secret.
The latest class of VerbTribe just ended. This week, I will feature on 37days the writing of VerbTribe members in this most recent class. These excerpts are in response to daily prompts the class provides, and I hope you will appreciate the voices of these writers. If you’re interested in becoming a VerbTribe member, go here for more information on the next class that begins January 3, 2013.
Secret
-Amy Rawe
As I was at 5 or 6, I still am at nearly 46. Tender-hearted at the core, but trying to wear tough. Sometimes it fits easily, but most of the time tough is too scratchy for my thin skin.
I think about me as the little girl on Christmas morning, and how I held the new raggedy ann doll in front of myself, arms wrapped around tight, almost like a shield. I had a new red cowgirl costume on, with fringe on the skirt even. Yet I didn’t hold the doll on my hip or to the side so that the outfit — or myself – could be photographed fully.
I still do this. I stand behind the camera. Behind the page. Behind my daughter. Behind the man, even when he was betraying me behind my back.
I’m the one who blends in, behind the “seens.” I’m the one who swallows my voice and coaxes others to belt theirs out.
I can still taste the fear I felt when I was that girl, running down the street from the German Shepherd that was chasing me, barking. I had the raggedy ann doll slung over my shoulder, holding tight to one of her ankles, as I ran, sobbing. Is it odd, or is it just is, that my fear wasn’t that the dog was going to bite me, or maybe even maul me, but that he would rip apart my doll. The protection I felt for the doll was but a flash of the fierce love I now feel for my five-year-old daughter. I tell her the story of my doll and the dog, and assure her that we made it home just fine. The dog, in reality, was close enough to snatch the doll the whole way but didn’t. Just barked.
“Maybe he just wanted to play, Mama,” my daughter says. “Or tell you a secret. But he had to yell and bark and chase because you wouldn’t stand still and listen.” She is giving my advice right back to me, mimicking what I say to her when she’s afraid of an imaginary werewolf, or monster, or even something real. I tell her to look at what she fears, that maybe it has something to tell her.
And so I am the same now as when I was the one who was that vulnerable girl. But now I am the storyteller. Am I now willing to stand up front, and be fully exposed on the page? The small cowgirl still within me says, “It’s ok now, sweetheart. Stop running. Let your fear tell you a secret.”
