I Must Have Been Hiding Under A Blanket


There are five children in my family of birth, four girls, Mary Grace, Michele (Me), Margaret and Martina and then my brother, Mark. Notice our names all start with the letter M. Our last name begins with an N. So my parents would sign all the holiday cards Laura, Tony and the 5 M&N’s. Cute huh? We also have the family shorthand of calling each other by our initials. Mary Grace became MG. I’m MT because my middle name is Teresa. Margaret Caroline is MC. ML is my sister Martina Laura and by brother Mark Anthony is MA.

I love that Mark’s initials are MAN. When he came to visit me in San Diego once, I took a picture of him outside the Museum of Man. But that’s another story.

MG, MT (Me) and MC were spaced three years apart. Then my mother took a break from birthing babies and ML didn’t appear until five years later, with MA to follow. This little gap in the line-up always offered a bit tension in the sharing of family memories. The fact that we moved from Delaware to New Jersey when ML was a baby and my mother was pregnant with MA, offered an additional split in the childhood stories.

One time when ML was about five maybe six years old, MG, MC and me, were telling tales of our Delaware days. In frustration of not being able to join in, ML announced, “Well I must have been hiding under a blanket.”

That phrase became a family classic to pull out whenever someone was feeling left out in the conversation. I, personally, of late have extended its use to when I feel I wasn’t fully present to what is going on, or when my shortcomings embarrass me.

This leads me into my chosen life focus of late, writing. I am a terrible speller, the rules of punctuation often evade me, and I mispronounce words on a regular basis. Just the other night when my friend Jennifer, helped me set-up this blog, we were reading how to post pictures. One way is through using a program named, Picasa. I don’t even want to say how badly I butchered that simple word.

In times such as this the dialogue in my head opens with “And YOU want to be a writer!” But I’ve gotten to the point of acceptance to where my cheeks will flush to blush red not full on crimson, I accept correction in pronouncing words, I ask others to read my writing for punctuation (some stuff still slips by), thank the computer geniuses of bygone days for Spell Check and I am willing to increase the muscles in my arms by lifting my huge dictionary.

But when the full grip of fear comes on me and I can’t seems to stop the critic in my head, I pull up from the bottoms of my feet a good guffawing laugh and announce, “when they taught that in school, I must have been hiding under a blanket.”