How a Pork Tenderloin Saved My Life Part 8 - Bozo Neurosis

 It’s a funny thing about cream cheese, even though being selected entree finalist was the biggest thing that had happened to me since I graduated from police training, to the world at large this was just another day and no one in my life outside of my husband, parents, and a handful of friends had much of an understanding of what was happening.

But that’s just the way it goes. We each live our own experiences and though we might have a passing understanding of what it is the next person is going through, at the end of the day the glimpse we get is peripheral at best.

It was the same when I went through police training.

Though my friends had a passing idea of how difficult it was to get through, unless you’re the actual person half drowning during a poolside exercise known as an “In and Out” (whereby the recruit must jump into the deep end of a pool, propel herself off the bottom, and pull herself out of the pool onto the deck using only the strength of her upper body while a corporal screams things like: “Whatdya need, a TOW TRUCK? A WINCH?”) - to the outside world all this is anecdotal at best.

There is method to the madness, I suppose, of paramilitary style training. The idea being that recruits would be broken down and then re-emerge as stronger, tougher, police officers.

For most recruits it took the six month training period to rebuild.

It took me almost 20 years.

That isn’t to say the experience wasn’t valuable. Although I ran over my trainer’s foot with an unmarked police car and apologized to the first person I ever arrested, the time management skills I gained were invaluable, not to mention the ability to iron shirts at the speed of light, and parallel park just about any kind of vehicle.

But I am the kind of person who takes things to heart - and being referred to as a “stupid bozo” everyday for a six month period had a way of sticking with me.

Maybe that’s part of the reason why I honestly kept expecting to be ejected from The Real Women of Philadelphia.

Although the sensible side of me understood I had won a spot in the live cook off, my "Bozo neurosis" told me it could all be taken away and that, soon enough, they would discover what an imposter I really was, promptly ejecting me from participating further.

One of the perks of being named finalist was having your picture go up on the Home page of the site, and right up until the time I left for Toronto, I checked those pictures daily to make sure mine hadn’t been removed; never really believing something this good could actually be happening to me...

To read Part 9: I Deserve Happiness, click HERE

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