Tag: childhood

Getting Real

I have only a few days left to say whatever I might have been holding back this past year. I’m going through the list to see what I might have missed as issues of note.

I have come to realize I write to stay sane. Was I ever insane? Well, no. Not in a clinically diagnosed sort of way. But I definitely drifted far enough away from the piers of nice North American female normalcy that caused many, and me, to wonder.

I didn’t have you would call a “normal” childhood. At least, I now know what a normal childhood means. A set of parents (or caregivers) who were consistent, available and sober.

Children knowing what bed they were going to sleep in every night. Kids who had a right and got to enjoy their privacy. They could slap a “no boys allowed” sign on their bedroom door and expect it to be respected.

Nope. Didn’t have any of that. So forgive me if you have read all this before. Essential backdrop if you haven’t. My father was an abusive, alcoholic, womanizer. My mom got through the marriage with countless bottles of “Mama’s little helpers.”

No one was there to answer my questions and help me sort out difficult situations. Just as often when I would bring an issue to my mother, I was mocked and invariably silenced. A very dry well.

It wasn’t so much that my parents were not interested in listening. For the most part, it was more that they simply weren’t there. Booze and pills are famous – and relied on – for taking you far, far away from your troubles.

Looking back on my life from this vantage point, I can see what was missing and forgive myself for the things I did to stay alive. The caregiving gaps in my early childhood affected me. What I did to make up for those gaps was rarely what I wanted or needed.

Booze couldn’t take the place of genuine love. Sex was a particularly transient and unsuitable substitute for comfort and belonging. I was a very poor conformist, no doubt partly due to my upbringing.

I never could happily adapt to the 9-5 life. I did one mindless contract after another over the years with the single intention of keeping body and soul together. No joy. no sense of purpose.

I didn’t have the courage to follow my dreams of international photojournalism. I had limited faith in the Universe at that point. My great dream of international media stardom never came to pass.

Truth be told, fame was never a real goal. Most of the time, I was just happy to have the press credentials to get me behind the scenes at a lot of big travel events. The official opening of Disney World’s Chautauqua Institute as one example.

I look back with some bemusement on the doggedness that led me to do a deep dive to see why I landed where I’d landed. I learned a lot. For starters, no man is an island. We are all part of a bigger story. Our people were working-class stock through and through – a fact I believe chagrined my mother.

To compensate for the lack of family pedigree, she imbued her three daughters with an undeserved sense of specialness and entitlement that could never have been sustainable in the real world. Even the best and brightest will falter and fail to thrive without safety and careful sensible nurture.

What I realize today is that above all else, I needed stability and safety to grow. I am only just finding it in my life. The stability gap between my life today and where I came from is vast.

In retrospect, mine was a story of survival that grew into eventual stability. It is not the sexiest script out there, I realize. But it is mine.

From the age of fifteen, I tried to find the source of my constant emotional discomfort and deep insecurities. I swung from one vine on the healing path to the next and the next.

I learned a lot along the way, including the importance of my famous catchphrase, “sayin’ ain’t doin’.” There is lots and lots of talking in the world. Backing up what people often say with action, however, is just not as common.

So this year of daily writing has been about seeking answers and finding my own authenticity. What matters to me and what most emphatically doesn’t.

It has caused me to look back on many of the roles and work I tried on just to get by. Some of it was ridiculous. A lot of life is actually if we give it a hard look.

Now I am planning the next phase. The final one. And mentally exploring what I think I want to do and where I might go one day.

I now have the time now to pursue any dormant passions. I have cleared most of the interfering childhood crud out of my psyche.

The future beckons and is also right in front of me.

Armed with my emerging sense of a solid self, I say, “Bring it on.”

Kewpie Dolls

When I was little – maybe 5 or 6 years old – I loved rifling through my grandmother’s vanity in her bedroom.

It was one of those old-fashioned triptych set-ups with three mirrors of which two angled inwards for a full 180 degree view, a low middle shelf and a small rectangular stool to sit on while performing your “toilet.” (That was a word that profoundly confused me as a child mixing it up, as I did, with the other, more familiar, toilet function.)

Sitting there in front of those three mirrors, I felt very grown-up and special. Nanny had the usual array of products for a lady of her age and station in that era. There was a little pot of cheek rouge and a round brush to apply it. Lavender hand lotion. Yardley as I recall.

An ornate metal brush and comb set with a handle and a mirror that matched. Presumably so she could see the back of her hair in the mirror while brushing it. Various accounts back then said hair needed daily brushing of up to 100 strokes to keep it shiny and healthy. That practice likely did wonders for your biceps, too.

Nanny also had one or two bright red lipsticks I loved to try. Nanny allowed it for dressing up. But I still remember her wistfully saying: “My dear, your lips don’t need anything extra. They are red and naturally beautiful just as they are.”

Not that that observation cut any ice with a six year old. Everything grown up was exotic and desirable. I’d sport those bright red lips for as long as she would allow. Or until the next snack of freshly baked molasses cookies and milk wiped my lips clean again.

Healthy children usually enjoy a naturally fresh face, bright eyes, and lovely complexion. It is usually only when the ravages of puberty hit in adolescence that skin care concerns emerge. Hormones promote zits and are hell on skin texture.

Fast forward, sixty years or so. I was disturbed when I recently read and watched videos that were most disconcerting. North West, the issue and oldest daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, is ten years old. She regularly posts videos documenting her “skin care routine.”

She beats most adults in her attentiveness to the process and product quality. Unsurprisingly, she uses her Mom Kim’s skincare line. “Why,” I ask myself, “is a beautiful child worrying about her skincare routine, much less promoting it online?”

This is so disturbing on so many levels. Sure, I am a devotee of self-care and go through the whole cleanse, tone, moisturize routine regularly. But I am an adult. I need all the help I can get in that department.

But a ten year old?? Really???

Apparently this is a huge social phenomenon these days. Ten year olds shopping for skin care products at Sephora and using high end skin products if their parents can afford them.

I can make the obvious argument that if pre-teens paid as much attention to their education as they do to their looks, they might benefit more in the long run. It sure looks like that insidious message to women about the primacy of their value being their looks and attractiveness is at work.

That little North West is promoting this behavior is even more disturbing for obvious reasons. By an accident of birth, she is a potential role model for other little girls. Other ten year olds might take her direction seriously and follow her lead. Apparently this “pre-teen skin care craze” is catching on.

It’s bad enough that females have been primarily judged on their attractiveness since time immemorial. Now it seems there is a push to get young females into the skin care game well before they are ready or there is any identifiable need.

Profoundly sad. It is hard enough for children to hold on to their innocence and enjoy the relatively carefree days of childhood in this information technology saturated world. Diabolically clever marketing push on someone’s part.

In North West’s case, very likely her famous bottomed mom and bottom line oriented family. And profoundly sad for little girls who do not have the funds to follow suit. And for the parents who have to argue with them about why that particular behavior and attendant financial outlay is premature and misdirected.

I am all for children flirting with the adult roles they will play one day. Playing dress-up and wearing their mother’s high heels for a couple of hours “to see what it’s like” is good fun.

But not this. This trend is something else all together and not a healthy one at that.

300 Posts and Counting

My 300th post in a row today. Only 65 more to go to reach my goal of writing a daily blog post for a full year.

Starting out on March 14th of last year (2023 for any of you who are just shaking off the trauma of whatever last year was), I wondered what the year would bring when I started out. I wondered if my goal of writing a book would be enhanced by this discipline. I wondered what I would learn about life. I wondered what I would learn about myself.

I’ve learned a few things. Among them, I have valued the feedback and support of fellow travelers. People in my life who may have only known me superficially before have stuck with me. They’ve read my posts, liked them and made valuable comments. I am grateful for you Diane and Gary. And Katie, too.

I have connected with other blog authors who are doing their bit to share their voice and insights with the world. Eclectic and interesting.

I’ve gleaned a few faithful readers and commentators along the way. I’ve signed up for their blogs and have learned from and enjoyed their writing. Thank you, Frank and Tony and Patti and Mangus and Kris. I see you too, ThatScaredLittleGirl. If I’ve missed any other regulars, please forgive me.

In the past, I have both applauded and decried the onslaught of technology and the power it has over most of us today. I’m just waiting for the internet to crash one day to see what kind of blind panic that triggers across the world. I don’t really wish that to happen, but admit I find it a fascinating prospect to contemplate.

I have discovered the memoir I originally set out to write is not as compelling a goal for me as it once was. I believe I was driven by a need to be validated and to share my learnings and survival strategies from the challenges of my childhood. How I overcame those challenges might be of help to others facing the same situations, I believed.

Part of me still believes that. Yet my life has evolved from a “survivalist” mindset and into a place of stability and contentment. I don’t have the same fire in my belly as I once had to share the atrocities I suffered in my childhood with the world. My solutions of choice come out in my blog writing practice anyway.

My deep-seated beliefs in spirituality over religion, self-care, meditation, yoga, healthy eating all inform my daily writing. Love over hatred. Kindness and compassion as a starting point for any new connections with others. When others disappoint or hurt me, I simply withdraw. I now believe it is their loss as much as mine for what we might have co-created together.

Like a wise farmer, I need to choose where I sow my seeds and try to pick fertile and welcoming soil. I spent too many years not doing that and have the results (or lack thereof) to prove it. I quote the wisdom of the late Maya Angelou who said: “When people show you who they are, believe them … the first time.”

That is such an important and hard-won lesson. My late mother destroyed her life by ignoring this truth. When she met my father, he was a firmly established drunkard and womanizer with a hair trigger temper. My mother believed that her love would change him. If it were not so sad and the consequences so tragic, I would laugh at that presumption.

Her misguided belief underscores a fundamental learning we all eventually come to. We can’t change anyone. It is difficult enough to change ourselves. Any of you who have successfully quit drinking, smoking, overspending, procrastination or other self-sabotaging behaviors know that truth intimately.

I have learned the hard lesson that you cannot push a string. People are as they are as you meet them in the present moment. What you hope and dream they will become one day, may or may not happen. Deal with them in the present, not in the someday you imagine.

If the present person you encounter proves to be a bad fit with where you are in your evolution, the only solution may be to walk away. You may wish them love and healing.

You do not have to expose yourself to the threat of being pulled under or back into the undertow of their unsettled and unresolved issues. That’s their job, not yours.

That was a tough learning for me. We are all tightly sewed into fraught expectations around family and friend relationships. Abandoning them may be seen and felt as disinterest or cruelty.

In my life, I have made those choices as an action of self-care and, yes, an act of love. It is often only in solitude and isolation that people learn the lessons they need to learn in their life.

Like people we lose through death, they are not gone from us. They are simply elsewhere.

I have learned lots over these past 300 days. I have much more to learn. I will always have much more to learn. It is an immutable truth that the more we know, the less we know we know.

I’m closing in on the final leg of this one year marathon. At the moment, I have no idea whatsoever what I will do on the 366th day. Carry on with daily posts or change direction? I do know this for sure.

Writing is not just a vocation but an avocation. It is an exercise in exploring the depths of the soul and spirit as much as it is a tangible product that others can ingest and ponder. It has given structure to my days, even when some of those days were very rocky and unpredictable.

I am finding my voice. I know her better now. I feel there is still much more to learn. So we’ll see. As we used to say regularly in the news business, the outcome “remains to be seen.” At any rate, you can safely assume there will be one even if I don’t yet know what that will be.

To Each Their Own

As soon as we’re born, we all get some challenge to wrassle with. Some affliction or obstacle that we have to overcome or learn to live with. I’ve observed certain obstacles seem to run in families.

In our family, it was alcoholism and mental health. If there was an upside to being born in an environment where those issues were at play, I learned stuff. Of course, I learned a lot of stuff I didn’t necessarily want to know but we don’t get to choose what hand we are dealt. The learning is lifelong.

Alcoholism is generally regarded in society as a “personal failing” or “a disease.” Alcoholism is often systematic with deep roots in a family’s history or the surrounding society. Ireland and drinking are practically synonyms.

Booze is an especially treacherous opponent because it works. Alcohol can numb our pain and make us feel better even if only temporarily. And temporary is all most people need. A stiff drink to “settle” your nerves. A celebratory toast. Or four. A bridge in social groups to ease discomfort or self-consciousness.

Like many other afflictions, it can be hard to pin down the exact moment when booze shifts from being a “friendly visitor” into a monkey on your back. Dealing with alcoholism myself, there were a few turning points. I lived the dynamic with booze that AA calls “cunning and powerful.”

As my drinking got worse, my body absorbed it more easily and I once experienced a blackout. It is alarming to not have any recall of a particular event or outing. When I saw the car in the driveway one morning and had no idea how it got there, I knew my choices were to heal or to die.

I have read that the Universe can be quite systematic in showing you that you are going off the rails. When you are just starting to head in the wrong direction, it may just jostle you a bit.

You might get klutzier than usual. Maybe break a few things in your house. Lose stuff more frequently. Or you might come down with frequent head colds. if you aren’t paying attention, the jostling can get worse.

I was in a relationship that I should not have been in for a bunch of reasons. We were in a car accident in the early days and had a minor fender bender. Some months later (same relationship), we hit and killed a deer on a back country road. Severe damage to the car.

The third accident – after the relationship ended and we were talking about reuniting – nearly killed us. We were broadsided by someone who ran a red light. Totaled the car. I was concussed and suffered a broken collarbone.

It was only in retrospect that the pattern of increasingly severe accidents became clear. It sure feels like I was being given a message to get the hell out of there.

Emerging from an unstable childhood with excessive drinking and wacky adult behavior all around me prepared me to be flexible. It probably made me resilient. I can easily spot dysfunctional wackiness in other adults (of the deleterious kind – not that of the fun and harmless wackos whom I love dearly).

Other families may have a history of DNA challenges that shape them: Huntington’s disease or MS or autoimmune disorders or ALS or a certain birth defect. The list goes on. Each family and family member has to accept and prepare for the possibility of that affliction popping up in their life up the road. No family is spared though the afflictions vary widely.

The good news is that we can grow out of these restrictions and learn how to manage them as adults. In my case, I gave up drinking almost a quarter of a century ago. I sought out counsellors for years as I tried to raise my family alone and recover from a rocky childhood.

Other good news is that whatever challenges we faced in our family can put us on a path of growth and exploration as adults. I could do nothing about the circumstances into which I was born. No one can. But I had and have ample choice in choosing what I had to do to live with it.

Choice is freedom. Those of us who came from difficult backgrounds where healthy choices were scarce may better appreciate our available choices as adults. Then it is up to us to improve our own lives and leave those circumstances in the dustbin of history where they belong.

There is usually no choice to change our inherited challenges (such as carrying a defective gene). As adults, however, our job is learning to carry whatever that burden is and face it with grace.

Then one day, you may get the chance to support someone else in similar circumstances who may benefit from your insight and knowledge about that issue. If you’re lucky.

Necessary Losses

Necessary Losses is the title of a 1986 book by Judith Viorst. The title intrigued me but the sub-title even more: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow. 

(Grown up children (like mine) will recognize Viorst’s most famous children’s book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. We loved that book when they were little people.)

When I first encountered Necessary Losses, I was in a period of deep mourning for my life. I’d lost nearly everything. My family of origin. My marriage. My job. My self-confidence and my center. My “promise of youth.”

What Viorst’s book taught me was that we all go through inevitable losses in life. They are unavoidable. We will lose “our childhood.” We will lose our youth. We will lose our parents. And, eventually, extended family. Then friends.

It is how we grow and change through these losses that we are brought to a deeper perspective, true maturity and fuller wisdom about life.

Oddly, it was this book I was thinking about when I was clearing out a storage locker yesterday. The contents of many boxes reflected my life back to me. An agenda for a planning meeting. Articles I’d published. School reports for one or the other of my children. Random recipes and receipts from everywhere.

It was both freeing and unsettling. Clearly, I had hung on too long to too much stuff. As my energy level dropped in proportion to the amount of stuff I had to go through, I understood why. It is emotional and daunting to revisit the past. My past in any case. It is also exhausting.

I saw my survival through line in the detritus. The contracts I pursued to keep body and soul together. The self-help books that acted as guides and friends when I felt bereft of both. The children’s art that I kept to remind them one day of their younger selves. (I honestly don’t think they care all that much. A mother’s predilection, not a child’s.)

Growing older, I can feel myself bracing for the upcoming wave of losses over the next ten years.

When you are younger, the death of a friend or acquaintance is shocking and seemingly random. We celebrate together as a community and memorializing that death is a noteworthy event. We go to the funeral as a community. We share remembrances of the departed and swap jokes they used to laugh at. It is a bonding experience.

Then I remember my mother once went to the funeral of three friends in one day. We are still in the time of “one-offs” when among the condolences, we dutifully deploy “s/he died too young.”

We see ourselves in the remembrances in the obituary. We remember rocking out to Tom Petty in the basement together. Furtively getting high on illicit weed from questionable sources.

We meet their adult children and marvel at how much they look like the parent – our friend – that they just lost. The culling has begun.

It is for the best that the wisdom we gain about death as we get older does not preoccupy us when we are young. Persistent thoughts of death and dying are deemed pathological in our youth. In youth, those thoughts are often treated as symptoms of a mental condition, like depression or suicidal ideation.

In old age, those thoughts can become constant companions. After attending so many funerals and reading so many obituaries, we aren’t surprised by death anymore. If we are wise, we prepare for it every day we are living.

We all know there are “no guarantees” in life. An infant can expire as well as the octogenarian.

I decided some time ago to walk with death. Aware it is there and standing by. But not yet invited to the party. I have too much living and exploration still ahead of me. I think.

This attitude has been both life-affirming and life-changing. I am philosophical about death compared to what I was in my youth. Then the thought of death or a terminal illness could make me white with terror. Looking back, I think my greatest fear was dying before I had actually lived.

No one knows the internal crater of pain and emptiness as well as the recently bereft. It is not a universal reaction, of course. Some deaths bring more relief than sadness. That is a loss for all involved in that particular passing.

I accept death’s inevitability now. I know it will take precious loved ones from me. That constant, hovering possibility focusses me more on living life now. I make the apple galette when asked. I watch a movie I’m not crazy about because he enjoys it.

This is not about suppressing or ignoring my own needs or sense of self. Because what I need most now is for my dearest to live happy and healthy for as long as possible. As that is my ultimate goal, the details of how I get there aren’t as important.

On with the day and dealing with the next batch of boxes. Sifting through memories. Even expressing gratitude for the hideousness of the task.

At least, I am still here and able to go through them – a privilege denied to many.

Tadpoles and Fireflies

Chasing tadpoles was a great way to spend time on weekends when I was a little girl. Armed with rinsed-out peanut butter bottles with holes in the lid, we’d head for the ponds near the railroad track to collect them.

I don’t think we gave much thought to what we would do with the tadpoles once we caught them. They were fun to watch swimming around in the jars. It was fun to contemplate that those little squirmy black things would one day become frogs. Of course, none of our tadpoles ever did.

There is wonder to be found in the fragility of nature. On other expeditions, we would sit quietly at night watching and then capturing fireflies in our trusty peanut butter jars.

I know now there was something in those activities about chasing and holding on to wonder. As much as I know now about phosphorescence, it never fails to amaze me. As the captive fireflies blinked on and off in their glass prisons, I was sure as a kid they were speaking directly to me if I could but interpret their messages.

The mind of a child isn’t particularly logical. That is both its blessing and its curse. In a freeform brain still unmodified by life’s harsher realizations and realities, a child can imagine damn near anything. And does. The best children’s authors know that and taper their stories to that malleable world of dreams and imaginings. I envy children’s authors for that ability. And they seem to have a lot of fun in the mix.

My friend Canadian Sheree Fitch has published dozens of children’s books It is hard to say what is more delightful and pleasing to the senses: the words or the pictures.

Parenting allows us to revisit the world of childhood which most of us lost touch with somewhere around our transition into puberty. In the course of reading bedtime stories to my children, favorite storylines and characters inevitably emerged. Watching children’s movies with kids transports us back to what was important about that time in our own lives.

Children seek structure and consistency and certainty. The best stories provide that or focus on seeking it out. There is a lot of gratuitous violence in children’s stories. Some academics say that is because childhood is full of nightmares for children. Children are largely powerless and have little to no control over what goes on around them.

I have read that is why the Harry Potter series has been so wildly popular. J.K. Rowling imbued young Harry with qualities and characteristics children long for. He was odd and longed to fit in. He had powers that could only be accessed through rigorous training. He made strong friendships with other weird and different kids like him. From a difficult beginning, Harry Potter took control of his own power and destiny.

That’s an easy sell to kids trying to sort themselves out as they grow up and experimenting with where their powers will lead them in adulthood.

In one of my unversity yearbooks, each faculty’s title page portrayed silhouetted adult graduates as children. On the Law page, a young boy no older than nine wore the black robe and white tabs of a future attorney holding a weighty tome in his little hands. The Engineering faculty was portrayed by a little girl of about seven years old who wore a hard hat and dungarees and held a slide rule and blueprints.

If I have grandchildren one day, I hope to help them explore the world around them beyond the world of bits, bytes, and WhatsApp. I want them to feel confident to test their own part in the world around them. We’ll bake cookies so they will know the magic of making their own creations. We’ll spend more time playing cards and puzzles and board games instead of in front of the television. We’ll wander in nature to encourage their appreciation of the world around them. we might even camp out and make S’mores over a campfire. That will be the greatest act of love. I detest S’mores.

And who knows? We may even find some tadpoles to collect and take home. We may talk about their dreams to become biologists or veterinarians one day. Childhood should be a time of dreams and wonder. In these fragmented times, dreams and wonder that can one day be put into action is needed now even more than ever before.