Dirty Foot the Dangerous Girl
As an infant, my mother observed
right away that I didn’t have the same coloring as my two other sisters. Abby
and Mindy were light haired, pale blue eyes with alabaster white skin like the
Scandinavians on my father’s side of the family. I recall many sunburns over
the summers of my childhood- those two being literally the fairest of us all
were blistered and slathered with vitamin E reliably. I was born with an
abundance of dark wavy hair and green eyes, likely passed genetically from the
Smith side of the family who are mostly British and Scottish. Although I also
had freakishly pale skin that took a tan only slightly better than my sisters,
all it took to mark me as different was having dark hair and green eyes to be
set apart from my older sisters. It also didn’t help that my mother took to
dressing Abby and Mindy in matching outfits as if they were twins, and that
Abby had to have all the things Mindy had or she would melt down into an
exhausting tirade. Even had to have her own birthday cake on Mindy’s birthday
so she wouldn’t freak out and ruin the entire party. The two oldest sisters
were a unit and I was the outsider- the interloper. My mother liked color
coding her children. Rather than have her third infant wear the pink pastel
dresses and matchy-matchy hand-me-downs my older siblings had outgrown, my mother
made a point to outfit me in red because, she would say, red was great for my coloring,
whatever that meant. For the entirety of my childhood red was my designated
color of the family, whether I liked it or not.
If you look at early family photos, I
look like a neighbor’s kid. Mom once called me a Mexican because my skin had darkened
over the summer when I was three. Two thinly fair haired girls dressed
identically and then this other tan, thickly-browed girl with freckles and copious
hair- I knew I was different even as a small child because my mother told
me I was different.
“You got all the Indian blood.” She
would say matter-of-factly. Usually, a statement like this was made when wiping
a layer or two of dirt from any one of my fast-moving limbs or trying to get me
to come indoors at the end of the day or when she had to brush the knots out of
my wild long non-blonde hair and I was never sure if it was a compliment or a
slight. “I can’t tell if you’re dirty or just tan.” When I was little, I had a
tendency to return home without any shoes because I’d taken them off and had forgotten
them at the park, at a friend’s, in the gutter, in a tree or at church. I also preferred
to be outside of her home whenever possible. My mother christened me with the
Indian name “Dirty Foot” because of this behavior she attributed to my vaguely
indigenous heritage.
It was the late 70’s and early 80’s when I was
growing up in Utah. I was raised in a perfectly planned suburb 15 miles north
of Salt Lake City with a fairly high Mormon saturation where it was acceptable
to allow your three year old to walk to the neighbor’s house a few doors down
without any escort. Mormons don’t rape or kidnap kids, so it was probably safe,
right? My folks settled into a three-bedroom ranch in 1981 with their four
children under the age of 10. We had moved from a two bedroom house
approximately two blocks from the new one because my mother kept having
children and had run out of room, but the new digs were far enough of a distance
to require us to change Wards. A Ward is the Mormon word for a small
congregation that is grouped into several Wards that are overseen by the Stake
leadership. So we still went to the same Stake House (NOT to be confused with a
Steak House, which would have been more fun) but switched to the appropriate
Ward that attends services at that Stake House, per the district boundaries
drawn up by the Stake Priesthood Leadership. It was all organized up to
National Levels of Leadership centered in Salt Lake City; the Hub of the Latter
Day Saints. All the perfect looking
prefabricated homes with large square lawns with kids playing on the front
porches and epically sized gas-guzzling station wagons in the driveways for
transporting All the Children lined neverending streets winding eventually into
larger tributaries like streams of Mormon waters draining into the larger river
of the commerce centers of Layton. Neighborhoods had been constructed in
multi-home developments complete with cul du sacs and sidewalks on both sides
of the tidily paved streets that were numbered by blocks and not given names
that anyone would remember. Mormon planners back then used a grid system- many
cities in Utah just have the numerical grid system instead of the typical house
number and street names like “Oak Street” or “Maple Lane” like I had seen on TV
or read about. 3200 S 750 E was our address. It just doesn’t have any flair to
it, does it?
There were neighbors who weren’t Mormon who we
were discouraged from getting to know too well, but this notion of regarding
Non-Mormons as perhaps dangerous just made me more curious about worldly people
in general, so I seemed to have a large proportion of friends who were
outsiders to the Church. I enjoyed how strange and titillatingly unholy their
interests were. One lived a few houses down whose mother actually worked
outside the home and let her kids watch cable TV whenever they wanted. Her name
was Holly, and she had a training bra. I had no idea how breasts needed to be
trained, but I was sure my mother wasn’t going to get me one. I had another
friend Suzie, whose mother was SINGLE and DIVORCED and Suzie had 2 older
brothers who liked KISS and AC/DC, which I knew at the time to be strictly
Devil Music that could wash me away into the pit of sin if I listened to it,
and to this day I am still too scared to really explore 80’s Hair Metal, for
fear of losing my taste for good music. Once, while we were on the swing set at
school in second grade, Suzie told me she wanted to be a sex-symbol when she
grew up. I was mortified right out of any sense of curiosity at her open use of
the S-E-X word, such that I was afraid to ask anyone what a sex-symbol even was
for years, ashamed that someone had even said the S-E-X word to me and that I
might find out what it meant and again, would be washed away in sin. No wonder
I grew up to be such a sinner and a leaver of the Church; the very limited
adjacent exposure to Motley Crue and cable TV clearly had a corrosive effect on
my purity.
Even as a precious Chosen Child of the
Latter Days, I was still fairly unsupervised by today’s standards. I roamed
around the cookie-cutter blocks either alone or with friends, only occasionally
receiving a glance from a passing adult, who was usually busy doing something else.
Kids all knew how to turn on the sprinklers in the yard to cool down when it
was hot, and we would gather in the afternoons before dinner to play Kick the
Can sometimes with other kids on the street. I don’t have any memories of my
mother ever accompanying me to a worldly friend’s houses to at least check what
kind of place it was before letting me hang out there- even for sleepovers- it
was just assumed that if there was another kid living there, it must inherently
be kid-friendly. And in this Utah suburb everyone seemed to have kids who all
knew each other and ran in packs as well. I was given a lot of agency in my
first 5 years of life, and am grateful for having had that- being able to slip
quietly away from the house to climb a tree or wander alone along an irrigation
ditch or just amble through the neighborhood with some kind of anonymity and
autonomy- though this freedom was granted to me more out of parental neglect
than out of good parental judgement- I was an easy kid to miss and I took all
the liberty my invisibility provided me. My early escapes were a survival
tactic honed early on. Little did I know that the escaping the family unit was
actually a long-standing family tradition.
It seemed like a typical American
white-kid childhood in the suburbs at the heyday of Reagan and MTV. But like
lots of other typical-on-the-outside homes, things indoors were not as perfect
as my parents would have liked everyone to know. Part of the culture of a
predominantly Mormon community is a collective reinforcement of
perfection-performing. It wasn’t just my family; lots of Mormon families in the
Ward and in the neighborhood were obviously dysfunctional and many were likely
abusive but the pressure to look like the Cleavers with the Priesthood was
intensely felt, so the less pleasant presence of family violence, neglect,
abuse and general shittiness was buried deep under the guise of some kind of
Stepford Family performance, complete with pretty dresses, Relief Society
potlucks and the collective faith that the Priesthood, which was in everyone’s
home, would guide us all to the Celestial Kingdom if we followed it properly.
Did all the handshakes and wore the right underwear. It would paper over some of
the other problems that come with growing up in a patriarchal, insular culture.
Parentification of children is one of
the more toxic characteristics of the Mormon upbringing, especially for girls.
It’s recognized today as child abuse because it wreaks havoc on a person’s
ability to have a fully developed childhood since they are taking care of other
children instead of themselves. I realize there are many other cultures that
press young girls into taking care of siblings due to poverty and the lack of
acceptable childcare in the community. There are reasons other family members
are asked to step in and help with the littler ones in a family. Since the
advent of birth control, women can now actually choose how many kids they have-
there doesn’t have to be a lifetime of unchecked births if you don’t want it.
That was the whole point of the Pill. Then, there are the Catholics. But at
least they have God-parents to help out with the zillions of kids churned out
by silly religious notions of sacred sperms. Mormons expect their daughters to
do the extra parenting help since childcare providers are all that girls are
destined to become. I think most Catholic women in the US are generally not
discouraged from having educations and careers in addition to a family,
although I am also pretty sure lots of Catholic women use birth control, too.
Because when it comes down to it, kids are expensive and take a long time to
get out of the house, while there’s always room for absolution and forgiveness
in the eyes of the Catholic Lord if you don’t want to have 12 kids and decide
to put on a rubber sometimes.
There were a couple of reasons that
parentification was particularly destructive in my father’s house. One reason
was Abby. The eldest. It’s probably not that bad to have your main babysitter
be the oldest child- it happens all the time. Eldest kids have a higher
standard of caretaking expectations put on them just because of their birth
order. My darling boyfriend was an eldest, as were both of my parents. First-born
kids, as a result of their exposure to more adult settings in early childhood and
then being designated more responsibility in the family as an older part of the
family, tend to be generally more responsible as adults. Although I suspect it’s
also likely that the “first pancakes” are the ones that are most likely to get
burned by inexperienced parents. I still am not sure what the fuck happened
with Abby in her infancy before the rest of us came along, but for as long as
anyone can recall, she was a completely burned pancake who was not content
unless everyone else in the house was also burned. My parents chose to believe
she was just born difficult which enabled her bad behavior and put the
responsibility for bearing her abuse on all of the children as if we were
martyrs to the family whole. As if petulance, histrionics and tantrums were a
genetic disorder one is just born with, like epilepsy or Type 1 diabetes. As if
she was simply born miserable by no fault of her parents, Abby was a screaming
basket case whose tattered wicker lid was always about to slide off and it was
our purpose in life to deal with her never-ending chaos. Later we would come to
realize she was most likely suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, but
the reality is that WE were suffering from HER Borderline Personality Disorder.
Part of the diagnosis is having a special way of making people around you
miserable while also refusing to do anything to prevent it by taking medication
or going to therapy or even admitting that you’re an asshole most of the time
for no reason whatsoever. I don’t think
there was ever an actual diagnosis because that would have required her to
relent to professional help for reasons other than getting attention via a fake
suicide attempt or scoring more pain pills. Whatever it was, it was a very
large entity in our home. Abby’s emotional terrorism started with me as teasing
and bullying, and then graduated into the delight of eliciting fear responses
in an array of creative and shitty ways. Once Abby realized she could make be
scared of something, making me afraid was a popular activity that bonded her to
my other elder sister and made both of them feel powerful over me, for sure.
Ganging up to pick me apart was a family tradition started by Abby and Mindy,
and practiced on me with increasing effectiveness clear through adulthood up
until the last time I ever spoke to either of them. As long as those two
jackals were in the house, I always had cause to make scarce.
Comments
Post a Comment