FREEDOM AND ANIMALS (Second book of Animals I’ve known and Loved)

WILD, AND FREE, ARE THE SAME TO ME:

When I married Tom, I began to emerge from someone who was like a chameleon--adapting to everyone else’s claims on me--into who I really am. He not only loved me the way I was, but encouraged me when I wasn’t sure of myself--when I felt that my self expression wasn’t good enough. He saw me as pretty, if not beautiful, and after several years of marriage, rocky mostly because of my own insecurities, I began to feel more sure of who I was and that I was okay after all.

When I was an impressionable young child of four or five, my braids came undone in play and my mother, in an irritable mood said, “Go go inside and fix your hair! You look like a witch that way!” I then thought of myself as ugly unless every hair was in place. I learned how to braid my own hair, and it was in braids from the first grade until the end of the seventh grade. Then it was forever in a pony tail. I actually felt like I didn’t fit in my own skin if I curled my hair and went to school with it falling free around my shoulders.

When I had my first serious boyfriend when about 15, I gave him a camera for his birthday. When he went to take my picture, and when I turned towards him and smiled, he asked me to close my mouth first, then snapped my picture. I think I knew in my gut at that time that I would never really trust that he thought I was pretty. When I forgot and smiled at him from then on, I’d quickly feel I should cover my mouth or close it, as I thought my teeth were unattractive. I had that trademark Carly Simon gap in front. This was before Carly Simon was a singing hit--where some even thought the gap kind of sexy.

The boys in high school sensed my vulnerability, and found great sport in teasing me about anything they could detect that would be a good subject for teasing me for the day… whether it was my choice of wearing both orange and green on St. Patrick’s Day (I wasn’t Irish… what did I know about those being fighting colors), or whether it be my inability to read well out loud. Years later I identified with Charles Shultz’s Peanuts‘ comics when one read, “Security is to know you aren’t going to be called on to read out loud.”

I ended up hating school and hating those boys for a long, long time after graduation. I found more than comfortable companionship with my animals. Like my brother said about his ducks… sometimes my dogs and cats were my “only friends.” My close friends with whom I felt comfortable confiding with were younger than myself so I’d feel I had the upper hand in being older. I dated the losers of society, because I wouldn’t and couldn’t hurt their feelings… they knew this and felt safe asking me out. I had plenty of dates because of that… very virginal ones. They were safe… I was safe. It helped some boys taken as the nerds of my day to show how great their personalities really were when they felt secure.

My first husband Al was a great guy, but he was the type, like Groucho Marx, who said, “I would never belong to a club who would have me as a member.” Instead, with Al, he could never be married to someone who was good enough for him, because if she was good enough for him, she wouldn’t have married him in the first place. So, with that, along with my turning out to be no more domestic than my mother in that I was no cook, nor could I keep a house neat, Al always gave me an impression of being disappointed in me.

I had to find my place in life outside of the home, and finally did at Church Bible studies, and as a Den Mother, then Sunday school teacher for Junior High age, and with the League of Women Voters. When I felt God in my life, I then thought that if I was good enough for God, then how could I be not good enough for ANYBODY down here on earth. By then, I was going into my forties and looked at my life ahead and all I could see is a life that wasn’t really me or mine. Ironically it was then (feeling that God was in my life) that I finally had enough steel in my spine to call it quits in my marriage, and went to a lawyer in Binghamton who drew up legal separation papers for us, and set out to eventually get a no-fault divorce.

Since I couldn’t have an in-house separation, I lived next door at Fessy Washburn’s house. She was a widow by then, and I asked if I could stay in her walk out basement for $100 per month. I then stayed at home during the day… when I wasn’t working at Hilltop Retirement Center as an aide, and going to school to become an RN. It was only at nights that I slept over at Fessy’s. It was as quiet as a tomb in her rec’ room downstairs. I slept on a day bed, and got used to making the bed daily so she would never be embarrassed if her guests passed through her downstairs. The downstairs was cool in the summer, and even cooler in the winter, as she kept the thermostat at 63 degrees… no higher. I liked it cool, and I loved the privacy. I discovered that I had ringing in my ears that I had never noticed before. I guess with the crickets in the summer, and the furnace going in the winter and the regular added noise of kids and a snoring husband, I just never noticed my tinnitus.

Poor Wendy would miss me and come scratching on Washburn’s basement door. I’d let her in quietly and she’d sometimes sleep with me or next to my day bed. Three years later when I moved to an apartment, Fessy sold me the daybed to take with me. I dated while separated, feeling as divorced as anyone who had finalized theirs, though I stayed just separated until I met Tom. I was real marriage shy, and unwilling to ever turn over my freewill again. I felt that free will was a God given right that marriage had stripped away from me. I wrote this poem in those lonely years of hesitant dating:

I tried to feed the wild bird
With quiet outstretched hand
And still it wouldn’t trust me
Nor near me would he land.

I wondered how he learned it
Instinctively a sage,
Misplaced love and trust can mean
A close, confining cage.

With deepest understanding
Why he chooses to be free,
I leave the seed on ground below
While he watches from a tree.

With my spirit soaring
in abandonment and ease,
I am alone, not lonely
And I travel with the breeze.

You stretch your hand to beckon
To trust you I may learn
Just leave your gift beneath the tree
Perhaps I will return.


I think I felt wild and free in my separation from Al. I told Tom my shortcomings, and he was good about it, and accepted me for ME. But there is always a feeling of a bond in marriage, and I’d have it no other way. However, I have a problem fencing anything in, and keeping anything tied up. You see… wild and free is the same to me. Somewhere inside me, I’m wild again, and will remain wild forever. So I live vicariously on the wings of the birds I’ve raised, and the unleashed dogs with whom I rove through the woods while they seek rabbits and chase squirrels. Yes, wild/ and free/ are the same to me.