FREAK SHOW -- PEEP SHOW

Often I hear of young girls who struggle with their body image. I have to laugh as I think of what I experienced in comparison!

I was told for as long as I can remember, "There's something wrong with you!"

This made me self-conscious as hell! I could feel my skin creep if anyone stared at me too hard or too long. Whatever was wrong with me, I was positive they could see it, even if I couldn't! This unnerved me no end. I felt ashamed to be noticed. I liked people best when they ignored me.

I found great comfort in being alone. To this day, coming home to an empty house is a wonderful feeling! No one is constantly in my face.

Being self-conscious I tended to slouch and be stoop-shouldered. "Stand-up straight or you'll grow a hump!" Mom was always hollering at me.

My mother had zero discipline when it came to maintaining her own body. Yet she held a narrow, distorted view of how I should look, act, talk, and think. After we moved to her dream house in 1960, I didn't fit in with the decor of her perfect abode. I was horrified and ashamed of all the things that were wrong with me!

My body was stick-like because I was a finicky eater. For example, eyes in mashed potatoes repulsed me as if they were cockroach peepers! Also I was so pale you'd think vampires had been sucking on me. "You look like you're going to die!" I heard this frequently.

After watching an episode of WAGON TRAIN with Bette Davis in which her character had died of a tumor, I asked my mother what that was.

"If you don't start eating right, you're going to get one!" came her reply.

My mother admired women with lush, heavy hair. Mine was fine-textured and fly-away, it tended to frizz in the slightest humidity, and tangled & matted easily. Also it shed like a dog! I was constantly told I was going to be bald!

I developed a stammer, which further embarrassed my mother. She screamed at me as if I could somehow control it.

Did I mention I was also pigeon-toed!

The thought of growing up depressed and terrified me! I pictured all the people stopping to point and stare at the hunch-backed, pigeon-toed, bald woman with a tumor, stammering to herself as she went along.

Probably I would be too hideous to even venture out in public! I'd be forced to hide myself away in a shuttered attic or a bell-tower like Quasimodo. Anyone who glimpsed me would recoil in abhorrence. (I actually visualized all this!) Fortunately, I wouldn't have to endure it for long, because the tumor would kill me. -- There really is a silver lining to everything!

Being a less-than child, I wanted desperately to be pretty. Before I hit the age of 20; God, Max Factor, & Miss Clairol answered my prayers!

The summer before I turned 19, I experimented with make-up. Also I bleached my hair back to the light blonde shade of my childhood. Wonder of all miracles, I was actually attractive! Through a twist of fate, my mother was now a religious fanatic.

"You look like a hooker!" she declared. "God will make every hair on your head fall out to punish you for bleaching it!" she warned.

"If he does I'm wearing a long, brassy blonde wig!" I told her.

Mom wasn't getting inside my head any more ... But her ugly spores had already been planted. Removing them was a long and painstaking process.