It (Used to) Hurt to Talk

I was a really shy kid

I was a painfully shy child. Painful as in my body physically hurt when someone, usually an adult, leaned in (long before Sheryl Sandberg made leaning in a thing) to talk to me or worse, ask me a question. My little body tensed up, I raised my shoulders to my ears hoping to envelop my freckled face already partially covered by thick chunks of pin straight light brown hair. I made this noise which was a weird combination of a hushed “mmm/don’t know,” which I figured could be the answer to any adult question or at the very least a sign to said adult to back off, immediately. That was my move. It was really all I had in my seven-year-old arsenal of how can I hide from the world around me.

My kids can’t fathom this. My son once told my husband that he thought my face was going to fall off as my family tried to get me to leave a party because I was talking to so many people for so long, and I just couldn’t seem to tear myself away from each and every conversation.

I am no longer shy, not in the least bit. I am an extrovert. I get energy from interacting with others. I love parties and events of all kind, meeting up with friends, telling stories, conversing, asking questions, all of it. My husband has on occasion told me he is in awe of my ability to work a room, to make the most of a situation that some people would not want to be in, to legitimately enjoy an obligatory work or family event. I guess I am in awe of this too considering the painfully shy little girl I used to be.

In the summer of 1981, when it still hurt to talk, I spent a week in August with my parents and brother on our family vacation at my aunt and uncle’s house in Martha’s Vineyard. I had never heard of Martha’s Vineyard. In 1981, when my friends spent their week’s summer vacation at the New Jersey shore, my family of four piled into my mother’s wood paneled Chevy station wagon to make the six plus hour drive from Pennsylvania to Woods Hole Massachusetts to take a ferry ride to an island where some lady named Martha I guess lived?

I slept on a cot in the upstairs hallway alcove of my aunt and uncle’s house for the week. The alcove was right outside of cousin Debby’s room. Debby was ten years my senior and by all accounts, very cool. She had a chair swing in her room, and she wore barrettes that she herself adorned with braided ribbons in her long dirty blonde hair, which was perfectly parted down the middle a la Marsha Brady. She also had a pair of the highly coveted Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the kind with the navy blue leather strap, gold buckle and wooden heel. My mother would not let me get a pair of Dr. Scholl’s as she deemed them unsafe for my, skinny seven year old ankles and I guess body. This not letting me get what everyone else had was a theme of my childhood and adolescence spanning the trends of Cabbage Patch Kid dolls in 1984, taffeta drop waisted dresses in 1987 and Guess Jeans in 1989. 

Debby had a friend from home also visiting for the week, and the friend secured the prime real estate of the other twin bed in Debby’s room. My brother Jonny took up residence in the boys’ room across the hall camping out in a sleeping bag on the floor in between cousin Jeff and cousin Tim’s (back then we called him cousin Timmy) twin beds.

In a quiet moment at bedtime on the first night we stayed on an island I had never heard of, I asked my mom why I couldn’t share the room with Debby and her friend as my mom sat on the foot of my cot in the alcove. She said it was because that room was for teenagers only and they were doing teenage things in there together. I imagined them braiding each other’s hair and making more barrettes with ribbons side by side in the chair swing. 

My cousins, brother and me along with our grandmother during that summer when it really hurt to talk.

Our first full day on vacation on the island in Massachusetts, all the kids walked down to the community center at the end of the road where we were to spend the next few mornings at the makeshift camp. At the community center, the morning’s activity was a giant coed softball game. Cool cousin Debby and her cool teenage friend were not interested in softball and so they wandered off to another activity, their Dr. Scholl’s sandals flipping and flopping in sync and handmade barrette ribbons flowing in the breeze seemingly whispering to me, buh-bye.

I stood silently (obviously!) nearby Jonny and cousin Tim(my) as I unwrapped my Snoopy hooded zip up sweatshirt from around my waist so that I could put it on (hood up) to protect myself from the New England early morning August breeze and from whatever stranger counselor or worse, other kid, might think about talking to me as I waited to be selected for a softball team.

By some stroke of luck cool cousin Jeff, adult-like to me at age 18 with a driver’s license and deep voice, was made to be one of the co-captains of one of the teams. I took the hood part of the sweatshirt down away from my ears, letting my pigtails break free, assured that I would be on Jeff’s team along with Jonny and Timmy. The boys would show me the way, protect me and speak for me. Jonny had learned to speak for me by necessity. He asked the questions when he knew I craved the answers. When adults came to our house for a holiday or birthday and they handed a gift to Jonny, he would immediately say in his rather loud little boy voice “and for Wachel” not being able to properly pronounce my name. Jonny was the Charlie McCarthy to my Edgar Bergen, or something like that.

Cousin Jeff and his co-captain, another deep voiced man/teenager who also like Jeff had longish curly hair, flip flops, a solid summer tan and a Martha’s Vineyard perfectly worn in rope braided bracelet, looked around at the group of kids strategizing how to put together some kind of a softball team. With more precision than I imagined they needed for a pick up community center game where half the kids weren’t even wearing sneakers (I was, my newish Tretorns) they started to call out names or in some cases make gestures to the kids whose names they didn’t know. A lot of the older boys were chosen first because, well the patriarchy, followed by a couple of athletic looking girls. One had a terry cloth sweatband wrapped around her forehead a la Bjorn Borg. She was cool, obviously.

Jeff and his co-captain picked Timmy, then the choice went back to the other co-captains. Next up, team Jeff chose Jonny. I waited for my name to be called once it was their turn again, only they didn’t pick me. They chose another boy who looked somewhere in between Timmy and Jonny’s ages, maybe ten years old? What did that asshole with the bowl cut and brand new white, vineyard rope bracelet have on me? I waited patiently for the next pick and the next pick. They never picked me. What the actual fuck? My own flesh and blood left me in the pool of little kids who seemed kind of okay with not getting chosen for the team.

The snoopy hood went back up as I stood there in shock and a dark deep silence. A nice looking college girl counselor put her hand out for me as she explained to me that we would go inside the community center to make a candle for the rest of the morning. I took her hand as the tears came pouring out of my squinty blue eyes. I couldn’t hold them back as hard as I tried. Nice girl counselor put her arm around me to move me away from the potential lifelong trauma of not being selected to play on a non-competitive softball team with the only people I knew and loved on a strange island in Massachusetts.

Jonny saw me crying as I was guided away, and I saw him pointing at me towards Jeff and Timmy. Jeff started to walk over to me perhaps realizing that he and his cool rope bracelet wearing man friend may have done some permanent damage or perhaps they just felt bad that I was crying. They had hearts, but it was too late. I would not, could not take their pity offer to be on a team where I could never feel truly welcome. Nice college counselor girl sensed my messed up state of mind and like the sisterhood of the traveling we didn’t get chosen to be on the team pants safely escorted me to the confines of the small arts and crafts space in the community center.

Once inside, I managed to get my shit together so that the kids who actually showed up that morning to do arts and crafts would think that I was cool and was there with them by choice. I stood at the back of a long line of arts and crafters as the counselor handed each of us a candle wick. No candle, just a wick, a sad lonely piece of skinny string. We were going to make candles. Actually we each made a candle and that took all morning, for three days.

It was a pretty simple system, one in which I would almost welcome the opportunity to do these days, mindless work like stuffing envelopes or knitting a scarf. You just waited your turn in line and when you got to the front, you dipped your wick in a giant hot vat of wax and then went straight to the back of the line and waited for more dipping.

At the end of the third morning, I walked back up the road to my aunt and uncle’s house with a fully made red candle, the extra-long wick dripping over the end of it. By that point in the week, the not picking Rachel for the softball team had been apologized for, made into no big deal at all and over explained by my mom as “candle making sounds like so much more fun anyway!”

I guess if your thing is waiting in long lines for the thrill of a dip of hot wax and the hope that you won’t burn your hand off then sure, she had a point. But, really like most everything my mom ever said to me, or at least that I can remember, she was kind of right and she managed to make me feel better. I left the Massachusetts island at the end of the week with a fully formed candle in my hand and perhaps a sense that I might be able to get along in a world without my brother and cousins speaking for me.

My mom placed the misshaped and too skinny red candle in a silver candlestick and displayed it on the side table next to the couch in our upstairs den next to a lamp and a corded telephone. The candle lived there in that house in Pennsylvania for as long as I did and then some. I’m not sure where the candle ended up. I suspect it went to candle heaven during a clean out of the den when it became the office after I had graduated from college and entered the work force in magazine publishing in New York. I was deemed a full-fledged super chatty extrovert by then.

I recently recounted this story to cool cousin Debby, now Deb, who is still ten years my senior and still by all accounts, very cool. She had no memory of the incident and then profusely apologized on behalf of herself and her brothers and mine, telling me what jerks they were back then. I laughed and she followed my lead. They really weren’t jerks then, and they are most definitely not jerks now, some 40 plus years later. In fact I count my grownup cousins and brother as some of my closest friends. They have been there for me in ways I never could have imagined when they ditched me for a half week of coed non competitive softball.

I was the jerk, and I don’t mean to say that shy kids/people are jerks. I know some lovely shy people although I think when you are a shy adult, you are just known as an introvert. It’s just that I was a shy kid trapped in the body of someone who had something to say and that felt so freaking awkward, so bad that I spent my first decade on the planet in discomfort and often, in tears.

It feels so good to talk now. It doesn’t hurt….at all.

NEW PODCAST ALERT - COUSIN EPISODE, TIM(MY) LEVY

How fitting that on this most recent podcast, our guest was cousin Tim(my) Levy. Since playing non competitive softball in the summer of 1981, Tim has gone on to become the owner and founder of Fairways & Dreams Indoor Golf, the premier indoor golf facility in the Philadelphia area. Tim is also a practicing lawyer who advises emerging entrepreneurs. Cousin Tim tells the story of how Fairways & Dreams came to be on this episode and his accessory is……a very special golf club, a first for Life’s Accessories.