Christmas 2015

It’s coming on Christmas/

Cutting down trees/
Putting up reindeer/
Singing songs of Joy and Peace/
-          River by James Taylor

I’m sitting here listening to James Taylor’s Album Christmas to a song called River.  I love the first few lines I have posted here for y’all.  I am trying to get in the Christmas / Yule Tide spirit.  I thought I would tell y’all a few stories of Christmas past, and as always we will start with Oma.

Oma made the holidays joyful, with a huge tree covered in lights, lights on the house, and a plastic Santa complete with Reindeer outside.  What I remember about her most was Christmas at her house.  The whole family would gather.  My uncle and his family would drive in from Houston, and the rest of us would come in from our local towns and communities.  There was often a well timed phone call from Germany calling to wish us well.  With a seven hour time difference they would have already had Christmas and be heading to bed at that point.  With that call and all of us there, it would seem as if we were not so far apart, for one night we were this big loving family, even if there was an ocean between us.

I think Christmas was when we expressed most of our German culture and traditions.  A week or so before Christmas a large metal box would arrive from Germany sent by Oma’s brother, from a company in Nurnberg.  It was filled with all kinds of candies, cookies, and breads.  For us it was Christmas Eve that was most important.  That’s the night we opened presents.  There were lots of presents, but nothing extravagant.  Angie and I often got matching gifts.  One year we got these huge life size dolls that Angie’s mom had made for us.  Angie’s looked like her’s, with blond hair and blue eyes.  Mine looked like me with brown hair and brown eyes.  We both got typewriters that year.  That was Oma’s last gift to us.  We were 6. 

In our area of Germany they did not do stockings.  The custom was to do Weinachtstellers, or Christmas Plates.  They were these thick paper plates with Christmas images on them, and fluted edges.  They were filled with nuts, an apple and an orange (luxuries during winter, not that many generations ago), a good chocolate bar, cookies, gold chocolate coins (for wealth), Marzipan, a few candies and sometimes a small gift.  My last plate from Oma had a lip gloss dressed up as a dolly, on a string.  Everyone had their own plate, per their own tastes.  I have a wonderful photo of those last plates she made sitting on a table in her house.  Christmas at her house was always warm and loving.

We kids had our own table, where the appetizers were, I always ate heavily from the relish tray.  The relish tray for those of you, who are not from the South, had black and green olives, and several types of pickles on it.  We kids would all get excited and run to open the presents, or try to eat from our Christmas Plates, have to be corralled back, told that no, we had to eat our dinner first, and then we could open presents and have our plates.  Only after dinner, desert, and finally when they were almost done with Coffee and/ or starting on the Schnapps would we be allowed to open them.  Oh waiting was such agony!  That joy and wonder of the season, that since of family and connection, across towns, states, and continents, when Oma died it all went away.  As far as I remember, after her death, we never gathered as a family again to have Christmas Eve.  Oma’s brother kept sending the metal boxes from Nurnberg, until his death, but it was never the same.

Christmas at Novelle’s, Daddy’s Mom, was different.  There were no plates, no calls from Germany.  I have this great memory of us going to hunt for a tree for Novelle.  You didn’t go buy a tree back in those days.  We drove down the road, until we saw some trees we liked, and then got out of the truck with an ax and just cut one down. 

We were out doing this one Christmas, and Daddy had been chopping on this tree for a bit, and this man walks up to us.  He was dressed all in hunter orange, gun over his arm, and I think carrying some birds.  He stopped to speak to us and my Daddy got real nervous like, and the man says to us, “This your land?”  Daddy says, “No sir.”  God I knew were in so much trouble, when he said it like that, and the man says, “Mine neither,” and then he just walked right past us.  It never occurred to me, until much later in my life, that we were not supposed to be on, whoever’s property we were, and damn sure not stealing their tree.  I think Daddy chopped down a little scrub pine, could not have been more than 4 feet tall.  We brought the tree back to Novelle’s, stuck it in a coffee can full of dirt, put some paper chains on it and called it a Christmas Tree. 

Mom and I have continued with the tradition of Christmas Plates and talking on the phone to the family in Germany on or around Christmas.  Calls to German, for most of my life, were just too expensive to do any time you wanted, so you had to save it for something special.  Now we have Facebook and can talk to them anytime we want!  Yeh for technology!

I went looking for the origins of the Christmas Plate early on in my Pagan path.  I found that it comes from the tradition where a bowl of milk would be left out on Christmas Eve as an offering, and if it was accepted the next morning, it would be filled with nuts and gifts.  I believe, although I cannot think of the reference at the moment, that the milk was left out for Odin and the Wild hunt, which includes Holda.  Milk is a traditional offering left for her, since she is related to children and domestic animals like goats and cows.  That makes sense to me.  Offerings for Odin and the animals that pulled his chariot could also be left in the bowl instead of milk, things like hay and carrots. 

In my family traditions the Christmas Tree does not come down until the New Year.  Oma refused to wash clothes between Christmas and New Years.  She believed it would bring bad luck.  She was big on luck.  She loved shamrocks and had lots of superstitions, like no shoes and no hats on the table or bed.  She loved shamrocks so much that she took Good Luck Bear, the green Care Bear with a shamrock on his stomach, as her personal totem, when she got cancer.  He went with Oma everywhere.  I think we even buried her with it.  On his stomach Oma wrote her personal mantra, “I can, I will, I must.”  

It took me a while to track down the origins of leaving the tree up and not washing clothes.  Oma was unknowingly passing down to us, old traditions of Yule.  The Christmas Tree was left up from Christmas to Epiphany, which covers the 12 days of Yule, a holy time for our ancestors, a time out of time.  House work was traditionally not to be done during this time of year, cause you cleaned like a mad woman right before it.  You were to take these days off and not clean house, or wash clothes.  The old saying is that, “no wheel, should turn during Yule.” 

I have, since I became Pagan, tried to keep the 12 days of Yule, which starts on Mother’s Night the night before Winter Solstice and goes until New Years Day.  I used to clean like a mad woman starting about Halloween and going right up until Mother’s Night, until Jay told me he didn’t like that, cause it just about drove me crazy.  The old belief is that when the Wild Hunt pass over your house during Yule, and finds it neat and tidy that Mother Holda will bless you.  I hoped each year that she would bless us with a human child, but that didn’t happen.  So the crazy cleaning has fallen by the wayside, but I am still anxious to get up and clean the top of my kitchen cabinets before Yule starts.  But Jay will have to help me with that, so we will see. 

For the last, oh so many years, I have made sugar cookies for Christmas.  I always try to leave Mother Holda an offering of these cookies and milk on Mother’s night.  The next morning I remove the milk and pour it in her well, a sacred spot, in my little grove area, where my outside altar is.  I split the cookies between our fur children (7 dogs,3 goats and pig). 

I hate the commercialism of Christmas / Yule Tide.  Some of my Christian brothers and sisters get it right.  I feel most Americans today are missing the entire point of Christmas.  Excluding Christmas in July, in this country we start putting out Christmas stuff just as soon as the Halloween stuff is sold out.  Christmas commercials start before Thanksgiving, which has gone from a major holiday into a minor one.  I like my holidays one at a time, Halloween, Thanksgiving and then Christmas / Yule Tide.

We can’t even give thanks in this country for all we have, without being bombarded with what almost seems like the foreplay of Christmas.  This ecstatic rush of presents, and lights, and parties, and charging up one’s credit cards to keep up with the Jones, and so that no one in the family might for a moment, be denied the smallest things they want.  People fight each other over dolls and rolls of wrapping paper, that will all at some point be thrown away.  It all finally culminates in Christmas Eve / Morning with the ripping open of presents, and beleaguered now broke parents.  These happy children who have no value of a dollar, who as adults will be dismayed when they finally learn, they can’t have everything they want.  When the kids go to their room and the parents are left to clean up all the mess, they are as exhausted as if they have just had a long loving session.  And in a way they have.  They have been fucked by this idea of crash commercialism that we are feed as Americans.  Buy more and you will be happy!  It’s all about making the kids happy!  X marks the spot, sorry darling, but that’s not it.

Long before the myth of Santa, or of the Wiseman giving gifts to the Christ child, or of Odin and Holda in the Wild Hunt, it was about Winter.  We forget in our cushy lives of AC / Heat and ready available food supplies, that winter used to be the time when lots of people died, those most vulnerable among us, the young, and the old.  Presents were given at Winter Solstice, the start of winter, so one might SURVIVE to see the next spring.  Gifts were practical, warm clothes, good portions of food, blankets and furs to keep warm with.  Anything that might help that person you loved, get to the Spring.  Neighbors helping neighbors, family helping family, friends helping friends, no hospitality was to be refused even to one’s enemies during winter.  The most valuable resource we have, is each other, both now and then.

Parties were held in the north lands on Mother’s night to honor the mothers in our lives, both alive and long dead.  To honor the gift of life, and the sacrifices they made for us to be here.  I think of those Viking Mother’s often, in the dark, by a smoky fire, never quite warm, and never with quite a full stomach.  Spinning, knitting, weaving, a gift to keep a brother, a husband, or a daughter warm and to make it through to the warmth of Spring.  The mother’s worried then, if she could ration out the food they had stored up long enough, to get them to the first harvest, and to when the chickens would again lay eggs, and they would have fresh protein for their children and themselves.  During Yule the family would come to visit and gifts would be exchanged, it would be one of the last times they would see their families before Spring, because soon the snow would be so thick, that traveling would be almost impossible. 

So as you are maxing out your credit cards this year, standing in line at Wal-Mart reading this on your smart phone, I urge you to think, “Will this gift help the person I love get safely to the Spring?”  Maybe put back the Xbox that you can’t afford, and get them some fuzzy socks and a good book instead.  I’m just saying.

Last year Juno told me that she had never really had a Christmas, that her family had always been too poor.  So Jay and I gave her and Kay one.  Many poor kids grow up thinking that Santa doesn’t love them, or that they were not good enough to be given gifts at Christmas.  I hate that.  I hate that in this culture, some poor kids believe that no matter how good they are, they will not be rewarded by presents, because that is what our culture teaches them.  If you are good Santa will come, and give you these lavish gifts.  Maybe if we didn’t buy into all of this, and got back to what the root of what each of our holidays are, no matter your tradition, it might be better for all of us.  Me, I’m hoping for functionality and practicality this year, I am hoping for fuzzy socks.

Blessed Yule to all of you. 

Ilsa

Many thanks to my Heathen Brother Rob who proofed this for me. 

http://urglaawe.org/Englisch.html

Novelle

My Mother remarried when I was 6 to a wonderful, loving, kind, and jolly man named Jef. My biological father, Beau, had left my mother when I was 2, while she was ill and in the hospital recovering from brain surgery. 

The night I met Jef, a.k.a. Daddy, was very unusual.  It is one of the very few times I have heard the Gods voice outside my body.  I was sitting behind my mom, combing her hair, at her then boyfriend’s house.  Daddy had just come in and was sitting down drinking a beer.  I was looking at him, when the room stopped, and time stood still.  I heard a woman’s voice say, “This will be your father for the rest of your life.” And then everything just clicked right back in.  I figured well, I guess she must be right.  I walked right over to him and said, “I’m Ilsa.  I’m 6 years old.  Can I comb your hair?”  He said yes and I jumped up in his lap.  Don’t ask I was into hair at that age.  I have no idea why. 

Daddy tells the story that he had met mom at the Dairy Queen in Logansport.  She and I had walked in one day and he was sitting with his buddy, who turned out to be a mutual friend.  The friend introduced them.  Daddy says, “I thought, now who is that beautiful woman in those maroon jeans and with that cute little girl.”  He could not stop thinking about her.  He found out she was dating a friend of his and decided to pay him a visit, with the express thought of stealing her away from him.  It worked.  They met and married within 6 weeks.  They’ve been married for 30 plus years now. 

I immediately began to call him Daddy.  I was instantly accepted into the family as one of theirs, accept by Novelle.  She was a mean and evil woman.  She always saw me as a step-grandchild, even after being legal adopted by Daddy, having my name changed, and beginning to study Daddy’s family’s genealogy.  Nothing I could ever do for her ever pleased her.  She always saw me as lesser than. Things would just be going along fine, and I guess she felt she needed to knock me down a rung, and then she would start her shit. 

She would berate me on a regular and public basis.  I remember many, many family dinners after church where she would sit and tell me how fat I was, and was I going to eat all my food.  NO ONE stood up for me.  Not my parents, my cousins, my aunts or my uncles, none of them.  I was forbidden to defend myself or say anything to her by my parents.  In fact this treatment from her continued until my teens, where I would drive to family functions in my car.  If she insulted me, I would quietly pick up my plate, place it beside the sink, and leave. She never did this to her other grandchildren, some who were bigger than me.  I believe she did this because I was her step-grandchild, and she always, until the day she died, saw me as such.  I am still listed in the family bible as a step-grandchild. 

The other thing she loved to do at dinner was ask me when the last time I saw my father was.  I responded with, “He’s sitting at the end of the table.”

“No I mean the real one.” She said coyly.

Now I had not seen Beau, my biological father since shortly after my 6^th birthday.  And she knows this, she knows this, but she just has to stick the knife in and twist it to get a rise out of me.  With no one to stop her, and being forbidden to say anything to her, I just had to sit there and take it.  I would go home and be in tears, just so upset.  I would tell my parents and they would say, “She is your Nanny.  You have to love her!”  I’d already been down this road with Grandpa.

This all comes to a head in August of 2002.  I am drinking coffee with the old men down in Kickapoo, trying to get inspiration for my upcoming “Prodigal Daughter” article, I was writing at the time in the local paper.  She walks in. I run up to her, calling her name.  I say come over and meet my friends.  She is furious with me.  She says, “you need to come away with me now!”

“Why?”

“You need to come away with me now!  You don’t disturb men while they are working!”

I am confused.  They are just drinking coffee.  I kind of dismiss her words, and start introducing her.  When I say, “Y’all this is Novelle, my grandmother.” 

She says, “Hump!  I’m not her Grandmother!  She’s Jef’s adopted daughter!”

I am in shock.  It’s been twenty years since my parents married.  Most of the men in that room did not know I’m not Jef’s.  She does this to me in front of a District Judge, the Sheriff, and several Police Jury Members.  I am public humiliated and disowned.  I run crying to the bathroom. Eventually I get in my car and drive, crying, 15 miles to where Maddie is working.  I collapse in her arms a crying, sobbing mess.  I had nobody else.  I had not met Jay yet and my parents are working in Oklahoma.  I was just devastated.

Now you have to understand I come from a very small community.  I have been told all my life that my biological father and his family are nothing but white trash, nasty people, and don’t care for me.  Jef’s family is well respected, has connections, and at one time long ago had money.  At this point in my life I have tried to down play my biology, at times wishing I could rip out my biological fathers brown eyes and change them for Jef’s blue ones.  Wishing to change my very DNA and not be Beau’s daughter.  But his damn brown eyes keep staring back at me from the mirror. The secret, of who I really was, that I had been trying to keep under wraps for many years was blown apart by a woman who said she loved me. From that day forward I never called her “Nanny” again.  She lost that right.  Even now, years after her death, I still call her Novelle. 

But I one upped her.  She tells all of Kickapoo who I really am, fine, I go on and tell the whole parish.  My “Prodigal Daughter” article is due.  Late that night I write it and the opening words are, “I have been living a lie.  I am not who I claim to be.”  I go on to detail who my birth father is, how he left, the fact he has had no contact with me, and how Jef has been the only father I have ever know.  I finish and pick up the phone and call Daddy.  It’s the middle of the night.  He steps outside the trailer for a cigarette and to listen.  When I am done, there are tears in his eyes and you can hear over the phone he is choked up.  I later frame it and hang it in his bedroom.  When the article goes to copy, I lay the paper across Novelle’s car.  Checkmate.

I have a few more contacts with her.  I cuss her out one day not long after the article comes out and tell her she is lucky to have a granddaughter like me, who loves her, who cares about recording the family’s history.  She should count her lucky stars I have had not illegitimate children or been on drugs, as that might disgrace the family.  She should be lucky that the only thing she can find wrong with me is that I am drinking coffee with the old men.

Once Christmas I go to her house to get my present.  My parents are desperate to get me to see her, and want me to forgive her.  Momma Muriel and Jay are waiting there at my parent’s house when I return.  I burst into tears and weep for a long time with my head in Momma Muriel’s lap.  I am inconsolable. 

The last time I see her, she is giving away some of her things. Dad goes with me. I go in and get her pictures that are in her trunk.  You know the old ones, the dear ones.  I also get the recipes that are in the little green box she keeps on the counter.  As I am leaving she says, “You know I love you Ilsa.”  I tell her, “save that shit for someone who believes it.”

She dies in October of 2008. I start singing, “Ding dong the witch is dead!  The Witch is dead!” My hatred for her is still so strong I tell my best friend, “You best come with me so I don’t spit in this bitch’s coffin!”  Thankfully she comes with me and I restrain myself. 

There is however a strange post script to this story.  For years I have refused to put her, or my grandfather for that matter, on my altar, even though her husband, her son and lots of her family are on there.  I refuse to work with someone that I know was a horrible person and I did not like in this life.  I felt for a long time that Novelle was in Purgatory.  That she was learning what an awful person she had been to some people.  Now she was not just evil to me.  I remember one day sitting at her table and she told me, “I’m trying to break up your Uncle’s marriage so he will go back and marry his first wife.”  He was on wife number three.  WHAT!  What kind of crazy, manipulative person does that!  And to her own kid!

I had a dream about her, a vision more like.  She came to me and wanted to tell me how sorry she was for the way that she had treated me in this life.  She said, “I am sorry I did not understand.  I did not understand what kind of grandmother you needed me to be.”  And then she sat down and read me a story.  Something she had never done with me as a child.  I have forgiven her, in a way.  I feel she has moved on and is no longer in Purgatory. 

Ilsa

Blood in the water

I am a big girl, at the moment I am currently pushing 350 lb.  and just under 5 ft tall.  I have not always been big.  As a little girl, about age 6, I loved to run.  I remember one time Grandpa was going to whoop me.  I said, “Oh no you’re not!”  and I took off running around the house.  He just calmly sat on the porch until I ran out of steam.  I made three trips around the house before that happened and I collapsed.  I was also a very picky eater.  If I didn’t like what was on my plate, I would just flip that plate over, food and all. 

My mom married my new step-dad, Jef, when I was 6.  I remember thinking that I wanted to gain weight so that I would look more like my new step-dad Jef, and then people would not know I was not his biologically.  Oma dies, when I am 7.  I become very depressed.  It is not long after she dies that I walk in to Mom and Dad’s room and tell them that I want to die too, to be with Oma.  Mom, who was already in a bad place at that time, kind of loses it.  Although I have no idea how to accomplish such a thing, I think this may have been my first suicidal thoughts.  I begin to gain weight.  In the pictures of my 8^th birthday you can tell I am chunky. 

It is in those early years I develop my first cases of Bronchitis and my first case of Pneumonia.  My new step-dad, Jef, who I will refer to as Daddy from now on, smokes in the house.  It is a while before we understand the connection.  I am terribly allergic to smoke.  As the idea that second hand smoke was bad for you is new, and Dad’s are hard to change, he continues to smoke in the house until I am in my teens.  By that time I am having about 3 cases a year or more.  I am told I must not get to hot outside or run and play too much or I will get sick again.  For years I am watched for signs of getting to hot, being red and sweating.  My running days are over.

Mom continues to lose it for several years after Oma’s death.  We cannot even talk about Oma or she will burst into tears. She nearly grieves herself to death.   She becomes anorexic and one night tucking her in bed, I can count every rib.  Mom never gets help and no one, I guess, ever suggest it too her. I continue to gain weight.  My Pediatrician suggests putting me on a diet.  I am 9 years old.  Mom begins to recover soon after and becomes obsessed with my weight.  Eating disorders are very common in those who have been sexual abused. 

Growing up unconditional love was something I only got some Oma.  As a child most of the “I love you’s,” came with a “but” attached.  I love you, but you’d be so pretty if you just lost 10 pounds.  I love you, but you should lose some weight.  I love you, but your butt is getting too big. 

At Novelle’s, Daddy’s mother, she berated me on a regular and public basis.  I remember many, many family dinners where she would sit and tell me how fat I was, and was I going to eat all my food.  NO ONE stood up for me.  Not my parents, my cousins, my aunts or my uncles, none of them.  I was forbidden to defend myself or say anything to her by my parents.  In fact this treatment from her continued until my teens, where I would drive to family functions in my car.  If she insulted me, I would quietly pick up my plate, place it beside the sink, and leave. She never did this to her other grandchildren, some who were bigger than me.  I believe she did this because I was her step-grandchild, and she always, until the day she died, saw me as such.  Despite being legal adopted into the family, and doing family genealogy on her side of the family. I am still listed in the family bible as a step-grandchild.  She even goes so far as to tell me one day, that no man will want me because I am so fat. We had a complicated history, but more on that later.

I never asked to be put on a diet.  I never saw anything wrong with my body till everyone else did.  Then the self hatred began in earnest.  Wanting to please I did as I was told, but the weight would not come off.  I look back at my pictures from that age and do not see a fat child, maybe a bit pudgy, but not in need of diets.  I never knew when the newest diet would begin.  My mother became the food Nazi. I was of course not allowed cakes, cookies, or cokes, even in moderation.  Things I had never been denied before.  Some days I would come home and only be allowed Slimfast for dinner, while my father ate a full meal, plus dessert. Mom would diet with me.  I never knew when the diet would start.  I have done Weight Watches, wheat germ, Slimfast’s and lots of other fad diets that were around at the time. And of all cruelties, when I went to stay with Novelle, she feed me as much ice cream, cokes and cookies as I could hold.  I remember eating extra portions, and others left over lunches at school. 

I was bullied in High School about my weight, by Jeremy Pace, John Scott Smitherman, Cajun Rink, and Neil Alexander.  They were my tormenters.  Every day from about middle school till my senior year, I heard about how fat, how ugly, how stupid and how crazy I was, sometimes on an hourly basis.  It was during these dark years that I first truly began to contemplate suicide, and stayed depressed most of the time.  I don’t know if they could smell the blood in the water or they just picked me for no reason. It was everyday, constant from them, being told how fat and ugly I was while sitting in class and anywhere else they wanted to at school.   I developed chronic stomach aches and anxiety over going to school.  When I told my parents, I was told two things that kids are cruel and I was never to fight back.  That if I did it would go on my permanent record and I would not get into a good college.  Again I did as I was told. 

Only one teacher every did anything to them, my 7^th grade English teacher.  Jeremy and them were being especially bad that day.  She called him out and told him to apologize.  She made him go outside the room until he was ready to apologize.  When he came back in he would ask for my forgiveness.  I told him I would not forgive him.  He did this about three times.  Finally I told the teacher, I will never forgive him for what he has done to me.

Jeremy and I had an interesting relationship.  He constantly harassed me at school, but we had United Methodist Youth Group (UMYF) together and he never messed with me there.  One night our leader took us into a little chapel to pray.  She told us to write our deepest heart’s desire on a piece of paper and pray over it.  She gathered them and slowly read out loud, with no names, from the back of the chapel.  Mine was, “Please make them stop teasing me.”  After that Jeremy was no longer the ring leader, and most of it stopped.

It wasn’t until Cajun joined the group in high school that the mooing started.  They would moo down the hall and call after me, “Free Willie!”  If you don’t get the moo thing, its cause Borden, the milk company, has a cow named Elsie.  And of course Elsie sounds like Ilsa, thus the mooing.  And I guess they thought I was as big as a cow.  Cajun loved to torment me.  He even went so far as to paint penises on my car one afternoon.  An action, over which, would get him suspend, again.  Thankfully the Principle had been hiding in a parked school bus, watching the kids, and had seen the whole thing.  My great joy was watching Cajun have to scrub my car with a toothbrush!

Jeremy’s mother was one of my favorite teachers.  I found her on Facebook some years ago, and I told her of the torment that her son and his friends had put me through.  I did not hear from her again for a while.  Turns out she was waiting to confront him about all of this.  He responded to her that yes he had bullied me in high school.  When asked why, he simply said, “Everyone did it.”  His mom apologized profusely for him.  She had no idea any of this had ever gone on.  She did give me an explanation though.  About the time this all began, Jeremy’s dad was abusing him.  It was threw this statement that I was able to forgive him.  If he was being abused, he may have simply used me as a scapegoat.  It was a way for him to blow off anger over the abuse.  I have never received apologies from the others.

I never stood up for myself until two weeks before I graduated high school.  I was sitting in class, quietly holding my cousins hand, when Eric Miller stood up and gave me a Texas Titty Twister.  Now for those of you who don’t know what that is, let me enlighten you.  A Texas Titty Twister is when you walk up to a girl and grab her nipple and twist it one way or another.  When he put his hands on me I had had enough.  I snapped! What the hell were they going to do to me next!  That was too far!  I grabbed Eric by the shirt and threw him against the desk.  But that wasn’t enough.  I felt the rage boiling in me.  I grabbed him again, and threw him to the floor.  He was stunned.  I stood over him and said, “You ever fucking touch me again and I’ll kill you!!!” Everyone was shocked.  They had never seen me react to anything they did to me.  Hey I was fixing to graduate, what the hell could they do to me.  I am hauled into the Vice-principles office.  She not angry at Eric for what he did, or what I did, she’s angry at me for holding my cousins hand!  She tells me there are to be no public displays of affection at school!  I still don’t know what kind of punishment, if any, Eric received.  But this incredible thing happened!  After that incident, nobody, my bullies included, ever messed with me again. 

My diets continued until I was 18, when I told my mother that I was legally an adult and she could no longer force me to do anything.  I remember my elation on my first day of college, no one mooed at me, and no one said anything about my weight.  I was free.  It was finally over. 

There is only one more incident of Mooing in my life.  It happens late in my college years.  I am walking past a group of freshmen.  They Mooed.  I decided to scare them a bit.  I figured part of it was because they had never had a fat friend and no one had ever called them on their shit.  I turned and went up to them an introduced myself.  I meant to ask them why they had done that, but the look of shock on their faces was enough for me.  They were clearly embarrassed.

No one Moo’s at me anymore but when I am out in public I am ever vigilant that it might happen again.  I have my comeback all ready.  “Thank god you told me I was fat!  I didn’t know!  I can’t see it every morning when I look in the mirror!”  Come on mother fuckers I’m ready for you this time!  

Ilsa