Welcome back!

Who is the little girl you once were? Was she born on
November 14^th like me, nine months after one snuggly Valentine’s
Day? Does she feel as special about it as I
do? Can you see her all pink and chubby
laying on the kitchen table in the sun, laughing and playing with Mother? It’s the first two years that were the most
important. They are the years before the
haunting appeared in her eyes, so she is the one who’s been hiding all these
years behind the biting of her nails, beneath the passion to perform well,
muffled by her doubt-snakes, closing her hearing down to drown her parents’
fighting under the cloak of her obesity.

Little Patty is tugging at the flapping corners of my soul
these days. She wants me to know her and
see all her facets. I know a few things
about her. She was beautiful enough to
win a Most Beautiful Baby contest. She
loved the green of her grandparent’s farm. She reveled in her grandmother’s gladiolas in the sun; she loved
swinging between the plum trees; she adored listening to adults talk and her
mind grabbed all they said and worked to push its topics into some kind of organization; she liked sitting on her mother’s lap when Daddy drove the Model-T and
she giggled when it blew its radiator cap. She loved sunsuits and popsicles
with her girlfriend.

Little Patty was afraid of her uncles but she loved her
aunts. She loved the perfume bottle with
the magenta clover on it; she loved Tiba’s glorious song at evening’s edge; she
was proud to be allowed to go to the store for a loaf of bread and terrified
all along the way there and back. Little
Patty was doted on and she basked in the love. Remembering the love makes my eyes tear up and tightens my throat. There were lots of ladies who fawned over her
and loved her. She didn’t feel that from
her Daddy. She spent her lifetime trying
to pluck it out of him and completely failed. She watched him give what she coveted to her sister and it hurt and
puzzled her. She is sweetness and
innocence bleeding over it’s unfairness. She decides to never hurt another through prejudicial preference –
never. She understands justness because
of injustice.

You can give your little girl a voice. She’s in there and she lived through it. She will tell you what she’s been wanting to
say all these years. Little Patty isn’t
done talking to me.

Love,

Pat

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 7:50 pm and is filed under 2007 Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.