WeeK Four: Childlike In Nature

"It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age."
~ Margaret Mead

Nothing in my childhood is really worth writing, but for the most part, I have little to regret about it. For all of the folly and violence, the misuse of trust and the brainwashing, I'd say that I came out far better than most do. That being said, I only have snippets, really. Mush like now, most of my days were the same, which makes them hard to recall in any specific order. 

I remember photographs; a child with curly blonde hair sitting on the front steps to an apartment building in a small complex. He looks happy and is holding a stuffed animal, and there is no one else in the picture. I don't recall ever being there, or being that child, but I do remember the picture. I find it odd that memory works that way. 

I remember, vividly, the first time that I came home to find my mother, passed out drunk, on the floor. I had just gotten off of the bus, let myself in the house, and there she was on the floor. She was wearing sweatpants,  a ruffled red shirt, and was face-to-face with her own vomit. For what it's worth, she looked content. 

There are blurs of Christmas, gifts unwrapped and strewn about the living room so I could peruse them and not be bothered with the hassle of unwrapping them. Upon retrospect, it may just be because she didn't want to clean up the mess, or drank to late into the night to wrap them. It's hard to say for certain. 

I was never a particularly popular child. I think that is due in no small part to living with a single mother that was completely outside the realm of anything even remotely normal or stable. I guess that she tried, but really, what does it matter in the end? A failure is a failure, and that's basically all that it boiled down to. 

I realize that thinking too far into my life with my mother doesn't really cover the complexities of childhood, or even a single moment of childhood, but in a lot of ways, I never really got to have one. Between dragging her to bed, making sure that I fed myself, doing my own homework, and a veritable laundry list of other things that should have been done for me, I really wasn't very much of a child in anything but age and experience. 

It's too bad, really. I would have liked this to be one of those pieces that a lot of people would read and relate to. I would like to go on about days of following the creek, trying to find out where it ended. I would like to talk about long bike rides with friends, and how we would head out at eight in the morning and not return until six in the evening, and all of the adventures we had in between those times. I'd even like to talk about the time I fell into the foundation of a large building that was being constructed  and how the firemen literally had to run a ladder over it and dig me out. Sadly, though all of these things happened, nothing is more ever present in my memories of childhood than being robbed of my childhood. 

I'd like to say this to my childhood, though:

We did make it out. Though it took years upon years, cost us time, money, friends, women and, at times, our freedom, we made it out. 

See, my inner child wasn't beaten. It was forced to retreat a tad bit early, but when I look around the room that I currently occupy, I see all the signs of my childhood still active. I have my horror movie posters on the walls, a massive collection of action figures, statues and comic books. From time to time, no one on this planet enjoys a bowl of Fruity Pebbles as much as I do, and I still like staying up late at night, just because I'm excited about life and hate wasting any moment of it. 

But the story of my escape and eventual liberation is a story for another time. And though she put me through a considerable level of hell, I forgive my mother for almost all of it.