Knock, Knock, Can Coleen Come Out?
A True Story of Finding Myself
by
Coleen Harty
Knock, Knock, Can Coleen Come Out?
Published by Coleen Harty at Smashwords
Copyright© 2011 Coleen Harty
Cover Artist: Rage Design
Editor: Tracy Seybold
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Authors Note: This is the story of my life as portrayed to the best of my recollection. Out of respect for privacy, the names and identifying details of most characters and businesses have been changed, except for family members.
Table of Contents
Chapter 10 - Investing in Myself
Chapter 12 - The Beginning of the End
Prologue
Oh God, please don’t make this my destiny!
Panic gripped me as I penned those words in my journal in January of 2001. I noticed there were only a few projects left on my to-do list. Then what? If a single day without a plan felt like an eternity, how would I live the rest of my life without one? Maybe I needed to have a few things left on my list, so I didn’t have to confront the fear of being just me.
I got out of the chair and headed for the computer as I tried to wrap my head around who “just me” was. I no sooner sat at the desk, when the words tumbled onto the page.
I really am gay. And I’m being called to write about it, perhaps even foster some understanding.
I chuckled at the absurdity. I had only been writing regularly for a couple of years and hadn’t even determined or accepted that I was gay. And now, I was supposed to write a book about it? Yeah, right!
A few weeks earlier, on New Year’s Eve, I’d taken a forty-five minute bath in a tub of heavenly suds from some concoction my brother, Kerry, had made me for a Christmas gift. While sitting in the tub, I thought about how little I really relax. I don’t stay busy physically, but am always busy mentally; reading, thinking, playing games and making lists. I wondered if my mind would relax if I ever finished everything on those lists.
After soaking, I put on a soft, flannel shirt and a baggy pair of pants. I then lit five candles, and settled into my comfy chair with pen and paper to see if I could figure out the mysteries of life. I went inward, wrote a couple of pages and then headed to bed.
I had purchased a book called Writing as a Way of Healing, and as I sat to write the following week, I wondered if writing was something I would ever be interested in. Peacefulness had surrounded me when I wrote on New Year’s Eve, and I wanted to experience that peacefulness again. Intuitively, I detected a big change coming for me; different than anything I had experienced before. I didn’t know that all this writing was just laying the groundwork for the explosion to come.
One week later, I settled in to write again. I usually only wrote when I was feeling depressed or anxious; but tonight no emotions bubbled close to the surface. As I sat to write, the creative side of me struggled to find expression, so I quit for the night.
The next week when I came back to my journal, I had no particular goal in mind. My house was clean, and I was close to finishing another project on my to-do list. And that’s when the revelation had hit me that I needed to write a book. When I had finally calmed myself down and started writing again, I figured out what “then what?” had meant.
I need to write a book about my journey to find myself.
Processing this information was difficult, and I sat up until three in the morning writing. I didn’t know much about the gay culture, except what I had seen on the news. If you listened to the mainstream media enough, you would believe the main focus of a gay person’s life is sex. That certainly hadn't been my experience.
I was being judgmental, but most of the lesbians they reported about on the news looked like men. I was never very feminine on the outside, but I certainly didn’t try to look like a man. That was where part of my self-hatred came into play. My outside appearance didn’t reflect the tenderness and femininity I felt on the inside. I didn’t want to hang around gay people, because I looked gay myself. Then for sure, it would be obvious that I was gay, so instead I became “homophobic”. What kind of a dichotomy is that?
To me, even the word lesbian had a negative connotation. Was it because I denied my sexuality for so long that the word was a constant reminder of my inauthentic life, or was there something more? Trying to understand my sexuality still confused me enough, without trying to explain it to others. I pleaded with God to not make writing this book my calling.
The next morning, a passage I read from Simple Abundance confirmed that I was being led to write my story. It wasn’t the message I wanted to hear, but something about my story needed to be told, and I’m not sure why. I just had to wait for the next step to reveal itself.
Eight years passed before I came up with the courage to sit down and start. This book is way more than a book about my sexuality; it’s about my spirituality and me as a person, exposing both my foibles and my gifts. The homosexuality was simply the impetus for writing about all the deepest parts of me I had tried to hide most of my life.
This is the story of the entire homophobic me coming out.
Family Background
I come from a small-town, happy, Irish-English, Catholic family. As it turns out, we were more gay than happy.
My father, Charles Franklin Harty, and my mother, Kathleen Helene Townsend, married after a seven-month whirlwind courtship. After their second date, he asked her if she would marry him, but it took him five months before he officially presented her with an engagement ring.
At the time, my mother, the youngest of nine children, was still living at home with her mother. My maternal grandfather died after a bout with pneumonia when Mom was fourteen. She and her mother had a very close relationship, so she stayed home after graduating from high school. After my mother and father married, they made the decision to continue living with my maternal grandmother until they were more settled.
A year later, on April 18, 1947, my brother, Loras Michael, was born. He was born with Spina Bifida, and he needed to be tended to carefully and unselfishly. My mother, who entrusted her baby to few others, very rarely left his side. His little body had an open wound on its back that oozed fluids constantly. He had to be bathed tenderly every day and have homemade bandages carefully applied around the wound.
Although he was in constant pain and was never able to walk, Loras possessed a “sweet and good-natured” personality, according to my mother. Many times, Loras writhed in excruciating pain, and when my dad couldn’t stand his little boy’s suffering any longer, he would go and spend the night at his brother Red’s house.
On one such night, after a few consecutive nights of Loras’ continual moaning from the pain, my dad could take no more. He retreated to Red’s house once again. That night, when my mother walked by Loras’ room, she looked in and saw the “smile of an angel” on his face. He passed away the next day, December 28, 1949. She always knew he saw a beatific vision and died peacefully, and that comforted her.
My next brother, Kevin, was born two years later in May of 1951. Following his birth, my dad was hired as a painter at the Savanna Ordinance Depot in Savanna, Illinois. Soon after, he packed up his wife, new son and mother-in-law and moved them all to Hanover, Illinois.
They moved into an apartment at Craig Manor, a sub-division of buildings originally built as government housing for Ordinance Depot workers. The Government eventually sold them, and now they were rented out. They stretched for blocks, each building containing four units and looking almost identical except for their colors; peach, pale yellow, gray or light blue. The only differences were the number of bedrooms in each unit and the families housed inside. We were raised with the expectations of that same conformity; only even more rigid; black and white, as opposed to peach, pale yellow, gray, or light blue.
A year or so after the family settled in Hanover, I came into the world. The DNA of my ancestry came along with me; victim mentality, poverty consciousness, sadness and the need for struggle. Our family rounded out over the next few years with my last two brothers; Kerry, born two and a half years after me, and Callen, who followed him fourteen months later.
My brothers and I were well taken care of when we were little. We were a typical family of the fifties. Our mother stayed home with the children during the day, and our father expected a hot meal on the table and a clean house when he arrived home from work. He didn’t allow Mom to either drive or handle the family finances. He was very frugal, and at times, she even had to beg him to give her a few dollars so she could go do something with her friends. This did not make my dad a bad person or my mom a weak one. They played the roles expected of them. I didn’t want to play that game though.
My dad loved his kids. He would bring home treats and hide them under a flipped over dinner plate. When we sat at the table for dinner, he would smile as we turned our plates to see what surprises would be hidden under them. Sometimes candy appeared; sometimes toys, but always something fun.
Both parents were strict disciplinarians. One night, when I was probably three or four, my mom made mashed potatoes much too lumpy for my delicate sensitivities. I gagged every time I tried to chew or swallow them. My dad insisted I eat everything on my plate. I tried, but the colder they got, the more difficult eating them became.
“You are not getting up from this table until you finish your potatoes, young lady.” he said, before he left the room to go assemble the train track with Kevin.
I loved when we played with the train track; the way the train would roll around the track and go out of view under the buildings; the smell of the oil from the friction of the wheels. I sat at the kitchen table, loathing the potatoes and envious of the fun going on in the next room.
After a half hour or so, my dad came back in to find I hadn’t finished my potatoes. “You go up to bed right now,” he commanded.
Crying, I got up from the table and trudged my way through the living room, past the train track and the smiling faces of everyone else having fun, and up the steps to my bedroom, feeling sorry for myself every step of the way. But at least I didn’t have to eat those damn, lumpy potatoes.
The next day, my dad acted like nothing happened. He grabbed me and threw me over his shoulder. “I’m going to take this bag of flour and dump her in the flour bin.”
My kicking, screaming and protesting were to no avail. He continued to look for the flour bin, while I continued my protestations. I enjoyed every moment high up in the air on my daddy’s shoulders. He would never dump me anywhere, but pretending was fun.
My dad loved baseball, so many nights as he rested on his bed listening to a baseball game, Kevin and I would get to shave his growing facial hair. Kevin got the privilege of running the three-headed Norelco shaver over Dad’s stubbly face, while I patiently sat and watched, waiting for my turn to pop the blades out and blow all the tiny pieces of hair off of them.
The only thing I loved more was when Dad let me help polish his shoes. I loved to help him open the cans of Kiwi shoe polish. The sharp scent and the varying shades of brown always intrigued me. He would polish his shoes, but then I got to shine them up with the cloth he handed to me.
A lot of memories from those younger years involved our car, a yellow Plymouth. Dad, Kevin and I would hop in the car and drive out to Harley’s Garage for car maintenance, or to the restaurant for an ice cream cone. On some of those drives, my dad sat me on his lap and placed my hands on the steering wheel.
“Look! You’re driving the car. You’re really good.”
Other times, I sat in the middle between Mom and Dad and focused all my attention on the car radio. Long before seat belts were the norm, I could sit close enough to the radio to look over the top of the numbers on the dial. The radio tubes inside, glowing softly in orange colored hues, created a living room. I imagined couches, chairs and other furniture, neatly arranged.
We took long trips in that yellow Plymouth to visit my paternal grandparents in Colome, South Dakota. My dad didn’t like driving with a lot of commotion in the car, so we left at bedtime. He walked out to the car ahead of time, laid plywood down in the back seat, and then covered the plywood with pillows and blankets so we were nice and cozy and would fall asleep quickly. When we arrived, my dad gently roused me enough to lift me up, carry me into the house and lay me down in my predestined spot. To feel so loved and cared for was very comforting.
Many times, we all hopped in the car and went to visit relatives back in Shullsburg. My dad’s brother, Red, his wife, Ella, and their eleven children all lived there. So did my mom’s brother, Bergen, his wife, Gert, and their seven children.
But my favorite person to visit was my Aunt Vene, who was one of the biggest influences in my young life. She lived with her Aunt Mae, her Aunt Jule and another renter, Mildred, in a large, two-story boarding house Aunt Jule owned at the west end of Main Street.
Vene, the oldest of nine children and my mom, the youngest, had a particularly strong bond. Vene always gave me the impression that I was her favorite person on earth, but she had a way of making everyone feel that way, not just me. She never married or had children of her own, but she filled the role of a mother nonetheless; somewhat like June Cleaver, always showering others with love, affection and food.
As a child, the boarding house appeared larger than life. Full-size picture windows in the front, a double door entryway and twelve-foot ceilings made the house appear like a hotel. Beyond the spacious front foyer sat another small, dimly lit room, where my aunts rocked in their rocking chairs and spent most of their time visiting. A large, upright piano sat at the wall directly ahead. My aunts offered me coins to sing for them while they played, but being timid, I never would.
On each side of the piano, there were open doorways, each with a couple of steps leading into the large kitchen area. Whenever we visited, the smell of something wonderful cooking wafted through the air. And I, like my dad, helped myself to whatever struck my fancy; warm, freshly baked bread with butter dripping down the side, or a piece of fresh apple pie, topped with cinnamon and whipped cream. I loved visiting there; not only for the food, but for the doting attention I received from all of my aunts.
The upstairs level of the house had a completely different energy. Downstairs, everything was open, airy and full of life, while upstairs things turned stern, dark and unwelcoming. The upper level consisted of four bedrooms, a bath and a small television room. One bedroom and bath were directly at the top of the stairs, and the other four rooms were dispersed throughout a long hallway. The bedroom doors were always closed tightly. We were strictly instructed not to go near any of the rooms, except for the bathroom and television room.
Because we were told not to snoop around, I always wondered what lurked beyond those doors. Every now and then, one of the ladies would be in her room getting something and the door would be partially open. I craned my neck to get a glimpse into their world, but was never quite able to.
The room at the end of the hall belonged to Mildred, the one person living in the house not related by blood. She was orphaned as a young lady and found her way to my aunt’s home, where she’d lived ever since. Next to her room was the television room, a small, cozy place with a couch, a few chairs and a television set, where everyone congregated to watch television in the evenings. I loved sitting there, snuggled in with my aunts, watching television. Besides my Aunt Vene’s room, that room was the only place upstairs that didn’t feel foreboding.
Many times on these trips, my dad left the women to talk and took us kids for a walk up the main street in town. Dad was very gregarious, and people loved him.
At home though, he sometimes exhibited a brooding temperament and occasionally exploded into fits of rage, one time throwing a full-length mirror down the steps. He often left my mom at home with the two little ones, while he took us older two and went visiting family and friends. Just by observing, I learned at a young age that a woman’s needs in life were to be relegated to second place; behind her man’s. But at that age, I didn’t care. He was my daddy, and I loved him more than anything.
One night, Kevin and I were playing in the hall outside the bathroom, where my mom was preparing for bed. Dad was listening to a ball game in their room, when suddenly a loud thud erupted from the bedroom. He had fallen off the bed and onto the floor. He must have tried to pull himself back up, because his arm was all I could see by the time I arrived at the door.
Mom scooted us out of the way as she went to check on him. He was in severe pain and foaming at the mouth. Grasping the severity of the situation, she phoned a neighbor, whose father was a doctor. The neighbor called her father to come tend to my dad, and then she came over to take Kevin and me to her house. My two little brothers were left sleeping in their beds.
Sensing my dad was not going to survive, my mom also made a call to the local priest. After two heart attacks within a half hour, my dad passed away. The priest arrived in time to pray for my dad and administer the Last Rites of the church. His next task was to come over and break the news to Kevin and me.
“Your Dad died tonight.” he said, staring down at us kindly.
Kevin let out a howl like a coyote in heat. I laughed. Being a five-year old, I don’t think I realized what was transpiring around me. I didn’t know the effect this night had on me until many, many years later. My dad died at the age of forty-one, leaving behind his thirty-four year old wife to raise four children; ages eight, five, three and two. And just like that, my life had changed.
The Early Years
After my father’s death, my mother, a very strong and proud woman, pulled herself together and moved forward with her life. Dad didn’t believe in life insurance, but had saved money. There was enough for my mother to make a down payment on a home back in Shullsburg, her hometown. So five months after Dad’s death, we packed up and moved to a brand new three-bedroom ranch house.
In Hanover, I had started school for the first time in September. Now, two months later, I was uprooted to begin again somewhere else. When out of my home environment, I tended to be very quiet, which made things more difficult when I was around all those children I didn’t know. During those first few days in the new school, I couldn’t stop crying. Sister Amadeus thought it would placate me if she sat me next to my cousin, Cherry. That didn’t help; I only cried more.
Delving into my schoolwork was the only thing that did help. I could get lost in studying and not have to deal with either the other kids or my feelings. I loved reading about Dick and Jane, and I loved school, even if I didn’t care for all the kids yet.
After school, Cherry and two of her older brothers, Frank and Joe, would walk home with me. They were going the same way anyway, so they figured they might as well keep me company. However, I preferred to be alone, so I cut off a block before I needed to.
“You don’t live up this block. You live up the next one!” Joe exclaimed, looking at me as though I didn't know what I was doing.
“No, I don’t,” I responded stubbornly. “I know where I live.”
Uncle Red’s eleven kids were not the only cousins I had. Between my mom’s eight siblings and my dad’s other two siblings, I had forty-three other first cousins. Mom loaded us up in the car and took us to visit them often. I knew all of my first cousins except Dorothy, who died as a young girl when a brick wall toppled onto her, and my cousin Joe, who lived in South Dakota. I only met him once, because his parents divorced when he was little, and he lived with his mother.
Because I had so many relatives, I was exposed to a lot of death at a young age, and developed an unnatural fear of it.
In 1960, the year after my dad’s death and our move to Shullsburg, my dad’s sister Bette and her five children, who lived about a half hour from us, came to spend the night while her husband, Don, went out with friends. Early the next morning, a police officer banged at our door to inform Bette her husband had been in a car accident. He had died instantaneously when his body was thrown from the car and slammed into a rock wall.
Bette, another young widow left with five young children, now had much in common with my mom. Unfortunately, Bette’s husband hadn’t left her as financially secure as my mother. She had to work outside of the home to sustain her family. My mom was eligible for both Veteran’s Assistance and Social Security. We were very fortunate she could stay home to raise us.
A sense of aloneness overwhelmed me as a child; not so much physically, but emotionally. I didn’t know how to connect with people. Kevin’s tendency to hog all of our company didn’t help either.
I always connected with my Aunt Vene though. One night while visiting her house, she turned on The Three Stooges up in her room so I could watch while she visited with her aunts downstairs. The Three Stooges made me laugh every time I watched them, but this particular night, I suddenly felt all alone, like a nun in a brothel. My heart skipped beats, and fear tightened its grip on my chest. Tears flowed like a stream in the spring. I couldn’t stop them. I was left alone again; but this time, only in my mind. I lived a lot of life in my mind.
Although there was no adult male role model in our home, our family life was similar to most other families in the sixties. During the warmer weather, we played outside from mid-morning until early evening, when we had to come home for dinner. We not only played all the staples such as Red Rover, Annie-Annie-Over, badminton, whiffleball, roller skating, bike riding, swimming and tag, we created many games ourselves.
We created elaborate make-believe houses in the gravel road behind the neighbor’s house. We divvied ourselves up into families; mommies, daddies and children. Each family swept the road bare where they wanted their house located and then used the gravel to create the walls and furniture. Once the houses were built, we fashioned our own little fantasy worlds. Inevitably, a car drove down the rarely traveled road, rousing us out of our fantasyland and scattering us near and far, necessitating us to either rebuild our homes or go on to something else.
Callen and I created a game I especially liked. One of us would throw a Frisbee to the other. If the other person caught the Frisbee while keeping one foot stationary, they could move wherever they wanted before throwing it back. If they had to move both feet in order to catch it, then they had to stand wherever the Frisbee landed. Sometimes, we would end up blocks away from home and had to figure out ways to get ourselves back in time for dinner. The thought never occurred to us to just quit the game and go home. No, that would be giving up, and we were already well aware of fortitude.
My favorite pastime was swimming. We were lucky enough to grow up in a small town with a beautiful park and an outdoor pool. The pool opened every day at one, and I was usually one of the first in line. I wore my swimming suit underneath my clothes to save time. Once the doors finally opened and I was given the basket for my clothes, I ran to the girls’ side of the bathhouse, ripped off my outer clothes and tossed them in the basket. Then I attached the pin with my basket number to my swimming suit and rushed to drop the basket off so I could get into the water.
When there weren’t others around to play with, I created all kinds of challenges for myself, from seeing how many laps I could swim, to trying to go underwater from the twelve-foot end of the pool all the way down to the three-foot end in one breath. That one took me awhile to accomplish, but I kept trying. Each time I got a little farther, until one day, I succeeded.
My biggest challenge was trying to find a dressing room where the curtain closed enough so others couldn’t see in when I changed back into my street clothes. Even at that young age, before any issues with my weight, I was extremely modest.
Most days, I stayed at the pool until five o’clock when they closed for the dinner hour. I dressed and headed home, arriving just in time to eat. After dinner, I had an hour to relax before I went back to the pool.
Thank God for that extra hour. I certainly didn’t want to get a cramp in my side and die underwater. We were always warned not to go swimming until our dinner had at least an hour to digest; otherwise we could drown. This was just one example of a lot of fear-based beliefs I grew up with.
After another two hours of swimming, I went home again to relax and enjoy the rest of the evening. Many nights, Mom took a lawn chair or two; one for her and one for whichever neighbor happened to stop over, and we all sat out in the front yard. While Mom and our neighbor caught up on all the latest gossip in town, we kids chased fireflies, chatted or lay on the soft, green grass watching the beautiful night sky unfold. Finally, at the end of another long summer day, I lay in bed, really aware of my body and my surroundings. I noticed not only the crisp, clean sheets and the breeze blowing through the window, but the length of my legs and how they had grown. The sense of wonderment at a day well lived filled my soul.
When winter arrived, we still spent a lot of time outdoors, but now our activities involved sledding, having snow ball fights and building snow forts. We weren’t inundated with toys at home, but we had plenty. Still, some of the most fun was from creating our own activities and games. We spent hours learning who the Presidents were and the order in which they were elected, the fifty states and all of their capitals and hundreds of types of birds and trees.
Even my Aunt Vene got in on the fun. She would come up to the house with a small coin purse bulging with coins. We eagerly gathered around as she pulled out various coins and hid them in the palm of her hand. Then she came up with a number between one and ten, and whoever guessed the exact number or the number closest, got the coins hiding in her hand.
We loved board games too; Life, Monopoly, Clue and Tripoly and spent whole evenings playing them. Game nights were fun in the beginning, but usually ended with me in tears. Typically, I was the first one out of the game. After a few minutes of sitting on the sidelines, I would feel excluded, dissolve into tears and then stomp off to my bedroom.
Not everything in our house was fun and games. After Dad died, Kevin required a lot of mom’s attention; most of the time not in a good way. When he entered puberty, he was in trouble for something almost every other week. He exasperated Mom to the point where she resorted to pulling out my dad’s method of discipline; the leather belt. I would eagerly await his arrival to see how much trouble he was in. But once the belt appeared, I retreated. Kevin eventually threw the belt away, and Mom never replaced it.
Mom was usually good-natured, but one day, I tested her patience. She told us we were going to go to Dubuque shopping, and I couldn’t wait.
Sometime that day, I approached her. “What time are we leaving for Dubuque?”
“I changed my mind,” she answered wearily. “We’re not going now.”
“You always do that!” I said it in such a sassy voice, she slapped my face.
I don’t know if I was stunned because of the slap, or because she hadn’t laid a hand on me since I was a toddler. Needless to say, I did not mouth off to her after that.
We weren’t exposed much to the world outside our own. The one exception was the Kennedy assassination when I was ten years old. The television screen reenacted over and over Kennedy getting his brains blown out and Oswald grimacing as he was shot in the stomach. I was exposed to plenty of death in my first ten years, but these televised events created a primeval fear in me. And yet, their impact wouldn’t show up for a year or two.
But for now, death was out, life was in. About this time, I learned the extent of what I would from my mother about the birds and the bees. She was doing laundry one day when she noticed a little discharge in my underwear. She told me if I noticed more, I should let her know. Within a day or two, a little more showed up, so I sought her out and alerted her.
“Go to your bedroom, and I’ll be there in a minute,” she said, without looking up.
I waited expectantly, not having any idea what was to come. When she entered the room, she was carrying a little booklet with her and a couple of other items. One looked like a thick miniature diaper and the other some kind of a belt with two little, metal attachments hanging down. The latter looked like the garters that held her nylons up. By the time she finished reading the book to me and explaining what these two items were and how to use them, I had learned two things; the word femur and never to let anyone touch me “down there”.
Within a week or two, I got an idea of what “touch you down there” did not mean. Mom had gone shopping for a few hours, leaving us at home to fend for ourselves. Callen and I had a little, playful skirmish, and as we were roughing around, his hand grazed my pants in the “Do Not Enter” area. I retreated to my room, where I began crying in earnest. What would happen to me now? I had let someone touch me there.
Luckily for me, my mom came home soon after. Wondering why I was in my room, she opened the door to find her daughter in distress.
“What’s wrong?” she asked impatiently.
“Callen touched me down there,” I sobbed.
”What do you mean he touched you down there?” she asked.
I tried to get my story about between the sobs. “We were pretend fighting in the dining room, and his hand slipped and touched me…there.”
“Oh, Coleen, I didn’t mean that. This was an accident,” she said gently as she tousled my hair. “You’ll be all right.”
At least I was safe this time.
I don’t recall a lot of sexual incidents from my childhood. When I was in first or second grade, a cousin and I played doctor. Later, I brought the incident up in a conversation with my mom. She asked me what happened, and I said we were playing together. Somehow she knew what I was talking about, and I was very fortunate she didn’t ask me anymore questions. She just gave me a look, which I interpreted as not to do it again.
Another time, when I was maybe eight or nine, a neighbor girl and I were playing husband and wife on the front porch. I lay on top of her and told her that’s what husbands and wives did. How would I know that? We didn’t watch much television, and my mom never dated while she was raising us.
Other than those incidents, there was a time when the neighbor boy, who was my age, gave me a peck on the lips. I got upset because I didn’t think he had any right to do so.
I attended Catholic grade school for eight years, where I felt intensely the sacredness and holiness of the church rituals. Before girls were allowed to be altar boys, I used to dream about being one. I imagined myself solemnly donning a Cossack and delivering the water and wine to the priest at the altar.
My first experience with the fear of death came as an anxiety attack around the age of eleven or twelve. Lying in bed one night, I listened as Mom and Phyllis, a family friend who used to come to visit us once or twice a year, were out in the kitchen doing dishes and discussing the war in Vietnam. As I listened, a vice gripped my heart and held on tightly. All of a sudden, the thought of dying enveloped my mind and took over my body.
This became my first conscious recollection of a mind and body sensation which would play out time and time again over the next forty years. Whenever something reminded me of death − a television show about a man going to the electric chair, a pain or any kind of uncomfortable feeling in my body, or an actual death in the family – an attack was triggered. Occasionally, the anxiety came over me without any recognition of what triggered it. One day in the middle of religion class, which I loved, I was overtaken to the point where I couldn’t even concentrate on what Father Ihm was teaching.
One morning before leaving for school, I had a particularly strong feeling of anxiety. I couldn’t force myself out the door to go to school. I began to cry and couldn’t compose myself. My mom heard my sniffles and came over to see what was going on. I didn’t know how to articulate what I was feeling, and she became frustrated with me and told me I had to go to school.
I went to school that day, and the next, and the next, and the next. I very rarely missed school. I learned to live with those feelings and not share them with anyone anymore.
When I was in eighth grade, I started babysitting for a cousin and also a couple of my neighbors. A lot of times, after I put the children in bed and they were asleep, this deep sense of homesickness would come over me. The agonizing aloneness made sense when I was at my cousin’s house, because they lived out in the middle of the country, but I couldn’t understand why those feelings showed up when I babysat at the neighbor’s houses. After all, I could look out their windows and see my own house right next door, but I would still stand there crying; just waiting for the parents to return, so I could go home. Sometimes, even when I was home, I would get that same melancholy feeling when I looked at classmates’ houses through my own bedroom window, wondering what it was like to live there.
Was I a restless soul or did I just did not feel at home anywhere?
The anxiety subsided for long stretches, and life glided along smoothly, like a hot air balloon hovering high above the trees.
My Aunt Vene had worked at a little corner grocery store all of her life. When the owner, Mrs. Kendall, retired, Vene wanted to keep it open; so she purchased it and asked me if I wanted to work for her.
When I was just a little girl, before we had moved back to Shullsburg, we would come here to shop and visit Vene, so I had a special affinity for the place. Housed in an old, two-story, red brick building with wooden floors, dark woodwork, and tall dark ceilings, the grocery store looked so big to me as a child, but it always wrapped me in its warm, welcoming ways.
People shopped not just for groceries back then, but for connections. For a lot of people, this was their weekly jaunt in to town. While the women socialized and stocked up on groceries, the men meandered up the street for drinks with the guys. Except for the time I took a couple of pieces of candy, and my mother made me go back and pay for them, this store always held fond memories for me. And now I would be working there.
A little of the allure disappeared, because now I could roam all the nooks and crannies I wasn’t privy to when Mrs. Kendall was the owner. But there were new things to learn to keep me intrigued. I learned what went on behind the scenes in a grocery store, which included running a cash register, learning how to use a meat slicing machine and a scale, pricing and arranging items on the shelves, unloading the grocery truck, learning where to store the items that didn’t fit on the shelves up in the store and even candling eggs.
Farmers brought their eggs in either wooden crates or cardboard boxes, with row upon row of eggs sitting gently inside. I took each egg out individually and held it to the candling light, a bulb encased by black metal with a hole about the size of a quarter in the front, which concentrated the light. My job was to make sure there wasn’t any blood in the egg, gently put the egg in an egg carton and then stack the cartons on the egg bench until they were needed in the store.
Vene was adamant about good customer service. “The customers are the reason we are here. If the customers aren’t here, then there would be no reason for us to be either," she would often tell me.
She told me that some of her customers complained about Tubby Lyne’s garage across the street. Some of his older children helped him out, and often their friends were there, so a rather large group hung around. This intimidated some of Vene’s customers so much they wouldn’t stop there to get gas. Vene said it was all right if my friends stopped in to say hi, but they weren’t encouraged to stick around.
I learned about a lot more than groceries in the four years I worked there. Mom had already taught me how to put other’s needs ahead of my own and worry about how things appeared to others; Vene solidified that belief.
Some of my fondest memories were when Vene and I would sit in a couple of wooden folding chairs by the ice cream freezer in the back, eating and talking. Some evenings, for a change of pace, she put a “Be Back in an Hour” sign on the door. We would then walk up to Ruby’s, the local restaurant, and order burgers, fries and chocolate malts. She let me eat whatever I wanted when I worked, so food engulfed a large part of my time; not just unloading, stocking and selling it, but eating it.
I never ventured much beyond the confines of the pool, grocery store and St. Matthew’s Catholic grade school. The nervousness I felt about graduating from grade school and going into high school where both the “Catholics” and the “Publics” would merge was unsettling. Although the population of Shullsburg was only twelve hundred people, I did not know these other kids.
I overcame my fear by turning into the funny girl, at least on the outside. Eventually, my classmates got used to me, and enjoyed the part of me that filled the role of the funny girl.
By the end of my freshman year, I became good friends with a neighbor girl named Elizabeth. Her mother and father were divorced, so we both lived in a home with no father figure, which may have helped cement our friendship. We did something together almost every day; talking, baking, hiking, cleaning, or hooking up with other friends and going downtown or to the park.
Sometime during our sophomore year, she fell for Joey, one of our classmates, and I saw less and less of her. We still did things together, and she invited me along many times when she got together with Joey, but something changed. She drifted away, a pattern I experienced almost every time I really cared for someone.
The summer before my sophomore year, I met a girl a couple of years older, who I wanted to spend a lot of time with. I talked to her any chance I got and loved being in her presence. I had no idea it would be considered a crush to always want to be around her. When she graduated and moved away, I was heartbroken.
I was a lot less emotionally mature than most of the girls my age. During puberty, I developed a fear of death, sex, and maybe even life. My knowledge of sex was pretty much nil, and that’s how I liked it. Once, my friends were talking about one of our classmates who got a boner when he was caught in a door in the Industrial Arts room.
“What’s a boner?” I asked innocently.
My friends chuckled at my naivety, but one of them answered my question. “A boner is when a guy’s penis gets hard. He can’t put his penis in you if it’s soft.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, so responded hesitantly, “Oh, OK.”
That was way more information than I wanted to hear. The thought of someone sticking their penis in me both frightened and sickened me. My mom hadn’t told me any of this stuff when she sat me down with my menstruation book and Kotex.
Before I started my junior year in high school, I found a sex manual sitting on the counter. I was intrigued, but after looking at a couple of the pictures, I shut the book. The images unsettled me in some way. They also planted themselves somewhere deep in my mind.
Mom, my oldest brother Kevin, and his girlfriend, Gale, were down in the basement and called me down. When I showed up, they told me Kevin and Gale were getting married in October and were going to have a baby in February.
Now I understood why that book was sitting on the counter. They had inadvertently left it there. They were afraid to tell me about the baby for fear I would be upset, but I was ecstatic. I would be an aunt! I had held out hope for a long time, that someday I would have a baby sister, but since my mom never dated after my dad died, the odds were getting slimmer and slimmer.
Following the pattern my mom set for me, I didn’t date either. No guy ever showed interest, and I wasn’t interested in anyone in particular. The thick walls I put up probably deterred anyone who may have been interested. I was the only girl in school who spent my lunch hours shooting baskets instead of sitting in the bleachers talking about boys and makeup. Those things didn’t interest me.
Not until my senior year, did I ever even want a date. I was elected Pep Club President, and I expended tons of energy on Homecoming. Because I had put so much of my heart into it, I really wanted a date so I could experience it fully. When it got down to a couple of days before the game and dance, I still didn’t have a date. I was so disappointed, because I wouldn’t be able to fully participate in something I poured so much energy in to. A few days before the dance, we were still putting the finishing touches on the gym decorations. I was up on a ladder doing something when I looked down to see Jim at the bottom of the ladder. I figured he was wondering what I wanted him to do next, so I scurried down to see what he wanted. “What do you need, Jim?”
“Would you like to go to the dance with me?” he asked politely.
“Yes, I would love to go to the dance with you,” I stammered.
“Great. I’ll pick you up at six on Saturday.”
“Thanks Jim,” I said as he walked away.
As soon as he walked away, my friends came rushing over to congratulate me. Wondering how they knew what he had just said, I questioned them to see if they set him up for this and they told me they hadn’t. I didn’t really believe them, but I was too excited to care. We double dated with his brother and his date, and I had a nice time. But in some way, I felt constrained by his presence, like somehow my freedom to socialize with others was curtailed. I wanted to have someone to go with, but I also wanted my autonomy.
It wasn’t long before football season switched to basketball season, and it was time for the state tournaments in March. Some friends were going to Madison for the weekend and asked me if I wanted to go with them. Naively I said yes, not knowing people went mostly to party. I was surprised my mom even allowed me to go, but on Friday we were ready to head out. A blizzard almost prevented us from leaving, but eventually we arrived in Madison.
I had only been to the outskirts of Madison before. Mom used to drive up to get Kevin when he was attending the seminary and wanted to come home for the weekends. Sometimes I would ride with her, but we always came right home and didn’t go in to Madison.
When my friend drove down Monroe Street to get us to our downtown destination, I fell in love with Madison. Trees lined both sides of the street and their branches were laden with thick, white snow. This gorgeous scene was the last pretty thing I witnessed that weekend.
A group of us went to the games on Friday and Saturday. The previous year my cousins’ team from Milwaukee got as far as the state tournaments, so I had watched them on television. Because of the excitement of the crowd, the shiny floors in the field house and the size of all the players on television; I was thrilled that I was going to get to be there in person. This year, neither our team nor any of the surrounding small town teams was represented, but I was still excited about experiencing all the hoopla surrounding the event.
When we finally got through the entrance at the field house, disillusionment set in. All I could see on all sides of me were vendor carts scattered among the people, cement floors and dark, dingy, metal rafters. I lightened up a bit by the time we found our seats, but even the basketball court and the people in the bleachers had lost some of their allure.
The day slowly deteriorated. By the time we returned to the friend’s apartment where we were staying, the party was already underway. I wandered around, wondering who these people were. They certainly weren’t the people I went to school with every day. The drinks flowed and the air was thick with smoke. There was an unusual odor I had never smelled, which I found out later was pot. I stepped outside long enough to watch one of my classmates tumble from the porch, and amazingly enough, get back up unhurt. I went back inside just in time to see another friend rushing to the bathroom to puke.
I found a few of my friends from the class of ’69 out in the kitchen, talked to them for a while and then went back out to mingle. I didn’t have anything alcoholic to drink and could only take this atmosphere for about an hour. The walls were closing in on me, and I had to get away, but there was nowhere to go. We were in the dead of winter, and I didn’t know my way around Madison.
My friend’s apartment was on the lower level of a two-story house. The stairs to the apartment above curved at a ninety degree angle about half-way up. When no one was looking, I climbed up and hid myself at the tops of the stairs, around the corner. The evening stretched out ahead of me, as I listened to all the commotion going on below. I sat on those steps hoping the neighbors didn’t come home, or no one downstairs would decide to come up to use this spot as a place to make out.
I was so out of my element and wondered why I had ever agreed to come to Madison with my friends. I could not wait to get back home. I stayed up on the steps for a few hours until most everything downstairs died down, and then I snuck back down. My friend who rented the apartment found an open bed for me to sleep in and finally this nightmare was over.
In the morning, I listened to stories of people puking, passing out and making complete asses of themselves. Then we heard the story of a couple, younger than me, screwing on the couch after they thought everyone was asleep. I had always felt that I didn’t fit in anywhere, and this weekend confirmed my suspicions. Would I ever fit in?
My family helped a lot. About a week after the basketball tournaments, my second niece, Lisa, was born. Lauri, her older sister, had been born the previous February, so I had two little ones I adored. They were my pride and joy. I loved when they came to visit, or I got to go visit them.
High school was fun for me, but I also carried a lot of sadness within. As much as I enjoyed people and knew pretty much everyone in the school, I was disconnected emotionally. I did not accept adolescence very well, from pubic hairs, to bras, to my period. When I started high school, I weighed 104 pounds and was in good shape from all the swimming, bike riding and other physical activities I engaged in. Even being fit, I was still mortified when I had to strip down to nothing to take showers after PE classes. None of the other girls looked the least bit embarrassed, which shamed me all the more. I found a corner closest to the shower, so I didn’t have to walk the full length of the locker room naked.
Even then, I wrapped the towel around me and held on tightly when trying to shower. I soon figured out I didn’t have to go to all that work. A long as I got wet, the teacher thought I had showered and would check my name off when I walked out. I was too embarrassed to talk to anyone about this, so food became my friend. I quit swimming and bike riding, and by the time I graduated, I weighed 203 pounds.
In a few short months, I would be heading off to Madison to start a new life. My excitement was buried way below layers of fear. I had led a sheltered life, and the only thing that made moving to the city bearable was that I would be living with two of my classmates.
I had been accepted into the Elementary Education program at the University of Platteville, but changed my mind at the last moment and decided instead to go to Madison Area Technical College (MATC) for a Business Machines program. I had wanted to take the Computer Operations program, but it was full, so this sounded like a good replacement, being as I was always intrigued by how things worked.
That summer, my mom got deathly sick, and I took her to the doctor in Monroe. When she came out from her appointment, I knew something was wrong, but I was afraid to ask. She quietly said the doctor told her to go home and get her things in order. This terrified me, not only because she was my only parent, but because of my fear of death. She had to go back for surgery in a few days, so my moving to Madison was delayed for the time being. Thank God when she went in for surgery, they found kidney stones instead, so they sent her home to pass them and she healed with no further scares.
So at the tender age of seventeen, after Mom recuperated, I headed to the city, ready for my new life. By the time I arrived in Madison, my two high school classmates, Jane and Jill, were already working at Madison General Hospital and settled into the apartment we would be sharing.
Another classmate, Gina, lived with her sister and another couple of hometown friends directly across the alley. Because my roommates and I were on different schedules, it was nice to know there were friends close by.
Even with all these familiar people around, I often cried myself to sleep because of homesickness and my fear of the future. Ever since I was a child, I had somehow known I would be alone in this lifetime. Envisioning myself all alone far into the future terrified me. Because I never shared anything going on inside of me with others, I suffered alone; never able to get the fear out into the open where it wouldn’t have this strong hold on me. Within a month though, I began to enjoy the present, even with my extreme fear of the future.
In my family life, Kevin and Gale had their third daughter, my namesake, Mary Coleen. Kevin had joined the Navy after Lauri was born, and they were now living in Jacksonville, Florida. When they lived in Dubuque, Iowa, I was able to visit them quite often, but once they moved to Florida, I only got a chance to visit them a couple of times.
In my school life, things were going well too. We had a small class of twenty-five students. Before long, we all got to know each other and started doing things together, such as playing cards during our free periods. I even got a date for the Homecoming dance.