Walking (Mostly) Alone
Mar. 12th, 2002 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckThis is part of what I wrote as an exercise for my psychotherapy appointment today. I couldn't get part of it to come out in a way that said anything, so I'm not posting that part.
As a child, I always rather felt like I knew more about what was going on than I was supposed to. Some (all right, most) of that was just the normal arrogance of childhood, the assumption that I knew how things worked better than the clueless adults around me or was somehow unique in my perceptions, and I was quite capable of the blind selfishness and naiveté most children have to shield themselves. Some of it, however, was genuine awareness.
In some ways, I think I'd have been happier without noticing quite so much. I still feel guilty about Jenny Dawes, the fat, new girl in my sixth grade class. I didn't like it that my friends picked on her. I didn't participate directly, but I also didn't stop them and didn't attempt to befriend her. Even at the time, I was ashamed. Without that shame, I expect I'd have forgotten her by now. I wonder if anyone else in the class recalls her at all. In my memory, Jenny epitomizes the horrific possibilities of the mundane, of the commonplace cruelties that are unremarkable and ought not to be. I suspect that having observed what happened to Jenny contributed to my reaction of horrified endurance to the harassment that I experienced the following year after we moved. I didn't expect there to be any other solution.
My memories of my parents are less singular. Multiple events, words spread over decades, the good and the bad… All of that comes together and not neatly. To use an analogy with cooking, these ingredients are not well blended enough to produce any singular flavor or texture. Nor are they layered enough to be easily separated and perceived. It's rather more like lumps in mashed potatoes or, even better, a badly mixed cake including fruit, nuts, chocolate chips and lumps of flour or baking soda. You never quite know what you'll get when you take a bite.
Trying to manage a memoir is difficult because there are so many paths to follow in this tangle. How do my first step-mother's cats relate to my mother's daycare service? They don't except through me at a certain point in my life. I expect that many children of divorce have the experience of finding pieces of their life that don't relate to each other in any sensible way. Events fragment into with-mother and with-father and eventually even further to with-people-connected-to-mother and with-people-connected-to-father. The addition of step-relatives and then their transition into ex-step-relatives breaks things up further. But I'm not sure that an analogy to a jigsaw puzzle or to a broken plate works for me. In my memory, events seem more like a series of oddly interconnecting tunnels that I moved through alone or mostly alone.
This separateness grew partly out of the awareness that what I did in other parts of my life was of very little interest to those who had not been there. What happened at school did not interest my mother unless it related to a problem she needed to solve or to something that had a bearing on her theories about education or politics. My father was interested only to the extent that he might get involved to make people like him better. My step-father took his cues from my mother, and my various step-mothers were ephemeral enough not to matter (That's a sad thing to say about relationships that lasted 5-7 years, but it's true).
As a child, I always rather felt like I knew more about what was going on than I was supposed to. Some (all right, most) of that was just the normal arrogance of childhood, the assumption that I knew how things worked better than the clueless adults around me or was somehow unique in my perceptions, and I was quite capable of the blind selfishness and naiveté most children have to shield themselves. Some of it, however, was genuine awareness.
In some ways, I think I'd have been happier without noticing quite so much. I still feel guilty about Jenny Dawes, the fat, new girl in my sixth grade class. I didn't like it that my friends picked on her. I didn't participate directly, but I also didn't stop them and didn't attempt to befriend her. Even at the time, I was ashamed. Without that shame, I expect I'd have forgotten her by now. I wonder if anyone else in the class recalls her at all. In my memory, Jenny epitomizes the horrific possibilities of the mundane, of the commonplace cruelties that are unremarkable and ought not to be. I suspect that having observed what happened to Jenny contributed to my reaction of horrified endurance to the harassment that I experienced the following year after we moved. I didn't expect there to be any other solution.
My memories of my parents are less singular. Multiple events, words spread over decades, the good and the bad… All of that comes together and not neatly. To use an analogy with cooking, these ingredients are not well blended enough to produce any singular flavor or texture. Nor are they layered enough to be easily separated and perceived. It's rather more like lumps in mashed potatoes or, even better, a badly mixed cake including fruit, nuts, chocolate chips and lumps of flour or baking soda. You never quite know what you'll get when you take a bite.
Trying to manage a memoir is difficult because there are so many paths to follow in this tangle. How do my first step-mother's cats relate to my mother's daycare service? They don't except through me at a certain point in my life. I expect that many children of divorce have the experience of finding pieces of their life that don't relate to each other in any sensible way. Events fragment into with-mother and with-father and eventually even further to with-people-connected-to-mother and with-people-connected-to-father. The addition of step-relatives and then their transition into ex-step-relatives breaks things up further. But I'm not sure that an analogy to a jigsaw puzzle or to a broken plate works for me. In my memory, events seem more like a series of oddly interconnecting tunnels that I moved through alone or mostly alone.
This separateness grew partly out of the awareness that what I did in other parts of my life was of very little interest to those who had not been there. What happened at school did not interest my mother unless it related to a problem she needed to solve or to something that had a bearing on her theories about education or politics. My father was interested only to the extent that he might get involved to make people like him better. My step-father took his cues from my mother, and my various step-mothers were ephemeral enough not to matter (That's a sad thing to say about relationships that lasted 5-7 years, but it's true).
