One Of The Stones In My Foundation Of Guilt

When I was about four years old my mother got into a car accident and I thought it was my fault. At that time we lived in Fountain Valley which is in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. In the early 1960's Fountain Valley was a sprawling developing land of contained townhomes and track houses. We lived in a small house that had no living grass that I could recall. There was a metal swing set in the backyard. I hated going into the backyard because the dirt was hard, the grass was dry and there were gopher holes every where. I did not know that a gopher was just a small rodent. To me a gopher was a monster that lived under the ground and made the swing set a dangerous place so I rarely went into the backyard.

I went to nursery school which I don’t really remember too well. My mother told me that I loved nursery school and that the teachers loved me. I was a charming little girl with big round deep brown eyes, an easy smile. I was bright, learning easily and participating readily in any activity that presented itself to me. I was a good girl too. I did not make many demands, I listened to the adults and did what I was told to do. I still have my nursery school diploma pasted in my baby book. I always did well in school – even nursery school, I guess.

The day of the accident, my mother brought me a gift when she picked me up from nursery school. She brought me a porcelain figurine. The figurine had a little booklet attached that explained who she was. We were driving home in my mother’s pale blue station wagon. I was sitting in the front seat next to my mother. I asked her to read to me what the booklet said. She read to me as she drove. We approached a cross-walk where a woman was crossing the street. My mother somehow noticed the woman, even though she was reading to me, and she hit the brakes but there was not enough time for the car to stop before it struck the woman. The woman made it to the sidewalk where she sat on the corner crying, a rag wrapped around her bleeding ankle. My mother was shaking. I was shaking. We later learned the woman was a nurse and she was okay.

For years I thought the accident was my fault because my mother was reading to me as she drove. It was not until I was an adult that I learned that the brakes went out on the car and that it was the car did not stop. By then however, guilt was the foundation upon which my personality was formed and the knowledge didn’t really help to absolve me.

The Upcoming Reunion

I attended an alternative school during my junior high school years (7th to 9th). The school was a cutting edge experiment in 1973 when it first opened and I was one of the first set of students to attend the school. It had classes for kids from kindergarten to 12th grade. It was based on a humanistic model, where homeroom was called "family" and every week there were group sessions to discuss just about anything. Instead of P.E. we went hiking. The openness and experimental nature of the school fostered creativity in its students.

This year, the school is having its first reunion.

When I first heard about the reunion, I was excited. I had some dear, dear friends back then who I have lost touch with and am interested in knowing more about. What are they like as adults? Are they married? What kind of work do they do? Are they still the type of people I would like to be friends with?

Then I started thinking about my life when I was in junior high. Ages 12 - 14 are not really the best year's in anybody's life, and certainly not mine. I get queasy when I think about the things I did when I was that age -- things that would make me die if my children did them! I put myself in situations where I compromised my integrity, experimented dangerously and acted in ways that were just plain stupid. Now I'm not so sure I want to see the people I did these things with -- first drug experiences, first sexual experiences. The social mechanics of the young teenager are not pretty and certainly were not pretty in the permissive atmosphere of the early 1970's. Some of my most benign memories of that time:

• Listening to David Bowie's "Space Oddity" with Rachel
• Dumping a dead snake in a back alley in Hollywood with Jenny Belleu after she stole her mother's car (we were 14 years old and found the snake during one of our school hiking trips)
• Going to Disneyland with Marina, Kevin, Michael, Dimitri and Gary
• Being Dorothy in the "Wizard of Oz"
• Getting mugged in the neighborhood park with Danny and some other kids
• Seeing a giant potato bug in the "Garden"
• The smell of school lunch
• Going to the radio studio to catch a glimpse of Dr. Demento
• Hanging out at the La Brea Tar Pits when the park was filled with street performers, hippies and LA County Museum entrance was free
• Window shopping at Sadie

But the painful memories reside like a stone in my heart. Some of it is the normal angst of adolescence that comes with the negotiation of relationships. But I also did things that made me feel anxious and guilty because I knew then that what I was doing was wrong. My parents were permissive. They trusted me because I was smart and nice. But I did things I did not want them to know about, especially things around my sexual discovery. I put myself in situations that were not conducive to developing healthy self-esteem in a young lady. I still feel very sad when I think about it.

My Earliest Memory

I was around two or maybe three years old. I was outside with other children who were bigger than I was. I was wearing a new two-piece bathing suit. I was very proud of my new two-piece bathing suit. I felt like a big girl in my new two-piece bathing suit. One of the bigger kids told me that the bottom was on inside-out. Right away, standing outside on the sidewalk, I took of the bottom, turned it right side out and put it back on. The other children laughed at me because my bottom was bare for that moment. I felt a brief sense of shame.