SECRETS AND THE GIRL WITH THE AMAZING NAME:  A Story Coaching Exercise

     “Give Cecily your chocolate Easter bunny”, my mother said. “You know I have to get the house ready for Passover and it’s too big for you to eat all at once tonight.  I don’t know why your father got it for you in the first place.” 

     Cecily and I sat in the breakfast nook of our kitchen, my favorite spot in our house. The sun warmed us, along with the cups of hot chocolate with marshmallows we were sipping.   In-between sips we played with each other’s hair, each one wishing she could have hair like the other girl. Cecily traced with her fingers the blonde pigtails of the Little Dutch Girl on the red and blue tablecloth.

     “If my hair was straight, I would fix it just like that, Iris, or like yours, with bangs”.  

       I could not quite believe my ears, since my hair was fine and stringy, and barrettes and bows never stayed in it for more than a minute or two.  Cecily’s hair fascinated me. It was black and coarse and done up in a lot of little pigtails and each pigtail had a different color bow.  It reminded me of my father’s garden or of a wedding bouquet and it made me smile when I looked at it.  Everything about Cecily fascinated me. She was my best friend and my next-door neighbor. She had luminous, happy eyes, thick, curly lashes and silky dark brown skin. She  smelled like cocoa butter, which she told me her mother lathered on her skin twice a day.   

     Even Cecily’s family was interesting.  She had at least 15 relatives living with her at different times. There were grandparents and a great-grandfather, and cousins of all hues and ages. Cecily’s house was like a bag of penny candy from the store, with one incredible goody after another waiting to be plucked out and delighted in.  She always had somebody to play with, whereas I was the baby, with siblings much, much older and there was usually some family drama going on among the adults so nobody had much time for me.   I mostly retreated into a world of fears, books and fantasy.

     The two most amazing things about Cecily to me were her mother, and her name.  Cecily and I, being 8 yr olds, complained to each other about how unreasonable our mothers were and how many rules there were for us.  We also complained about our names. We wanted what we perceived of as pretty, “normal” names.  My favorite at the time was Barbara Ann and hers was Susan but we had been cursed, in our opinions, with names that made no sense to us and names that made us targets for our classmates.  I was regularly reassured by my parents that I had been named after my two great grandfathers and that Iris was a beautiful name to them.  It didn’t change the fact that I had never encountered another person with my name. People always commented and asked me if I liked the flower, which I didn’t, and kids called me Iris Jack O Lantern, ridiculing my middle name, Jacqueline. 

     Cecily’s name, though, was wondrous to me.  If I could not have been blessed with what I thought was a simple, pleasing, regular American name like Barbara Ann, I might have liked to have her name. Her mother or her aunt would stand on the front steps of her house in the evening, while she and I were down the street busily engaged in catching fireflies in jars, and they would call out her name, or I should say her names.  I can still recall and hear her mother’s melodious voice.  She was tall and dark-skinned and looked like a painting from one of my older brother’s art books. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf, usually brightly colored, like orange or purple, with the tail of the scarf flowing down her back.  She would cup her hands over her mouth and sweet syrup would begin to pour out, thickly and slowly,  picking up volume and momentum.

     “Cecily….Come home now.  Cecily…Cecily Judith Peachy-Peach-A-Neeny Woo Woo Lady Flower Vandillia (I added) Pickle Sawyer.  Time for bath. Where are you? Get your sweet behind here now!”

     At the sound of this call, to me an untold story with many hidden and magnificent adventures and secrets I wanted to unlock and discover, I would run to Cecily’s mother, hypnotized by her voice and by the name.  Cecily would hang back, hoping none of the other children playing outside in the steamy, sticky evening air would have heard the cursed roll call of her family pet names.  Then she would skulk home, head down, covering the half-block distance, as slowly as possible, with a despondent look on her face.

     I was dying to know the story or stories behind those names, but Cecily refused to discuss this topic. We talked about our friends, the little songs and poems we liked to create, our dolls, foods we loved and hated, about TV shows, books, comic books, our siblings and our cousins.  We talked about how we would be famous one day, who would fall in love with us, how many babies we would have (I always imagined a multi-racial family, even back then). We talked about Jesus, because this was a topic forbidden in my Jewish household, and even about sex, or what we thought was sex at age 8.  When I asked how she got all of those amazing names, Cecily would stick out her lower lip and tell me it was none of my business and I should just hush up.  I gathered that different people in her family had given her nicknames but I didn’t know why, or why her family would string them all together in a near song when they called her name. She said it had something to do with her father, but her father did not live with her and she said she never wanted to see him again. Sometimes she said this with a good deal of anger, shouting it in my face and almost making me cry. It was hard for me to understand because I loved my Daddy. Cecily liked my father too and said he made her laugh with his silly rhymes and games and the way he liked to stick out his false teeth to surprise children.

     Cecily told me she hated being different.  At the time they were one of the first few minority families in our neighborhood. Our school in Queens, which was on the border of two different neighborhoods, seemed to be filled with spoiled little divas in the making, who already passed their time boasting about their fancy clothes, their leads in the ballet recital and the great vacations their families took.  They were kids who had white bread sandwiches with bologna and twinkies in their lunchboxes

     Cecily and I shared an embarrassment that made us both stand out.  Her grandmother walked the ten blocks each day to bring her a home-cooked lunch and sat with Cecily in the auditorium while she ate it.  Her grandmother didn’t want her playing with all of the white kids being that she was the only black girl in her class.  I, too, suffered a similar indignity. A year before, I had been in a serious car accident with my parents , had been hospitalized for more than a month and had nearly died, suffering a skull fracture, respiratory arrest, brain swelling and temporary blindness. While I had recovered, I still had some emotional scars and developed some ticks and twitches, which ran in our family but which were probably aggravated by the helicoptering and over-protection of my parents. The strong message I got was that I was “fragile”, “special” and “not like other kids” and needed to be careful or something would happen to me.   My mother, too, walked the ten blocks and sat with me in the auditorium while I ate lunch. She brought little containers of matzoh ball soup, or pieces of chicken, chopped liver sandwiches, and home made cookies or pastries.  When I finished eating, my mother and I went on to her volunteer job for the rest of the lunch hour. She helped out in a class for children with special needs, who mostly had various types of cerebral palsy. While I am sure she felt it was a good lesson for me to see other children who had needs more complicated than my own and to help them, it compounded my feelings that there was something wrong with me and that I would always be different.   I lived for several years, unable to verbalize my fears but haunted by them, thinking that I would “catch” the cerebral palsy, that my car accident had rendered me defective in some way and that I was probably going to die young. 

     Cecily and I never discussed this, or other topics that seemed to be taboo for her, such as her name, where her father was.  One day when I was about nine, my parents told me we were moving back to Brooklyn to be near my grandparents.  Cecily and I said teary goodbyes and promised to write. These were the days long before the Internet and e-mail. I had an allowance of 25 cents a week and stamps seemed expensive.  We had a measured rate phone service of (as my mother was constantly lecturing me about) 2.5 phone calls per day within the 5 Boroughs of New York City, and she did not believe her precious call allotment should be squandered on little kids. So Cecily and I wrote one or two letters and then simply lost touch.  I never forgot her though, or her remarkable name and once wrote a children’s story about it,  just as I am now remembering her and her amazing name  with this very tale.

     As the years passed, and as I grew comfortable in my own skin and with the person I had become, I realized that being unique was something I liked.   I learned that my secrets and fears had created conflict and pain for me, but had gradually been transformed into a vehicle and tool for me to focus on what made me different in a positive way. 

      As you listen to this story, can you identify with it in any way?  Can you remember a time when you felt different and didn’t enjoy the feelings engendered in you?  How did that shape who you were then and who you became today?  How was the early “ you” a prototype for the character you are now?  Did you create your story or did your story create you? Or was it a little bit of both? Can you explain this?  Did you ever consciously set an intention to rewrite your life story or a particular chapter of it?  How?  What part of your story would you like to reshape or shift now? How will you begin to do this?