So, I'm writing this book.
"Oh, what are you writing about?" they ask excitedly.
There was a time, not too long ago, when I doubted that I was capable of writing a book that anyone would ever want to read. I've been wanting to chronicle my childhood experience for at least the last ten years, seriously. Just last year, I started telling people that I am actually trying to write a book, and, OH how often I regret it!
Now added to the seemingly impossible uphill climb of describing, in painful detail, all the painful details of my childhood, I have "helpful" acquaintances. They smile at me and then speak of what they do not know
"You just have to do it." they'll declare after soliciting a thirty second life summary. Ha! I imagine these people would be living out their lives in padded cells if they had experienced my teenage years. I also think they might be right, but, after years of avoidance, addiction, failure, and painful processing of my own emotional landscape, I realize it's just not that simple.
"Have you written ANYTHING?" they query, like I'm a sad little child whose only missing piece is a friendly challenge to my self-worth, and they're right, but only if their goal was to make me want to kill myself and be done with writing once and for all. I don't think I'm ever going to kill myself, but I had to fight to get to this point through a lot of supposedly well-meaning but terribly invalidating people. How could they know?
My dad discouraged most of my creative endeavors, especially writing. In the early weeks of my freshman year of high school, I walked into my room and discovered him reading the three or so pages of "free-writing" I had been working on privately for English class. Of course he beat me. Showing my journal to my teacher carried the obvious potential for psychological analysis and a possibility that the police might get information out of me which could land him back in prison. He needed to beat me, because I had been so careless as to put him at risk. I don't remember the details of the beating, but I probably had to take a few days off from school until my bruises healed. This might be a good story for a book.
So, now that you feel sorry for me and know to never say anything to me about my writing, I would like to admit that writing "anything" has become a useful tool for me. Sometimes, I need to tell myself to "just write." Apparently, advice is not all bad. I'll still get angry if you make it sound like my next step should be clear. I'm worn out from fighting demons, and I'm not above taking out my frustrations on total strangers. I'm sorry. Should you tell me what to do, I'll probably tell you where to go, but, on the other hand, I am listening. Sometimes, the advice and the stupid sounding questions are actually helpful. Help me if you dare!
© Copyright Ernest Samuel Christie III 2013
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Four and Thirty-four
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
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
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