Who Can I Count On To Suck Out The Poison?

     Psychoanalysis-Stage Two.

     Some people have a natural confidence in themselves and wear it like a second skin. Others never find confidence no matter how great their achievements. I fall somewhere in between. Mine's more like a sunburn that peels easily. Or like the shell game you find on street corners-now you see it, now you don't, and even when you see it, it's not there for long. Definitely a sucker's bet.

     It was distinctly not there for most of my school years when I was too shy to peek out from behind my curtain of hair. In my junior year, I was chosen as a majorette. Not top tier popularity like the cheerleaders, but moving up the ladder just a bit. In my senior year, there was the combination of being head majorette and realizing this was it, I would probably never see most of these people again, so what did I have to lose? I stepped out of my shell a little and gained a thin layer of confidence.

     Then I left for college and a whole new life. It was a very small school, but these people hadn't been there for all my awkward years, hadn't seen my Cousin It impression, hadn't known my family, and hadn't had front row seats for every embarrassing puberty-driven humiliation life had dealt me. I could start fresh. And I did.

     I had great friends, I was in plays, I dated cute guys, and even when my confidence flickered, I had discovered the secret that most successful-people-manuals share with you--fake it. That's right-fake it. I became the queen of faking confidence and surviving faking it made me more confident.  I challenged myself all the time-- if nobody wanted to be the one to ask the cranky professor for more time to complete an assignment, I volunteered. Nobody wanted to approach the group of hot guys to find out where the best party was going to be--send me in. My knees would be shaking and my head would be spinning like a seat on the Tilt-a-Whirl at the town carnival, but I'd grit my teeth and do it.

     By the time I graduated from college, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I had a college degree, a guy who thought I was pretty special, lifelong friends, and my whole future ahead of me. The guy asked me to spend my life with him and everything was coming up roses. Besides, that was part of that brief period when my lumps and bumps were aligned like the stars.

     So when exactly did that layer of confidence start splitting like the skin on an overripe banana?

     Maybe it was when my future father-in-law told me to be sure my coal-cracker family wore shoes to the wedding so he wouldn't be embarrassed. I could be wrong, but I think IBM required that their executives, of which my father was one, wore shoes to work.

     Or perhaps it was when my future mother-in-law said she wouldn't come to the wedding if it was in my church because she wasn't going to sit through a "heathen" ritual (you know us Methodists are always beheading chickens and smearing the blood on our infants to appease the pagan gods).

      Could it have been in the middle of my bridesmaids' luncheon, when in front of everyone, my soon-to-be sister-in-law announced that no one in her family was happy about the wedding going forward (she could have just given me a toaster, but this was a nice gift, too).

     Or maybe it was the first ten Christmases or so when I arrived at their house with bags of carefully chosen gifts for all of them and left with bags of gifts for my husband and children, but not one item in there for me. I guess the Grinch took all mine up the mountain and they fell off his sleigh. (Oh, to live in Whoville where we can all join hands and enjoy the Roast Beast--Yahoo torres  . . . ) (Note to mother-in-law--Yahoo torres is a phrase from a Christmas cartoon, not a chant from one of our pagan rituals. That goes more like Ba boo zorres. Just want to make that clear.)

     These are just a few of thousands of examples, but this steady drumbeat of "You're not good enough, you're not smart enough, and gosh darn it, we just don't like you," was more than enough to break my thin shell of confidence. I responded by vowing to prove them wrong, but the more I tried to be what I thought they wanted, the less I was myself and the unhappier I grew. I don't remember what the straw was that broke the camel's back, but one day I realized that I didn't want to be like them, I didn't care what they thought, and being around them was like sprinkling arsenic on your salad, toxic and self-destructive.

     I couldn't cut them out of my life altogether because that wouldn't be fair to my husband and children. I do show up for the important functions a couple times a year and I never try to talk my husband out of going to as many of his family's get-togethers as he wants (well, except for the time I was only a week out of the hospital after major abdominal surgery and they insisted he leave me to participate in a family photo at their house). Sometimes my girls go with him, but most of the time they don't. They are smart girls and have witnessed things for themselves.

     At some point in the years after I stopped caring if they liked me, they started liking me. My in-laws went from "no gifts for you" to bidding on and winning a signed Joe Paterno football for me just because they knew he's my favorite coach. They call me for help and advice and actually respect my opinion. Sometimes, they even tell people we're related.

     What caused this change? I have no idea. It all happened around the time my first book was published, so maybe the move from hick/heathen/mutt to author was the turning point. Maybe it was because my kids turned out so well, despite their predictions to the contrary, or maybe it was because my marriage survived past all the dates in the betting pool estimating it's eventual failure ( I hear my mother and father-in-law put a crapload of money on six months). I don't know the reason why, but I do know it makes me very nervous.

     After all, what other creature does a rattlesnake cozy up to? Only a victim or another rattlesnake.

     Trying to figure out which one I am keeps me awake at night.