On Travel Trailers and Redemption

Like most seriously funny and creative people, I had a very awkward and painfully uncomfortable childhood.  What follows is proof that, no matter the angst, God can redeem the times.

From the time I was pre-school age until the sixth grade my family lived in Odessa, TX.  Dad worked in the oil industry and it was in the early eighties.  A simple Google search of “1980s, oil, West Texas” will give you some idea of the economic climate.   By the time I was in kindergarten, my parents had four children, a mortgage, and a salary that had trickled to almost nothing.  I remember evenings spent in fields while my parents gathered abandoned industrial wires and burned the plastic off in bonfires to get to the copper wiring which they could sell for a profit.  It was dirty work.

Like a good many of people in Odessa, Dad and Mom put our house on the market.  The market became saturated almost over night and my parents were looking to at least break even.  Our Realtor was also a dear friend from church.  He knew that my Dad was a highly skilled craftsman and he offered my family a rental house he owned that needed a great deal of remodeling;  Dad would work on the house in exchange for rent.  In short order, we moved into the very damaged rental in a particularly rough neighborhood, our house was sold, and my parents purchased a red brick house that had been completely gutted by fire – purposing to restore the house completely while living in the rental.

I was in the first grade by this time and was accepted into a public school for gifted kids.  It was nowhere near to the side of town we had moved to and I had to be bussed across town each morning.  I was the second stop for the bus in the mornings and the second to last stop in the afternoons.  The bus’ first and last stop was for a group of about eight Hispanic girls who developed an immediate dislike for me.  They called me “Fifi” because I was like a “princess white poodle”.  Some afternoons they would get off at my stop and follow me most of the way home, mocking me, kicking dust at me and swinging my very heavily loaded backpack to make me stumble and lose my balance.  If I had any spare change at all, I could give it to them and buy myself some sweet peace since my bus stop was at an Allsup’s convenient store.  ”Give us some money, Fifi.  We know you got lots of it.”

Arriving at school was no relief.  I went from being the hated rich white girl on the bus to the poor white trash in my classroom.  In three years I was invited to only one class birthday party(remind me and I’ll tell you about it sometime.  tragic.).  My gifts to the teacher were unwrapped and my snack from home was usually cheap saltines and peanut butter in a baggie verses my classmates expensive individually wrapped treats of awesome.  My clothes were hand me downs and my shoes were a mess.

When the weather got warmer, my Dad set up tents in the backyard of the house that had been destroyed by fire and we stayed there so he could devote every spare minute of the day to making a house for his family.  This, while still restoring the rental house and working his oil job plus odd jobs.  The house was walking distance from my school, so I was given the sweet gift of no more agonizing bus rides.

My memory of my time at that school is a hazy patchwork of angry teacher faces, red marks on my schoolwork, and stacks of homework.  I never to rarely completed the two hours of nightly homework and this caused a great deal of gut wrenching tension for me at home and at school.  In my young life, it seemed that every grown up was a wagging finger of “We expect better of you” and every peer was an extended tongue and the scoff that I would never be anything more than trash.  On a scale of one to misfit, I was pathetic.

There was a fourth grade teacher at that school that every student hoped to get.  Her name was Ms. Hicks and she was the bright hope in my dreary existence.  She went to my church and I knew her more casually as Pam.  I believed that I was guaranteed a spot in her class and that if I could just hold on through the third grade all would be made right with the world.

I saw Ms. Hicks on occasion in the halls at school and one such meeting sticks out above the others.  I was being escorted by my teacher for what seemed like my weekly visit to the Principal’s office.  My frazzled third grade teacher was at the end of her patience with me (again) and had pulled me from my seat in her classroom by my wrist and was less than delicately marching me down the hall with my limp hand flapping by her shoulder and my feet tangling and tripping, trying to keep up with her brisk pace.

We happened to pass by Ms. Hicks in the hall and she smiled and waved at my teacher who smiled and waved back.  Ms. Hicks appeared to not notice the firm grip my teacher had on my arm and so I tried to play it cool like we were strolling hand in hand.  “Be cool, Amy.  Soon you’ll be in Ms. Hicks class and this will all be a distant memory,” went my calming self talk.

I never did learn if Ms.Hicks was going to save me, because a generous couple at our church took pity on my plight and offered to fund the tuition for me to attend a private Christian school.

I spent the next 20 years thinking of those first three years of school as brutal and pointless.  In my next post, I’ll tell how it was all redeemed for God’s glory in an instant and how on earth a travel trailer was involved.