Walking in Circles Before Lying Down

Chapter 1 Remember to Write from Your Unique Perspective I think one of the things that makes me unique is that as far back as I can remember, I have always talked to a lot of things besides people. I found it comforting, a way to prove that I existed. From early childhood on, I was haunted by the feeling that no one could hear me. I was not without my reasons. My mother, Joyce, demanded and usually got all of whatever attention was available. She was beautiful enough to have stumbled into an accidental modeling career when she was seventeen just by waving at a photographer at the beach. Dressed in her yellow plaid shorts set and a big straw hat, she looked like a cast member of some seldom seen television show greeting smitten fans. A few months later, when her picture turned up in hundreds of inexpensive frames for sale at discount drugstores, it made my mother a local celebrity. Unfortunately, because she'd signed a release and accepted fifty dollars, she never received any more money. But once she realized that people knew who she was, she felt entitled to dominate any gathering, large or small, whether or not she had anything to say. I figured out, early on, that getting a word in edgewise wasn't going to be in the cards for me. So I became a quiet, obedient kid, good at blending in, easy to overlook. I learned to cope with my need for attention by creating my own private personal rituals to make myself feel special. As early as second grade, I'd take the phone into the closet when I got home from school and call local radio shows so I could dedicate songs to myself. Then I'd spend hours by the radio, switching from station to station in the hope that at least one deejay would say, " 'You Light Up My Life' by Debbie Boone goes out to the girl who lights up everybody's life, Dawn Tarnauer." I never did hear anyone say it, but I kept right on hoping. While I waited, I would pretend to host my own TV show. For guests I would interview whatever was available: my plastic horses, my stuffed animals, my mother's cat, my chair, my own reflection. But The Day Everything Changed was the first time that anything ever answered me back. I was born to the prefeminist version of my mother, a woman with a constantly lit cigarette and a perpetually jiggling leg, bored out of her mind but not sure what to do about it. I think she saw her firstborn much the same way she did her never finished pieces of decoupage: as something that needed more work than she had time for. By the time I was five, I had figured out that the fastest way to my mother's heart was to fetch her cigarettes and tell her everything was going to be okay. Halley, my sister, was born when I was six. Sometime during that pregnancy, my mother turned into a feminist. She dropped her decoupage work (which consisted mainly of hatboxes shellacked with magazine clippings of female faces that looked like her own) in favor of something called "creative breakthrough parenting," where she learned that she could offset parental neglect through the use of extravagant praise. I remember not quite trusting all her suddenly effusive reinforcement, even finding it kind of embarrassing. But it worked like gangbusters on Halley, who loved hearing that her preschool drawings were "as good as Matisse" and her one-finger piano compositions had the precocious brilliance of a grade school Beethoven. This despite the fact that neither of us really had any idea who those people were. Of course, now that Halley and I were both effortlessly producing masterworks and our careers in the arts were assured, my motherMarkoe, Merrill is the author of 'Walking in Circles Before Lying Down', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400064830 and ISBN 140006483X.