Childhood, Part 1

When we are in the midst of growing up, we don't know anything different than what we are exposed to. We think that "all families are like ours".  And I truly believed that mine was idyllic, that we were "living the life" like the Cleavers' or the Brady's or the Cunningham's.  And if you're too young to know who they are, try Google!

Many of the decisions I made as an adult were based on whatever knowledge I had at the time.  My only big decision I made as an early teen was "never wanting to be like mom".  But I am not sure what led up to making that bold statement. 

My advisor tells me that I should write about childhood experiences to see if I could get to the bottom line.  But my kid memory filtered everything through a kid's mind, so is that accurate?  Try reframing it around something and see where that leads, was the suggestion.  So I'm trying:

We ate dinner every night as a family at the table. We all sat in our assigned spots. Food was basic, mostly simple meals like spaghetti, meatloaf.  And I recall eating meals rather quickly.  I remember being told to "stop laughing or go to your room".  Did we speak of anything real?  I don't remember any discussions that weren't of light hearted topics, not what we did in school, or how we felt about something.  As I look back, I am trying to determine if mealtime was a safe place to voice an opinion? I don't think so.  So was it more like a minefield we all learned to dodge by not bringing up topics? 

After meals, we got up and my sister and I cleared, then washed and dried the dishes.  If they weren't clean enough, we had to start over.  Yes, that happened quite a few times. We got through that chore as fast as we could every night.

Were we trying to escape? 

I can remember one time I was drying dishes and I must have said something .... I can't recall ... but Mom got up out of her chair and hit me a couple times.  Yep, that was a shocker.

I got here pondering those growing up years, and after 60 years, the memories are faded. Or filtered.  

What we learn at our parent's knee, as they say, becomes part of our road map for life. Or our inspiration to do things different.  What we don't expect is for those childhood feelings to come back so much later in life. It's easy to revert back to patterns we learned, much harder to forge new ones, especially if those patterns don't fit with mom's.   Which is the start of all this self reflection.