No Girl Is an Island
(But Sometimes She Really Wishes She Lived on One)
I take after my dad in that I tend to be stoic, introverted and reticent about talking about my feelings. I believe in each generation improving on the last, however, so I am only occasionally verbally abusive to household objects.
My mom, on the other hand, is classically extroverted. It is well-known in my family that at parties, there will be no stopping her whirlwind of energy that borders on mania. Nobody will be lacking in at least four salad dressing options — whether they asked for them or not. Hell, whether they are eating salad are not. Family dinners were punctuated throughout with my dad saying, “Honey, please sit down.” Since he died in 2002, my siblings and I have carried on the tradition.
Her extroverted personality is how my mom is able to go to churches where the people all around you are waving their arms, murmuring “Yes, Jesus” in a discomfiting, vaguely sexual way, yelling out “Yes, Jesus!” is a way that is not vague at all, and generally making it abundantly clear to those around them how they feel about Jesus and how Jesus is making them feel.
I don’t go in for that kind of thing. Between the ages of eleven or twelve, I tried to pretend like I was as into praising Jesus as all the other kids in youth group were. I couldn’t sustain it. Faking a religious experience is exactly the opposite of what a religious experience is supposed to be, and, besides, I was beginning to suspect I didn’t believe in any off that stuff anyway. Anyway, if I were to be religious, I’d live by more of a Matthew 6:6 model of conduct.* I much prefer to spend time in my room, preferably in the company of fictional people. Or dead people. Or fictionalized dead people. They’re the best.
I have a feeling that I am somewhat baffling to my mother. She thrives in groups of friends, with people around her, but there are often times when I don’t anyone around at all.
I haven’t written much about friends yet in this work. According to my mom, when I was a kid I was this close to universal popularity, but I would keep my friendly classmates at bay by seeming sullen or uninterested. She called me “stuck up” a lot then.
I don’t dispute what she may have seen, just her interpretation of it. I had a perfectly good best friend who lived across the street, and that was enough for me. The truth is, I distrusted the nature of school friendships. In a group of more than two girls, I invariably was the one left out of secrets. If I confided to one girl that I didn’t like something about another, the first girl would immediately go tell the other, starting an elementary school drama that I could not bring myself to care about.
Come to think of it, there were a lot of elementary school dramas that I didn’t care about. Like when I somehow started the trend of collecting milk straws. I quietly amassed a plastic baggy full of them in my desk, not really telling anyone about them, but somehow it turned into a Thing. My poor first grade teacher had to deal with girls whining to her about how so-and-so took her straw or so-and-so was taking straws out of the garbage. I remember thinking, Don’t complain to the teacher about straws. She isn’t going to care. I was right. Our teacher told the girls that if she heard one more word about straws, she would have all of the straws confiscated. At that point, I stopped caring about straws too. Once too many people were involved in something, whether it be straw-collecting fads or friendships, it became more than I wanted to deal with.
This may be why my hero in the second half of elementary school was Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell. Left alone on her island home when her entire tribe is taken to Santa Barbara by missionaries, Karana lives, what was to me, kind of a dream life. She was completely self-sufficient. She builds herself a house with a fence made of whale bones and kelp! She kills a pack of wild dogs and tames their leader! (Even though he was the dog who killed her little brother, which I found a little weird. But, whatever! She tames a wild dog.) She makes a gorgeous skirt out of cormorant feathers! She catches and kills a devilfish just to prove she can! But then later she swears off violence toward other living creatures!
To me, Karana had that indefinable it that I was looking for. Was she lonely on her island with nobody for company but Rontu her dog and occasionally the Aleutian woman who came with the sealing expeditions? Of course. But she dealt with it. She was an entity unto herself. She made her own sunglasses. She was cool.
I finally visited Mission Santa Barbara, where this plaque memorializing "The Lost Woman of San Nicolas" hangs, in June 2009, something I'd been wanting to do since I was nine. Wasn't it classy of the DAR to make sure their credit was nice and big like that?
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* “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Despite being a fledgling non-believer, I excelled at memorizing Bible verses.
Usually I just lurk, but I wanted to pop in and say that these are pretty wonderful. Fun, relateable little things. :)