When I Was Alone

I was the only girl my age in the cul de sac where I grew up, which meant that I only had people to play with when the boys needed an extra number or they were feeling generous (or when a girlfriend from school asked me to come over for the afternoon). After all, I couldn't catch or throw a baseball to save my life (although my football spiral was a thing of beauty) and my basketball skills were unreliable. I had reasonably thick glasses from the time I was nine, which probably had something to do with it.

But I was the only kid who wanted to play the part of Spock when we played Star Trek with someone's LEGOs and sometimes they needed an extra number for a sports game (my little brother was a thousand times better than I was by the time he was seven, so he took my place completely when I was 11, which was also when the boys determined I was truly a girl. After all, I was now wearing a training bra.

So I played alone a lot, even before I got a bra.

The thing was, I was only seldom sad about it. I'm alone most of the time now, too, but I'm sad about it most of the time. What was different and how do I get back to not minding being alone?

Having parents and a brother didn't much diminish the solitariness of my social life, so for the most part in this discussion they don't matter. And my parents didn't really relate much to me, so we didn't play a lot, either. Right now, I'm addressing my solitude on a personal and social level daily and ignoring the fact that I had a family then. The occasions when we played together or went off to play with friends were occasions, not my every-day existence, which is what I'm addressing here.

What did I do with my time?

I read. I played with some of my dolls (but not the Barbies ... I liked the ones that looked like little aliens better). I wrote stories and drew and painted pictures a lot. I had solitary toys to play with: Fun Flowers when I was around 8, which basically involved filling molds with liquid plastic and cooking it; and a chemistry set when I was 12. I could spend hours quietly and contentedly playing with either of those toys. The "adult supervision part" involved my parents asking me if I knew what I was doing, then going off and reading or watching TV or something in the living room. I only broke one test tube and only burnt my fingers twice. And I had fun.

I also used to make up my own fun when the other kids weren't available due to naps or not wanting to play with me or simply being gone. For example, I decided to be a detective (I read a lot of kids' mystery books), so I put together my own detective kit using flour and a mini magnifying glass. Then I hid my kit in a tree where no one else went and skulked around the neighborhood looking for clues of crimes.

I 'm not sure how other kids did a lot of things, because of being alone a lot. For example, I taught myself to climb trees by repeatedly trying to climb the walnut tree in our front yard starting when I was 8. I was too short to quite get my foot up into the fork of the tree until I got my growth spurt at age nine, but once in awhile my little brother would help. Then I'd climb higher until I got to a place where getting down was going to be a problem. Plus I was afraid of heights. Sometimes the only way down was to slide to the next foothold. I came away with many scrapes and scratches in my early tree-climbing days. But I got good enough that when Rev, the most volatile of the boys on the block, decided he was angry and wanted to hit me, I could climb the nearest tree faster and farther than he could, even if I had to run to the tree (I learned to run faster than the boys, too, because I couldn't hit back very hard).

Mindlessly routine physical activities covered the exercise part, when the boys didn't need someone to even out the team numbers. I rode my bike or roller-skated around that cul de sac more times than I could count. I fell down once or twice because the sidewalks weren't all even and there were always twigs and pebbles and little toys in the way. I fell off my bike once or twice and scraped the hell out of my knees, shins, and feet. But I always went back. They were meditative activities. They allowed me to daydream. And daydreaming was one of my major pleasures, after reading.

Every two weeks, our neighbor (our babysitter before we became latchkey kids when I was 11) took us to the library. Her two kids, me, and my little brother. A lot of times we rode our bikes. I had a basket on my bike and a book bag on my back and I still took out the limit (25 books), filled my own basket and bag and took up the extra space in the other kids' baskets (they would get one or two books). Within a week I'd be finished with my books and ready to go back to the library. I spent my allowance on books. I spent my parents' money (and patience) on the Weekly Reader Bookclub book catalog that we got monthly or quarterly at school. So I always had books to reread. I think I'd cleared out the kids section of the library for fiction by the time I was 11, then I graduated to adult fiction when a nice librarian introduced me to science fiction. Reading then took up a lot more of my free time and I didn't care much at all that the boys didn't want to play with me.

The boys may have been little jerks often enough, but I got the last laugh on them a few times. Like the time the teen boys down the block got out their five-foot gopher snake to show it to us. The boys wouldn't back up because that would be girly. But I was the only one who was willing to have the snake draped over my shoulders. And I was the only one the teen boys and girls in that family pulled up into their very tall tree house.

I was also the only one to make friends with our next door neighbors, who were a single mom with three or four teenagers. Mom later told me that the word was that the woman was a prostitute because there were always men over 'visiting' her. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn't. But her kids were kind to a little kid who was sometimes lonely. The family pets included a giant tortoise, a sheep, and a sheepdog, and the oldest guy,who slept in the little room that was separate in the backyard, kept the door wide open so no one could say anything was wrong while he played Flying Purple People Eater for me on his stereo.

I lived on the same street as my brother and a number of other kids. But if you asked us, I imagine you'd think we lived on entirely different streets. They lived in one neighborhood and I lived in another.

I think I need to find a way to enjoy living in a different neighborhood than other people, to find the pleasure in living a more solitary life. I was a happy child for the most part, not developing depression or anxiety until just before puberty, between 10 and 11. And even after that, I could still enjoy my solitude in between times with friends. That's where I want to be again: in my own little world because they know me there and like me.  (grin)