October 8, 2006

• Late bloomer

  Last week on Featured Grownups, they had a challenge to write about a particular decade of your life.  I decided to write about the 1990′s.  Its turning into a mini-memoir.  I graduated highschool in 1990. 

  Please feel free to post critiques, comments, whatever as I finish this up.  Its proving to be very cathartic for me.

  Have a great day,
  Janette

               There was a certain trepidation that pervaded the environment of my childhood home.  The mantra that held the family together in an uneasy truce was “what goes on in this house, stays in this house.”  Mother’s mood swings grew worse with each passing year.  Each descent became more melancholic, more violent.  The monsoons of rage and pelting of slaps would rain on for days, sometimes weeks.  Her staunch Baptist beliefs often exacerbated the punishment and onslaught of verbal injury.  The clouds always broke eventually, and she would soon be Mummy again, sunshine and smiles, fun and frivolity.  My sister and I clung to the hope of those days like drowning men in torrential flooding. 

              One respite from the fluctuating climate of mania and depression was the knowledge that soon I would be graduating from high school.  Commencement would mean freedom from the murky deep of mother’s illness, but the future held more questions than answers.  I was a tender sixteen, obscenely naïve and very sheltered.  Uncertain what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and fearful at the prospect of college, I found a job working full time as a data entry clerk for a Christian camp in Niles, Michigan, three hours away from Lansing and crazy.

              For two years, I typed the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of those individuals who sent their children to the camp or donated money to the ministry.  I was the youngest person working at the headquarters by at least two decades.  Married men and spinsters walked around with stacks of paper in monastic silence.  Whatever inherent badness that existed in my soul that my mother hadn’t already ascertained and later brought to my attention was confronted austerely in my veritable convent.  

              Deeply religious at that time, I would often pour my heart out to God through prayer, singing, and journaling.  Music became a passionate form of worship and escape.  My thirsty heart was parched for love and exhortation, and through my voice, I was able to get the affirmation I had long desired.

              Nearly nineteen, my life was tedious but safe.  However, like an earthquake, an unannounced meeting with my boss soon shook my foundations to their core.  The ministry was updating the computer systems and outsourcing their newsletter and mailing lists to a third party.  As such, I was being let go.  While employed there, the camp paid me a paltry stipend of $400 monthly while I lived on the grounds.  Having no money, no prospects, and no education, there was only one place for me to go; back to my mother.

   

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