birth to a part chimp, and you had one ear that tried to migrate toward the nose and was sort of curling inward, you know, like how a sunflower will tilt its head and lean in toward the sun.”
I instinctively reached up to feel my features, hoping they had settled into their proper place after forty-four years of living.
“Thank the dear Lord they handed you over in that pretty blanket and showing the good side of your face, the side that had a nose on it. Plus, of course, they had the cap on you and must have worked on that ear to get it up under there so we wouldn’t have to see it curling toward your bent nose. Thank goodness the doctor said we could mold your face, so every night your sweet daddy would go to the crib and work on your nose and ears, kneading them like Play-Doh.”
This is exactly how the world began for me.
As for my sister, born two years later, she started out in life being hailed the most beautiful baby to EVER come into the world at Spartanburg General. She had the perfect head, not a mark on her.
When Mama went into labor with Sandy, she wore a beautiful aqua gown and robe set—like something Eva Gabor from Green Acres would wear—and gave birth to the most breathtaking baby girl anyone had ever seen. The doctors and nurses couldn’t take their eyes off this perfect specimen of brand-new human life.
“She is so angelic,” the nurse told Mama as she held her daughter in a pink teddy bear blanket. “Nothing like your first, is she?”
Mama didn’t know what to say. “You remember her?”
The nurse sort of blushed and stared at the floor. “Hard to forget her, but I hear she’s much better or I wouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Oh, yes, she’s gotten so much cuter since you saw her in here. Lots of the fur has rubbed off and her nose is starting to inch over more toward the center of her face, thanks to my husband’s handiwork. He’s a true sculptor, that man.”
The nurse had no manners. “What about those ears she had? Biggest things we’ve ever seen in this hospital. I am not supposed to tell you this. Shhh, our little secret, but we had some plaster and made molds of them because we were absolutely certain no one would believe it when Dr. Milner wrote it up for the American Journal of Abnormalities . We didn’t do photos, knowing you could have sued us. One of her ears was much larger, you know.”
Mama was getting mad and her pain meds were wearing off. “We figure her head will grow and everything will eventually balance out,” she snapped. “I measure them once a week to make sure they’re stabilized and not enlarging, and when we go out, until she gets more hair to cover them, I have handmade bonnets with flaps that do the job. She’s really a cutie-pie nowadays, so go on and give an enema or two and let me be unless you have more pain meds on you. My bottom is throbbing like it’s grown its own heart.”
“I’m sure your firstborn is now pretty as a picture,” the nurse said with a quivering voice. “Oh, but look at this little piece of heaven’s finest you have now. The good Lord sprinkled beauty dust all over her precious features. Those ears are flawless and so cute and tiny.”
Yes, it was true, my newborn sister’s ears lay flat against that lovely round head that needed neither forceps nor the hospital janitor’s Ultra Hoover to pull her 8-pound body from Mama, since I had seasoned her passageway with my brutal birth and donkey ears.
Sister Sandy stayed pretty for the whole week until Mama checked out of the hospital, the entire staff still marveling and cooing. The very next morning, during an afternoon feeding in our little bungalow near the duck-filled lake, Mama walked into the nursery and screamed. Baby Sandy’s genetically perfect ears had sprung from their resting position plastered against her head and shot out like two slices of bologna, huge and perpendicular to her skull. They also grew four inches apiece over the next three weeks, scaring everyone who saw them as they glowed red and were hot to the touch.
To this day we aren’t sure what caused our ear malfunctions, but, needless to say, Sandy had a plastic surgeon correct and beautify her pair. I left mine alone, targets for years of bullying and teasing.
We had no hope for turning out to be anything but crazy. Birth sets the stage, parts the curtains and gives a new human life its first audience. If I tried to pinpoint the exact age that any chance of turning out a regular kid was nipped in the bud, I’d have to say around four years old, when Mama and Daddy signed me up for Kiddie Ranch private kindergarten in Thomson, Georgia, a little Peyton Place town just outside of Augusta where the Masters Tournament is held each year and it meant something if you could get tickets so my daddy got on the list and always had them.
Here’s one big mystery: If your daddy can get tickets to the Masters, why isn’t his daughter asked to join the Junior League? Not that I care. Not that I’m still sore, mind you. Twenty years of therapy and I’m fine, you hear?
Throughout my entire life I’ve both loved and feared and tried daily to please my daddy. I think he was mystified by being the father of a nervous, jittery little child with tics and annoying behaviors that linger to this day.
David Sedaris, one of my author heroes, also suffers from OCD—Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder—and tics. I read it in his book Naked that he licked things: lightbulbs, fixtures, furnishings, and he jerked his head around and rolled his eyeballs up into his skull.
My disorders were checking things a million times and peeing every three to five minutes. This is when the Kiddie Ranch teacher tattled on me and told Mama I tee-teed more than I breathed.
“We went in there with her forty-two times in a single day and, sure enough, I hear it trickling out plain as day,” the teacher said. “Where she’s getting this water I have no idea because all we give them is a Dixie Cup of Kool-Aid. She must be like a camel and store it all in her humps.”
The teacher smiled at her witty remarks, but Mama was all in a tizzy as any mother would be whose kid was a human PVC toilet pipe.
She carted me to a kidney doctor in Augusta, who saw my bare possum (vagina) and I died a thousand humiliated 4-year-old-girl deaths. He prescribed the teensy Valium I took every morning before kindergarten to stop the tics and pee-peeing. I guess it worked. I fell asleep by 10 AM and never awakened until Mama pulled up in her aqua Plymouth, cigarette smoke curling from the windows like kite tails.
There was no way of turning into debutante material with a mama and daddy like ours. I’m not saying that as a bad thing. I love my mama and her sacrifices and selflessness, but her infamous spankings with flyswatters, some of which still had giant Georgia-fly remnants in the webbing, and her constant fears her daughters would become hussies and not get husbands, were terrorizing.
So was her insistence on calling our vaginas “possums.” I know of zero women whose parents refer to their privates as a possum, but ever since I can remember, that’s what my parents have nicknamed my sister’s and my you know whats.
We’d hear things like this throughout our childhoods: “Did you wash your possum?” and “Cover up that possum.” and “I need to take you to Dr. Grayson and see why you keep picking at your possum.”
My parents explained that they chose that euphemism so no one else would catch on.
“It’s not like we can say ‘vagina’ in public, Susan,” Mama said. “Everyone would know exactly what we were talking about, and I’m sure not about to call it a vulgar term. I’ve never cared for the word. It sounds like an emotionally needy body part. It’s too engulfing a term, like a giant
