The Year I Became a Butterfly (Almost)

By Roberta Cardwell

Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, I was a chubby light-skinned girl with glasses.  I don’t remember being especially shy when I was little.  I had my girlfriends Mimi and Rita and was included in most things on the block simply because I was a member of the neighborhood.

Age 7

As I got older and approached adolescence my glasses became thicker and thicker and eventually I became the girl with coke bottle glasses.  When the other kids were allowed to venture outside of the neighborhood, I could not hang out anywhere my parents couldn't see from the front door.  My parents had to be able to look out of the front door and see me.  I have no recollection of where the other kids were going, but I do remember looking out of the living room window as they gathered under the street light on the corner and wishing that I could join them. Now I know that my parents, especially my mother, were frightened of what could happen to a girl in the outside world when I was living in a segregated society.

I became extremely shy.  More than anything else this shyness defined my adolescence and adulthood. Actually, “shy” doesn’t adequately describe it.  I had a real fear of what people would think of what I said and did, and that I would be judged and come up lacking.  I found it hard even to talk to people and could not perform in front of anyone.  At that time, the telephone was becoming the way to socialize, but the few times someone called me I was in a panic about what to say; I didn’t know how to just chat.  

Back then every black teenager was expected to know how to dance.  Nobody just got up and did their own thing.  You had to know the dances. Indeed, your popularity could rise and fall based on how expert of a dancer you were.  I was never able to get up and dance, even in my own home with family when everyone was doing the Madison.  My mother would urge me to get up and join the line, but I just couldn’t- I was frozen in place. 

I remember sitting in a classroom in school and feeling as if I were viewing the world with just my mind, which was completely disconnected from my body (decades later when my father was near death he said he did not feel like himself because so much of what he had been was associated with his body, a body that he no longer had use of; all that was left was his mind.  I completely understood what he meant).  So I read.  I turned to, and got lost in, books.  The Enoch Pratt Free Library on North Avenue became my place to be.

The Enoch Free Library on North Avenue today

Today, I think that I have social anxiety disorder, but growing up there was no such diagnosis.

So here I was, by now a 15 year old teenager, with thick glasses, without social skills or friends, and gaining weight every year because I spent most of my time inside reading.  But  that summer my parents did a really amazing thing – they got me contact lenses!  I had never even heard of contacts, but my parents had found out about them through a friend. They were very new, and probably very expensive.

That was the year I was suppose to bust out of my cocoon and become a butterfly.   I not only lost the glasses, but lost a lot of weight too.    That September, waiting at the bus stop on the first day of school I heard a boy say “Isn’t that the fat girl who used to wear those thick glasses? She sure looks different.”  Unfortunately, what I didn’t lose was the shyness.  My looks changed, and I began to face new challenges now that I was no longer invisible.