I was sitting here trying to get motivated to work on my movie scripts.  Two of them. So I turned on my record player and started playing records. Everything from Henry Mancini, Neil Diamond, The Pointer Sisters (for my work out) and migrating to the Beatles. The Beatles ’65 album was great. The nostalgia thing was going well, so, I dig through my collection for more.

Isn’t it great when you can listen to an album and get transported back in time, even to a time perhaps you shouldn’t have?

There are great times in the past and maybe times best left in the past. This may have been one of them, but then maybe not.

I sat here smiling at A Hard Days Night, remembering the time a bunch of us kids got into a friends ’53 souped up Chevy ala “American Grafitti” to go to a drive in, ala “Grease”.  I sat in the front with my friend and I do mean just friend. We piled in several others into the trunk of the car to sneak them in.  Once we got situated, they’d pop out the back seat.

Then a series of songs came on and I was overwhelmed.

Have you ever had your heart broken and have the pain be so excruciating that you think you could die?  Well, that’s what I was experiencing now. How can an album do that?  How can one song especially do that?

 

I was at first in so much pain just now, I could’t explain it.  I didn’t know what the how was I just knew it was something that happened in the past. Then it all came gushing forth.

As I listened to this song it was as if I was transported back to that time and the tears began to spill and fall and it was all I could do not to blubber. My heart was broken all over again. I had loved and lost, not once but twice in a row in just one year and I remember feeling lost and oh so unloved. For awhile, I was that kid again.

I’d not only lost love but now I was pregnant. I remember fretting about how I would tell mother.  I was pregnant and no father. I knew what she’d say. It was my fault – I was “no good”, “a tramp” nad “who’s gonna love you?” “no decent guy would have you”!! It was true, I was unlovable.  It couldn’t have been more agonizing.  But, I would had to face the music alone. It was the 60’s and good girls didn’t get in “trouble.”

My mother was pregnant already with my little brother and now to drop a bomb like this.

I managed to keep it hidden until well into my second trimester until my brother was born, then braced myself.

I was an embarrassment to my family, a disgrace to the church and my young man gone.  People wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence. In the church I belonged to at the time, not even God loved me. No shower was thrown. They couldn’t show acceptance. To throw a shower would send the wrong message to other teens.  No balloons, no banner or congratulatory responses. I was shunned until her arrival like she was a disease.

I would do my exercises and listen to music and cry. More often my tears were more in query. I so wanted a boy to treat me like I saw them treating other girls. Special.  I never had a boyfriend go to bat for me. No, my “boyfriends” lasted a couple of months and then they’d throw me away like yesterday’s garbage.

What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t anyone love me?  It had to be me. I’m not good enough, I’m the scourge of the earth.  I’d go to the delivery room with a scathing mom who in the end transferred any love she was capable of having to my child. She would claim her as her own.

If you’d seen or known me then you’d never have known the weight I was carrying because that’s what I do.  I survive. I hide the hurt and the pain inside and keep on truckin’. Inside I was feeling such pain you could not have imagined but it all worked out.

At the time, I would reconcile myself to love and being loved by my beautiful daughter. She was gorgeous and she was mine. No one could take her away.

Thanks for listening y’all.  I must be in a mood.

Eventually, I was reconnected with the lost love that gifted me my daughter and we are now good friends and… at 45, I finally found my true love and a very good friend in my husband.

It had never occurred to me then that all those years of physical and emotional abuse as a child had created a very needy person. I did, in time learn that I am lovable and now I feel like Sally Fields when she won her Academy Award, and burst out with “You like me!”

So even though I had an nostalgic meltdown, which I’ll chalk up to perhaps aging, I must confess,  I have a great hubby, a supportive family, friends and blog community so truly now, I am blessed with no complaints. It’s all good.