This appears to be from a nightmare scene edited out of the final cut of The Muppet Movie.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!  Kermie!!!  Mel Brooks’ Nazi scientist had nothing on this fashion designer.

Image shamelessly stolen from this site.

My father’s fourth wife was the queen of passive aggression.  It chapped her ass that I would go to my room to watch TV and study after school, because clearly I should want to spend time in the cold, drab kitchen with her while she watched sports*.

Her solution to her annoyance was to call me down to dinner via a dinner bell.  She couldn’t come up to my room and knock on the door.  She couldn’t even set a specific time for dinner and simply ask me to be punctual.  Nope, not Ellie Smith.  She had a knack for finding the most absurd methods of getting even for real or (usually) perceived slights.

Understandably, it annoyed me to be called down to dinner in this manner.  One afternoon after school before ma bête-mère came home, simply out of curiosity, I picked up the bell from its resting place next to the kitchen table and examined it.  I discovered how to remove the, um, clangy thing in the middle.  (Aha!  The dictionary saves me yet again.)  I figured out how to remove the clapper from inside the bell.  It was simply a matter of unscrewing the top of the bell’s handle.  Loosen it enough and the clapper fell out.  I put it back in but left it loose, just loose enough for what I hoped would happen later that night.

At around 7 p.m., I heard a clank, clank, thud.  The clapper flew out of the bell and hit the floor.  All the king’s horses and wife number four couldn’t put the bell back together again.

Problem solved!  Until she decided to call me on the phone to inform me dinner was ready.

*The really frustrating thing is that, even had I done what she supposedly wanted, she still wouldn’t have been satisfied.  If I had hung around too much, she would have found an excuse to be get upset; she likely would have decided that I was cramping her style.  She certainly didn’t like it when I had dinner with her.  I had an unfortunate habit of speaking my mind.

Contrary to my love for the Barbie fashion show.

Mattel created a real-life Malibu dream house for Barbie, and it is hideous.  Come on, Barbie is Hollywood Regency all the way.  I don’t buy for a second that she’d live in such a tacky wreck of a house.

Last night I was reading a book that mentioned the pater noster, and I immediately remembered it:

Our father, who art in heaven.

Hallowed be thy Name.

Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom,

and the power, and the glory,

For ever and ever.

Amen.

I’ve had to memorize many things in my life:  the first soliloquy from Hamlet, the Pledge of Allegiance (which I repeated every school day from first to fifth grade), yet somehow I remember the pater noster after only about one year (or 52 Sundays) of attendance at church.

It kind of pisses me off, because that was one of the worst times of my life, when I was forced to live with an irrational, immature sixty year old (my father’s wife) and was forced to coddle her by going to her church.  FYI, never, I repeat, never go to a Lutheran potluck.  Trust me on this.

The ultimate shame of that period is that I allowed that woman to railroad me into being baptized, and confirmed, a Lutheran.  I was originally baptized a Unitarian, and I was perfectly happy to remain that way.  But no.  In order to keep the peace, or rather to keep that woman from developing a brood of her very own, I had to submit to a baptism.

I have to remind myself that I was only 13 years old at the time.  I have long had an unfortunate habit of holding myself to impossible standards.  This, coupled with the memory of an elephant, leads me to beat myself up over things I did as a small child.  (I wish I was kidding.)

Until I started to come to terms with that time in my life, I found it really hard not to blame myself for being weak.  Now, as an adult, I know where to put the real blame:  on that woman and especially my father who prioritized her over his own child.  It’s a basic survival mechanism to be weak and to cave to an abuser’s demands whenever necessary.  The path of least resistance, just going along with what she wanted, was my best possible method of holding off the verbal and psychological abuse for as long as possible.

Instead, all of that craziness was parceled out over a period of two years.  More manageable at the time, but so much the better for permanently alienating me from my own father.

My first name has been misspelled my whole life.  The most perplexing misspelling is the one above.  I have never, ever seen my name spelled that way, except when people misspell it.  I’ve seen Erykah (as in Erykah Badu), Erycka (ugh), Aricka (double ugh), but never Ericka.  So why do people misspell my name this way?  Are they trying to hedge their bets?  ”Well, I don’t know if it’s “Erica” or “Erika”, so instead of asking her, how ’bout I just put both a “c” and a “k” in her name.  That’s the ticket.”

Argh!!!

The worst are those people to whom I say, “Erika, with a k”, and they interpret that to mean with both a “c” and a “k”.  I feel like I have to live my life troubleshooting the weird interpretations people make.  What if I told them by last name is “Olsen” with an e?  Would they spell it “Oleson”?  Actually, I think that did happen to me once.

The most frustrating thing is when I fill out a form or give someone my driver’s license AND THEY STILL SPELL MY NAME WRONG.  They don’t spell my annoyingly difficult hyphenated last name wrong, oh no; that almost never happens.  Instead they almost always spell my not-particularly-unusual first name wrong.  This happened when I gave a guy my driver’s license when I signed up for a new cell phone.  I’ve also worked with people who see my name in print every week and still manage to think my name is “Erica”.

As a copyeditor this mystifies me.  People can look at my name and still see it spelled with a “c” or “ck”.  I suspect that, if I had a really unusual name or a really unusual spelling of my name, it would almost never be misspelled, and I’ve noticed this with the first part of my hyphenated last name:  Skornia.  If anything should be misspelled, it’s that, but it almost never is.  Usually, if it’s misspelled, it’s merely because I didn’t write it out clearly enough and the “r” and “n” seemed to merge together into “m”:  Skomia.  That’s understandable.  When I’ve worked with someone for four years, and they’re still spelling my name “Ericka”, that is not understandable.

But what am I complaining about?  People like this ensure my continued livelihood.