As a present to myself for passing the Academy, I bought two Rottweilers, a male and a female, and named them Samson and Delilah. Of course I was in Oklahoma and now had to get them back to Connecticut. They were definitely not going to fit in my MR2. (I didn’t say this was a smart idea…) So I rented a big trailer and towed my car behind it. One of my former coworkers flew out to Oklahoma to help me drive back to Connecticut. I had less time to get back there because I had a report date that was in a little over a week, but I still had to find a place to live. We drove pretty much straight through and only pulled over to get gas and when we were both so tired we couldn’t keep our eyes open.
I managed to find an apartment in Ledyard, Connecticut (it’s famous for Foxwoods casino, one of the first casinos on tribal land) that would take dogs. I reported to Groton Tower on July 14th, 1991. Once you’ve passed the Academy you start to feel invincible, but if you don’t get certified at your facility you lose your job. I was incredibly frustrated with Air Traffic Controller training. They don’t really teach the way that I learn. They give you lots of books with information and leave it up to you to figure out where the information is to be used. And you plug in and they tell you to work. Of course you have no idea what you are doing. So they teach you by telling you, “Nope, that’s not right.” over and over again until you’re about ready to scream. Some controllers are good trainers and some are horrible trainers, but everyone trains. You just have to hope that you get a good trainer.
I started at Groton when there were already three other people in training so initially I didn’t get a lot of training time. Groton was originally a pretty busy airport, but it had lost most of its traffic and so there was very little time that was busy enough for good training. I spent a lot of time in training and didn’t fully certify until I had been there for about 15 months. I would get several hours of training one week and then not got training for a week so it would feel like I was starting over again. I actually designed a training trivia game to help me learn all of the information I had to recall when working. I got a $300 cash award for the game, but it still took me a while longer to finally get certified.
Once I had reached full performance level I began to relax and enjoy the job for the first time. I would push the envelope a bit to see what worked and what didn’t and some of the more conservative controllers would tell me that I needed to dial it back a notch, but it seemed to be the best way to figure it all out. I’m sure this sounds scary for people who are not controllers, but controllers always have a second and third plan if their first one doesn’t work, so it is not really dangerous, it’s just more work for the controller to sort it out.
So, I was certified and feeling pretty good about myself. I had gained a bit of weight back, but not too much and was enjoying going to out karaoke whenever I could. I still seemed to keep making poor choices where men were concerned. For some reason I always seemed to attract the younger guys. Groton has a huge naval base so I was always getting hit on by sailors it seemed.
The summer after I got certified my old Police Department was having a softball tournament and I was looking forward to going. I started watching what I ate again so that I could take the bit of extra weight back off and actually started working out again. Then I managed to get poison ivy…on my face. Seriously. I remember going in to the Doctor’s office and bursting into tears. I poured out the whole story of how hard I’d worked to lose weight and how I was working at making a lifestyle change and right before I was to go back to see all of the cops that I used to know, boom. I remember wailing something about “looking like a gargoyle.” The Doctor actually laughed at that and told me I was overreacting and that I most certainly did not look like a gargoyle. She gave me some steroid cream and said it should clear up the poison ivy pretty quickly. I was not convinced it would work because I’d had some pretty severe reactions to poison ivy in the past, but within a couple of days the marks had faded until they were barely noticeable.
I got tons of attention at the softball tournament and it was nice to feel attractive and desirable for once. I wore a little black dress to one of the parties at the tournament and one of the cops called me a “Robert Palmer girl” from the Simply Irresistible video.
I also saw the cop I’d been pretty much obsessed with prior to leaving and almost immediately fell back into old habits. Losing weight only changes the outside. It doesn’t change all of the years of doubt and bad self talk. But even more dangerous is the idea that I was “cured” from weight problems. That I had somehow stopped being the person with weight troubles and could eat and not work out and I wouldn’t gain weight because I was now a “thin” person. It’s very much like the alcoholic who thinks they can have “just one drink.” An idea that will lead you down the primrose path to destruction rather quickly.
But for the moment I was enjoying life and attention from the male gender. And soon my karaoke habit would lead me to meet my future husband.