old. The spanking that then commenced was much worse than the original whack that had sent me to my room. Isn't it interesting that my tongue got me into trouble—as it would continue to do for so many more years?
Whether or not I received spankings, I continued to lie. I lied to my mother, my father, my siblings, my teachers, my employers, my lovers, my husbands, and my friends. Why tell the uncomfortable truth when they won't understand it anyway? A lie is really just a timesaving device, and if it makes me look better than the truth would, so much the better. If it prevents me from laying out cash, better yet. If it gets me whatever I want and helps me avoid some unpleasant reality, that's best of all. At least that's what I used to think.
I lied myself right up to the brink of death and into recovery; even then, in the beginning, I lied to myself about why I was there. Now, a half-century after that tongue-poking incident, I'm finally learning how to be honest. And not just with my words.
I am a recovering member of a twelve-step fellowship; I do what I say I will do when I say I will do it, and I don't say things that aren't really so. And that's how my soul grows.
THE SOUL WORKOUT
If you let your child answer the phone, please don't ever tell them to tell the caller you're not there. It confuses and upsets them, and it teaches them that it's okay to lie.
When you don't know something, just say so. The amount of trouble this can save is amazing.
Have cash-register honesty. If they overcharged you a dollar, you would let them know. Let them know when they undercharge you a dollar, too.
When I was about six years old, my father got a Bell & Howell black-and-white home-movie camera. Because of the technology of that time, the first movie he made was silent. It shows my mother, my younger brother, and me walking along a sunny sidewalk alongside a chain-link fence. On the other side of the fence, in a stranger's yard, was a swing set.
We lived in an apartment; we had no yard and no swing set, so this fenced-in plaything was tempting. On the movie screen, I see me holding my mother's hand like the good little girl I was always trying to pass myself off as—if not actually trying to be. I see my little brother lunging for that fence, and I note that I'm being edged out of the frame. My dad keeps the focus on Dougal, not quite four years old and already a devil, as he seeks to tear himself out of my mother's grip to climb the fence. The toes of his sneakers are just able to fit into the diamond-shaped interstices of the wire mesh. A struggle ensues, then the frame goes upside down and black as my father loses control of the camera, presumably to intervene and get Dougal back onto the sidewalk side of the fence. Then, when the film resumes, the focus is still on Dougal, swinging away and pumping his legs for all he's worth, having won another battle with my mother, and evidently with laws ranging from those of gravity to those regarding private property. He's smiling, and I'm nowhere in sight. I had always hoped to see myself in those old home movies, but somehow I never made the final cut.
All the old home movies are like this. In one reel, taken at Edinburgh Castle on our first trip back to Scotland as a family, I noticed my father was filming me. I hoped to do something entertaining enough to merit inclusion in the finished home movie, so I began dancing a childish, improvised “highland fling,” which lasted scant seconds before I must have been yelled at to “quit it!” My smile disappears in an eye blink. My arms fall to my sides and my feet stop moving. Then I slink out of camera range and finally hide behind my mother. Onscreen, my disappointment and dashed hope are visible, almost palpable. I'm surprised my parents kept this reel, much less showed it. Hope disappointed is a heartbreaking thing to see on a child's face.
Over and over again throughout my childhood, I got the message that I needed to quit it and to shut up, NOW, when what I was hoping for was someone to listen to me, to look at me, to see me, and maybe even to appreciate me. I was a slow learner, though, because I kept on hoping the result would be different one day. I kept trying to stand up, no matter how many times I got hammered down. And I always got hammered down. Even today, the vision of hope disappointed on another person's face, especially a child's, can make me sob like nothing else.
I saw a movie once that was a highly fictionalized account of a man incarcerated in a maximum-security prison where a sadistic warden brutalizes him into murderous insanity. The maximum time an inmate was legally permitted to be held in “the hole” (solitary confinement) was seventeen days; however, this man spent three years there, stripped, bleeding, freezing, and beaten with clockwork regularity. The entire movie was brutal, but the scene that destroyed me emotionally was the one in which a cruel jailer opens the cell door, allowing the man to think he's finally going to get back into the general population after months in the hole.
The man's ruined, beaten face expresses pure, unbelieving joy, and you can see hope welling up in him—the hoping-against-all-hope he allows himself to feel, the hope that he will be able to feel sunlight on his face, experience human contact, and see sights other than those of the inky-dark hole for the first time in God-knows-how-long. Then, after only a half hour of freedom, he is thrown back into his solitary cell. All his hopes of freedom are crushed. With an animal howl, his transformation from man to murderous beast is almost complete; however, beasts do not hope. Only humans do or need to. That scene resonated with me, gave me nightmares, made me weep, and had me talking to my therapist for many sessions.
When my childhood hopes were crushed, my self-acceptance was crushed, too. I must have been hardheaded or a cockeyed optimist to allow myself to hope for recognition that was never going to occur. I eventually got the message that I was unacceptable. When self-acceptance goes, acceptance of others is almost impossible to achieve. Trust goes along with all of these things as well. How can you trust when your hopes are constantly dashed? How can you be optimistic when experience tells you that you will never achieve that thing you want so much? Yet hope, optimism, trust, acceptance, and self-acceptance are all so necessary to live a life of recovery. Without them, it's almost impossible to work and embrace the steps.
The poet Emily Dickinson called hope “the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul.” Hope—the most necessary and most delicate and easily crushed emotion—is, paradoxically, the most resilient of spiritual qualities. When the mythic Pandora opened the box that let out all the evils into the world, one little speck of something very important remained at the bottom; that thing was hope. We need hope to counteract the many “evils” with which our lives are sometimes filled. I needed hope to move forward into recovery, hope that I could live as I saw others in recovery living, “happy, joyous, and free.” Being desperate enough to hope once more, and trusting in the process, carried me through those early days and sustains me now as I work through the steps and try to practice the principles of twelve-step recovery in all I do.
Hope is a tender thing. Try to nurture it in others. They need it. And try to find it in yourself; you need it, too.
THE SOUL WORKOUT
When someone tells you what they're hopeful about, like getting that new job they just interviewed for, don't point out all the practical reasons it won't happen. Rather, wish them well.
Saying “better luck next time” builds hope. Saying “I told you so” kills it.
Support “hopeless” causes— e.g., prison reform, the elimination of land mines, spay / neuter programs at local animal shelters. You may never achieve total success, but you can hope that you will make a difference.
