Misty, Water-Colored Memories...
...that may or may not have portions with big black splotches over them...
One big thing my therapist and I have been working on lately is the idea of being able to connect the dots from my childhood to a lot of the issues I’m trying to get through today. Objectively, I understand well enough that the things I experienced were instrumental in shaping everything from my worldview to my trauma responses. But, subjectively, there’s a part of me that feels like it’s lazy to “blame” everything on your childhood. As much as I hate the idea of “getting over” anything, I sometimes wonder if I haven’t had enough time to “get over” things that are still tripping me up in my middle age. It’s a weird place, my brain. Full of contradictions.
And I occasionally feel like I throw out false narratives about my childhood. I think that owes more to the belief that people tend to only think in binaries. Things can be black and white, or neither black nor white. I can acknowledge that my upbringing is unique, and was imperfect in a lot of ways. But to say that every moment was bad-which I sometimes think people glean from reading the things I write or listening to me speak about my childhood-would be false. Of course, the fact that I feel the need to explain this might say more about the complicated journey I’ve had than anything else I might write or say.
I was watching the NBA Finals game Friday night, and as Steph Curry hit one of his effortless yet ridiculous mid-court shots, I thought about how my grandfather would laugh whenever we watched basketball games together and someone hit a clutch shot or dunked aggressively. Those memories are as fresh in my mind as the memories of his occasionally embarrassing (and probably drunken) tirades, the after-effects of which I still feel when someone raises their voice angrily without warning. Sitting in bed reading yesterday afternoon, my mind flashed back to lazy weekend afternoons as a teenager. In those days before social media and cell phones, I’d spend entire afternoons with a book or a stack of magazines in my room, playing tapes on my stereo. The warmth of that moment conveniently obscured things like the lack of direct interaction with kids my age in more intimate settings. I went the entirety of my junior high and high school years without having a friend my age over to my house, and don’t remember being able to go inside the houses of other kids my age until maybe my senior year of high school. Or the fact that for at least a year, maybe more, I didn’t even have a bedroom. I slept on a cot in the basement of my house, sometimes sharing that cot with my grandfather as the house got too crowded with family friends and foster kids. Those kids (as well as my grandmother’s day care charges) would go through my cassette collection and unspool the tapes that I’d spent my allowance on, or rip through the magazines I’d collected. No possession was safe-from my sneakers to my pre-SAT guides. I tried to keep the stuff I considered valuable in one of the wooden closets that held clothes my grandparents, uncles and aunts never wore and must have abandoned at some point after we moved into the house in 1979, but I’m not even sure my things were safe there.
I guess even the lightest memories have a little bit of a dark spot on them. Or vice versa. No straight lines of complete pleasure or straight lines to complete disaster, I guess.