It started simple enough.
Uneventful, really.
My dad called home as he was leaving work and asked what we all wanted from a nearby fast food joint.
It was 1990 and I had two working parents, so fast food was a staple. When one or both of my parents were working late, either fast food pickup or pizza delivery was on the menu. It kept us from having to eat dinner at 9 pm on a weeknight.
That night, we made our requests and waited patiently for our dinner — and our dad — to arrive. Forty or so minutes later and in walks Dad, both hands full of grease-spotted paper sacks, smelling like heaven.
We ran to the table, salivating as he began unloading bags. I held my breath as the last bag was emptied. Something was missing, and it happened to be my dinner. My brother scarfed his fries and shrugged as if to say, at least it wasn’t me.
It happens. Huge disappointment of course, especially for a hungry thirteen-year-old, but I don’t think I shed any tears. My dad split his meal with me, and I may have had a bowl of cereal to finish the job. I’m sure I moped. But it didn’t harm my psyche or anything.
Not yet.
We ate out a lot back then — my parents never liked to cook, and we had busy lives. Fast food on late nights, sandwich place after Saturday games, breakfast at the diner on weekends, family dinners at the casual family restaurant. We celebrated birthdays and other happy occasions at “the nice restaurant”.
Restaurants, food, eating out, meeting friends and family for meals — it was a huge part of my life as I grew up. Nearly every event in my life at that time involved ordering and eating a meal.
So, it didn’t take long to realize the food that I ordered was not arriving. Just mine. It was happening consistently — nearly EVERY TIME.
Now, I’m a realistic and thinking adult person. It has crossed my mind, of course, that I don’t remember this right. I would think, logically, that my memories of the events were the exaggerated recollections of a preteen, persecuted in her own mind.
However, my family still recalls the time period and remembers the events just as I do. We still talk about it from time to time and how it was so unbelievably strange.
Whenever someone picked up fast food, it was MY order that was missing. It was so frequent my parents started to review the contents of the bags before driving away from the window. But they still noticed that MY meal was the one they needed to ask for.
It wasn’t just at the drive-thru. At sit-down restaurants, I would place my order along with everyone else. When the food arrived, my meal wasn’t delivered. The server would look at me as though they’d never seen me before, apologize, and take my order again, promising to rush it.
This continued to occur for about a year.
Now, we did not only patronize a few restaurants. My parents were, and still are, restaurant aficionados. We went everywhere in town. And this phenomenon of missing food, MY missing food, was happening everywhere.
It wasn’t every single time, but it occurred with a regularity that can only be described as really, really, super odd.
It was funny, but also not.
The strangeness culminated, and concluded, with one event that still sticks out in my mind as a defining moment in my childhood. I recall it very clearly.
It was just after my grandmother’s funeral.
Aunts, uncles, and other extended family members were in town to celebrate her life and spend time together. We decided to have lunch at the IHOP just down the street from my grandmother’s house — one of her favorite places to eat.
We were a large group, probably one the servers would prefer to avoid. The waitress assigned to our table came over with pen and pad. She went around the table taking orders.
I placed my meal order as usual. In the back of my mind, as it always was, I wondered if I would receive my food.
I had definitely placed my order. She had spoken directly to me, looking at my face — we made eye contact — and smiling, as usual, but still, I suspected I would be missed.
It was my dad who brought it up in conversation with the table.
He wondered out loud whether I would actually receive my order of food, and then he told the family why he would wonder such a thing. He’s a good storyteller, my dad, and everyone was fascinated.
He told them about how frequently I was overlooked at restaurants and how often my order was missing from the fast-food sacks. I’m sure some of his examples were specific, but the gist was simply how strange it was that it continued to occur again and again.
They were entertained. They all agreed, “Oh yes, that IS strange. How very odd,” they concurred.
Of course, they didn’t think the tale was a lie, but certainly, it was exaggerated. It couldn’t be quite as frequent an occurrence as was described. That would be just TOO weird.
Fun story, though.
Before long, the waitress, along with a couple of helpers, arrived with many trays and multiple folding stands. She distributed food to the large table.
When all the food was passed around, the place before me at the table was still empty. I looked around to see if there was any more coming.
“Is there anything else I can get you guys?” she asked the group.
“What about hers?” My dad asked, pointing at me.
I could see on his face that he was somewhat satisfied, as was I. It looked as though we were about to prove the authenticity of the story he had just told.
The waitress looked at me with the expression I had seen on many a server in the preceding months. An expression that seemed to ask, when did you get here?
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. What did you get again? I’ll go check on it. So sorry about that. “
I smiled. My dad was smiling. It was kind of funny, wasn’t it?
Then I looked around at the rest of the table. Aunts, uncles, cousins — all staring at me open-mouthed. They were stunned.
It didn’t seem funny to me anymore, I suddenly felt really uncomfortable. They looked at me like…I don’t know…like a freak.
My aunt Gail was the only one to say anything, and I will never forget what she said.
“That would give me an inferiority complex.”
I’d never heard the term before, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out what it meant.
My mind swirled. Up until that moment I had thought it was weird, funny, annoying — a million different things. But I had never thought it was about ME.
Why was it happening to ME? What was it about ME? Was I doing something to cause it? Was there something about the way I looked, spoke, and acted, that made me less visible to the world? Forgettable?
I didn’t even have to be present for it to occur, as in fast food pickup, but clearly, surely, there was something about ME.
It stopped after that.
Oh sure, sometimes my food is forgotten in a restaurant or pickup scenario. But in a normal way. In a just-sometimes kind of way. In a not-any-more-often-than-it-happens-to-anyone-else kind of way.
In a doesn’t-give-me-a-complex kind of way.
But the truth is, that year — that formative preteen year — has had an enormous impact on my perception of the world. And of myself.
When I look back on my childhood, that year and those instances of perceived invisibility are a major part of what I remember. That day at IHOP is a significant memory.
My aunt Gail’s words.
Inferiority complex.
I’m inferior.
Or am I powerful? Was I able to create the recurring phenomena simply by expecting it? Did I will it to happen? Could I do it again, if I tried?
Was I meant to experience this? Was there a purpose? Was it a message?
~~~~~
I’m a scientist by trade and education. But whenever I start to dismiss strange phenomena as unscientific, I think to myself — well, there was that year.
When I read the book The Secret and thought the idea of manifesting something, causing an occurrence with your thoughts, is utter nonsense, I reminded myself — there was that year.
When I am tempted to dismiss religion, deities, fate, and universal grand plans, I think — but there was that year.
There are scientific explanations available for it all, of course.
While the repetition of events is not likely, like rolling the same number on a die 100 times in a row, there is still a non-zero probability of this set of events.
With all the people, in all the world, in all of time, such a year is bound to happen to someone. At least once — maybe dozens of times!
Or a simpler explanation, perhaps a psychological one.
My parents and I, expecting that my food specifically would be missed, would behave in some small, nearly imperceptible way, that through some evolutionary psychological pretense, created a signal in communication that induced the event to occur another time. The more times it happened, the more likely it would happen again.
Or, maybe my parents, believing they were hilarious, or maybe even wanting to hurt me, devised and executed this diabolical plan, intentionally skipping my order at the drive-thru, and bribing restaurant servers to play along. Afterward, they felt too guilty to fess up.
I don’t know the answer.
I don’t know if it was part of a grand plan or pure coincidence.
I only know this.
I’m the girl that was invisible for a year.