The Ghost At My Shoulder

First, the happy news:

Yes, at a state-wide kick-off meeting Wednesday Ginny won the coveted Stuffed Celery Award.

She works with a team of people who feed about 200,000 hungry children a year. This semi-charitable held an organizational meeting yesterday and Ginny won this token of recognition for her superior knowledge of efficient procedures.

Yaah! Ginny

Then, on the other hand, there’s me.

Every time I make a mistake, I mentally kick the shit out of myself. I call myself vile names and berate myself unmercifully. Every mistake I make churns up a thousand other mistakes from my past. In a flash, 68 years worth of mistakes, faux pas, blunders, missed opportunities, sins, stupidities, failures — all burst forth with their accompanying pain as though they happened just an hour ago.

I rage and curse and accuse myself. And as one 16^th Century Puritan said, “I mislike my self right well”.

Today this perverse talent of mine exercised itself to the extreme.

I’m painting our house.

It’s light gray with dark charcoal trim.

The eaves are boxed with white soffit.

I use a thin metal masking board so the lines between trim and walls and soffit are sharp and crisp…

Most of the time.

But since my hands shake after a few hours work, I began to bleed paint from one color to another. When I tried to correct my mistake with a damp rag, I smeared the paint even worse.

And I flew into a rage at me.

I am unbelievably harsh on myself.

About this time a helpful neighbor came over to tell me what I was doing wrong and how I should have done it.

Gee, thanks.

I happened to be painting an area over where we store the garbage cans when he approached. For a while he watched me trying to delineate sharp crisp lines in that cramped area then he said, “John, why take so much trouble back there? Who’s to see”?

“My mother,” I snapped immediately without thinking.

I realized I was right.

I’ve been mad at me for offending my mother even though she’s been dead and buried for more than twenty years.!

Once I painted her home — actually, I refurbished the whole place from plumbing to window screens. I painted with meticulous care, just as I’ve been doing on my home today, because I knew she was a perfectionist. Yet, I heard her complain to her sister, “Johnny’s out there just slopping paint around”.

Mother, God rest her, was a fault finder.

In fact, she never found anything else.

Once I won a huge sterling silver loving cup with my name engraved in a scroll between the handles. My parents had not been at the awards banquet and when I proudly brought the 18-inch high trophy into the house, my mother accused me of stealing it.

She would not believe that I could have won such a thing till she saw what the jeweler had engraved.

Even then she viewed it with suspicion.

Kind of soured me on awards — not that I’ve won all that many of them.

Like a fool, I proudly carried my first published article to show her.

Before reading it, she said, “Johnny, you’d better not have written anything in there to make me ashamed”.

But she was ashamed.

The one refrain I heard a thousand thousand times while growing up was, “Johnny, I’m so disappointed in you”.

Anyhow, I try to paint exact sharp, crisp lines, and I curse and berate myself when I smear paint or even spill a drop. I feel as though my mother is watching over my shoulder, standing there accusing me of slovenliness.

Immediately when I realized that I wanted the paint lines in the garbage can storage area to be perfect, I then worried about what I may have done to my own children, how I may have warped them through lack of praise, how I may have belittled their achievements, how I may have spoiled their joy and squelched their spirits.

That grieves me.

I never meant harm.

I’m just passing it on.

I’m sorry.

However, I can think of one hopeful note in all this mental regurgitating.

In Psalm 27:10, King David says, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up”.

And here is a verse I can identify with; one of my teenaged cousins had a baby and she threw it in a dumpster behind the old Pic’nSave on Eighth Street. A store employee heard the baby cry and fished it out.

Fuel for much family gossip.

But, the promise God Himself makes in Isaiah 49:15 says:

Can a woman forget her sucking child —
That she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?
Yea, they may forget.
Yet, will I not forget thee.

Bad parents beget bad parents. From generation to generation we pass on the unconscious mind-set we have seen acted out in our predecessors.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

My touch of creativity, which I see displayed also in my children, I saw first in my mother’s handicrafts.

Yet, when it all does go haywire, when the ghost of an accusing parent stands over my shoulder while I paint above the garbage cans, when I’m harder on myself than any responsible adult would ever be on a child, when the haunts and taunts of 60 years ago still plague me and make me hate myself, Even then, the Lord will take me up.

Even then, Jesus loves.

Me.

It’s hard for me to add that last word. I’m one of those miserable souls who mentally amend Scripture. You know, “The Lord is the Shepherd of everyone except John Cowart… For God so loved the world, except for John Cowart, that He gave His only begotten Son…”

Yes, even though I’m a Christian, that’s the way I really feel. For me it is an act of raw faith to put aside my background and gut feelings to root-believe God’s word that in spite of my self-image and the ghost continually at my shoulder that Jesus loves me.

Even me.

And I don’t even have to color inside the lines.