Remember what it's like to be four-years-old? Nah, me neither. I remember moments, snapshots, mostly in my bedroom. I think I enjoyed lying on the floor listening to Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker singing songs "for kids." I know I liked my Disney books and the accompanying audio tapes. Sometimes, I was happy, sometimes bored. Sometimes, I found myself cowering in the closet, shaking, totally unaware of anything but convulsive tension in my otherwise lifeless limbs. In these moments, Tammy Fay's warnings would come back to me. "Mommy told me something a little girl should know, and it's all about the devil, and I've learned to hate him so. She says he causes trouble when you let him in your room..." I felt shame that I could not figure out how to dispel the devil.
But four-year-old memory is spotty. Perhaps it hasn't caught up to four-year-old consciousness at all. Perhaps we start life as people with ideas and motivations, and what we call our Self is largely a set of bullshit banners and advertisements based on what we've believed was true or acceptable. Perhaps four-year-old me was a person I never really knew. How else can I account for him picking up a knife and attempting to stab our dad? I sure don't remember it. What I do remember is running away from my dad, fully conscious, laying down full-color, panoramic video of the path I scurried through our single-wide trailer and the fear I felt as he closed in on me.
In the kitchen, with nowhere else to run, I darted under the dining room table and crouched against the wall. He was right behind me. I remember, because I can still feel the disappointment of my short respite broken by the stinging pain of my hair pulling out as he jerked my head around to face him. To me, he was a loud, angry blur of terror with a bulging vein on his forehead.
Thirty-some years later, when this memory came back to me, it wasn't a story. It wasn't a memory at all, not like memories are supposed to be, not of when we were four. I was working as a plumber's helper on some cracker-box houses in a McNeighborhood, putting in a kitchen sink or something. Funny how the introduction of being four, under the table with my dad, completely overwhelmed my memory banks to the point of obliterating my thirty-four-year-old mental clarity. I think I put a tool in my mouth to free up my hand, and, quite suddenly, I was somewhere else, feeling a sharp knife blade between my clenched teeth, teasing the flesh inside my terrified four-year-old cheek. It took me a couple of months to realize who was holding the knife, years to remember his angry command that I open my mouth, receive the knife into it, and close my lips around the blade, all while the blade and my hair-bridled head shook in dangerous opposition, both under the complete control of a man whose fiery emotions were in complete control of his hands.
Was the hand of fear strangling his compassion? Was the hand of anger and hatred holding a knife to his heart? Sometimes, later, I would think that his logical mind existed only to justify his narcissistic rage. The more I think about life, my dad, and Jesus, the more I think that all of us are controlled by our feelings. Maybe we only pretend to have control. Maybe the fear of facing how little control we have is what drives a man to act out so aggressively with his four-year-old son.
Then again, I don't remember what I did to him with that knife. Maybe four-year-old me was just as emotionally wild, just as cut off from reason and self as my lunatic father. Maybe.
© Copyright Ernest Samuel Christie III 2013
The human mind is interesting...our earliest experiences are more deeply and permanently embedded into our memories than any others...it's why when people start losing their memory the ones of their childhood are the last to go, and rarely ever do.
ReplyDeleteI wish we as adults would never forget this. Too often I see poor behavior displayed or directed towards children, that while understandably is often brought on by frustration, exhaustion, or depression, cannot be excused by the belief that a child will be "too young to remember." The stories of the difficulties parents have had with adoptions from the orphanages where children were neglected as babies show just how early this damage begins.
Your story, however, is much more severe, complicated by obviously a very broken and mentally suffering person. It is just so wrong in so many ways I find myself shaking when I read it. I try to find some kind of compassion or understanding of your father, realizing that he too was once a child and something terribly went wrong for him as well, but admit that I can't grasp the disconnect in how if we were hurt as children, we could ever desire to inflict the same hurt on another child, especially our own child.
I do not know the response you will get from this blog, but my guess is it will be a blessing to those who have gone through their own childhood horrors and yet cannot express them, or, as in your case, even clearly remember the circumstances; instead they just always sense a "devil" lurks nearby. Tammy Faye was wrong; as a child we have no power to "dispel the devil," literally or figuratively.
As adults we may be able to physically get away from the devil, but the psychological process is so much harder when the devil still lives inside the room in our head. I believe your blog will help people open that figurative door and dispel the devil for good, or at least begin to try.
Sam, do glad you are doing this. Hugs, Anne
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