Transcript from an Essential Oils Addiction Recovery Meeting

Meeting called to order at 7:01 p.m. FACILITATOR: So when did we know our habit had reached the point of no return? Marvin? Did you feel like sharing?

MARVIN: Sure. I guess I knew it when I found myself hoarding essential oils, just buying large vats of eucalyptus oil, worried that the world’s supply might run out and then I wouldn’t have a remedy for a stuffy nose. And then what? You know?

FACILITATOR: Sure. Aubrey?

AUBREY: For me, my rock bottom was realizing I couldn’t cover the world in essential oils the way I wanted to. I would dream about pumping coriander onto my kids’ slip n’ slide. I seriously considered power-washing my house with dill. And after awhile, thyme was curing my husband’s sleep apnea so well that I considered getting a water bed but filling it with essential oils. I mean--who does that? Do they even make waterbeds anymore?

GABE: I hear you, Aubrey. I loved the Thanksgiving blend so much I put it in an enema, and...yeah.

JAN: Enema! Ha! That’s child’s play. By the end I was sniffing, snorting, and shooting melaleuca any way I could get it. I’d go really hard at my spin class and eventually the teacher would ask if anyone else smelled tree sap in the room. I was so embarrassed but I couldn’t stop.

SUSAN: Uh-huh, well for me it was when I just couldn’t stop commenting on every Facebook thread about how oils were the answer. I started to see every status message as a cry for help, like, Please give me some essential lavender!

[knowing laughter ensues]

FACILITATOR: And then what happened, Susan?

SUSAN: Well after accusing so many of my friends of having Munchausen syndrome by proxy for using cough syrup when their kids got sick, most of my Facebook friends blocked me. And no one would come to my oils parties anymore. So I would just spend hours on Pinterest learning more about oils and staring at other people’s oils parties. Which, I know is sad, but it’s not like I was mixing up meth in a trailer in the desert….

FACILITATOR: Remember, though, Susan, qualifying our addictions as not as bad as others’ may inhibit the healing process.

SUSAN: Oh, I know all about the healing process. Do you have any thieves oil at home? You just start with a few drops of thieves oil in a diffuser. I personally like the generic one they sell on Amazon. You diffuse that for 24 hours and rub 2 drops of lemon along with a carrier oil on your big toe and --

FACILITATOR: Um, Susan, yeah, what I’m hearing from you right now is a real attachment to your oils, which we are trying to break free from. Because for so many of us, the pursuit of essential oils has ruined our lives.

SUSAN: I’m sorry. [starts crying.]

AUBREY: Here’s a tissue, Susan.

FACILITATOR: Wait, Aubrey--

SUSAN: Aubrey? [sniffling] Is this tissue infused with eucalyptus?

AUBREY: Oh--

MARVIN: Here, let me check. If anybody here can spot the smell of eucalyptus…

FACILITATOR: Oh no!

AUBREY: [starts crying] I’m sorry. I thought eucalyptus was like methadone and would help me with the withdrawals.

MARVIN: HAHA! Give me that tissue.

FACILITATOR: Hey, everybody, let’s go have some punch and popcorn.

AUBREY: [sobbing] I spiked the punch with peppermint.

JAN: Yeah, sorry, I sprinkled oregano on the popcorn.

FACILITATOR: This is ridiculous! None of you are actually taking steps toward your recovery! You should all be ashamed of yourselves!

SUSAN: Well I don’t know. It’s kind of like old times. It’s like you all showed up to my oils party. And just like every other time, nobody bought anything because they already had it all at home.

Meeting adjourned at 7:14 p.m.

The Gym Shorts I Borrowed - Part II

(cont. from Part I) The Lost and Found box in the school dispensary is a moldy mountain of polyester uniform pieces and orphaned mittens. The mother superior of the dispensary, Mrs. Whittaker, doles out Ritalin, reads thermometers, and is the gatekeeper of the Lost and Found.

“Do those shorts have your name on them?”

"No."

I was honest.

“Frost*,” is permanent markered onto the waistband of the shorts in question. Frost as in Tim Frost, then in the 6th grade and also our community newspaper delivery boy.

“Okay, then you have to bring them back after class,” said Mrs. Whittaker.

So I do. I arrive to school on gym day and scavenge through the moldy abyss for the Frost pair. They are kind of blousy but at least they cannot be mistaken for a bandana. I rock them for an hour of dodgeball and then return them to being lost. Why I don’t just cross out “Frost” and write my own name on them, I cannot say. Just a rule-follower I guess.

And then there was the matter of how I had stapled my hand to a bulletin board in 4th grade and Mrs. Whittaker rode in like a hero, extracting the staple from my hand using her long sculpted fingernails. I just imagine those fingernails every time I think about claiming the borrowed shorts as my own.

Week after week I do the dumpster dive for the shorts and then I put them back. The shorts never get washed the whole year. I see Tim Frost on the school bus everyday; monthly he rides his mountain bike to our house to collect the $2.25 for his paper route. I fumble around our change drawer, searching for the quarters, feeling equal parts shame and kinship toward him. I am finding and using the clothes that he probably has no idea he has lost.

For all I know, there are others who were, too. The lost and found box is equal opportunity, after all. Gross.

In the usual end-of-year mayhem, I muster up the moxie to just not return the shorts. I keep them for all of 8th grade. To spite my mother, I never change the name on the shorts. With each load of uniform laundry, I hope that the jock itch will be washed out of the shorts and a sense of guilt will wash over my mother. (Mom, I am so sorry you had to raise satan's spawn.)

Several years later, I will ask Tim Frost to a school dance. My mom tells me to go vacuum out the mini-van before I pick him up as my date. We have already shared gym shorts, I think. I don't think he's going to be scandalized by a leftover juicebox in our van.

Every day is a holy day of obligation in my family: obligations to help, to not complain, to eat everything on one’s plate. The gym shorts, I know, were an opportunity for me to suffer in silence. Just like my mom did when she was my age and her mother gave her a bad home perm. Just like my dad did when his own father died and his mother couldn’t afford anything but an ill-fitting blazer for school. I know the consequences of complaining: I will be met by these stories of my parents’ woeful adolescences. There are penances for every misdeed and an accompanying sense of guilt over which one will stew for a long shameful season.

In this way, I feel as though my upbringing well prepared me to be the daughter-in-law of Korean immigrants. Korean culture, like many cultures infused with Confucian values, deals in a currency of honor, indebtedness and strength. My parents never coddled us and rarely indulged us. They provided for us, but we were forever in a position to be more grateful and to show a stronger sense of duty. The stories of the people my parents served in their workplaces were sobering: families ripped apart by drugs, Social Security benefits extorted from the mentally retarded, children abused and neglected and handed over to the state foster system. Someone always had things way worse. So be grateful. Buck up. Go put on your gym shorts and come back when you have a real problem.

*names changed to protect the innocent

The Gym Shorts I Borrowed - Part I

My mom purchases my sister and me all new gym uniforms the summer before we enter 4th and 7th grade respectively. She buys them from Jim Mayer Sporting Goods, the monopoly proprietor of all Catholic schoolie gym uniforms in Cleveland. As I have not yet experienced a “growth spurt” (which next summer will consist solely of my hips expanding two jean sizes), I am still wearing youth sizes. When I try on the new Youth Large shorts, they come down just past my wrist.I am so already winning at junior high.

“Mom? I cannot wear these. Like, all of my organs are showing.”

My mother works part-time for the federal government and then comes home to wrangle three kids: a hormonal rageball (myself), a sweet, sensitive secondborn (TP) and our younger brother Michael who has special needs. My dad, a criminal defense attorney, sometimes pays evening visits to his clients in the slammer. Friends ask me why they don’t see my dad very often. I tell them he is in and out of jail, which is basically true.

My parents always look tired. My mother, since I have known her, yawns from the three o’clock hour until she goes to bed at 10:30 p.m. It is only now that I understand why. BECAUSE PARENTHOOD EXHAUSTS.

My mom is a natural redhead with turquoise eyes. When you have pushed her last button, you will be seared by a laserbeam of ginger-headed cat-eyed NO. The day of the gym uniform reveal, I am sure that I have not even tread close to that threshold, not even flirted with it, but down the axe falls when I tell her she had clearly purchased me the wrong size.

“I’m not going back there. Jim Mayer assured me that large was the largest size he carried for youth. If you want to buy yourself a new pair, you can be my guest.”

I regret not thumbing a ride to Jim Mayer, just to see where it would have gotten me. Idaho? The 6 o’clock news? Into a pair of gym shorts that was not ill-fitting? I rock the gym shorts the first week of school, mostly to spite my mother, because I am a peach. Because I am in 7th grade.

I am blushing before I put them on. My whole body feels as though it is radiating blush as I emerge from the lavatory where we change into our gym uniforms.

***

The one salvation that first gym class is my very best friend Mary. She is the only good thing happening to me in 7th grade besides Jonathan Taylor Thomas renewing for another season on “Home Improvement.” She spends most of the class period shielding me, which is a Herculean feat since her frame is the width of a Pez dispenser.

Our gym class winds single-file through the halls of the junior grade levels en route to the school gymnasium. Occasionally the gym instructor with her array of bright windsuits stops us in the halls and rebukes us for interrupting the first graders from learning to read. As we pause outside the classroom, I see 25 1st graders turn from their pint-sized desks to stare at the Big Girl in the hallway who seems to have gotten hold of their gym shorts. I pull my T-shirt over the shorts and yank a sweatshirt down, but then it looks like I had just forgotten my shorts. The official gym uniform of St. Raphael School is maroon, which nicely complements my flushed complexion.

After the first physical education class, I need to find another solution if I do not plan to transfer to a school without a gym uniform. My solution is in a box.

(To be continued....)