In recognition of Mr. Richard Nadeau of Greenville, Maine
Many of you reading this watched me growing up. Some of you have heard me tell aspects of this story. Very few of you know what matters to me … and I believe that we all deserve to know how we have impacted others in Life.
I was fat.
I was made fun of for it.
I was very sensitive.
I hid it well when it mattered most.
When I didn’t hide my feelings, it simply meant that it must not have been that important. The drama that we all saw was the frustration around not getting myself seen & understood, until Mr. Nadeau. He somehow knew what I needed, and he came and helped when others told me differently. He took me aside and he said:
“You know you can ruin their fun and then they won’t get enjoyment out of hurting you—if you do it first.”
Or something along that line; Where they got enjoyment and felt powerful for putting me down, If I deflated myself with their insults before they got to me, Then I was not a balloon that they could pop. So, every day he would help me learn, create, or memorise my own set of fat jokes to say back at the people who were using fat jokes against me.
“Oh, yah that’s funny… Buutt I’m actually SO FAT that I leave potholes when I go to the bus.”
“I’m so fat I got my own zip code.”
My favorite:
“When I go to the beach I come home with harpoon marks.”
The fat jokes were no longer swords to my gut - They became more like a shield. He helped me to protect myself during a time when I didn’t actually know how to do that for myself.
Mr. Nadeau’s lesson from that day lives on in me and gets deeper with each pass.
Like when I was really sick, I remember reflecting on my life and all the bad things I said about other people even though I actually loved them. Regret. Remorse. Sorrow. Grief. Shame.
Also, for the times I make one friend my favorite - in secret - on the inside—but behaving the exact opposite on the outside.
During this time of reflection, I noticed that I had been talking bad about the people and things that I loved the most, somehow in my little girl brain, it meant that I got to keep them. (Instead of letting them fall prey to losing them as punishment, I learned to manipulate the perception of what mattered to me.) the inverse was revealed:
I must really actually love myself! Like my beloved friends, I was putting myself down!
Protecting myself! The insults represented protection.
That opened my heart to another level- it’s unbelievable how many years it had been from his original teaching!
Again, most recently, he re-surfaced —Deeper still.
As I go through this human experience of “deaths of my old selves” and “rebirths into my newness”, I woke to his lesson and began to recognize that the motivation to look at myself more clearly and fully can also be tied back in relationship to the teachings of Mr. Nadeau:
Each morsel of painful Truth that I digest is less ammo for the enemy.
So in other words, if I look inside and I do the deeper work of myself to recognize and acknowledge the parts of myself that I don’t particularly like, want, or feel good about; While painful, it’s more beneficial for my ego to do so first. Than to wait for an outside event where others point it out. 😉 That helps prevent a whole layer of shame!
As I am reflecting on him yet again, this time as I lovingly tend to the birth and delivery of this story to Heidi at the Moosehead LakeShore Journal in Greenville, Maine to publish, I recognize and honor that today is Mother’s Day.
Lisa Carmen Lahves
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