Different Drummer

I am by nature an introvert.  I tend to be an observer and can relate to the feeling of being on the periphery of a group of friends or family.   Before I started school, I was surrounded by loving family and believed that all mommies and daddies were deaf inside the house and hearing outside.  The reason for that is sign language was still stigmatized when I was a child in the ‘50s-60s-70s.  My parents didn’t sign in public, only using their voices with my brother, family members and me.

When I was in first grade, we moved to a neighborhood about 10 miles from most other family members.  Our neighbors on either side had children and I wanted to be friends with them.  One morning, I woke to chanting out my bedroom window.  I went outside to see what was going on and found these “friends” dancing atop a mound of peat moss my parents had delivered to our back yard.  They were chanting, “Cassie’s mother is deaf and dumb.”  I wasn’t sure why they were calling my mom dumb because she wasn’t.  I was hurt and angry, charging up the mound to push them all off.

I ran inside and found Mom in the kitchen.  I mouthed and acted out what happened, and her eyes began flashing with anger.  I wanted to know what “deaf and dumb” was.  Mom said it was an insult because she couldn’t hear.  That was news to me.  For the first time, it crossed my mind that she couldn’t hear me speak.

“Can you hear me?” I asked, loudly, and she shook her head no.  Now I was really upset.  I shouted, “Can’t you hear me NOW?” She shook her head no over and over.  I was thunderstruck.  My parents weren’t like the neighbor kids’ parents at all.  Just as suddenly, I realized we were different.

I did eventually make friends with other kids in the neighborhood but I was more reserved than I ever had been.  I’d been burned and never played with those first friends again.  Sometimes the newer friends would invite me to their houses to play; I was reluctant to ask them to come to mine.  I didn’t want a repeat of those first new “friends”.

At 10, we moved to Baltimore.  People thought I was shy because I was very quiet.  My brother and I did play with kids in the neighborhood but we were always on tenterhooks because we were different.  Sometimes those kids would taunt us and say our parents were foreign spies because they “talked funny.”  It was a lonely feeling, not being a part of the group.

It wasn’t just my parents’ deafness that made me feel different.  It was as if being far from family removed my parents’ inhibitions.  They discovered a social club for the Deaf and that became their center.  The drinking and domestic violence began.  My brother and I didn’t want to have friends over.  I didn’t want anyone to learn the truth about what was happening in my family.  I already had co-dependent characteristics and they were aggravated and increased by the drinking and fighting.

As I maneuvered my way through school, I had a handful of friends.  We socialized by phone only after school.  I never fit in with a clique.  Fortunately, after a disastrous year in junior high, I managed to move up from the bullied loser caste level to a level where the mean kids just tolerated and left me alone.  I was just so relieved to be away from the cliques. 

I preferred to hang out in my bedroom with the door closed, reading or writing, and listening to Neil Diamond.  I enjoyed my privacy and definitely enjoyed being away from my battling parents.

As I got older, I learned about transcendentalism and was introduced, by a favorite English teacher, to writers like Emerson and Thoreau.  I found a quote that hit me where I lived and it became “mine”:

If a man does not
keep pace with
his companions,
perhaps it is
because he hears a
different drummer.
Let him step to
the music which
he hears, however
measured or
far away.  –Henry David Thoreau

This is me, I thought.  It was an early act of self-care that I took this quote and decided to wear it proudly as a shield against hurtful words and being left out. 

It wasn’t always easy to wear that shield, especially when it came to dealing with my parents and their issues.  All of my own were triggered often as I tried to be a “good girl” to control their drinking and stop them hitting each other.  Stress brought on panic attacks/depression and I would lose that shield I was wearing.  Sometimes I couldn’t find it again for long periods of time.  I told my parents I needed to see a psychiatrist, and they were horrified.  How embarrassing.

I got help once I got a full-time job with benefits.  Therapy was a little helpful in that I got medication to reduced my panic attacks and depression. It was 1974 and there wasn’t a lot of information about children growing up in dysfunctional homes.   It was in the early 1990s before I learned about 12 step meetings specifically about my experiences.  Later on, in the ‘90s, I found a therapist who had alcoholic parents.  I learned so much about why and how I felt such intense anger and anxiety.  Understanding why I felt as I did help me learn how to reshape my own responses to difficult situations.  It’s taken years but now I’m in a very comfortable place.

I know how to act like an extrovert and I can take that role if it’s necessary.  Most of the time, though, I am who I am and don’t feel a need to explain myself or feel left out of things or hurt.  I have a few good friends, my books, my music, my writing.  Most of all, I have a supportive and loving husband, and an awesome blended family, 3 of my own adult children, 2 of his, 8 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren.  Life is good.  I am grateful.

I still march to that different beat.  I always will.