Four days before I turned seventy-two, I gave myself a remarkable gift: a three-full-day Think. Zero functionality beyond bodily needs: eat, evacuate, sleep. It was beyond glorious. An utterly singular experience.
Every time the idea of doing something I knew had to be done popped into my head, I shut it down. Shut it down! Purposely non-directed my musings. No planning, no note making, not even programing myself to remember that or gotta Turtle that.
‘Twas the first taste of pure freedom I’d had since the... wow... three days I drove from California to Chicago to say goodbye to Tom once-and-for-all and then marry him ten days thereafter.
That marriage lasted thirty-two years, one month, and sixteen days. The Think’s afterglow didn’t begin to ebb until three days later. Damn. Talk about your stream-of-consciousness realizations!
It’s gonna take me many whiles to sort through all the brainwaves. This was no guided meditation; I wasn’t looking for answers or trying to communicate with the universe. I was just… ya know… thinking.
A few items have subsequently bubbled up from the gelatinous pool of those collective musings: Scripts and Truths, a wide-ranging topic in my free-floating head. Facets of confusion, like a dragonfly’s eyes, each with its own PMA, each spawning evermore disorientation and unbelonging.
The globe and Borneo-headhunters combo that warped my perspective for all time—
It was actually more of a two-fer than a combo plate. I was in first grade when I first met a globe and was thunderstruck by how the world was so much more than I’d been led to believe, with so many, many more people than my mother’s “everybody” could possibly encompass.
From that moment on, I couldn’t not see life from a global perspective. From that afternoon on, in response to my mother’s reaction to my new discovery, I also couldn’t not keep my big, dumbasfuck mouth shut about it, either.
The “Headhunters of Borneo” report was for an assignment in fifth grade that was apparently leagues beyond the scope of what I was supposed to write about. Less thunder on that epiphany, more a triple fucking lightning bolt:
Time does not play out as those in authority—like, say, Mom (and my teachers)—claimed
Get this!—black people are pretty fucking smart, and
Real life is an amazing assortment of cultures, not just the one true and the other lesser!
Nothing about life was as I’d been taught. Nothing.
BTW, I originally printed that report in pencil because it gave me more control over my hand. Miss you-don’t-need-to-know-her-name made me redo it in longhand pen, for which I received a “sloppy” note in the margin.
“Duh” was not yet an in-vogue response.
The next year, when I thought I’d finally figured out how to conquer my writing, my teacher came up to me during an essay test to say, “You’re not left handed!” and adjust my paper to the correct angle. No, I wasn’t left-handed, but also no, I could not write legibly at that slant.
Points off for poor penmanship.
... and empirical proof (continuing from eleven paragraphs above) that my sense-of-self is so newly minted, I’m afraid to wear it too often for fear it might get torn, stained, or disintegrate like a sand castle in the rain.
All of which I’ll doubtless explore in due time.
But some questions, GDIATH, just won’t shut the fuck up—which is why I’m here, deconstructing the crap of my life when I should be completing my financial model or rewriting client chapters. Because they are, I now see, all of a piece that fucking must needs be addressed, if not satisfied. (Onaccounta, really, what’s the chance of that, right?)
Why, really, did my mother keep me away from my brother and father?
To protect me from them? To safeguard them from me? What was so terrible about me that I needed to be removed from my own family? To divide and conquer? To keep me for herself? Good lord, Why?? So she could live vicariously through me? That doesn’t make any sense—I could not find a way to comply with who I wasn’t for her no matter what I did or didn’t do.
For another reason I’m too dumbasfuck to see?
Of that same piece, why did she constantly reassure me “They’re just being nice” whenever I thought I’d made a real friend? “Just wait until you don’t have anything else to give them, and you’ll see.”
What was I giving them?? I had to know so I could keep doing it! I would lie in bed, ping-ponging between two thoughts: “What do I have to do....?” and “I wish I could lie down.”
I recently found myself repeating the latter as I huddled under my comforter. “I wish I could lie down.” I couldn’t have been more laid down without being dead. But I digress.
If’n my childhood were a novel, the grooming would plausibly follow from “To keep me for herself,” but... to what end? To the end it got her—a loyal, obedient child she could puppet-master for life until death mooted the point?
Every time I go there, the Other in my head—not in my gut or spirit but in my pre-packaged, clear-cellophane-wrapped mind—pulls the emergency stop cord. I cannot... I do not want... to believe I was abused. To such an extent I just deleted the words “my mother” and replaced them with “I was,” rather than even type out the concept.
Because WHY?
Another piece of the piece: yes, I damn well knew I wasn’t a girl at age two. Whether I said it aloud or just thought it, whether I used these exact words or just feel them, my spirit wanted to know if I’d get my penis for my third birthday, even while knowing damn well I wouldn’t because I couldn’t. I wasn’t precocious enough to know why, but it is my oldest memory.
My second is being dis-enfamilied.
I don’t blame the Think for not coming up with the answers I seek. And I can rip what I know about my mom apart as much as I like, but it won’t help. She be the only one who could possibly know the truth.
And she was a bald-faced liar.
But that truth has set me free. Because if I’ll never know, then it doesn’t matter, does it? And if’n such a fundamental aspect of my life doesn’t matter, then nothing else really does, either.
Which, it turns out, is the only thing that actually does matter.
Happy Pride!
