Back When My Wife Pretended to Be Homeless...

I was looking through the archives of the blog the other day, and I was reading this post and noticed the part when I wrote about my wife pretending to be homeless when she was a kid. I mentioned there that that was a blog post in and of itself. So, I've asked her to do a guest post about that time in her life, because I personally find it both very funny and weird. Thanks, Liz.

Well, I don't really know what the big deal is. Didn't everyone imagine weird stuff when they were kids? About being homeless and finding homeless babies who needed care? No? Well, I did.

I had this long running pretend scenario where I was homeless and I would wander around with a  basket trying to find food. It was really convenient that we had these big pecan trees in our backyard, because if it were the the right time of year, I had an endless supply of food. And since I lived in Georgia, the best time of the year to wander around outside with a scarf wrapped around me was the fall, which was when the pecans were ready to eat.  Perfect timing!

So, then I would wander around imagining myself going through different adventures. (I'm sure I looked a little crazy.) I would then sometimes find an abandoned baby who needed me to care for her. I would wrap her up and put her in my basket and then go about "milking" dandelions and milkweed and other random plants so that she could have food to eat and stay alive.

[Scott's note: This was probably the same baby doll she brought to our marriage, and was seriously THE CREEPIEST DOLL EVER. It's eyes were weird and cloudy and stuck half-open. It's head was a different color than its body, not on purpose. It's toenails were messily painted with real nail polish, and it had a big crack in her plastic side. In this crack, Liz stuffed a ton of paper clips at some point in her life, so there were a bunch of rusty paper clips rattling around inside it that would occasionally fall out. Why the paper clips? Liz has never given me a real answer to this. The baby's name was Hadley, which, incidentally, is the name that is always on her list of favorite baby names.  At some point in our marriage, Liz got rid of Hadley, but I guess she'll always live on in my mind (and my  nightmares).]

Frankly, pretending to be homeless is probably one of my least weird childhood imaginings. A friend and I used to pretend that our Cabbage Patch Kids were our children, but we didn't really want to deal with pretend husbands, so we just had them die in the "War."  Funny thing is that my pretend husband's name was Scott... what do you think about that!?  Ha!

My friend and I also used to play this scenario at school (if you read this, Rachel, you'll have to tell me if you remember this) where we had this mean uncle (Uncle Methuselah) and we had to work for him, cleaning or something like that and he kept us locked up and we were always trying to escape.  We made up this song that went something like "Uncle Methuselah is his real name, he plays .... (something)... like a game." I can't really remember all the words, but I can definitely remember the tune!  We had many verses we would sing, probably made up by Rachel because she was very creative and musical.

Then, at home, I would always climb out my window onto the roof (my room was on the second floor) and then scale up to the very top of the house to look out at the world below (this would have probably make my parents, and especially my Dad, have a heart attack, so it's good they never really knew about this.) And I remember one time trying to start a campfire in my bedroom. People, it's a miracle that I didn't burn our house down.

I liked playing pretend as a kid, in fact, I was still playing with dolls until I was about 13 or so. I had five Cabbage Patch kids - and, shockingly enough, I did not keep any of the names that they came with. Remember how they always came with the weirdest names? I totally disregarded them and made up my own. I still remember them: Mary Lou, Malcolm, David Michael, Amy, and Chrissy.

Scott had a boy Cabbage Patch, and he kept the name of his, in fact he was appalled that I changed mine. But I've noticed that Belle is like me - she'll always name her own dolls.  We're rebels like that, I guess.

So, that's my story. Random, yes. Blog fodder? Of course.