Have you ever been just gobsmacked by something, some song lyric or piece of poetry you memorized as a child without understanding, or some family ritual that seemed to make some kind of sense when you were little, or some song you used to sing in church that you never even thought about, when it hits you out of the blue, that this is some fucked up shit?
I started intentionally looking back at childhood events with adult eyes a few years ago.
Stuff that I never thought about. Like the Pledge of Allegiance, or the Star Spangled Banner, like we were forced to regurgitate in school when we didn’t even know what it meant. That’s called indoctrination, I think. Forcing a bunch of little kids to stand up in their classroom every morning, put hands over hearts and say a bunch of stuff nobody even explained to them, and never being given a chance to question it. That was happening in America in the ’70s? Oh hell yes.
Stuff that happened at family reunions that the moms tried to distract the kids from so they wouldn’t have to explain. Stupid shit your mom’s weird second cousin three times removed said to you that made six year-old you feel ugly and dirty and dumb. Kitchen fights you walked in on between your mom and the aunts that got real quiet real fast.
How about this old thing: Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop; when the wind blows the cradle will rock; when the bough breaks the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all. Wait, what? First of all, what the hell are you doing putting a baby in a treetop? And then to let the wind knock the cradle out of the tree and splat goes baby? WTF is wrong with people?
And so on, and so on. You have these stories, too. As many or more than I do. Yours may be darker and scarier, or weirder and creepier than mine, or maybe yours is just funny and strange and innocent. I hope so, I truly do.
But we carry this stuff, and because we never analyzed it rationally from an adult perspective, it trips us up in weird ways.
One of my mother’s shirt-tail relations once called me the Ugly Duckling at some family gathering or other. It stung, and I never said anything about it to anybody adult, so nobody ever told me what a totally useless and idiotic waste of oxygen the guy was. So I believed it. I internalized it, and it shaped my perception of me. When I look back at photos of me as a young woman now, and I see a cute, skinny kid with a rebel’s heart and a bard’s soul vying for dominance. But when I saw those photos at the age when they were taken, I saw a pudgy, ugly, awkward git with a bad haircut. That voice of self-doubt, the one who really believed I was an ugly duckling, made sure I always saw the worst, even as an adult. For years I dreaded having my picture taken, and dreaded even more having to look at the results. It took a miracle worker called Carrie Montgomery to help me exorcise that old demon so I could see the delightfully rebellious, elegantly bardic, passionate healer within, and project her on the outside, too.
Pretty lame, huh? But see how these things fester and stick? Children have cookie-dough brains. They absorb things like sponges, and they don’t have any filters to help them navigate and interpret. It takes experience to know when somebody is a bullshit artist. It takes a developed intuition to realize what’s actually happening in that uncomfortably silent kitchen between sisters. It takes trial and error to negotiate family territory with no map. A young person in my life has a mantra; “Family is everything.” I just have to shake my head and wonder who fed them that line of bullshit. Sometimes people who are family can be serious assholes that you don’t want anywhere near your life. Sometimes they can just be idiots who are more trouble than they are worth. But how are we to know that when we’re toddling around looking most people squarely in the belly button? Grownups are giants, and if our parents are infallible, which we totally believe at that age, then most other grownups must be as well. So when a grownup says, “Boy, you are an ugly little duckling, aren’t you?” you don’t raise an eyebrow, look them up and down and say, “Coming from you, that’s a fuckin’ complement, you fat, balding, red-nosed moron in a bad suit.”
When we examine our deep past, we discover a whole lotta detritus that needs to be flushed.
And that crap can safely be utterly disregarded. It doesn’t take much effort–now–to figure out who had their head screwed on straight and who wouldn’t have known their ass from a hole in the ground. I know now that Cousin Ugh was a good ole boy who wanted women to know their place. He could tell I wasn’t getting the proper programming from my lib’rul, big city-dwellin’ parents, so he thought he’d better take me down a peg or two. And after looking at it rationally, I literally burst out laughing at the ridiculousness and realized, you know, I turned out to be pretty bad-ass, so he failed in his mission after all. And I’m so over it.
Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. This may not have been exactly what he meant, but you know what, Socrates me old matey? Looking back at childhood memories and analyzing them so that we can put them in proper context and heal some old wounds is one of the most helpful things I have ever done for myself. From the big to the little, and sometimes the little is bigger than the big, there are countless wounds that can be instantly healed, mysteries easily solved, and familial algebraic equations done and dusted.
It takes a little effort to start, but once you get started, it seems to be a self-replicating process. You could start by looking through old family photos, watching videos from family reunions, or reminiscing with siblings or cousins (if you’re on speaking terms, of course – and hey, who knows, you might solve a problem or two there as well). Try to bring to mind stuff that just made no sense at all, stuff that seemed really uncomfortable, and look at it from an adult perspective. Think about how your kids must see stuff you do, or how you have tried to steer conversations with family in different directions when the kids burst into the room. Sometimes it hurts, but it usually heals. The important thing is to remain detached and rational so you can really cut to the heart of the matter.
Safe journeying!
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