The Caca-Brown Jacket Manifesto
My Birthday Blog Story
Birthdays make me reflective, mostly because they remind me that I’ve spent a great chunk of my life perplexed. Even as a kid, I wasn’t one to take the world at face value. While other children were content eating chalk or believing in the tooth fairy and elves, I was busy trying to untangle the contradictions of existence.
Don’t get me wrong—I believed in elves at one point, too. I can still hear the sleigh bells outside Grandpa Arthur’s house on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, I later learned it wasn’t Santa and his reindeer at all but Grandpa’s brother, Jim, buck-naked under a flapping bathrobe, sprinting down the lane, shaking those sleigh bells and laughing like a lunatic.
After that revelation, I started questioning everything. If Santa was actually Uncle Jim and his wardrobe malfunction, what else were adults lying about? It was the beginning of my lifelong suspicion that the world was a lot stranger and more complex than the grown-ups let on.
I couldn’t just accept that things “were what they were.” I needed more info or proof. The church alone was a minefield of mystery. During Mass, I’d stare at the priest and wonder how, exactly, a thin wafer and a sip of wine could turn into the body and blood of Christ. It felt suspiciously like a magic trick, yet one that intrigued me so much, I wanted to be a priest. When I asked my dad to clarify these hard-to-explain things, I bet he panicked. He knew I was like a dog with a bone when it came to trying to understand a good mystery. And as you can read in my book, NO MATTER WHAT, he did his best to help me come to conclusions on my own, but I bet he wanted to just shut me up and mutter, “It’s called faith, honey. Just accept it.” Though it wasn’t lost on me that ‘faith’ was its own mystery.
I’m sure my question about the Aborigines in Australia made Dad cringe. Once I learned about them, I couldn’t stop worrying about their eternal souls since they had never heard about Jesus.
“But Dad, if they don’t know Jesus? Are they going to hell?”
My poor dad probably panicked with that inquiry, too. Besides asking his proverbial, “Well, what do you think, Née Née?” he likely responded confidently with something like “Well…I’m sure God has that all figured out.”
Great, but that doesn’t really help me make sense of anything. Can I at least have the Cliffnotes for God’s plan?
The contradictions just piled up from there. The Bible said “Thou shalt not kill,” but also “an eye for an eye.” Which was it? Was I supposed to forgive my third-grade classmate for tripping me during Square Dance Fridays, or was I allowed to poke him in the eye? No one seemed to know.
And then came the other confusion—the kind that made my stomach feel like I had swallowed a small tornado. The day I saw the sexy and scantily clad Jessica Lange in the 1976 version of King Kong, something stirred in me that I didn’t have language for. It felt good, but also scared the heck out of me. I wanted to cozy up beside her inside King Kong’s black leathery hand and… kiss her. Which, at that age, was quite a complex thing to face…and, gosh, what was that feeling going on below my belly button?! 😳
For years, I was convinced I must be an alien. My family adored me, but I felt so different, I figured there had to be some cosmic mix-up. But I looked exactly like my dad, so that ruled out the alien-abduction or the “I’m adopted” theory. Even so, I often felt like I’d been dropped into this body and told, “Good luck, kid. Try to blend in.” I never did.
In my adolescence, I just gave up and I tried being different on purpose. The year satin jackets were all the rage, everyone at school had one—except me. Until I did. Since I attended Catholic school, we wore uniforms with a very strict dress code every day, except on the first Friday of every month, when we were allowed to wear whatever we wanted. For me, this freedom was equivalent to descending into hell. When Mom, Julie, and I went clothes shopping, I was urged to pick out one of the trendy satin jackets everyone else was wearing. Defiant, I chose one that was the color of overcooked yams—somewhere between burnt orange and a shade of baby-poop brown. It was hideous. It was my silent proclamation to the world: I’m not like anyone.
Back then, my confusion and difference felt claustrophobic. But now I see it for what it truly was: pure curiosity. It’s a superpower to me now. The same part of me that once agonized over the afterlife of the Aborigines is the part that still refuses to stop asking questions.
Because here’s the thing about curiosity—it’s not always comfortable. It pokes holes in certainty. And if we’re honest, most people don’t like that. They’d rather accept the hand-me-down beliefs they were given and call them “truth.”
That kind of truth doesn’t breathe, though. It gets stuck like bad circulation or old cooking oil. And when our beliefs stop moving, we stop growing—just like when our blood stops flowing, we start dying. I wholeheartedly embrace some secondhand beliefs, but it’s because I have the internal knowing that they are true for me.
Today, I’ve learned to celebrate confusion, to let the questions emerge, and to ask why, even when it makes people (or myself) shift uncomfortably in their seats. The very curiosity that once made me feel like an alien is now what makes me feel alive. When life confuses me (which is pretty much daily), I try to see it as proof that I’m still paying attention.
The good news is, amidst the perplexity, life still amazes me—just like it did the day I turned one and stood on my grandparents’ dining room table, singing Happy Birthday in perfect tune while my big, beautiful family clapped and roared with laughter around me. Even with all its contradictions and chaos, the world is still full of wonder. I’ve just learned to lean into the mystery instead of letting it convince me that I don’t belong.
If being perplexed means I never stop asking “why,” then bring on another birthday, because I plan to stay curious for a very long time.