Manatease

            I used to be obsessed with becoming a marine biologist. This lasted approximately from the first time I saw Free Willy until I took biology in high school, at which point I realized how much learning comes between understanding cell reproduction and riding on top of an orca.

            Most girls don’t experience the single-minded fanatical devotion I felt toward marine mammals until they fall in love for the first time with a human. My room was trimmed with a border of orcas breaching. I had dolphin and orca stuffed animals. Posters of sea mammals covered my walls. In fifth grade, we had to write “interest reports”- research projects about any topic we chose. Most of the kids in my class chose to write about sports players or Mariah Carey. I wrote mine about the Short-finned Pilot Whale.

I recently found a journal entry I wrote in sixth grade. I was clearly going through a bit of a rough patch as I wrote, “I think my only reason for self-esteem is my dream.  I WILL live to work with the DOLPHINS.  I swear it.  I will.  It’s practically my reason for living.  I haven’t given up my passion.  No matter how much the boys at school tease me about saving the whales, I won’t stop loving dolphins.  I WON’T!”

            It was tough being obsessed with all things marine life while living in the Midwest. At the time, the best St. Louis had to offer marine-files was a tiny aquarium with a bunch of useless fish and one anemic-looking shark. I used to be jealous of the girls at school who were infatuated with the more attainable animals- cuddly things like kittens and puppies and bunnies. Clearly, there was no room for an orca in our backyard and anyway, how would we afford one? My mom assured me that SeaWorld would not view our golden retriever as a fair trade.

            After assessing my options and finally accepting that my parents weren’t going to move to a remote island inhabited by mystical natives who would teach me how to communicate using sonar, I decided to go with the next best option: adopting a sea mammal.

            I thoroughly researched my options and decided to go with a manatee. Whales and dolphins just seemed a little obvious. And honestly, I felt guilty for not liking manatees as much as their shinier, more extroverted peers. Manatees are shy and seem a little sad. Whereas most dolphins and whales are lithe and playful, manatees are slow and bloated, earning them the unfortunate moniker of “sea cow”.

            After a minimal amount of badgering, my mom agreed to adopt one manatee for me and one manatee for my sister. My sister and I poured over the brochures, looking over the pictures of all of the different manatees available for adoption. We spent what seemed like hours debating the various personality traits attributed to the animals by the non-profit organization that ran the “adoption”. Finally, we chose our pets and sent in our $25.

            Four to six weeks later, we received papers certifying the adoption process. The official papers also contained pictures of our manatees and promises of manatee newsletters to come. I was in sea cow heaven. We named our new pets and hung the pictures up in our rooms. Every morning, I walked to the bus stop with my little secret. The boys on the bus might make fun of me for how hard I tried to save the whales, but I had a manatee.This simple fact rendered the boys insignificant.

            A couple of months later, Lauren received a letter from the non-profit organization regarding her manatee. As we read the letter, we discovered that her manatee had been struck by a boat propeller and killed.

            My mom was horrified. “Who the hell would send a letter like this to a seven year old girl?!” My sister started crying. The good news, the letter assured us, was that for $25 more, we could adopt a brand new manatee.

Death is an important part of the life cycle that every pet owner must learn sooner or later. Regardless, Mom dismissed the entire racket as a scam and wouldn’t let us adopt any more manatees.

            It was probably for the best. Manatees do not age well and I doubt I could have afforded my manatee’s medication with just my allowance. Now that I’m older, I’ve moved on to caring for more sensible animals, animals capable of exhibiting proper affection. I’ve decided to adopt a narwhal. 

The Miracle Worker

As everybody knows, it’s healthy for children to have role models: someone to admire and to whom they can look up. This role model is someone the child spends a lot of time learning about and trying to emulate. As a society, we talk about role models a lot: Ke$ha is a bad one, parents strive to be good ones, Lance Armstrong was a good one but now everyone wants to punch him in the face (although, let’s be honest, most of us wanted to do that before the whole doping scandal). Most young children’s role models are people within their immediate vicinity: parents, extended family members, teachers, coaches, etc. I never even bothered getting into those “my dad is better than your dad” arguments at school because it wasn’t worth it. My dad is better than everyone else’s, period. If the role models aren’t someone the child knows, they’re people kids see in movies or books or magazines. When I was in elementary school, my classmates were preoccupied with New Kids on the Block and Full House (and then there was always that one kid who would never stop talking about Ulysses Grant or Napoleon or something). Me? I was obsessed with Helen Keller.
 

I’m probably the poster child for reasons it may not be a good idea to over-expose young children to culture. For example, I saw my first opera when I was ten. It was Falstaff: The opera based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. It follows the drunken, lecherous escapades of an old man. My aunt took me to see the show and then bought the libretto for me upon my request. The following week, one of the neighborhood moms called my mom and asked her not to buy me any more opera librettos because she had overheard us reciting the lines from Falstaff and didn’t think it was appropriate.

Now, Helen Keller did a lot of really cool things. She graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first person who was both blind and deaf to earn a college degree. She became a world-famous speaker and author. She was a political activist and birth control supporter and was friends with lots of famous people like Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain. However, at the time of my obsession, the extent of my Helen Keller knowledge came from the play (and subsequent movies) “The Miracle Worker”. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the play follows Helen Keller, her teacher and companion Annie Sullivan, and the Keller family as they work to help Helen Keller communicate with the world around her. The pinnacle scene of the play involves Helen and Annie standing next to a water pump. Helen’s hands are under the pump as water is flowing out and she’s frantically signing the word for “water”. It’s an exhilarating moment- the audience has witnessed the tantrums and anguish that have accompanied Helen’s inability to communicate. Annie Sullivan has tirelessly worked using unorthodox methods to create the connection in Helen’s mind between the symbolic signs and the objects they represent. The play contains several positive themes that any parent would want for their children: perseverance, innovation, struggling in the face of adversity. Those themes were not immediately apparent to Mom and Dad, though, as I spent hours by the sink, shaping letters with my fingers beneath my imaginary water pump. Or when I was walking around the house with my eyes closed, running into things and emulating Helen Keller’s character by throwing massive pretend tantrums in the dining room.

My fascination with Helen Keller started when I saw a low-budget community theater rendition of The Miracle Worker. After that, I was obsessed with all things Helen Keller. I read every children’s biography of her that I could find. I used dull pencils to punch holes in my paper and pretend it was braille. I had passionate opinions about the merits of each movie version; Anne Bancroft/Patty Duke was the best, but I loved Melissa Gilbert as Helen Keller mostly because I recognized her from Little House on the Prairie. Also, sometimes when I got bored playing Helen Keller, I would switch over and pretend to be Mary Ingalls, because she was also blind and I was good at making prairie skirts out of bed sheets.

My best friend Anna and I learned the American Sign Language alphabet and used it to attempt to communicate in public. We also made up our own secret language so that we could comfortably converse around our peers.  Obviously, Anna and I glided through middle school without ever being teased:  two girls who spoke a secret language and talked relentlessly about Helen Keller.  We were untouchable by bullies mainly due to the inherent cool factor possessed by any twelve year old who still goes home and plays make believe.

                In fact, the biggest fight Anna and I ever had was because of Helen Keller. We were playing "blind kids" for like, the third day in a row. This mostly consisted of closing our eyes and groping around the unfinished basement.  I could tell Anna was losing interest, but she was my last friend who stilled played make believe and I was going to cling to that with the tenacity of the truly self-deluded. One day,  Anna “magically” got her sight back.

                “You can’t do that!” I said, outraged. She looked at me the way my classmates had when I’d attempted to cast a play I’d written about two girls who happened to be blind who were running away from home. Pity mixed with embarrassment.

                “Why not? It’s make believe. I can do whatever I want. Besides, this is really boring.”

                It didn’t matter that she was right, it actually was really boring- I was still pissed. I took a developmental psychology class in college in which we learned that children often use play as a way to work out whatever is going on in their lives. In this way, they can grapple with the complex issues they’re confronting, despite the fact that they may not have fully developed capabilities for abstract thought. Granted, the developmental psychologists who articulated this theory were most likely talking about kindergarten through around third grade- and not about kids who may hit puberty at any moment. Still, that theory makes sense here. As an awkward girl with a unibrow and a nervous twitch who was obsessed with Helen Keller, dolphins, and Yeah-Yeah from The Sandlot, I probably felt as unable to communicate with my peers as a young Helen Keller. Anna, by “magically” getting her sight back, was signifying that she was ready to emerge from our world of make believe and give the real world a try. It was the developmentally healthy thing to do.

Needless to say, we didn’t speak for days.

The Time I Cried on a Mesa

            I’ve always been an intensely emotional person. The day my mom brought me home from the hospital after I was born, I apparently cried so hard my belly button came undone. I know. I didn’t know that was possible, either. The pediatrician said she’d never seen anything like it before, which, I’m sure, was a comfort to my 23-year-old first-time mom.

            A lot of things make me cry: lack of sleep, stressful social situations, pretty much any time I have to say goodbye to my parents. It’s as though my tear ducts never progressed developmentally past the second grade. While I am thrilled that I made the decision to move from my hometown of St. Louis to Denver, it did lead to a 400% increase in crying due to change-induced stress.

            Because of a peculiar personality quirk, I am also drawn to novel situations. If it sounds irrational that change makes me cry but I’m drawn to change, that’s because it is. The result of this masochistic paradox is a lot of situations in which I enthusiastically sign up to try something new only to cry while I’m actually doing it. I’d probably be much happier if I could content myself by sitting on the couch and watching Real Housewives of Duck Dynasty, but no- I sign up for helicopter lessons and white water rafting instead.

            My grandpa taught himself engineering via mail-order courses and created a successful steel pipe construction company while also managing his epilepsy. Although his engineering abilities bypassed me completely, his stubbornness has manifested itself in me in a way that is not even remotely useful. Some people would use this genetically-gifted tenacity to become CEO of a fortune 500 company, scale Mount Everest, or take over a small eastern European country. Me? I attempt impractical hobbies and refuse to quit even when I am miserable. I have yet to see an evolutionary advantage to this.

            This also means that I’m drawn to the adventure of certain activities while being overly emotional about much more common activities. For example, I had no problem parasailing over the Pacific Ocean, but cried every night when I had to go to sleep away camp for two weeks (I was fifteen). I was wound so tight in middle school that I had a nervous twitch, but I managed to skate to Jewel’s “You Were Meant for Me” in a regional figure skating competition. A few years ago, I got up in front of a packed bar and read my adolescent journal entries out loud in front of over 200 people as part of a comedy night, but last weekend I had a panic attack while camping with 15 other people. There’s really no pattern to it. Believe me, some very competent therapists have tried.

            My simultaneous love of adventure and wanton use of tears for anything from fear to frustration didn’t affect me much until I moved to Denver with my boyfriend. When Tom and I first started dating, we bonded over, among other things, our love of adventure. However, “adventure” in Missouri, where I grew up, looks very different from “adventure” in Colorado. In St. Louis, it was like,

“Want to see if Beale on Broadway has a good Blues band so we can go dancing?”

“Sure!”

“Want to drive to Chicago to see the Million Dollar Quartet this weekend?”

“Absolutely!”

“Want to drive up to Hannibal Missouri and take the ghost tour trolley and heckle the Mark Twain impersonator?”

“Well... We did that last weekend.”

            In Denver, there are legitimate sports that scare the shit out of me. And my wonderful, adventure-seeking boyfriend wants to try all of them. Together. I spent the first several months oscillating between being honest about my limitations and desperately trying to be the laid-back, trendy “Colorado”-style girl: the one who never wears makeup and manages to look tiny even when wearing ski pants, who owns both a road bike and a mountain bike, and who, incredibly, knows how to fly fish. I wasn’t very good at it.

            Our first weekend here, we went hiking with friends. In St. Louis, hiking is a relatively flat activity geared toward people who think nature involves pavement and who are generally not in the best shape. Since most of my Missouri hikes involved asphalt trails, it didn’t occur to me that tennis shoes weren’t appropriate until about five hours into the soul-crushing wilderness mountain climb, when  was halfway up a boulder without a foothold.

 That was the time I cried while clinging to the side of a gigantic rock.

            I also bought cross country skis without ever having attempted it. I figured it was one of those “figure it out as you go along” sort of sports.

I know myself well enough to know that I am terrible to be around when I’m trying something new. I hate not being good at things, so I often swear, get frustrated, and occasionally throw things. As we drove to the Nordic trail, I tried to prevent this bad behavior with positive self-talk: “This is going to be SO much fun! Falling doesn’t need to be frustrating- it means I’m learning! The more times I fall, the more I’m learning!”

            After my second face plant in a row, Tom says, “Babe. You are learning so much today.”

That’s the time I whimper-cried while carrying my cross country skis down a mountain.

            In spring of our first year in Denver, we spent a weekend in Moab, Utah. Neither of us had spent a lot of time in this part of the country prior to living in Denver and we were ready to explore. The night we arrived, we collected every single activity-related brochure in the hotel lobby and fanned them out on the dinner table.

            “Should we go rafting? Or take a horseback ride tour?” I’d been looking forward to this trip for weeks. I was overly excited and sounded like someone from a local access “Visit Moab!” commercial.

            “What about mountain biking?” Tom asked. I stared at him. It sounded dangerous and stupid. But. Tom and I had been dating about two years, and I figured he probably knew my crying threshold by now. Surely he wouldn’t choose anything I can’t handle. Tom promised we’ll take the easiest trails, it’s really not that different from riding my bike at home, and we can always quit if we don’t like it.

            The next morning, I’m sliding around the side of a mesa (or some other strange-looking geological structure we don’t have in the Midwest), praying to God that I don’t hit a rock at a bad angle, and conjuring venomous thoughts in my head. I am in a dark place. Tom casually mentions that oops, it turns out we’re on a different trail than he thought and who would have decided to name the technical trail the ‘EZ Trail’, anyway? I see him occasionally looking at me out of the corner of his eye, calculating the exact right time to ask me what’s wrong. He’d rather put it off as long as possible, but at some point, I may actually explode.

            He finally asks and I completely lose it.

            “What’s wrong?! I'm bouncing around on this fucking seat, I’m pretty sure I have whiplash, and all I can think about is why did I choose the higher deductible on my health insurance plan?!”

            To Tom’s credit, he sat down with me and talked to me about the way that I’m feeling. He didn’t make me feel any more ridiculous than I already do about losing my shit on the side of a mesa (or something). After we sat and talked for a few minutes, I was ready to get back on the bike and try again (but at my own pace this time, and getting off to walk the bike when anything looks even remotely scary).

            I think that’s what makes me feel better about being such an awkward person and having an intense temperament. Do I wish I wasn’t constantly the girl with lipstick on her teeth who backflips out the back of the white water raft? Yes. Do I wish I could spend more than two hours in a social situation without needing to take a nap? Absolutely. Do I wish I could be one of those super laid-back, trendy Colorado girls who bikes down mountains without sweating and then run a half-marathon while looking like someone out of a Lululemon ad? Not really, but I do wish I could punch those girls in the face.

My tears are embarrassing and something over which I often have very little control. However, they usually come as quickly as they go, and I always dust myself off and try again after the initial burst of tears (I call those the “first wave”).

My enthusiasm for trying new things and subsequent realization that I’ve overstepped my comfort zone mean that I’m constantly testing my boundaries and pushing myself. Yes, staying in a ski condo for an entire weekend with five other people may not sound courageous to most people, but that’s okay. I’m sure there are things at which I excel that other people wouldn’t even consider attempting- things like organizing fundraisers, teaching preschool, or eating an entire box of Cheez-Its in one sitting. And each time I repeat an initial tear-inducing adventure, I handle the experience with slightly more grace. For example, the next time I found myself being forced to boulder in tennis shoes, I didn’t cry. Instead, I simply yelled “This is not fucking okay with me!” (twice), and then I was totally fine.

Also, I need to start wearing hiking boots.

Victorious on top of a mesa, post-emotional meltdown