When I was at my sisters for those three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I borrowed her car a few times to go grocery shopping. One of those times I went between 2:00pm and 3:oopm and the little shopping center was swarming with kids that were unmistakeably junior high school or middle school age as it's called now. You can tell they're that age by the way they act, so full of themselves, seemingly, how they travel in noisy packs, and how all they do is so obviously fraught with significance. How they act often reminds me of what an ex co-worker said about 12 year old boys once--that as soon as they turn 12 they should be shipped off to a place called 7th Grade Island where they'd be isolated and not be allowed to return till they turn 13....
Anyway, it feels like I both look askance at them--feeling a little superior because I've learned not be so out there like they are (thank god), and I also look at them with a good deal of sympathy. It isn't hard to remember being that age, how it felt. I think I can even separate out what was normal at that age in me, and what was not, what were typical feelings and behaviors for a child of that age, and what was a result of the bizarre "family" situation I was in.
I can hardly stand to call it a family--is this because I have unrealistic views of what a family should be, that because mine was so crooked, I have unrealistic expectations of the straight? Yes, maybe. But the family I was in at the time, "led" by my step-father, a step-grandmother from hell, and my mother (in that order) and various other "step" relatives that wandered by from time to time, seemed more like a collection of people who were doing all they could to warp and pervert the next generation, my brother, myself and my three stepsisters.
I was thinking about families after I wrote that last paragraph, and remembered a line from a poem by Rilke, which sent me scurrying away into a little digression. I googled what I remembered of the line and that brought me to a transcription of the poem, The Vast Night, in a blog by a young Malaysian poet, Reza Rosli. The lines from Rilke are:
...a child began crying. I knew what the mothers
all around, in the houses, were capable of--, and knew
the inconsolable origins of all tears.
Of course families are the origin of all that is worst and best in us. They're where we live. What would you expect?
Den of Iniquity
My sister's ex-husband once called the house we all lived in when I was in junior high a den of iniquity. They visited us once in the midst of that life and his judgment was sound. These days, people use the phrase, den of iniquity, when they want to be melodramatic. They don't want to believe such places exist, certainly not in a home.
And now I find I'm not really sure what I want to say about that time in my life, the time that comes back to me as I watch children of that age.
I hardly existed then. I was still merely a piece of baggage that my mother had to lug around as she moved from man to man. I didn't know how to be anything else. I remember how once in 8th grade the teacher wanted us to write an autobiography, but he wanted it to be different than the ones we usually wrote, which for the most part said where we were born, where we had moved to, and where we lived now. He wanted us to put down more than that, to write down what were our likes and dislikes, what was important to us etc.
Well, that was a stumper. I wasn't a person, I had no likes or dislikes. Whatever came came, and all I had to do was figure out how get through it. No preferences of mine (if I'd had any) were involved in any way.
So you know what I had to do in that "autobiography"? I had to make things up. It embarrasses me to think of it now. I didn't have a clue, but I remember I wrote that I liked "simple beauty" and the startlingly original example I gave was a single rose.... It sounded good, right? Well, maybe not good... but it sounded like something a real person might like, didn't it? Apparently I thought so. I could have just quoted "raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens"....
That's all I can remember about that essay, I can't remember what else I wrote, what else I made up. But I do remember how peculiar it felt to have to make things up. I knew instinctively the truth wouldn't have done at all. I could have said "I would like a step-father who hasn't been in prison for raping his daughter" or "I'd prefer a step-grandmother who doesn't put locks on the refrigerator" or even "I like mothers who protect their children instead of offering them to all and sundry with the inclination" or "I like being left alone", which was, I imagine, the greatest good I could conceive of at the time. Nope, I couldn't have said any of those. And if I had, I'm not sure that anybody would have acknowledged it. This was in the mid 60's, people were still buying the idea that outsiders shouldn't interfere in a family's business--period. That's a terrifying thought--those were terrifying times.
I came to myself late, I think. And only after my mother and step-father divorced and I got out of that particular den of iniquity. Suddenly, I emerged into the world, full-blown. That's how it seemed, anyway.
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