Who Do You Think You Are?
Ever had these words thrown at you? Usually it's in a spirited debate. Lately there's been interesting dialogue about who a person really is versus what they post on Facebook. Facebook is often your highlight reel. Isn't that how you really want it to be? Do you really want me to post about who I really I am, especially the ugly parts. The true epitome of #nofilter.
A recent spirited debate got me thinking about who I really am. Lest there be any confusion from the beautiful hydrangea pictures that I post or the funny quips and quotes from my kids and the snippets from my morning scriptures, I am much more than that.
I could quickly borrow lyrics from Meredith Brooks and quote:
I'm a bitch, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother
I'm a sinner, I'm a saint, I do not feel ashamed
I'm your hell, I'm your dream, I'm nothing in between
But maybe I should be more specific. I stood back and looked at some of my posts and pictures and can see how one would misconstrue the true fullness of me. I live in a beautiful home that I sometimes wonder if I deserve, I have a job that I love and kids that so far are looking like they might turn out okay. It's still really too early to tell.
However, much of what I remember about who I am started in a mobile home, or a trailer as we called it, plopped down on an acre of land given to my parents by my grandparents with a gravel driveway and the most beautiful dandelions a kid could want. Where my mom would stay up late and wait on my dad to get home from night shift, eating the hulls from the popcorn so he could come home and enjoy the good parts. A place where a can opener in the window would bring my favorite cats screeching from acres far and wide to come and nest and eat and purr. Where sometimes the animals we loved wouldn't make it home from acres far away, either eaten by survival of the fittest or squashed on the road by crazy Sadie that drove way too fast on our country road.
I grew up with people that crawled under your house and often in your crap, literally, because my grandfather did plumbing and heating and lots of other jobs that you paid for because you never learned how to do. You needed him and I learned about hard work and being paid for it. I learned about sacrifice when many a family meal, he would get up and go because your toilet didn't work or your heat stopped working on Christmas Eve and rather than honor our Christmas meal, he left us and made sure yours was warm and good and dry. One year, when I was old enough to "do the books" in the family business I charged double time for a holiday visit which had never been done before. My grandfather scolded me and told me that we didn't do those things and explained to me that those people didn't have that kind of money. My grandfather curses like a sailor in pain but knows the value of treating people well.
I grew up with a father that worked his way up from a night shift mechanic to a well paid engineer and was too busy working that he skipped that college education part. Many of his young colleagues fresh out of the frat house and laden-ed with student debt probably didn't want to know that.
I've seen scuffles and fights among family and addiction gripping their very souls and all gathered round the plastic table cloth at grandmas house out of love. I've seen my mom build fence and take out brick chimneys while my dad was at work and follow the ambulance when our baby cousins were born too early and she didn't want to miss the only breaths he had in case there weren't enough.
I've seen money change hands when we didn't deserve it but just because we needed it without shame or judgement or fear, only out of love. I've seen many a candle lit on a sheet cake covered in chocolate icing. My language is salty, learned carefully over the years as a generational art form.
With my uncle's permission, I've driven a car long before the BMV thought it was okay and cut Christmas trees on the side of the road in the dark of the night. I've drank sugar in my milk and stirred it like coffee just like the grandmas and aunts, listening to stories of the factory. I've watched family take their factory money and turn it into mounds of security and others drink their paycheck before church started on Sunday morning.
So yes, I post the beautiful and the inspirational and the funny and the good. Not because I don't know the darker sides, but because I do. Because I've cried myself to sleep with hurt and anguish and pain, because I've huddled on my closet floor afraid to face the day, because I've had the awful manager at the fast food place threaten me as a young girl, because I've seen the hurt in my child's eyes from my own words and anger. Because I've gone on the jail visit to see family on Christmas Eve, because I've broken the refrigerator door in a bout of anger.
Because .....
I'm a bitch, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother
I'm a sinner, I'm a saint, I do not feel ashamed
I'm your hell, I'm your dream, I'm nothing in between
And because I know the dark and the light, I will continue to share the light and the beauty and the funny and inspired. Not because it's all that I know, but because it's all that I seek.
