Domesticating Mary and Other Fun Stuff

By the age of 9 I had lived through so much that I faced my new life in Columbus Mississippi as just another adventure. I would not have been surprised if I was not in Columbus for very long. After all, by the time I celebrated my 9th birthday I was adept at moving, being transient, having no roots, for I had lived in Panama, Pennsylvania, Alabama, California, Texas, Arizona, and now I was catching my breath in Mississippi.  In the short time that I had walked the earth I lived in 9 different homes and attended 3 different schools, spoke English with a true Southern flare frosted with a Spanish accent, spoke Spanish colored with some Gaelic, and a smidgeon of  French learned in the Alabama school system. By the time I was 9 I was very colorful. My mom and her new husband rescued me from a life filled with uncertainty and hurriedly introduced me to a life of predictability. There were new people to get to know like Jim Finley, my mom's husband, and I had to learn who my mom was for I had forgotten so much about her. She still had her red lips, she still painted her fingernails red and white and she still wore her hair up, but I did not know who she was in her heart. My mom had a dream of what our family life was to be like and I had no dream. The weed in me wanted to continue to be my own boss while at the same time longing for and needing guidance. I was in desperate need of tender loving care while at the same time being petrified of love. It does not take long for a child to adapt to their surroundings, and over the course of time since my parents divorce, I had adapted to my ever changing habitats much like a weed adapts to its every changing environment.

(Image found via Google on http://blog.muddybootslandscaping.com/tenacious-r/)

It's true, you know, that humans can be just as wild as the wildest animals in the woods, or jungles, or deserts, or even the swamps. The difference between a wild animal and a feral like person is the wild beast lives in one reality, a world consistent within an environment that stays pretty much the same whereas the tempestuous human spirit lives in two different worlds - one world of performance and conformity and one world devoid of personal rules or boundaries. Due to my impetuous essence my  new life created two worlds within me where I often collided with myself. Those collisions between my wild nature and the domestication attempts caused me a bit of grief with consequences. In Mississippi, I began to learn that there were other types of hazards in life besides being hungry and uncared for. I faced a new conflict, the conflict of living with ramifications of not following rules or receiving accolades for following the rules within a family like structure. These new rules set down by my mother and her husband were not like the comforting rules I embraced at school or at church. My mom's rules poked at my character, my spirit, at who I was when I was in my most wild expression. There was unending conflict inside my immature brain because I had been my own pilot in life for what seemed an eternity and now? - now, there were people in my life who wanted to change the ravenous, beautiful weed I had become into a docile, obedient little wall flower.


To be continued .....



(All stories blogged by me are my property and protected under copyright laws. No part may be used or reproduced in anyway without my permission ~ Maryanne Mesplé)