The Making of a Woman: From the Inside Out

By Jewels A. and Marlayna Glynn

*NEW! First place award winner for LGBTQ memoir and second place for autobiography in the FIREBIRD Book Award Contest!*

 

Told with an unflinchingly honest voice as real as the flawed people that populated her world, The Making of a Woman is an unexpected memoir exploring the path less traveled. Childhood abuse and trauma powered an alcoholism that would nearly defeat Jewels. Yet Jewels' assures us that even when we lose those things that give shape to our soul-belonging, the need for touch, and safety in our own home-we can go on to devise a new way of being that surpasses our childhood haunts.

 

Jewels was seven years old when her father attempted a family suicide, so her mother whisked her away to the arms and family of another man. Ruled by her mother's delusional survival aspirations and the ignored evidence of her suffering at the hands of her new relatives, life became a daily struggle for survival for Jewels. But when the truth could no longer be hidden, the family split, leaving Jewels to navigate a new world not of her making. Deciding to use her earlier trauma to enter recovery, sexually liberate herself, and enter the competitive world of professional bodybuilding, Jewels created a life that inspires others to push forward no matter the details.

 

In this uncommon ode to survival, Jewels creates a quite unexpected career from her truth-underscored by her complicated relationship with the allure of sexuality. Through a tangle of forgiveness and understanding emerges an elevated journey of the mechanisms for survival, of pain and joy, and of discovering that family is what you make of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Birthright Books, LLC
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201465704

Jewels A.

Jewels is an award-winning author, speaker, and bodybuilder who strives to inspire others to push forward no matter the challenges. After enduring an abusive childhood, Jewels decided to use her earlier trauma to enter recovery, sexually liberate herself, and enter the competitive world of bodybuilding. At age 49, Jewels placed 3rd at the NPC North American Championships in 2021. Jewels recently completed her guest appearance on Consenting Adults Podcast with Leyna Nguyen, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and host. During her book launch tour, Jewels has appeared on over 18 podcasts to discuss a variety of important topics from her memoir including childhood trauma, sexual abuse, alcoholism, shame, LGBTQ, and alternate lifestyles. Jewels has had the honor of being a guest speaker on Keys and Anklets, a podcast focused on separating facts from fiction within often widely misunderstood lifestyles, the Pillow Talk with Venus crowd cast, another podcast that focuses on female-led relationships, and a documentary of alternate lifestyles broadcasted in the UK. Click here to browse her full list of podcast guest appearances. For more information on book signings and speaking engagements, please email [e-mail]. Follow her on social media: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.   

Book preview

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been in the making since the fall semester of 1999, when I met my long-term friend, Kenlyn. My gosh, did we ever think this book would get into print? You’ve walked beside me during some of my darkest times... and my most glorious times. Thank you for always seeing the positives.

Thank you to my parents. Without my childhood experiences with you, I would not have the strength I have today.

Thank you to the hundreds of people who walk the path of recovery with me. I wouldn’t be alive right now without you.

I wish to thank my dear friend, Carol, who showed me by example what a successful marriage looked like and reminded me time after time, Ms. Jewels was very good to you, thank you very much!

For every man that has walked into my life; and walked back out. You’ve shown me what I want and don’t want in a relationship.

Steven, you changed my entire life. Your faith in me allowed me to shine. Thank you. You will forever be in my heart.

And to my biggest supporter, my husband. When I asked Source for you, I had no idea of the quality of the man who was about to join me on my journey. You are a gift that keeps on giving. Thank you for always pushing just enough so I could taste success. I love you.

Marlayna, Source knew you were perfect. Thank you for your endless effort, patience, and empathy as I told my story to you. Your dedication and heartfelt work are much appreciated.

Jade, thank you for being the unseen magician who made our words make sense.

Thank you to my wonderful cover artist, Donna Cunningham, of Beaux Arts Design.

And finally, thank you to Charn and Jason who will help me deliver a lifelong dream to the world.

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PROLOGUE

Hey you! You in the back of the room, who thinks you’re alone — I see you. You’re not alone. In fact, you’re in fabulous company.

Even if you can’t recognize it yet, I see that you’re an amazing woman; someone the world needs to see more of. Perhaps you’re the quiet fighter behind the scenes. Maybe you’ve only ever heard negative things about yourself:

You won’t get anywhere in life.

You won’t make it.

You won’t finish school.

You’re a loser.

A whore.

An addict.

A dropout.

A SLUT.

Yet you suit up and show up every day. You keep fighting and you keep surviving despite what happens around you and to you. I wrote this book to reach the sore spots of your heart. I want you to know you are loved.

Perhaps your heart is broken. Maybe you have been victimized by others. You might worry that you’re not enough because someone said that to you when you were vulnerable. Try not to focus on the surrounding people, you’re not supposed to connect with all of them. That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with you, and the opinions of others do not shape you. Sometimes you will watch the people who have populated your life grow smaller in the rearview mirror until they disappear. Let them fall away while you keep moving.

I once wore the shoes you’re wearing. I hid behind that same kind of mask because I saw myself as a master chameleon. When I looked in the mirror, I was sure that I portrayed a very well-balanced, confident, and attractive woman, who had it all together. But it was a different story on the inside. I strove to be everything that other people needed me to be. I had two identities: the real me, and the constructed me, who others told me I should be. I was drowning in dogma and I didn’t even know it. I just kept swimming.

The minute somebody rejected me, I would throw my stuff in a black garbage bag and hit the road. In the last three years before I became sober, I moved every 12 weeks. By the end of my disease, I was very much in my anger and defenses. I was barely surviving.

Now, despite the differences in our stories, I am certain that we all have what it takes to survive. We are all sparks of the divine, replete with divine qualities. Source often interjects by making certain areas dim while illuminating others until ultimately balance is found.

I now work with people in recovery, so I can recognize when others are struggling to flourish. I can sense when they’re deliberating their own course and are not quite there yet. My part is to plant seeds and ask questions that get to the root of the matter, to encourage growth.

We all have competing attributes. Ideally, we bring them into balance through healing. Maybe courage is bright and sensitivity is a tad dimmer; creating a balance between the two gives us something to work toward. Some people say, Nope, I’m out. I don’t want to be on this path, screw it. During my first phases of this lifetime, that’s certainly where I was, I understand.

When I first discovered my own courage, it felt difficult to recognize it as a strength. Everyone else had always told me who I was. To label myself felt foreign. I was trying to live my life in the correct lane according to everyone else’s standards. By others’ definitions, my actions were often negative. But my mistakes became a part of my story, a product of my path, and the way toward my future. The lessons I have learned have made me who I am today. I understand what’s going on in your mind. I’m sure you have the same questions I did.

Why can’t I get my feet underneath me?

Why do I keep making the same mistakes?

Why can’t I fit into their mold?

Sometimes, I am still challenged by those questions today. So, I have to examine my life, and ask: Is this my mold, or someone else’s opinion of who I should be? I challenge you to do the same.

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CHAPTER ONE

The First Quartet

Shortly after my father died, I stood in the muted afternoon sun near a window in his home, scanning the letters and papers and newspaper articles that people of his generation keep. There’s an old blessing that says something like: May you live long enough to understand your parents, a mantra that knocked around in my head as my eyes took in the details my father never shared with me. Only by going through those musty shoeboxes, full of old paperwork, had I lived long enough to understand the why of who he was. And the why of who I am.

Dad was born in shame, as what was then referred to as a bastard child who resulted from an afternoon tryst between his young mother and the man at the barbershop next door to her house. As her belly swelled, I can imagine how my grandmother must have panicked, aware of the perils of being an unwed mother in her day. Sullied by a child born out of wedlock, she wouldn’t have been able to get married — and women needed a man to survive financially.

For women of my grandmother’s era, the options for dealing with an unplanned pregnancy were few. As was the sad yet all too common choice, she took a vacation, delivered the baby, and promptly homed her infant son with Aunt Mildred in Turtle Lake, Wisconsin. I remember visiting Aunt Millie — our Mil — with my mom, but those visits ended when my parents split. When you draw sides, you lose people as they feather away to the wind. So it was with Mil.

Swoosh.

And so it was with this grandmother, whom I never met. Dad showed me a few faded photographs, but she was just a sepia-toned face in the background. I understand she passed away recently, just days before her 97th birthday. It’s hard to mourn a family member you’ve never known. Hell, sometimes it’s more contrived to mourn the ones you knew all too well.

In Dad’s paperwork, I found a letter dated July 1949 from Mil in response to some pretty heart-wrenching questions he must have put to her in a previous letter. On lined stationery that had long ago faded to a parched pale pink, she did her best to comfort Dad in her spidery cursive handwriting:

No, dear, I’ve always loved you.

You always have a place with me.

You are a son to me.

Your mom did not abandon you because she didn’t love you, but because she loved you unselfishly.

Your mom wanted you to grow up without shame.

Times were different then.

That last line could be the first line of all of our stories. When you slip into someone’s history, it’s always some version of times were different then. It’s through this lens that I’ve done my best to reconcile the choices my parents made — despite the careening direction those decisions took us all. After all, the choices my parents made... made me who I am.

Dad told me stories about sleeping in railroad cars and wearing toeless socks and shoes that didn’t fit, but I was never sure whether to believe him. As a little person, it wasn’t in me to imagine life being so hard. But I later learned that life didn’t seem to be easy for anyone in my family. Men could be a hundred percent in their disease of alcoholism and shenanigans while they expected women to marry, to agree, to birth children, and to just get on with the business of life.

Shame was the weapon of choice most used to control, and Mom’s father wielded shame with gargantuan force. While he was never physically abusive with her, that verbal abuse might have been even worse. Mom was a healthy, chubby girl, and her father’s cruel taunts went a long way in ensuring that she remained thin and ate little throughout her adult life. I dare to say that by doing what society expected of her — remaining slender — marriage was her reward. Paired with her ability to never indulge; nor entertain her own wants, Mom made a life out of famished yearning. I too would stumble along that same path until I discovered my strength.

When Mom graduated from Catholic boarding school in 1964, her only option to escape her father’s cruelty and establish a home of her own was to get married. While the Civil Rights Act of that very year opened public facilities, public accommodations, education, jobs, and voting booths to more Americans by making it illegal to discriminate based on race, color, religion, and national origin — women were conspicuously absent from the Act. In fact, women couldn’t take out a loan or get credit in their name for another decade after Mom tossed her graduation cap in the air. Mom refused to go back to her father’s home, and when she met my dad through mutual friends, they quickly married. Boom.

Mom weighed only 97 pounds when she became pregnant with me. She had a small frame and was by then just an itty-bitty slip of a woman. When my diminutive Mom gave birth to me, I didn’t arrive on a soft cloud of babylove, but fighting for survival. Given only a 20% chance of hearing, I suffered a sensitivity to sound that would later send me running for cover at the sound of a vacuum cleaner or the flush of a toilet.

I spent the first six months of my life in and out of the NICU. By all accounts, I should have succumbed to some such thing or another. But perhaps the struggle for my earliest breaths only prepared me for the bigger battles that lay ahead. I would need strength, and I would need to know how to fight.

I had long fingers and people would often tell my mom that I would either be a pianist or a pickpocket. I like to think that although I was neither; I was some kind of emotional amalgamation of the two. I learned to play the right notes, and I learned to covertly collect what I needed from others when I could not afford my portion. Emotional manipulation is common with co-dependence, which is rife among children of abuse. When we cannot help ourselves, we quietly take, especially by over-giving.

Mom’s place in the world was slight, and everything about her person reflected her station. She was neat. Quiet. Carefully organized. She wore glasses, which were the bane of her existence; they framed her face, along with her wispy, short hairstyle. They teased her as a child, both at home and at school about her appearance. Back then, glasses were an eyesore: Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses. Mom’s glasses were always a point of humiliation, and she resented them, although they helped her see. No matter, I thought she was the most lovely woman in the universe.

My first family was a quartet comprising myself, Mom, Dad, and Yogi, a floppy-eared coonhound. When I was nowhere to be seen, you could find me in the doghouse. There, bundled underneath Yogi’s faded red and green plaid blanket, I read to my old hound from my dog-eared copy of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I had so much joy as a little person and wanted nothing more than to share it all with Yogi. I felt safe and loved, but I wouldn’t recognize the disparity until I was neither safe nor loved. And it was coming soon.

Mom was petite but big in dreams. Had she been born in another time and place, she would have done all the things she dreamed of doing. Her goal was to be an independent businesswoman and in later years she would try many side-gigs to create her own business. But during our early years together, I’d see her washing dishes or vacuuming, and I imagine that even then she was dreaming of the future she hoped to have. She packed our shelves with books about finance and wealth-building, and I could often find Mom curled up in a chair under the lamp reading about business.

In the meantime, she devoted herself to crafting popular in the 1970s. She made my Halloween costumes by hand, sewing leaves on my green leotard and painting my face with Frankenstein-green face paint: I was the Little Sprout to the Jolly Green Giant. She made homemade cards born of children’s books purchased from the secondhand store. Meticulously cutting each character from the book, she would affix it to the card stock and write cheerful messages such as, Hooray! It’s Jewels’ Day!

When she wasn’t crafting, she read books or did crosswords. I loved to traipse behind her in the fields near our home, where she would take a seat on a paint bucket and spend hours sketching an old red barn. I was content to lie back in the grass and read, while Yogi occasionally licked my bare feet. Mom had dreams and talent, but it never manifested into anything. Times were different then.

It was Dad who took me to attend activities. I loved to crawl up in his big red pickup truck because I wanted to be by his side, no matter what he was up to or where he was going. I was sure to snuggle up close to him on that long bench in that truck’s cab that smelled of leather, cigarettes, and corner-store cologne. My idea of the very best day was driving around town with Dad, as he knocked around the gear shift just in front of my little knees.

Dad was lean and tall; clean-shaven with styled hair. In my memories, he’s always wearing a pressed flannel shirt, neat and tidy. I remember that he was always cold. I don’t know if it was simply because Mom and I were so quiet and he was the man of the house, but he had a deep voice on him. This, paired with his nervous disposition, made him busy-bodied, and he would fidget when he couldn’t control things. He wasn’t a violent man, but he’d occasionally bang his hands in frustration on the table or slam the cupboard doors when he was angry. Dad wasn’t the type to break chairs or punch holes in walls. He turned his pain inward; ignoring it until it spilled over the sides. Though our time together was short, he taught me well.

My parents did what they needed to do to make it. Dad worked hard at a failing gravel mill business, while Mom worked a minimum wage receptionist job for a local lawyer with ties to the mob. Despite our precarious financial situation, Dad was in the throes of his disease; he’d waste his and my mother’s hard-earned money on booze and other vices. His pridefulness would not permit him to take a handout, and our family began what would become a familiar circling of the drain. We could have weathered Dad’s drinking and repressed emotions that bubbled to the surface in an occasional jaw-clenching grimace. But the one thing we could not weather was his attempt at a family suicide.

My little town was in a quiet pocket of our state, especially when the snow billowed down on the long winter nights. We were the only household on our rural dirt road. At night when there was no moon, it was so dark that when I stood at the window, I could just barely see the dim glow of the next house a mile away.

On that night, Mom and I had gone to visit some friends. The adults played cards, while the kids raced around inside, playing hide-and-seek and tag. On the drive home through the snow, Mom hummed along to the AM radio, while I hugged my jacket tight to my chest, watching the snowflakes fall in the light of the headlamps. We returned home to find Dad in the midst of a bubbling-over-the-sides uproar, and I instinctively knew that it was time for me to go to bed.

I pulled on my favorite Holly Hobbie pajamas, the ones with the pom-pom balls on the ankles. Brushing my teeth before the bathroom mirror, I saw my bright blue eyes. Just as everything about my mother was small and quiet, everything about me was white. My hair. My eyelashes. My eyebrows. My skin.

Mom hurriedly tucked me in bed and scooted back to the living room to monitor my dad. She chewed a nail as he placed a gun on the table and took a swig of his Old Milwaukee. He narrated his thoughts aloud as he fidgeted. Raging anger would have been easier to battle, but his disappointment smacked of a rolling lava kind of resignation that frightened my mom.

I adore you.

I’m suffocating in pride and ego in not being able to provide what I want to give you and Jewels.

I can’t do this anymore, and I can’t imagine leaving you two to fend for yourselves.

I’m at my wit’s end and don’t know what else to do.

I can’t abandon you two: you’ll have to come with me.

I did my best to sleep the unsettledness of that night away, but I could hear Dad arguing with Mom about the things that I would later learn only make sense when you’re drunk. I stared at the hallway light filtering in under my bedroom door, willing the fight to end. I prayed to ease that feeling that I was about to embark on unfamiliar territory.

I am safe.

Mom is safe.

Dad is safe.

Yogi is safe.

Dad stumbled in to tell me goodbye repeatedly, smelling of beer and desperation. I wasn’t aware of the extent of the danger of my situation. Experience taught me that Dad

Reviews for The Making of a Woman

[Traci Parsons · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A woman’s journey of recovery...

Ms. Jewels shares her life story from childhood trauma thru multiple trials and tribulations as a young woman. You are able to connect with the child who endures many traumatic events through her childhood. Childhood sexual assault, losing a father, trying to blend into a family that is dysfunctional, watching as she looks to the one person she hopes will protect her only to find she is alone in her struggle, except for a stuffed animal fondly known as Grover from Sesame Street. As soon as she was able, like many of us who have endured childhood traumas, she runs from one thing to another trying to fill the empty hole inside. As a young woman, she does as so many do who have been abused, and looks for validation through men, booze, women, drugs. Anything to change the way she feels. After suffering many years, by chance or the grace of a higher power, she finds the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, she slowly builds her life and gets the gifts of love, friendship, self-love, and discovering her inner beauty. What many of us know about recovery is that it is a journey full of lessons and she keeps learning and growing. Life and recovery brought her many happy moments and life repaired itself. I’ve been on of the lucky people to say I know her and shared part of her journey until i relapsed. I’m grateful that she kept on the right path - it gives me hope as I travel down my own path. She shares her experience, strength, and hope so that others might have an easier path to follow. If you can find the similarities in her story and are seeking a better life, read this book and find recovery in the rooms of AA. It’s there for you, all you have to do is surrender - and she has a lot to say about that particular word!