In third grade, I was kicked out of the Brownies.
I was heartbroken.
I wanted to be a Brownie.... but most of all I wanted to be a Girl Scout.
I wanted to go camping. I wanted to learn how to rub sticks together and make a fire. I wanted to hike and carry around a map and have a compass attached to a string hanging around my neck.
I wanted to sell Girl Scout cookies.
I wanted to go off someplace with lots of other Girl Scouts and camp in the mountains or a meadow or in a forest far from home.
I wanted to make s'mores and tell ghost stories and be too scared to sleep.
I wanted to wear a green uniform and a little beret and have one zillion badges.
But I was kicked out of Brownies.
My mother told me that I had missed too many meetings and I couldn't go back.
They didn't want me.
I suffered through a sore throat that turned out to be Strep and then progressed to Rheumatic Fever...a complication of strep....where the bacteria seeds into other parts of your body.
I was hospitalized for two weeks. Out of school for a month.
I wasn't in pain....but I was very very tired....and very afraid... as my parents went home at the end of visiting hours (they both worked) and I was all alone during the night at the hospital.
How could the Den Mothers not understand? How could they say I missed too many meetings when I was far away in a children's hospital? Why wouldn't they give me another chance?
But my mother said, "no ...no....no...don't even ask because you've been kicked out."
The hurt healed.
I used the incident for joke fodder.
"Hey, I got kicked out of Brownies as a kid." Ha Ha Ha. It seemed so unrealistic ...it was funny.
Years passed...I bought Girl Scout cookies....my two sons were in Scouts and I still buy Girl Scout cookies today....or I should say, my hub does, coming home with a semi-guilty look on his face and big bag of cookies. "We can freeze them," he says joyfully. I know he doesn't want to turn down parents/fellow employees who have quotas and lots of kids. So we freeze lots of cookies.
Sometimes when we'd defrost a box of cookies, I'd say to my hub, "How could they kick a kid out of Brownies for being sick? I mean, I didn't purposely miss the meetings."
My hub would come up with a new snotty answer each time....something like "they knew you would never be able to rub sticks together" or "they saved you from flunking knot tying and map folding." Two things which, I admit, I cannot do.
I head for the center treadmills. I jump on...and mostly ignore the TV. My earplugs are in and my Iphone on.
But the images on the TV crystallize and I notice Katie Couric interviewing little girls.....little Girl Scouts. I pull my plugs out.
Perky Katie is rolling off statistics....80% of women executives were Girl Scouts as kids....10000% did this.....10000% did that.
I repeat my old comic line to myself....."Ha Ha...I got kicked out of Brownies"...
which is why I'm probably not the head of Chrysler or Microsoft.
I punch the "stop" button and stand there.
"You alright?" asks Dottie, the 70 year old scarecrow of a woman, who treadmills every day for a couple of hours.
"Yes."
And then I say to myself in a calm voice....."My mother lied to me."
I was NOT kicked out of Brownies.
The truth is so self-evident ...so real....so "right"....I am stunned.
My mother wanted me to be a princess.
She bought me expensive Italian suits (which I hated) to wear to Church.
She forbade me from joining my Lithuanian grandmother on her weekly outings to the forest preserve.
She did not want me to be "rough" or "common."
She wanted me to be interested in clothes and fashion and princess-y things.
My mother hated that I loved the outdoors, that I planted tomatoes in the yard and collected worms and buried dead baby birds.
She didn't want me to sell anything....she would habitually buy up anything the nuns would distribute to us for sale...from candy to wrapping paper...so I wouldn't ask anyone for money. My mom considered that very un-lady-like....and "beneath us."
Rubbing sticks and hiking was too peasant-like...smacked too much of the "Old Country" which was just a generation behind her....and my mother certainly did not want me to aspire to a weekend in a tent on the ground ....somewhere away from her watchful eyes.
It all made sense...that's why she didn't want me to talk to the Den Mothers and plead my case....because there was no case.
I suppose you might wonder why I didn't realize this possibility years ago....I knew my mother was very capable of such an agenda....she had no qualms squashing things or adjusting the truth to fit her needs.
But why did this all come together now?
Because I just finished going through 60 plus jumbo boxes of her papers....
I discovered over and over again....what she said in public was not always the truth.
From her financial status to her personal history to our family stories....my mother created her own truths.
With each new box I opened...I would shake my head and mutter "Holy Shit" when I chanced upon fact from the fiction she told....from her real name...to her real age....to her real education....to her finances....she was....creative.
My mother was goal-oriented and she told tales/adjusted reality/changed facts to fit the direction she wanted her life and her family to move towards.
And so, there it was.....a small sentence which has slightly haunted me since I was a child.....
"The Brownies don't want you...you missed too many meetings"
...........exposed as a lie.
Katie Couric was smiling and telling the world how inclusive and welcoming the Girl Scout organization was to all girls.... I smiled back and nodded.
The Brownies did not kick me out. The Brownies did not kick me out.
I punched "start" on the treadmill and put my plugs back in.
I felt a sense of relief....as if a small sliver had finally freed itself from a wound.
The Brownies did not kick me out.
I waved to Dottie and cranked the machine up.
The Brownies did not kick me out.
