This may have been the first time I was in the newspaper. Trish joked, “How many kids can say they’re late to school because they got stopped to have their picture taken for the front page of the paper?”
She was always making light of our situations. The truth is, I was late to kindergarten forty-seven times, and those tardies were merely a symptom of the utter chaos of our life. Despite that, Trish and I are smiling in this photo. I didn’t yet realize that our life was anything but normal.
It was actually at school that I learned that I was pitiable—–for living in a van, for qualifying for free lunch, for having a mom I called Trish who was “weird” and drove a pedicab for work, for not having a dad, for the clothes I wore, and for the snippets I’d innocently share that showed how differently we lived.
Older and wiser than me, my brothers knew better than to freely divulge details of our homelife. They probably hoped no one they knew would see this embarrassing photo. Over time, I learned to keep quiet too. This secrecy did avert disdain and ridicule, but it regrettably created fertile ground for shame to take root and thrive.
As I tell these stories now, from a wiser and more compassionate adult perspective, the shame dissipates. And where I tell them matters too. In the words of author Ann Voskamp, “Shame dies when stories are told in safe places.” I like to think that what endures are some of the very gems of our humanity——our ability to empathize and connect, heal and grow, and help one another.
So there we were, getting a ride to school in the pedicab——as simple and as extraordinary as that.
I love what you wrote. It could not have been easy. What a great photo.