Childhood

In my earliest memory, I am about two years old, on top of the world. Or at least on top of a chair in a dressing room. I fall from grace, and then watch as my mom tries to open the door with blood on her hands. I wake up in the van on the way to the doctor’s office, and then my brother’s curious face is looking over my own, asking about the stitches. My mom takes me home, and a few weeks later my dad removes the threads holding me together.

After that, the years passed, with only the odd memory sticking out, a fight with my best friend, walking home with my mom after preschool, lying on the floor colouring pictures, and then, around the time I turned six, the news that my mom had gotten a job with the government. At first, I remember only excitement, thinking that she would become rich and famous, not realizing the true implications my mom’s job would have on my childhood. She started work before my brother and I went to school, and ended after us, which meant that we spent weekday mornings and afternoons at my grandma’s house.

My brother and I calculated at some point that, without including sleeping, we actually spent more time at my grandma’s than at our own house. When I had a bad day at school I went crying into her arms, when my parents angered me there was always a sympathetic ear a few blocks away, and any boy problems always went straight to her. I know I drifted from my parents in those years, but it was often hard to find a way to talk to them. Most people seem to think their parents are scary; when my dad got mad at me, he slammed my door so hard he broke the door frame.

Eventually, as I got older and more able to understand the reasoning behind my parents restrictions and actions, I connected to my parents more, rather than hiding myself from them. Even so, as I went through the lonely years of middle school and then the hard years of high school, my parents were never able to fix my problems the way they could when a bandaid was enough to subdue the tears threatening to fall from my eyes.

Although I miss the days of preschool and a life unsure of the meaning of stress, and though I constantly have to remind myself of it, I am glad of my teenaged life. Some of the things I face were problems I distanced myself from when I was younger, thinking nothing of that sort would ever enter my life. Depression was just a word, drugs were what bad people did behind the world’s back, the military was only for people with no foreseeable future. Cancer, heart attacks, homosexuality, anorexia, suicide, teen pregnancy, drinking, death. These weren’t things I would ever see, they were for daytime TV shows and movies and people who weren’t me. But though getting older means that I do have to face these things and find a way through them, it also means that I have a way through. It means I have friends I know I can confide in, a brother who is there to talk, and parents who I can have serious conversations with. A piece of thread isn’t enough to hold me together anymore, but now that I can understand and trust those who are there for me, I no longer have to fall to see who will be there to catch me.