Grace.
I ended the last blog post vaguely, and I did that for a reason.
I didn’t want to go in to detail just yet, but I didn’t want you contemplating all the bad ways my story with nanny could be headed either. I wanted you to know that no matter where this part of my story went…that nanny was good. Nanny IS good. Nanny just wasn’t NANNY for awhile after my papaw died. Understandably so.
When papaw died, we were left with nothing. I told you that not long after his death, nanny and I left the church she had pastored for my whole life. Not only did we leave people I had known my whole life, nanny also left friends she had fellowshipped with for longer than I had even been alive at that point. Everything we had grown accustomed to over the many years was gone in a matter of months. It felt like everything was just always up in the air. Were we going to be ok? Were we going to lose the trailer? Where would our next meal come from? The questions were endless.. We lost people and we also lost the little income nanny had from pastoring. This was devastating to our livelihood.
We were left with NOTHING.
Being an adult now, I can see how this put nanny in a massive fight or flight mode. She was probably thinking “how in the world am I going to take care of myself let alone Merina and her brother, and now her dad and his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s daughter. I can’t imagine the pressure she felt. I can understand now why she made the choices she did.
I was ANGRY…beyond angry with the decisions she made during this time. Looking back, I don’t feel anger anymore. I can’t even feel it if I try. I just feel an overwhelming amount of grace towards her…and that HAS to be God, because for awhile I was angrier with her than I had ever been with my parents.
Trust that doesn’t exist can’t be broken. I never trusted my mom and dad. Nanny on the other hand, I trusted her with everything in me.
Like everything else at that time,,,that too was gone in only a matter of months.
I’m probably going to be everywhere in this specific post, and I apologize in advance. I’m running off of 2 1/2 hours of sleep but I really want to get this blog post up today. I think its a huge part of my mission to be consistent with this blog spot no matter what..
I began getting really sick only a couple of months after my papaw died. It wasn’t long til the ER visit I briefly told you about and the psuedotumor cerebri diagnosis I got. At this point I had already lost a significant amount of vision in both of my eyes, and it was only getting worse. I was throwing up in the school bathroom daily from the pain the headaches caused me. I threw up Mini Wheats so often that to this day I can’t even think about them without gagging.
I learned that the teachers didn’t believe I was in that much pain simply because they didn’t want to believe it. If I cleaned the bathroom stall after I threw up I was “faking it” because there was no evidence that I had actually been sick. If I didn’t clean up after myself I was “making myself throw up” ORRRRR my favorite…..I was “overeating breakfast and may want to skip breakfast entirely before”…LOL ….I have to laugh or I’ll cry. Do you think they would have ever said that to an average sized student? No way,
So every day I would start my day with a headache, throw up all over the school bathroom by late morning, have splotchy vision for the rest of the school day, get yelled at for not paying attention in class, make it home to the couch by the afternoon…and live there with something over my face to keep the light out of my eyes until I fell asleep and stayed asleep….only to wake up and repeat that ALL over again. I was 13 and had no quality of life.
School was brutal at that point, too. Not only was I barely making it through the school day, but I was getting bullied so bad. I was in middle school at this point and as I got older, the bullies just got meaner. I come to miss just being called “fat”. Middle schoolers were so much more cruel.
I was fighting for my life in math class one day. I had one of the worst headaches of my life. Beginning in middle school I began wearing a girdle every day to school. It didn’t make me look skinnier, I was morbidly obese after all… a girdle wasn’t going to change that. I guess it just made me feel better about myself. I can’t really tell you why I began wearing a girdle to school at such a young age, if you want me to be honest. I just know I wore them religiously. I wore them so tightly that I couldn’t roll it down by myself, meaning there was no using the bathroom for the whole eight hours I was in school. I would hold my pee til I actually cried. I wore them this tightly for all of my teenage years. Later on, I even began wearing THREE at a time.. I’ll explain that one in a minute,
ANYWAYS
So I was in math class with one of the worst headaches I’ve ever had and I hear kids behind me openly laughing. I learned VERY young that if you even suspect someone is making fun of you… DON’T bring attention to it. It only makes it worse. Act stupid and naive, they eventually get bored without a reaction. So I tried to ignore it until it got so loud that it disrupted the teacher and the whole class took a pause. Come to find out the girdle I was wearing was so tight that it caused me to have INSANE “back fat”. You know how I say I have a front butt and back butt now? Well back then I had front boobs and back boobs lol..
And the kids just thought that was hilarious.
I didn’t miss the quick hand-to-the-mouth-quick-turn-around-before-anybody-notices-you-laughing thing the teacher did. That one hurt because that teacher knew my family and they thought very highly of him. I secretly called him “turd” under my breath from then on out. I saw him not long ago on social media and still found myself calling him “turd” under my breath lol.
After that situation I did two unhinged things.
-I wore a second girdle to go underneath the first girdle. The first girdle resembled biker shorts which is what caused the back fat, and the second girdle went around my waist like a corset of sorts. They were the dream team of girdles. The corset one took care of the back fat and the biker shorts one made sure the corset one didn’t roll down lol.
-The second unhinged thing I did was I found the master bully. The really well known, popular one, and I made an agreement with him that I would pay him my lunch money every day as long as he didn’t openly embarrass me anymore. I figured skipping lunch wasn’t going to hurt me. I didn’t eat lunch in the lunch room anyway because that just made me a walking talking target so I always just saved my lunch money and used it for something else. Surprisingly, he agreed AND he stuck to his word. As a matter of fact, he even began taking up for me in class. When someone would say something mean he would say “Hey now Merina is cool! Leave her be!”….they never knew I paid him to be kind to me. They thought he saw something cool in me or something, and in return, they began to talk to me like I was a human. The teacher started being kind to me too! Somebody had said something really mean out loud about me, and the master bully openly took up for me…the teacher chuckled and said “Well Mr.**** It seems you have a crush on this here lady. I didn’t think she was your type.” The master bully did what I paid him to do and said “naw Merina is my friend. Leave her alone.”
I thought that was the best $5 I ever spent because nobody ever bothered my in that class anymore. Not even the teacher!
Little did I know I was creating a warped mindset during all this. “Paying” for friendship was something I kept doing all the way up until I met Shane. Nobody could just like me for FREE. Their friendship, their kindness, their “love” always came at a price. I still struggle with this in my adulthood. That mindset is basically engrained in me at this point.
I eventually had to leave school because of the psuedotumor cerebri and how aggressive is was attacking my brain and eyesight. I don’t remember being worried about myself. I remember being sad that I couldn’t pay anybody to be my friend anymore.
That makes me want to throw up.
The school put me on something called “homebound”. That’s when you’re too sick to go to school so a teacher comes out twice a week to give you new lessons and pick up your completed lessons. I would do school with my teacher in a nightgown sitting at the kitchen table. I didn’t have it in my to get dressed. I got used to wearing pjs around the teacher and he got used to seeing me in them lol. Maybe that’s why I’m still always in my pajamas who knows.
I liked this teacher. He was kind, and he was GOOD at teaching. He had me understanding things like math problems within 15 minutes. I thoroughly enjoyed school during my homebound days!
Not only was I on homebound because I was too sick to go to school but I was also on it because I had to be in Knoxville ALL the time. My neurologist was one of the best in the state. He was brutal and had no beside manner but he knew his stuff. It didn’t matter that he sent me home feeling like dirt…he put me to sleep during the spinal taps so I liked him lol.
He would grill me about my weight, make me feel like my blindness was all my fault for eating food, send me home crying, caused me to develop a gnarly eating disorder, and had me running laps around my trailer til I almost had a heart attack…but I overlooked at that because I didn’t have to be awake during the spinal taps. I felt like that was a pretty good trade off for the emotional and physical damages my appointments with him caused me lol.
I had to have several back to back spinal taps. A spinal tap is when they insert a needle into your back and drain excess fluid off of your brain. Essentially, psuedotumor cerebri is a false brain tumor. It’s an excessive amount of fluid on the brain that mimics an actual brain tumor. When you have the fluid drained off of your brain, it relieves the headaches for awhile. I hated the spinal tap part but I loved not having headaches for several weeks afterwards. After every new spinal tap, the headaches came back faster though. The relief periods in between spinal taps got shorter and shorter so the neurologist was suggesting I have a shunt done. The fluid was just accumulating so fast that the spinal taps were mostly in vain at this point.
I never had the shunt done. I really needed it done, but it never happened.
This is where the word GRACE shows up.
Nanny had began seeing someone during this time period. I didn’t like it, but I dealt with it because I figured she needed a friend.
That’s what I thought they were….friends.
They began going out together a lot and I began to have my suspicions that this wasn’t just a “friend”. But I ignored those feelings cause surely I would know if this person was more than a friend, right?
Not only were they going out very often, but he began coming over to the house a lot too. I hated that. In my 13 year old mind that was my papaws house, and nobody else was welcome there. I didn’t have a say, though so just lived in my room that wasn’t really my room anymore because it had been taken over by my dads girlfriends daughter…..lol. I pretended it was still my room though and was only reminded it wasn’t when she kicked me out because she didn’t feel like company lol. He also was showing up to my spinal taps. Jesus, keep me near the cross…..but I hated that.
Let’s do this rapid fire, cause I’m not sure I’m healed from this or will ever be healed from this… but GRACE, Merina, GRACE,
RAPID FIRE KEY EVENTS
Nanny comes home with a “friendship ring”.
Nanny is getting ready one day and asks me if I want to go with her.
“Where you going nanny?”
“I’m getting married today.”
BOOM. CUE THE VIOLINS. READ THE OBITUARY. MY LIFE IS OVER.
dramatic, but really though lol.
I can’t put into words the feelings I felt at that moment. I had never before felt those feelings and I haven’t felt feelings like that since. All I can tell you is that is a core memory for me, and that core memory absolutely taints every day of my life from that moment up until SHANE. I can assure you I was devastated every agonizing moment up until SHANE walked into my life. Call it a trauma bond, call it whatever you’d like to, but Shane saved my life. I would not be here if I hadn’t met him. I promise.
I stood at the top of our driveway and watched nanny drive off to get married to her friend, lol. It didn’t slip past me that I now had nobody that stayed.
My mom chose her life and left me.
My dad chose drugs and left me.
My papaw died and left me.
And now nanny had left me.
The only silver lining I could find there is at least my papaw was taken from me. He didn’t choose to go. I kept that in my pocket and thought on that often. For awhile it gave me a reason to stay on earth cause shoot, at this point..I wanted to leave me! It told me that I wasn’t so insufferable that EVERY person I loved wanted to leave. One wanted to stay. One would’ve stayed. One did stay til he couldn’t anymore.
I honestly believe God showed me so much grace in my marriage because of this….this pivotal moment in my life where I officially realized everybody had left. I think that’s why Shane found it somewhere in him to stay through everything I did to him. I TRIED to push him away. I tried everything I knew to do to push him away. I wanted him to leave. EVERYBODY left me.
But he stayed. I owe him everything, because for once SOMEBODY STAYED.
After her car was out of sight, I walked next door to my mamaw and papaws house. Apparently they knew what was going on, and they didn’t go to the wedding either. Apparently everybody but me knew what was going on. I guess everyone else was smart enough to put the pieces together. I didn’t think I had any pieces to put together though. I thought nanny told me everything, but I can’t blame her for keeping things from me. Lord knows, I kept plenty from her. The only difference is I kept what I kept away from her FOR her. She didn’t keep what she kept away from me for me. Nanny doesn’t like conflict and never has. I’m a lot like her in that way. I just wish I would’ve been worth the conflict that one time.
Its tough to look at her wedding pictures and know that everyone was there except for me.I try not to think about that when I see them. I try to find happiness somewhere in me for her. It comes a lot easier these days.
Nanny came back a married woman. She left for her honeymoon that night and I stayed on the bathroom floor until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, I moved to the couch in the living room because that’s the only thing I had that was mine anymore.
Next post 11/22/2024