stone. She is also very chatty and open about teachers, friends, boys, hobbies, etc. We talked about her ex-boyfriend (total jerk!) her friends, the pool, shopping, favorite colors (hers is blue) and in the midst of all this, she starts talking about her mother. We’re laughing and having a great time and she launches into this story about how “loaded” her mom is all the time and how one time she fell asleep in her cereal bowl. And here’s what floors me…my men tee is laughing about this as if it were the same topic as my favorite color. Its light, it’s normal. She’s doing her best to make lemonade out of her rotten lemons, and this breaks my heart, a little. More than anything, though, it amazes me and makes me want to be very careful with this fragile, impressionable, but amazingly resilient young person who is sitting in front of me with ice cream dripping down her chin and giggling like the school girl she is despite the absolute crappiness that fate/God/Whatever has dealt her.

This is magnificent to me and I don’t know what her life will be like in couple of years. I don’t know what bad or wonderful decisions she will make. I don’t know what paths she will follow, but I want her to do well and fall in love and work hard and learn to trust people again…and again…and again because that will always be an uphill battle. Life is filled with people who let you down, everyone knows that, but there also some rare souls that will lift you up. That offer a wall to lean against instead of a cliff to fall off of. I want to help her trust in that. I want so much for this spunky kid (after just an hour of talking to her!). This is new to me, to want the world for someone I barely know, but I do. I absolutely do.

Aeroplanes

So, this past weekend I took a little trip to Houston, TX to see my very sweet boyfriend (this title is new and recently, mutually agreed upon...gasp!) Friday comes and I'm all excited and basically the equivalent of some extremely hyper golden retreiver puppy jumping and barking and wagging my tail and such. Airplanes, trips, and quality time! Oh my!!

Except for one thing...one very important thing. I am really, unequivically, TERRified of flying. And somehow....somehow my spastic, ADD brain always forgets this until the exact moment when we are careening down the runway going WAY too fast and I am absoluetly positive that the plane is about to fly apart w/ bolts, and sheets of metal and screaming innocent people going everywhere. My palms sweat. I grip the armrests and mutter shit, fuck, Hail Mary full of grace, under my breath and the person next to me looks at me like I am absolutely out of my mind, because I kind of am in that moment.

And then we hit the turbulence (because I can never, never, seem to be able to fly w/out going through some sort of torential downpour) This is when I really start to bargain. Which is interesting because I'm bargaining with a God that I'm not really sure exists, or what his agenda is, or if his name is really Buddha, but I DEFinitely bargain. I promise him that if I get off this wretched death trap and to the ground that I will never take another day forgranted. That I will go to church every Sunday, that I will stop swearing, that I will no longer have pre-marital sex. If he will just get me off the fucking airplane alive.

Then we're above the clouds, and I'm calm and self possesed. I'm envisioning myself as a world traveler, roaming with grace and dignity to places like Africa, India, France. I am strong, a survivor. I send peaceful vibes and smile graciously to those around me...and then we start the descent and its back to everything before. Grinding and gnashing of teeth as I become certain that the landing gear most defintely did not descend and we will be forced to do a belly flop on the runway amidst flying oxygen masks and panicked passengers, and then we land safely and securely and I get off the plane wanting to kiss the ground and collapse in exhaustion.

This was a one hour flight.

So I stay the weekend, and come home to NOLA Monday morning, resisting the urge to rent a car and drive the five hours back. Instead, I calmly board the plane expecting my brains usual torturous ascent to paranoia. But on this trip, I envision my BF beside me holding my hand and pointing out the window and saying as we bump through the air "Leah, look at those stupid, silly, clouds...they are so RIdiculous!" And I'm not calm, nor sure of myself, and I'm still pretty scared, but at least I can grin a little while wiping my palms. And this makes me happy. And this is why we now have an official title. This is why I like my boyfriend.

Blindfolds, walls, and motorcycles

This title is inspired by a conversation that I had recently with a very dear wonderful friend. I was sitting outside of Super Walmart on my cell phone listening to this friend bemoan the latest upset, and I truly, truly felt her pain because I've been there...sometimes beyond there.

The year after I graduated from college the following things happened:
I moved...ALOT
Shreveport to DeRidder to Baton Rouge to New Orleans---from May to August...I literally moved once a month.

Then Katrina hit and I moved from New Orleans to my (now) ex-boyfriends apartment, to his parents house, to my great aunts house, to (finally!) my own apartment!

Then Katrina was over, or as over as it could be and my job moved BACK to New Orleans. So I moved back again. This was last February and thank God, Buddah, Walt, I haven't moved since. In the midst of all this I ended my 3 year, longest, most healthy relationship and started dating...

The beginning of being a single in the city was f-u-n. I mean swinging from the chandeliers going to bed at 6am fun. Then I got hurt, again, and again, and again, and again. Oh, and I lost my job. I quit one and was laid off from the new one, and Jeee-sus! I didn't know how much more I could survive this.

So, I'm thinking all of this and relating the various similarities of our lives with my friend and she says something so brilliant and amazing that its the only way that I will be able to think of this time period of my life, probably for the rest of my life, and if I ever have fat little babies I will tell them this very thing when they are my age and this is what she said:

Your 20's are a time when you discover which way is the right way to go and I feel like someone has blindfolded me and put me in a room of brick walls and the only way to know that I'm going the wrong way is to keep ramming myself into the walls.

To which I responded that I felt like the past year I had been blindfolded on a speeding motorcycle and now maybe (with a new, better job and *crossed fingers tightly here* good guy hanging around) I'm finally just walking instead of riding like a hell's angel and I am stupidly thankful for that. So bring on the walls...as long as I'm able to keep walking. I would prefer not to ride, thank you.