Shyness Factor: Girl on the Outside

I think Zoey might be an elective mute.  Her swimming teacher of six weeks said she has never heard her speak.   I had seen Zoey shake her head yes or no when she was asked questions during her lesson, but had been unaware that she wasn’t speaking at all.  When I mentioned this to one of my sisters, Brittany, she told me that while she spoke at home, she was silent throughout kindergarten.  Her teacher thought she might’ve been an elective mute.  I asked if Brittany if she remembered why she didn’t talk.  She said she didn’t recall not speaking, but remembered not liking the teacher.  As a kid I knew that my sisters and I were shy, but Brittany’s year of silence hadn’t been on my radar.  It’s clear to me now that shyness runs in the family.     

Me and Kate

I met my best friend, Kate, in kindergarten and we stuck together from elementary to high school.  In elementary school, I was lost without her.   On days she was out sick I spent recesses and lunches alone.  She wasn’t sick often, but I remember how tough it was for me when she wasn’t around.  I considered her my only real friend.  While I knew other kids that lived on my street or were in my classes, I was too shy to approach them.  I distinctly recollect one day that Kate was absent.  I watched a group of girls playing hopscotch.  I was too shy to ask if I could play with them.  So, I just stood there on the outskirts of their circle, hoping they would notice me and ask me to join them, but they never did.  I think I was afraid of rejection and it’s the same fear I have today.  Why my fear of it was so great, I don’t know.  I don’t have any memories of ever putting myself out there enough to have been turned down.    

This wasn’t something I grew out of.  In junior high Kate and I expanded our group to include some girls we knew from sixth grade: Michelle, Rachel and Marisa.  We later added two others that Michelle had made friends with: Sabrina and Colleen.  When boyfriends became part of the picture, friends of the boyfriends were added to the group, as well.  Through the comings and goings of boyfriends, we girls remained friends.  While we flip flopped who we spent the most time with outside of school, this was our core group. 

Kate, me, Marisa, Rachel, Michelle Colleen & Sabrina (9th grade)

Someone once told me that people thought I was stuck up.  Whatever, they didn’t know me!  Had they ever talked to me, I would’ve talked back.  Apparently, I have a facial expression that gives people a bitchy impression of me. (A friend of mine in adulthood lovingly coined it my “Trisha Face.”) It just takes time for me to warm to people and open myself up.  I have always been terrible at small talk and starting conversations.  But, I guess there have been some exceptions to these rules.  One of them was so damn embarrassing that I still feel my cheeks redden at the memory.  I had a crush on a boy in seventh grade and for a short while it seemed like he liked me too.  We talked on the phone a couple of times.  One Sunday, shortly after our phone calls stopped, after hours of contemplating calling him, I finally gathered up the nerve to do it.  I awkwardly asked him why he no longer talked to me at school.  He said he didn’t know, but he would.  On Monday, he fell in step beside me in the halls and said, “Hi Trish.”  I was so nervous that I didn’t respond.  I just kept walking along beside him, acting like I hadn’t heard him.  Inside I was screaming at myself: “What are you doing?  He’s talking to you, just like you asked him too!  Now, you’re ignoring him?  What the hell is wrong with you?”  I could feel his eyes on me as we walked.  He must’ve thought I was a lunatic.  Eventually, he realized I wasn’t going to respond and he headed off in another direction. It made perfect sense that this was the last time he attempted to talk to me. 

Zoey and Isabel's hands

I see myself reflected in Zoey, especially regarding our shyness and this makes me sad.  When Zoey was about two, we were at a birthday party for one of her good friends, Isabel.  Of course, the birthday girl knew everyone at the party, but Zoey only knew her.  I watched Zoey follow Isabel around and stay on the outskirts of the kids she was playing with.  I flashed back to myself in elementary school and I felt a frog in my throat, remembering how I had felt. Even though Zoey was so young, I knew she was probably feeling the way I had felt.  When Zoey came to me upset, I told her to join the other kids, but she wouldn’t.  I ended up kicking a ball around with her, while making further attempts to get her to approach the group, which she never did. 

As Zoey grows older, these similar circumstances continue.  With her best interest at heart I attempt to help.  I tell her to ask the child, be it a cousin or a friend, if she can play with them.  After several tries and she still won’t ask, I ask for her.  I ask the child, “Can Zoey play with you?”  Every time the response has been a happy, “yes!”  Each time the little kid inside me jumps for joy.  I have come to realize that it’s likely that I would’ve gotten the same responses as a kid, if only I’d been brave enough to ask.  I want Zoey to feel confident enough to be able to speak up for herself.  When she starts school and begins making friends, I hope she will.  I’d love her to be aware enough to include that kid that’s kicking the ground on the outside of the circle, waiting to be invited in.  I’d like to think and hope that I’m empowering her to have different experiences than I had.  

Would I have had a better life had I not been so shy?  Would I be a different person?  Probably not. I might have had different friends or maybe more of them, but the quality of the friendships would not have been as great.  I’m happy with the tight knit group of girls I grew up with.  We’re all still friends today, though most of our communication nowadays occurs on Facebook.  I’ve had to overcome some of my shyness mostly in work situations.  I used to be a manager in retail and had no choice but to initiate conversations with both employees and customers.  I still feel timid approaching a new person on a personal level but I’m not that petrified little girl anymore.  I’ve come to realize through both asking kids to play with Zoey and asking if I can join someone a lunch that most people are welcoming and want to play or talk.  I’m proud to say that within the past few years, there have been occasions where I’ve initiated conversations and have made new friends, but it still isn’t second nature.  I wish I knew as a kid what I know now.  I’d love to help Zoey learn this in childhood and save her the torment of feeling like the girl on the outside. 

Anxiety in My Mommy Head and Mommy Heart

I have mini heart attacks every day.  I find the more time I spend with my kids the more coronaries I have.  As so many things in life are uncontrollable, children being highest on the list, you might imagine how often I feel like crawling out of my skin.  It really got started at birth (probably mine), but I was referring to Zoey and Hunter’s births.  For several months after they were born I religiously listened for their breathing, watching their chests rising and falling to make sure they were still alive.  This is something I still do today.  I look in on them before I go to bed and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and rush in to gently place my hand on their backs to feel that they are breathing.

I’m not exactly sure where my need to control things and the resulting anxiety began.  Did it come from my childhood or is it just in my DNA?  It goes hand in hand with my perfectionist tendencies.  These inclinations aren’t all encompassing.  My house is not immaculate to say the least, but I can’t stand to be wrong and will never make the same mistake twice.  My grandmother had obsessive compulsive tendencies (her house was always perfectly decorated and clean) and so do other members of the family.  In my case, the need to control my surroundings stems from not being able to control my internal feelings or emotions.  

anx·i·e·ty 

Noun:

A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. Desire to do something, typically accompanied by unease.

Hunter in the "noodles"

I don’t have much control (ha!) when this uneasy breathing monster chooses to gurgle up inside me.  The other day Joe, the kids and I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).  Hunter went running about in the “noodles” with Zoey.  There were a handful of other kids rushing around in there too.  While I stuck close behind my toddling Hunter, I didn’t feel anxious about him getting hurt.  The next day when we were at the park with no crazy kids nearby, I was on high alert.  Hunter was playing on the slide and my anxiety was chomping away inside me.  I was constantly bracing for the fall that I felt would inevitably come.  When he did fall face first off the slide, I felt slightly vindicated, yet angry at myself for allowing it.  My overbearing feelings hadn’t been for naught!  He stood up crying through a mouthful of sand, and while he was only slightly annoyed at the crunchiness in his mouth and recovered quickly, he had still been hurt, if only a little.

Joe tolerates my madness for a while, before he inevitably gets upset with me.  As I become more on edge, I react angrily to everything and everyone around me.  On my rampage this morning, I was short with both Joe and Zoey and while I was aware it wasn’t appropriate I couldn’t help myself.  Who was I mad at?  I was mad at myself for not having been more organized.  All logic disappears when these crazed moments occur.  Joe simply picked up the phone, called the doctor and asked if we could get copies.  Of course, they could replace them, but that wasn’t really the point.  They shouldn’t have been misplaced!  Of course about two minutes after he picked up the copies, I found the originals.  They were in the most obvious place, the kitchen table.  They had been folded up and looked like they were something else, so I had never even picked them up to look at them.      

Shortly before the fall

My mood is easily affected by my anxiety and this creates tension in my relationships.  Joe is a saint to deal with me when I’m taken over with anxiousness.  While it’s something I’m trying to get a handle on and be more aware of, I still struggle with it.  My anxiety involving Zoey has changed as she has grown up.  I’m no longer so worried about her getting physically hurt, as I now am with Hunter.  I worry more about how her emotional hurts about how her extreme height or her left handedness will affect her.  I’m anxious for her before I even need to be.  I want to make things easier on her before I even know if these things will be difficult for her.  I get all twisted up inside thinking about the future and my desire to control what I can’t.  

Maybe this type of irrational anxiety is something I can try to talk myself out of. Maybe it will fade as the kids get older.  Maybe in time I will be able to truly grasp that my struggle to be the perfect mom is an impossible feat.  I will have to get it through my mommy head and my mommy heart that I just can‘t control every aspect of my kids’ lives.  They will stumble, they will fall, they will get up, brush themselves off and be okay, and maybe, just maybe, so will I.   

Thirty-Five, I'm Alive

Making a wish at 2 years old

If I was living in the 1600s, when the life expectancy for a woman was about thirty-five, I’d probably be dead by now.  Thank God that’s not the case!  My birthday is tomorrow, August 12th.  Birthdays are no longer a big deal to me.  I don’t look forward to getting another year older.  If birthdays could come and go without making me older then I’d be in Heaven.  Don’t get me wrong, while I don’t want to add any more candles to my birthday cake, I still want the cake, the ice cream and the presents.   

I wonder how my parents feel about me getting older.  Of course, as I age, they age.   How does it feel to tell someone that your oldest daughter is thirty-five?  How quickly has this time passed for them?  I feel old as Zoey and Hunter get older.  I marvel at how I will feel when Zoey is thirty-five and Hunter is thirty-two.  I will have just turned sixty-six when this happens.  It’s difficult to wrap my mind around this.    

That old popular phrase “age is just a number” never used to apply to me.  I used to say it to people that were feeling bad about their age.  As I get older and the numbers creep higher, I’m beginning to understand the phrase.  I’m going to be forty years old in five years!  How the hell did that happen?  I don’t feel like I’m thirty-five years old.  There’s no book on how this is supposed to feel, so who knows? I still feel young and (knock on wood) my body hasn’t started to betray me yet.  In my head I feel eighteen.  Obviously, I’ve matured emotionally in many ways since then, but I’m still that young woman who feels like she’s just on the cusp of becoming something.  

One of my most memorable birthdays with my sixteenth when I received my license to drive.  My mom gave me permission to drive my five friends around in her big old blue Astro van.  I drove us to Video Shack to rent a VHS movie.  If I hadn’t already dated myself by revealing my age and driving an Astro van, then renting a VHS tape would have done it.  After picking a movie, (I have no recollection of the movie we rented) we piled back into the van.  We were having a good time laughing about something and instead of turning the wheel as I pulled out of the parking spot I backed up straight, bump, right into a parked truck.  I paused, unsure of what to do next.  One of my friends yelled “Go!”  I peeled out of the parking lot and drove a few miles before pulling over on a side street.  My friends jumped out first and rushed to the back of the van.  Their reactions told me what I already knew, I was in trouble.  I just had my first accident, while on my first solo driving trip, on my freaking birthday!  One of the back doors had a dent almost as large as the back door itself.  With the logic of a sixteen year old, I decided to stick with the plan of going to dinner with my friends, instead of returning home to face my mom.  I knew if I went home I wouldn’t be going back out again.  After dinner was over, I had to go home and tell my mom what happened.  I cried crouched in a corner by the front door, while my friends listened from the other room as my mom spoke sternly to me.  Many tears, on my part, and words on her part later, she drove to the video store.  She discovered the truck that I hit was owned by one of the employees.  Amazingly the other vehicle had no damage.  My mom told me I would paying to fix the dent, but let my friends stay over for the rest of my birthday sleepover.  

My twenty-seventh birthday was memorable in a much more romantic way.   Joe proposed to me.  I knew it was coming.  I had essentially told him I wanted to get engaged for my birthday.  It was nearing sunset and he asked if I wanted to take a walk to the beach.  I had a feeling he was going to pop that famous question.  I was nervous and I felt a bulge in his pocket that occasionally bumped against my leg as we walked.  I knew it had to be the ring box and not a “pencil” in his pocket because he was happy to see me.  Once we arrived at the beach Joe got down on his knee.  I too got down on my knees because I felt embarrassed as there were people around.  Of course, I said yes.  Later that evening we got drinks with friends to celebrate my birthday. I held up my left hand and showed them the ring on my pinky finger.  Yes, you read that right, my pinky finger.  The ring Joe bought me didn’t fit.  I wore it on my pinky until we got it sized.

Making a wish today (in the exact same place as when I was 2!)

In a moment I can flash back to myself at different points in my life.   For example, I can remember my first true heartbreak when I was almost eighteen.  In some ways I feel like my heart just cracked yesterday.  This was seventeen years ago and this break healed long ago, but time is so fluidic, it doesn’t feel that distant.  So many great and terrible things have happened since.  While I have matured, I’m still intrinsically the same.  I wouldn’t change any of the stepping stones I walked upon to get to where I stand today.  I still have things I want to accomplish, as I previously wrote about in my post Eighty Years Old/Death Bed.  I’m in a good place moving into my thirty-fifth year on this earth.  I’m a wife, with an awesome husband and a mother, with two amazingly adorable kids. I’m more confident and happier than I’ve ever been. So, Birthday, this year I challenge you to keep the candles coming, but don’t take it personally if I ignore their numbers as I blow them out.

  

Trust Me, This is an Experience You Won't Remember

Hunter's first Dodger game

Zoey has been to Disneyland twice, Sea World once, to several Zoos, and two Dodger games.  We have also had a couple big birthday parties for her.  She even tagged along on a trip to Europe in my tummy.  Hunter went to Sea World in my tummy (poor boy won’t be able to say he was in Europe, but will surely have a better chance of making it there again over a trip to Europe).  He has also been to Disneyland, Zoos, a Dodger game and had a big first birthday party.  Zoey and Hunter won’t retain any substantial memories of these events into adulthood.  I know I’m not the only one to spend small fortunes to take their kids places and give them experiences they won’t remember.  No matter what the price, I wouldn’t take back any of these moments.  I still think they’ve been worthwhile endeavors.  They won’t have the memories, but I will.  I’ll have the pictures of the good times and/or the bad times (often these big days occurred without naps or they were overstimulated, which can make for some cranky times) and the thrill of watching their excitement.    

San Diego Zoo

Zoey can talk and remember places we have been now, but I know she won’t remember them very much longer.  As she learns new things, like letters, numbers and how to write and read she will have less space in her brain to store these memories.  Five months ago we went to Disneyland.  I asked her if she remembered going.  She said she didn’t.  I was surprised by this.  I asked her if she remembered meeting the Princesses and then she remembered.  Now, I was curious to delve into her pockets of memory.  We went to Sea World a year ago.  I asked if she remembered going.  She said she didn’t.  I asked if she remembered seeing the penguins, she said she didn’t remember that, but did recall the fishes she saw there.  I asked if she remembered when Hunter was born and going to see him in the hospital.  She said she didn’t remember holding him while he was sleeping.  This response intrigued me.  I asked her why she said that, if she didn’t remember doing it, she didn’t have much to add, of course.  I wonder if she remembers because she has seen pictures of her holding him or if she really remembers.  She then asked why daddy came home late at night while I was in the hospital, so I know she does have some memories of this time, which is over a year ago now.   

Pictures are like a mnemonic device for memory.  I can look at pictures and recover memories that are just below the surface.  The brain is such an amazing thing in that memories are like books on a shelf, they can be set aside but rediscovered and looked at again.  I don’t remember a great deal from my early childhood.  I have little pieces of memory of things that happened.  One summer when I was about three we were on vacation in San Diego.  It was an overcast summer day, we were at the park and I fell asleep on a blanket.  I ended up with a sunburn that was so bad that my cheek sort of bubbled up.  They had to take me to the hospital and the doctors had to pop the bubble.  My mom always said they did a great job because I am scar free.  I have sort of concocted a memory from the story my mom told me.  The only true memory of this event, which is really the earliest memory I have, is of being in an unfamiliar white room in a bed with white sheets.  It’s interesting what the brain holds onto and what it lets go.     

A day at the park

I wonder what Zoey and Hunter’s earliest memories will be.  While they may not remember specifics of day to day happenings or special excursions, that we spent good money for, it’s okay.  They won’t remember the thousands of hugs and kisses I have given them or the hundreds of times I will hold them when they cry.  I’m hoping they won’t remember the times when I wasn’t at my best with them, when I was cranky and short.  They won’t remember the frustration they felt from me when I was teaching them what was right (from simply sitting correctly at the table to saying sorry when you hurt someone).  It’s not realistic for me to think their childhoods will be 100% perfect, but I can only hope the percentage of good feelings will by far outweigh the bad ones.  These memories or feelings won’t be in their minds, but in their hearts and their souls.  They will affect their future relationship with me and Joe, who they are and who they will become.  No matter what they do or don’t remember of these early years, above all I hope they remember how much they are loved.