"a time you weren't invited"

"A time you weren't invited" - this was a prompt Nancy Aronie used during the writer's workshop a couple weeks back, at Rowe.  

A situation late last week got me thinking about it & how it feels like I was never invited into the circle of people that made up my family.  How it still seems to me like none of us felt invited.  

Suddenly swept with memories of the "Lemon List" at the private school Mom (Class of '28) & all of us kids attended.  

The Lemon List was a not-so-secret shame we Lockhart females shared.  Not the guys.  Dad attended Harrisburg Academy, boarding back when it was all boys.  And Peter & Mike?  HA!  From pre-school through college, they were social A-List, all the way.

Mom, Mim et moi were not so blessed.  Our names were always written in scarlet letters on the Lemon List - girls without dates to dances.

There were three dances everyone had to attend - Alpha Kappa Mu/Phi Alpha, Deka/Sigma & Junior-Senior Dance.  Girls who didn't get a date showed up on the Lemon List.  Either a high school boy was dragooned into asking you or, if none could be strong-armed into it, a college guy would step up to the plate.  

It was bad enough to not be asked, but to be asked in that way - supreme mortification, three times a year.  In my four years in high school, I always showed up on the Lemon List.  Just as Mom had, just as Mim did.

When Mom was in her late 80s & I was closing in on 50, we were part of a mother-daughter discussion group. Just the two of us & three other pairs.  Except for one mother, all of us had attended the same high school.  Luckily, the other daughters had no memory of the Lemon List, long gone when they were in school.  The other two mothers had vivid memories of it, although they’d both been spared. 

The 4^th mother - the one who didn't attend the school, but whose daughter had – listened to our back & forth.  She was silent, soaking it all in.  Finally, she looked at Mom & asked, "Mrs. Lockhart, what was it like, being on the Lemon List?"

Mom took her answer in an interesting direction.  She was effusive in her appreciation for the all the dashing college men who had chivalrously served as her escorts, remembering them by name.  It was a happy, appreciative reply.  But I suspected it missed the mark of what Helen had tried to discover.

On the drive home, I mentioned to Mom my sense that Helen had been asking about how it felt to be on the Lemon List, to have everyone know that no one had asked you to the dance.

Will always remember Mom's startled expression & her simple, simply devastating answer - "But I was a lemon."

 

Imagine the feelings that swept through me.  I pulled the car over to the curb & turned to Mom, looked fully into her face.  Once before, I'd had the same sensation of looking full into the face of a teenager, not my octogenarian mother.  "Mom, no one should ever feel that they are a lemon."  

To this day, am not sure which of us was the more floored - me, at hearing Mom trash herself, or Mom at thinking it was anything but right & just.

That moment was extremely revealing for me.  Mom wasn't outraged when Mim & I were subjected to being Lemon Listers - we simply followed in her foot steps.  Mom accepted being a lemon; when her own mother emotionally abused her, that was acceptable, too.  When Peter & Mim treated her like dirt - as they did throughout her life -  my guess is that felt right & natural to her, too.   What else would a lemon expect?  

Even with her friends, Mom felt lemony.  She was close to several remarkable women who clearly found in her a kindred spirit & whose friendship meant the world to her, but she always marveled that they found her to their liking.

In Mom's life, Dad - like her sister, Betty - was the aberration, someone who made her feel like a beautiful rose, its petals unfurled under the basking glow of his love & tender nature.  

 

I bring this all up to underscore that, with the exception of her beloved husband & sister, Mom never felt invited into a circle, a greater whole, why she stepped very gently around Mim & Peter, because one poorly expressed word or presumptuous expectation & they'd chill her out, feeling lemony, lonely, like she'd been cast out into the cold.  Again.

To this day, I don't feel invited to be part of my family.  I doubt the others do.  Everyone assumes we are, but not so.  It feels like when Buddy Dudlik had a big party at his house, with its indoor pool, back in 7th grade.  The whole class was invited.  I received my invitation, too - except Buddy took me aside & told me I better not show up.  That feels like my family - we all got invitations, along with the message to not show up. 

My great saving grace was that I invited myself.  Oh, not to Buddy's party - I steered clear of that big event.  But to my family.  They didn't consider themselves part of my circle, but I made them part of mine.  Not from any wild-eyed hope that maybe, some day, they'd like me.  It's always been clear they'd never see me as part of an inner circle they only acknowledged to let me know I wasn't in. 

The odds aren't very good that I'm ever going to feel invited into a family circle that's highly fragile at even the best of times.  Ah, but there is another circle, one that's strong, resilient, offering open entree to any wanting to come in, showing a smile & a beckoning wave to any lingering outside.  That one has existed in my heart from my earliest days.   

My dear friend, Diana Glenn Peterson, knew the Lockharts about as well as anyone.  Her mother, "Aunt" Alice, was close chums with mine.  She was in Ian's class, shared our heartbreak when he died at eleven.  Her sister was in Mim's. I was in my late thirties when - knowing my grief over being so separate from my sibs - she wrote out a poem by Edwin Markham to help ease my heart:

Outwitted

He drew a circle that shut me out--

Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.

But Love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle that took him in!

With that poem in my back pocket, can never feel uninvited or in the least bit lemony.  Call me a Perennial Pollyanna, but as long as we answer Life's invitation with a resounding YES, nothing else matters.  

 

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