The reliving
13 July 2011 06:39 AM Categories: Childhood hangover
These hours, this leisure time, me with the lap desk and my feet crossed on the coffee table, listening to the rumble of San Pablo and the mechanical tap of the forever beckoning cat and the ringing in my ears (antidepressant side effect No. 3), I need to add them up, to remind myself someday of my second childhood. It’s been a childhood granted upon having a child, a kind of reliving. Much of it hasn’t been carefree, much of it hasn’t been free at all. Still, I have more time now than I’ve had since graduate school – library school was no intellectual or temporal challenge – and I sit on the precipice of the world again, older, perhaps wiser. Definitely more battered. Stronger, too.
Adults often look at children with envy, think back to an era when time extended before us, when summers lasted forever and we had the luxury of being bored, of being full up on sleep. Children don't know about bills or about deadlines or about existential angst. We imagine their internal lives, the little pangs and sadnesses, but we believe they haven't been in the world long enough to experience the full terror of it. Covered over with experience, with joys and disappointments and fashion changes, adults see childhood as a time apart from the difficulties of life, a time before, a time you'd better enjoy because, well, it gets worse. The responsibilities accrue and time slips away and let them dream because we allow it, that brief period in life when anything is possible. Fools.
But: Adults also drag children along according to our foibles and whims and fucked up agendas. We take our childhoods out on our children or on other peoples’ children, usually unconsciously, sometimes not. Some adults repeat the cycle, in power this time, powerful and powerless all at once, the larger body lording over the smaller one. We forget how children are stuck with us, little people with no control over where we take them or what we do to them, primed to love us, primed to blame themselves for our bad behavior. The adult-child relationship is one we should take seriously and respect: adults should always try to remember what it was like to be little, to be dependent, while still holding our adult role of boundary enforcer, teacher, protector, and encourager.
A few weeks ago, in a dinner conversation sparked by our son’s requests for stories from "when you were a kid," I gave him a sixth grade excerpt. Our school had a closed circuited TV system and a video camera and I was part of a team that put on an occasional news show. Sometimes we played a morning song over the P.A. The joke – the joke – was that one morning we would put on "Hell is For Children" by Pat Benatar. Because at 11, we weren’t children, right?
We weren’t children. We believed it. And every afternoon I took Bus Six back to a mildewed house where my mother’s boyfriend and my grandfather were waiting in a cloud of smoke and sawdust and sweat. They were waiting for her to get home from work, to perform her duty, her function, the meals, the cleaning. I moved through that house like a ghost while I thought of summoning ghosts, hoped my grandmother was watching over me protectively from heaven. I don’t know what to attribute my recent feelings about this time to, the great upwelling of emotion about something I don’t entirely understand. I was lonely and angry, full of hatred. I thought I was strange, bad, unsuitable for life.
By the time I was eleven, I had moved to at least eight different apartments and houses. I had attended four elementary schools. Mostly I lived with my mother, sometimes with my grandparents. My mother and I spent one brief stretch with a boyfriend who was an abusive drunk. My father, who was becoming a more frequent presence, had been on and off the scene for most of my life. At nine, I had watched my grandmother, the most stable person in my life, die in front of me as I panicked and called for an ambulance.
We played "Hell is For Children" and that last year in elementary school was the year I carried around pills and threatened suicide and got a secret racy card from my grandfather and dragged my ouija board everywhere. Maybe it was suppressed grief for my grandmother or maybe it was the accumulation of sadness. I wish that I had been capable of getting real help or that someone had stepped in, but who knew and who cared enough to suss out the details of my depressed state, to protect me?
I want to save children, to scoop them up from bad circumstance, to provide a stable and sympathetic presence, to give them the tools to survive. I think of Holden Caulfield’s image, him in a field of rye stopping children before they fall off the cliff. I get it. I want to be a catcher in the rye, staving off the premature ending of innocence.
This isn’t possible. I know. But I think there will be something I can do, someday, to ameliorate the pain children feel from being dragged into the adult world too early. This is not your doing, I would tell them, not your fault. And I would give them tools to recover, to let them rediscover their beauty, their wholeness, something to make them better adults someday. Adults who haven't forgotten what it was like to be helpless.
Image: Christmas 1980. My soon-to-be stepfather, grandfather, and me. I've used this photo before, but it seems very appropriate for this post. Because I look so ... comfortable.
Adults often look at children with envy, think back to an era when time extended before us, when summers lasted forever and we had the luxury of being bored, of being full up on sleep. Children don't know about bills or about deadlines or about existential angst. We imagine their internal lives, the little pangs and sadnesses, but we believe they haven't been in the world long enough to experience the full terror of it. Covered over with experience, with joys and disappointments and fashion changes, adults see childhood as a time apart from the difficulties of life, a time before, a time you'd better enjoy because, well, it gets worse. The responsibilities accrue and time slips away and let them dream because we allow it, that brief period in life when anything is possible. Fools.
But: Adults also drag children along according to our foibles and whims and fucked up agendas. We take our childhoods out on our children or on other peoples’ children, usually unconsciously, sometimes not. Some adults repeat the cycle, in power this time, powerful and powerless all at once, the larger body lording over the smaller one. We forget how children are stuck with us, little people with no control over where we take them or what we do to them, primed to love us, primed to blame themselves for our bad behavior. The adult-child relationship is one we should take seriously and respect: adults should always try to remember what it was like to be little, to be dependent, while still holding our adult role of boundary enforcer, teacher, protector, and encourager.
A few weeks ago, in a dinner conversation sparked by our son’s requests for stories from "when you were a kid," I gave him a sixth grade excerpt. Our school had a closed circuited TV system and a video camera and I was part of a team that put on an occasional news show. Sometimes we played a morning song over the P.A. The joke – the joke – was that one morning we would put on "Hell is For Children" by Pat Benatar. Because at 11, we weren’t children, right?
By the time I was eleven, I had moved to at least eight different apartments and houses. I had attended four elementary schools. Mostly I lived with my mother, sometimes with my grandparents. My mother and I spent one brief stretch with a boyfriend who was an abusive drunk. My father, who was becoming a more frequent presence, had been on and off the scene for most of my life. At nine, I had watched my grandmother, the most stable person in my life, die in front of me as I panicked and called for an ambulance.
We played "Hell is For Children" and that last year in elementary school was the year I carried around pills and threatened suicide and got a secret racy card from my grandfather and dragged my ouija board everywhere. Maybe it was suppressed grief for my grandmother or maybe it was the accumulation of sadness. I wish that I had been capable of getting real help or that someone had stepped in, but who knew and who cared enough to suss out the details of my depressed state, to protect me?
I want to save children, to scoop them up from bad circumstance, to provide a stable and sympathetic presence, to give them the tools to survive. I think of Holden Caulfield’s image, him in a field of rye stopping children before they fall off the cliff. I get it. I want to be a catcher in the rye, staving off the premature ending of innocence.
This isn’t possible. I know. But I think there will be something I can do, someday, to ameliorate the pain children feel from being dragged into the adult world too early. This is not your doing, I would tell them, not your fault. And I would give them tools to recover, to let them rediscover their beauty, their wholeness, something to make them better adults someday. Adults who haven't forgotten what it was like to be helpless.
Image: Christmas 1980. My soon-to-be stepfather, grandfather, and me. I've used this photo before, but it seems very appropriate for this post. Because I look so ... comfortable.
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