ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 225: Phone Sexy Gu-Gu

Mary, leader of the Co-dependents Anonymous meeting I attend, greets everyone at the door. She sees me coming and smiles, extending her palm. Our palms meet. We’re blood sisters.

At tonight’s meeting, Mary speaks of personality development.

“Personality develops between birth and ten. We learn our relationship skills and coping skills from our parents. If they don’t have healthy ways of relating to themselves and to each other, then how can we? We model ourselves after them. Until we get into Recovery, recognize and heal our hurt inner child, and begin to take responsibility for our own behavior, we are victims and perpetrators.”

Growing up, I was given my own room — a huge luxury in a family with seven children. On the back of my closet door, my father hung a long mirror. At night I talked to my mirror image — but even then, in a whisper.

Sometimes I put on my mother’s plain black swim suit. I don’t know why the swim suit was hanging in my closet, but it was. Then I carried on an imaginary conversation with a boy, and I practiced being sultry, provocative, a siren. I was teaching myself a siren’s song. No wonder Ernie wrote, in an early note to me: I think I love you, even your damned sarcasm, bad grammar, and phony, sexy gu-gu.

He knew about me. But his knowing didn’t help me because I didn’t recognize the truth of what he was telling me about myself. I didn’t know to take his words to heart.