Big Girls Don’t Cry

When my dad came home from Vietnam, we returned to the United States for a few months, and then were sent right back overseas again to Germany.

Over the course of my childhood, I lived in fourteen different homes on nine different army bases and attended eight different schools—almost all of them overseas. Each year, everything changed. If we didn’t move, most of our friends and neighbors did. The only constant was the five of us: my mother, my father, my brother, my sister, and me… and the U.S. Army.

We went where duty called, so the armed forces provided our family with its few islands of stability. No matter where in the world it is, every base is a little bit of the United States. There’s a uniformity to military housing. All those cookie-cutter homes in a neat line. The same government-issue furniture. We all added some personal touches to our apartments. You could tell where a family had been stationed by the knickknacks they collected and unpacked after every move. Families with time in Germany had Hummels and cuckoo clocks. Those who had lived in Asia hung beads in doorways and displayed bamboo trays on black lacquer chests. Wherever you went, though, one thing was always the same: the look and smell of the base commissary, where you bought eggs and ground beef and milk in half-gallon containers. Once you entered a PX, you could be anywhere—in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Frankfurt, Germany; or Livorno, Italy.

There were rituals to daily life in the armed forces. Reveille every morning, “Taps” at the close of day. The silent performance each afternoon as three soldiers gathered around the flagpole, two standing at attention while a third lowered the flag. Then their solemn, almost Zen movements as they assist in the folding of the Stars and Stripes, never letting it touch the ground. All of these aspects of growing up army instilled a lifelong feeling of patriotism at my core: a steady beacon in a landscape where the only constant was change.

My parents were determined not to be base bound. They wanted, even on my father’s limited salary, to show us the world. We took many family trips together during our years stationed in Europe.

The five of us would pile into our tan two-door Maverick along with our new Dachshund, Gretel.

We were usually towing a camper behind the car, to save money on hotels. We would drive for days, with Aimie, Chris, and me crammed in the backseat—nudging, bickering, shoving, singing, and generally keeping up a nonstop level of background noise. We camped our way through the south of France and the beaches in Italy. We saw the tulips bloom in Holland and the art treasures of Florence. We learned to ski in Austria (we left the camper at home for that trip) and learned to slalom in Switzerland. It was an amazing gift our parents gave us. In those early years in Europe, I don’t remember feeling anxious or worried, or having to fight panic. I think it was because we were all together. I felt safe.

That was not the case, however, when my parents took trips by themselves. That was hellish for me. They would leave us with friends for a week while they went to Paris or London. I would sit in the living room window, watching them drive away, the panic mounting in my throat. It took everything I had in me not to scream or cry and chase them down the street. I would endure the week they were gone, numbly going through the motions, always teetering right on the edge of completely losing it. My anxiety filled my body. I could not eat. The friends minding us would ask, “Are you okay? Aren’t you hungry?” There was nothing anyone could say or do to make it better, and I felt I couldn’t tell anyone how fragile and terrified I really felt. Naming that fear would give it even more power. I had learned in Okinawa to keep it hidden. I didn’t say a word. I simply hung on and somehow endured until my parents came home. I remember my mom and dad used to sing a song to me when I was little, when I would get tearful. “Big girls, they don’t cry, they don’t cry…” It was the same lyric, over and over. They would sing and laugh and clap their hands. They were trying to distract me from whatever was making me upset, but it only made me frustrated. I thought they were mocking me and my tears. By the time I was eight, I embraced that refrain as a way of life. Don’t cry. Don’t show anyone you hurt.

I learned to run from my anxiety by losing myself in the imaginary world of books. I was a voracious reader. At school I would sit in the back of the classroom with one of my own books tucked inside whatever textbook we were supposed to be studying. I would read under the covers at night with a flashlight when we were supposed to be sleeping. I shed my worried, panicky self and took on the lives and the characters that captivated me. I imagined myself in all the girls’ classics as if they were my own life. Who was I in Little Women? My namesake, Beth? Or Jo? Or Amy? I fell in love completely with Anne of Green Gables. Anne was the plucky orphan who not only survives but thrives despite tough challenges. I devoured the trilogy about her, wishing I too had red hair. When I got bored with the Nancy Drew series, my mother introduced me to Agatha Christie—the first book I read was And Then There Were None, though at that time it was still titled the politically incorrect Ten Little Indians. By the time I was nearly ten I was deeply immersed in reading about Henry VIII and his six wives. The glamour, the peril, the betrayal, the beheadings! I would dream that I was a reincarnation of the doomed Anne Boleyn, done in by her ambition and a ruthless Tudor court. At other times I would fantasize about traveling back in time and whispering in Anne’s ear, “Your daughter Elizabeth will be one of England’s greatest monarchs.”

My parents took heart from my interest in books and my fascination with English history. For years, every birthday or Christmas meant a new doll from the court of Henry VIII—the massive king, all six of his wives, even the two princesses, Elizabeth and Mary. For a school project, I built the Tower of London out of paper towel tubes and cardboard, carefully painting it to look like a stone fortress. I was thrilled when on my tenth birthday my mom and dad surprised me with a fake British newspaper—the type you can buy at a shop selling tourist trinkets. The headline said HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BETH. We were going to London, just us! It was my first trip alone with them, and I felt special as we tramped to the big tourist sights: Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and, of course, the forbidding Tower, where Henry VIII would send wife number 2 (Anne Boleyn) and wife number 5 (Catherine Howard) to their execution. I hung on every word of our guide, who told us that on some nights, people swear they can hear Catherine Howard’s screams as she was dragged to her appointment with the royal headsman. That trip meant so much to me. It brought my imaginary world alive, and that world had been my lifeline since we arrived in Germany.

The years since our move from Okinawa had been difficult. We moved to Stuttgart, in the middle of my third grade year, and friendships and cliques forged fast on army bases were solidified by the time I arrived. I was the outsider, nervous and lonely. I was very small for my age, and because we were seated alphabetically, I always sat in the very back. That year, I might as well have had a sign saying BULLY ME pinned to my back. I quickly became the prime target of the class queen bee, Andrea Powers.

Every day Andrea would threaten me, announcing to her gaggle of girls, “I’m gonna beat her up when the bus drops us off.” So the second I stepped off the bus I’d run for dear life. Thank God I was fast. Fear can do that.

This went on for months. One day, my brother, who knew what was happening, came to the bus stop to meet me. I remember seeing him on his bike, waiting for me, his brown eyes searching for mine in one of the school bus windows. My heart sank. Instead of feeling comforted by his presence, I was ashamed. He could not protect me; he could only watch me running for my life, backpack flapping furiously behind me, just out of reach of Andrea’s grasp. It never occurred to me to ask the bus driver for help or tell one of the teachers. I was utterly resigned to my place in the pecking order.

The bullying followed me, like a bad feeling you can’t shake, even to the classroom. All my classmates were into playing jacks that year in third grade. I begged my parents to buy me a set. I brought them to school, brand new, still in their little felt bag. During the first free period, I proudly took them out and began to play. Now I’ll be just like the other girls. They’ll see that and begin to like me.

Instead, as I bounced my ball and scooped my jacks, Andrea walked over, raised her foot, paused for a second, and then slammed her foot down, crushing every one of my sparkly new jacks. I stared at the broken pieces. I didn’t even look up. I knew that none of the other kids would defend me. I didn’t utter a word of protest. I just sat there, heartbroken and embarrassed.

My mother had been bullied herself in school, and it broke her heart to see me go through it. She began writing me notes every day, hidden in my lunch box. They would be just a few words of encouragement and love, always signed with a smiley face. The lunch box notes helped a little. It was only after I became a mother myself that I realized how hard that must have been for her. She now wishes she had marched over to Andrea Powers’s house—it was just a few blocks away on base—and read her mother the riot act.

Andrea was the first of many bullies I had to contend with over the course of my childhood, in a series of schools scattered from Germany to Kansas. They were always cut from the same cloth: queen bee girls, “it girls” with long limbs and curtains of blond hair who were always whispering mean-girl gossip behind my back—and sometimes in front of me.

I became convinced that if I only just looked different, more like everyone else, I would fit in. I was always too small, and I had thick, unruly hair. I hated it.

All I wanted was long, straight hair, not this chaos of short black curls that would not lay flat, no matter how hard I tried to make it so. In seventh grade I came up with the bright idea to Scotch tape my bangs to my forehead as they dried in the morning, to keep them straight. It worked, sort of. But then one morning I forgot to take the tape off before I walked to the bus stop. I stood for ten minutes smiling nervously as kids stared quizzically, a few smirking, before somebody said, “Hey, you might want to take the Scotch tape off your forehead.”

Great. Ditch the Scotch tape. My lack of self-esteem was compounded by the fact that I was a late bloomer. So, when all the other girls were developing curvy hips and wearing bras, I was still skinny and flat chested. One day, in early adolescence—when we lived in Kansas—I was feeling reasonably good about myself and even kind of proud of my new school clothes. The pride evaporated when the queen bee of the class sat down beside me and brought me down to earth. “Beth, you shouldn’t lean forward with your blouse open when you sit like that,” she said in a phony-friendly way.

“Why?”

“Because everyone can see that you stuffed your bra with green Kleenex.”

With each move, to each new school on each new army base, I prayed that I could conquer my worries and insecurity, and reinvent myself. This time I’ll find the magic formula. This time I’ll figure out the rulebook that everyone else obviously lives by but no one ever showed me. And then, if I act a certain way, or dress a certain way, I’ll fit in.

My anxiety, as always, was lurking in the corner of my eye. As I grew older, and bigger, it seemed to grow along with me… and began slipping out, no matter how hard I tried to suppress it. I began to feel anxious when my family took day trips away from home, although I didn’t recognize at the time that was what I was feeling. In contrast to the sense of security of being with my family that I felt when we piled into the car and went on camping trips in Europe, when I was in early adolescence and we lived at Fort Leavenworth, weekend outings in Kansas City took a different turn. We would pile into our white station wagon, and drive to the city for a little window-shopping and a pizza—nothing that out of the ordinary. You’d think I’d look forward to a change of scene from Fort Leavenworth, but by this time my anxiety had progressed to the point that leaving the familiarity of the base rattled me. I would get nauseous all the way to Crown Center, triggering my vomit phobia, further rousing my anxiety. I’d sit in the backseat clutching a paper bag, my face pressed against the window, praying the queasiness would pass. Hours later, as soon as the car pointed back toward the army base, the nausea would suddenly, miraculously, be gone, leaving me wrung out but relieved to be heading home. It was only decades later that I learned that feeling of needing to vomit is a classic manifestation of anxiety in many people.

The dogged daily battle with anxiety had one unexpected and positive result. It made me tougher. I didn’t like fighting with my fears every day as if my very life depended on it, but doing so gave me a resolve, an inner reserve that would serve me well.

My adventure in cheerleading was a good example. It started in Germany as I went out for the squad when my brother was playing Pee Wee football: a nostalgic slice of Americana on the playing fields of an army base in the middle of Europe.

At the cheerleading tryouts I was a complete washout: timid and afraid, incapable of lifting my gaze from the ground five feet in front of me, a far cry from the high-spirited and perky attitude that puts the cheer in cheerleader. Not surprisingly, I didn’t make the cut. My mother tried to comfort me.

“It’s okay, Beth,” my mom said. “Just try harder next year.”

I spent the next twelve months practicing cheers, doing the splits, and making eye contact with the imaginary judges in front of me.

The next year, I was picked for the squad, and for every other cheerleading group all the way through high school. My skill at gymnastics worked in my favor. I loved launching handsprings across the football field or, later, the basketball court, or balancing on top of a human pyramid in front of the crowd. It was the first time in my life that instead of shutting down with my anxiety, I turned and faced it head-on, and won.

Cheerleading gave me the social entrée that had eluded me ever since first grade. All of sudden I was no longer the shy outsider who got picked on. I was part of a group. I had the novel experience of feeling accepted, even kind of cool. For the first time, I fit in, joining in normal teenage activities as we moved back to the States, to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: hanging out at the mall, going to the movies, checking out the boys in the parking lot at McDonald’s, and, to my surprise and delight, being checked out by the boys in return.

Those last years in high school, we moved back to Germany, to a small base in Heidelberg. They were relatively happy years. Like many kids, I tried drinking, but only in tiny sips. I was frightened of feeling out of control. The local gasthauses did not check our IDs and were happy to serve teenagers beer and wine and apple schnapps. My parents never worried about me drinking too much, like some of the other kids who got caught. They knew how terrified I was of vomiting. “We never have to worry about you getting drunk like some of your friends,” they would laugh. “You are too afraid you might throw up!”

I was smart enough to be placed in all the AP English classes, but I coasted academically, until the end of junior year, when a school-wide scandal shook me awake. That year, the varsity basketball team was in a tournament, and the cheerleaders decided to have a slumber party to paint signs and make streamers.

We all said there would be parents at the house where we stayed that night. We lied. We stayed up late, blasting Sister Sledge and Dire Straits on the stereo, baking cupcakes for the football team, and taking turns frying our faces under a sun lamp. We ended up oversleeping, and by the time we arrived at the school, with our pom-poms and cupcakes, our faces blistered and swollen, the team bus had already gone. The whole varsity cheerleading squad missed the tournament and got into big trouble. Our night of baking—both our faces and the cakes—suddenly morphed into a night of unsupervised partying in the whispered accounts in the school halls. We were threatened with suspension. And for whatever reason, the teacher who was in charge of us blamed everything on me. To this day I am not sure why, but it was clear then and in the following year, that she had it in for me.

It was wrong, and I knew it. I was shocked that an adult would target me this way. I was accustomed to classroom bullies, but they were always other kids, not members of the faculty.

That teacher pulled my mother aside at that time.

“Beth’s not college material,” she said. “You should make her stay home after graduating next year. Then you can see if any school will accept her.” My mother was furious. She knew that woman was wrong, and she told her so before abruptly walking out.

It was then, at the end of my junior year, when I made up my mind. It was time to focus and get to work. I quit the cheerleading squad. I buckled down in my studies. I was nominated to be editor of the high school newspaper. That same teacher actually tried to block me, but the other faculty overruled her. (What an awful woman she was!) I worked hard my senior year and discovered I loved writing and reporting. I wrote most of the articles in our newspaper myself, and then cut and pasted the layout each week on my dining room table before taking it to the printer.

It was that year, my last at home in high school, when I realized what I wanted to become in life: a journalist.

I was accepted to college, proving that teacher wrong, and it was one of the best schools of journalism in the country: the University of Missouri. My parents packed me on a plane in Germany and sent me, all by myself, to a school I had never seen (no college tours for us) and where I didn’t know a soul. I was panicked when I left, and unbearably homesick when I arrived. I would not see my family again until Christmas. I could not afford to call Germany. I could only spend the next four and a half months writing tearful letters home.

As I began that first, difficult semester, two sides of my character were set: driven by anxiety, panicked that it would show my fundamental weakness, and—on the other hand—an ability to buckle down, set goals, and achieve them. All through college and then on up the rungs of the career ladder in broadcast journalism—progressing from smaller to ever larger markets—I was able to keep my anxiety hidden, sometimes just barely. No one knew it was there, except me. And for many years no one knew I was drinking to keep it at bay, until the alcohol turned on me.