Open Letter to my Roma Tomato

It started with a voice on the telephone. All the way from New Zealand. This little munchkin giggle and the sweetest "Hi daddy". Sugar dripping from every syllable. "Can I come see you daddy? When I get there will you take me to chuck-a-rama? Does papa still live in the same house? Do you still live in the same town? What does your house look like? Do you have a cat? Are you gonna get a cat?" And a million other questions blasting out of speaker phone and a daddy's smile full of love and longing for his little girl. I couldn't even conceive how much that one phone call would change my life. How much YOU would change my life.

I was so scared when you came to live with us. You wanted so many things and none of them from me. You wanted to live with your daddy. You wanted your mum to fly over from New Zealand and live with him too. You wanted your sisters, your cat and your dog to live at daddy's house but you didn't want me. There was no room on your drawing of the family for a girlfriend and her daughter. In your barely 8 year old mind I was the REASON you couldn't get what you wanted. I had to battle for your love and there were times when I thought I might give up but little by little, we became friends. I began to notice when I left one room for another you would miraculously show up in the same room. If I left the house, I got grilled. Where are you going? When are you coming back? Can I come?

We went to back to school night and your third grade teacher informed me that almost every sentence you uttered started with "Lee says..." When people came to the house, you were glued to my side, whether standing at the door or sitting on the couch. And ALWAYS that insatiable curiosity, those constant chattering questions, "Lee, why does Cleo lay like that? Lee, when is the rain gonna stop? Lee, is it OK if I beat up Colton on the bus? Lee, did you know Michael Jackson used to be black?"

It's been almost six years now. I've watched you grow from an adorable vivacious, chattering little girl into a charming, bright beautiful young woman. I've been so blessed to share these years with you. You've enriched my life in more ways than you can ever know. You taught me how to love in a way I didn't know was even possible. I think that in raising and caring for you, a child that is not my own, I love you even more because I had to EARN IT! I had to prove myself to you. No lip service. No faking. You would take nothing less from me than the real deal.

You will be leaving us tomorrow to go back to New Zealand. You will be leaving me. There are so many what ifs floating around the air. What if your mum never lets you speak to me. What if you hate it there. What if you are homesick. What if you are hurt and I can't get to you. What if you forget me. What if you doubt how much I loved and will forever love you.

Please be brave my Roma Tomato! Please remember what we have taught you. Always be kind. Always speak kind words. Keep your mind open to new people and new things. Just because someone is different or dresses strange or listens to different music, it doesn't mean they are not worth knowing. ALWAYS stand up for yourself! You are so smart and have a good head on your shoulders. I know you know right from wrong. If you know you are in the right, SPEAK UP FOR YOURSELF! It's OK to please the people in your life but not at the risk of losing yourself. BE STRONG! Make your OWN decisions in life. You are old enough now to start choosing for yourself. Don't let anyone make decisions for you that you know in your heart are wrong. And most important, don't EVER EVER EVER FORGET THAT YOU ARE LOVED. And you are NEVER ALONE. You have a daddy who loves you with every fiber of his being, three big sisters and one stepsister who would cross oceans for you if you needed them.

And you have me, you will always have me. No matter what. Whatever you need, wherever and whenever, you have me. A phone call is all it will take. You are my light and my joy. You are part of me. I carry you around in my heart everywhere I go. I will think of you everyday. I will miss you everyday. I will be sending you my love over that big blue ocean every minute until you come back.

Love,

Lee

Ghost Story

I grew up in a haunted house. For REAL people. A REAL honest to God HAUNTED HOUSE. Actually it was a haunted trailer. I know, weird huh? BUT TRUE. See, I've told this story many times to my friends and their friends if I'm asked to tell it and the story has been perfected in order to elicit as many chills and thrills as possible cuz honestly, what's the point in telling it if you're not gonna get the full effect. And people are thrilled and chilled and I can tell they WANT to believe it. Or maybe they don't. But here's the truth, the story is true. When I was living it, scratch that, when WE were living it, there was no thrills and chills. It was terror. Pure shivering, heart pounding, panting, sweaty terror. And I lived it.
I'm sure people wondered about me when I was little. They thought me strange or angry or quiet or whatever. They couldn't relate. Most people chalked it up to "oh, she came from a broken home." or "Her mother is single and works full time." or "Her daddy has a new family and he's never around." And that was probably part of my personality make-up and later rebellion but what they didn't know is that I was scared. ALL THE TIME. Scared. And I thought maybe I was crazy. But now I know better. You see, I think about that house quite often and I replay "the moments" in my head and I ask myself, "Did you imagine this? Did you make this up? Could what happened have another explanation?" And the answer is NO. I saw what I saw. I heard what I heard. I felt what I felt. And YEARS later all of my experiences were corroborated by my mother who heard, saw and felt the same things I did.
So, for your Happy Halloween pleasure and because I've been asked to BLOG this little tale...here you go.
From our family room you would go down a long hallway that ran the length of our house in order to get to first, my room, then my brothers room, the bathroom and then my mother's room at the end of the house. Our television sat in the family room in direct view of the hallway. Because it was a trailer home you could hear every footstep any person made as they walked through the house and you could discern by the weight and noise if it was my mom or brother.
I was sitting cross legged as close to the TV as I could get when I heard the footsteps. These steps were heavy. Like a large man and as the footsteps came down the hallway towards me, I found myself looking that direction in puzzlement as they weren't a step I recognized. I was actually panting in fear as I realized that although I could distinctly hear the footsteps coming directly toward me, there was nobody there. At the end of the hallway, a few feet from where I was sitting, they stopped. My impression was of a very large man. I don't know how I knew, I couldn't SEE him with my eyes but my mind saw that he filled the doorway. He was looking at me and again I don't know how I knew. And I say HE because I instinctively KNEW it was a HE. I was afraid, frozen to the spot. I was totally unable to look away and after about a minute I heard the footsteps receding back down the hallway. My fear evaporated and was replaced by a general unease and I moved to the couch, as far from the hallway as I could physically get.
I would hear those footsteps and feel his gaze MANY times over the next few years. I never told anybody. My brother and I called him "the invisible man." My brother refused to go down that hallway by himself and I would get frustrated with him cuz it was always me who had to escort him down the hallway to bathroom or to bed. I gave him a really hard time about it and called him a scaredy cat or whatever but the truth was, I DIDN'T WANT TO GO DOWN THAT HALL. For anything. I remember getting spanked one night cuz I refused to escort my brother to the bathroom. I think they called me a "stubborn little shit". Of course, they didn't know I was terrified.
At night while I was sleeping I would be awoken by those footsteps coming from my mom's room to my doorway. I would pull the covers over my head and I foolishly thought that if there was no part of me outside the covers and he couldn't see me then he would go away. Under those covers was a little girl who was literally trembling in fear. I can still feel it to this day. I almost couldn't breath I was so scared. I remember thinking any minute now I would feel those covers be pulled off of me and he would be standing there. Every once in a while I would feel a small tug at my feet and I would wet the bed in terror. There was NO WAY I would get out of bed, go down that hallway in the dark and go to the bathroom. I would hold it until I was almost bursting. Somehow I would drift off to sleep and as soon as my body relaxed, I would pee the bed. That's how frightened I was. You know, my parents must have spent hundreds taking me to doctors to cure my "bed wetting" problem. All they needed to do was call an exorcist.
I don't know for sure when I stopped hearing the invisible man. Eventually I did though. I don't remember any certain event that brought it to an end for me although I suspect it was the arrival of my stepfather. One terror replaced by another and I actually forgot about it as little kids are so blessedly capable of doing. I didn't hear or feel my stalker at all from about six years old until I was fourteen. THAT day I was in the bathroom at the end of the hallway. I had the house to myself and I was curling my hair into my oh so stylish Farah fawcett, feathered bangs. The mirror faced the doorway so I could see into the hallway from where I stood by looking into the mirror.
It was an almost nostalgic feeling when I heard the footsteps. I remember thinking "Oh my gosh! I haven't heard that in AGES." I froze with my hands above my head holding the piece of hair I had been preparing to wrap around my curling iron when he stepped into the doorway. Plain as the keyboard I am typing on, the computer screen in front of my face was a tall, dark muscular man. His hair was dark and wavy, his clothes were simple, not old fashioned, not modern, just a plain short sleeve shirt and pants, his face was obscured in shadow but I very clearly saw his arms at his sides and his hands clenched very tightly into fists. His entire posture reeked of anger and hatred. I gasped, turned to face the doorway and he was gone. By gone, I mean I couldn't SEE him but he was most definitely still there. And he hated me. He wanted to hurt me. He wanted to rip me apart. I have never to this day felt so much anger and rage directed at me. I knew I had to get out of that room but in order to do that I would have to leave from the very doorway he was standing in.
I was panting heavily and sweating from fear and I had to force my feet to move toward that door. I started to pray, kind of. You know the kind of praying people do when they think they might die. "oh god, please. oh god, don't touch me. oh god, help me." I went slowly because the animosity grew the closer I got to the door. Now, you have to realize that the doorway was empty to my eyes but there was, without a doubt, someone there. HE was there. I was so sure of this that as I went out the doorway, I remember shrinking myself against the door frame, praying I wouldn't feel his touch as I squeezed past him. I almost felt suffocated in hate at that point. I literally thought I was going to die. Everything got darker. I don't know how to describe it so people will understand but it was like I had stepped into shadow from sunlight. But it was a darkness that almost had mass.
Once I got out that door, I started to scream and I started to RUN. I could almost feel his breath on me as I ran down that hall. I ran through the family room and straight out the front door. My friend Derek happened to be walking to my house and he said I came out that door like the devil was after me, completely hysterical, trembling and screaming "there's a man in the house. the invisible man, help me."
I have relived that moment so many times, I've tried to explain it away in so many ways but the facts are this. I heard him, I SAW with my eyes a man, one second there, the next gone. I felt his hatred and I KNOW he wanted to hurt me but was unable to. I felt his frustration that he couldn't hurt me and I also felt it was because I was a woman. Again, I don't know HOW I know but I KNOW.
Years later, after I became a mommy, I overheard my mother tell a story about her house being haunted. I listened in disbelief as she told her friend about a man walking down the hallway to her room every night. She said he hated her. He was evil and he wanted to hurt her. She talked about having to call people in the middle of the night because her fear was so great, she thought she would die. She told us how her father, my grandfather, would drive over from another city in the middle of the night and check under every bed and open every closet in the house because my mother had called him hysterical telling him there was an evil spirit in her house.
Then she talked about how, finally, at the end of her rope, she had told a neighbor, who in turn gave us her calico cat. She told my mom that Cally could help. My mom said that Cally would sleep at the bottom of her bed every night and when the footsteps came down the hallway Cally would wake, stand up and stare intently at my mother's bedroom door until the footsteps reached the doorway. As my mom cowered in her bed, Cally would jump to the floor, step out of the room and instantly the feeling of the man would be gone. After a few moments of Cally's nocturnal wanderings, she would return to the bed, curl up and go to sleep. My mother knew she was safe, the man was gone and she would be at peace.
I was so excited hearing this tale that I blurted out "are you talking about the invisible man?" She turned to me and said "What did you say?" "The invisible man, mom! I heard him when I was little, I saw him!" She was dumbfounded. She had had no idea that I knew. And it was such a RELIEF to me. To finally be able to tell my story and know I would be believed. At least by her.
Now that I'm older, I am able to recognize when things aren't quite what they seem. I am also aware that even if something wanted to hurt me, it cannot. I've heard things, experienced feelings of something not quite there. I have had the extraordinary experience of a loved one coming to see me a few hours before they passed from this earth. It was both exhilarating and devastating for me. I have NOT, since that one time seen a full fledged apparition. I can't honestly say I wouldn't do the same thing again and run screaming in the other direction. But part of me wants to believe that next time my curiosity will get the better of me and I will take a moment to study what I'm seeing. Maybe even try to communicate?
So...anyway, that's my story. You can believe it or not. It's not going to change the fact that it happened to me. But here's something to think about...my mother sold the house to a single mother, whose son I happened to be dating. He asked me one night if we had experienced anything unusual in that house. I told him my story. I had only told a select few my story at that point and didn't know anything about my mom. He was white as sheet by the time I got done and told me that both he and his mother had heard the footsteps and his mother experienced that same feeling of evil and dread I had described. I knew that his mom was getting married soon and told him that once his new stepfather moved in, it would stop. I don't know why I said that. I didn't even know if it was true and don't know if that ended the haunting for them. But the fact that they experienced the same thing makes you stop and think, doesn't it?
The house is still there. People are living in it. I drove by one day and saw a young women sitting on the front porch smoking a cigarette. I wanted to stop and ask but then again, if the haunting has ended why freak a young girl out, ya know? But I felt dread as I looked at the house and I wondered...does he know I'm out here? Does he recognize me? Is he watching me even now? Is he still waiting for me to come home?