Mildly Traumatic Childhood Events

Childhood is traumatic. 

And not just because of the hats.

Even the best childhoods are rife with embarrassments, injuries, heartbreak, or a combination of all of those. The world is terrifying as a child...and not much better as an adult to be honest, but hopefully by the time you reach adulthood you have learned some ways of appropriately dealing with the terror that is daily life. 

We create sayings like "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" to ease the burden on children and make them feel like all this suffering is actually benefiting them. The truth is, sometimes what doesn't kill us scars us for life, but try breaking that to little Jessica as she's looking for a reason why her older cousin threw her pet hamster out the 4th story window. 

Children are amazingly resilient though, and sometimes they easily shake off what should seemingly be a traumatic event. Other times, some event that seems rather meaningless and minor is the very thing that shapes them as a person. 

The following incidents didn't necessarily shape me, but I do remember them clearly, and that says something right?  

Thankfully there was nothing too traumatic (that I can remember). In fact, these can all be summed up as "first-world problems." I come from a loving, middle class family, so my privilege was very high from the beginning. Hartford wasn't the greatest city (still isn't) but I lived in a nice house in a safe neighborhood. Regardless, there's always incidents that leave their mark on you no matter how great your life is overall. I wouldn't say I was traumatized or defined by any of these events but they definitely made an impression. 

The first one happened on a cross country trip with my family when i was about 11 or 12 (again, privilege on high). At Bryce Canyon in Utah we went hiking in the canyons. At one point I was near a cliff, which dropped down hundreds maybe thousands of feet. There was one area where the ledge was on an incline. I walked up and looked over the edge, acting carefree. As I started to come down the incline, my foot started to slip. I crouched down, yet kept sliding, so I dropped on my ass. I continued to slip downwards, towards the edge. 

I envisioned a long fall to my rocky demise.

I probably stopped 5-6 feet away, but that vision of slipping over the edge  stayed with me long after I had stopped all movement. I didn't tell anyone and I tried to forget about it, but the memory never left. I was shook. It was traumatic in the same way touching a hot stove as a child is traumatic. It didn't give me a fear of heights (I've gone sky-diving several times after all) but it gave me a new respect for heights. 

The next moment was traumatic in a different, grosser way. Lying in my bed in Hartford. In the state of consciousness right before sleep sets in. I hear a "poof" next to my head. A few seconds later, I hear another one, as if something light was landing on my pillow. In my dream state, I pictured Tinkerbell or the Indian from The Indian in the Cupboard jumping up and down on my pillow. The beautiful naivete of youth.

Something tickled my ear. I brush it away. Then something falls on my neck. This wasn't fucking Tinkerbell. I jump up, throwing my arms around, slapping my neck, and shaking my entire body. I jump to the light switch. 

When the light turns on, I look on my bed to see big, black, squirming ants. 

As I swallowed hard to hold back my dinner from spraying all over my room, I rubbed the skin off my entire body and ran to my parents room. These were unacceptable living conditions. My room was above the garage so the ceiling was sloped, and a wooden beam at the apex had become infested with ants. There were so many they had started to fall out, right on to the sleeping adolescent underneath.  

I have flashbacks to this scene any time I feel something on my body at night or if I hear some slight noise near my head. Not only that, this experience completely ruined Honey I Shrunk the Kids for me.

That scorpion is a hero.

Absolutely traumatizing.

Finally, probably the most traumatizing event from my childhood. I think I actually repressed it for a good portion of my life. 

My family was at our friends' house up the street. The kids were playing while the parents hung out and talked. As the sun started to go down, my brother and I were still playing around outside with our friends. For whatever dumb kid reason we had for it, we started jumping on the outside cellar door. 

It was an old, rusty metal door that we had run over and jumped on many times. Nobody bothered to tell us to stop because it was so common. What was not common was crashing through the doors to the concrete stairs beneath, tumbling and falling all the way down to the landing. 

Dazed and confused, we sat there while our parents came rushing down the stairs. My parents, caring individuals that they were, took one look at our beaten, bloodied bodies and said, "Ok, time to go home!" So instead of the ambulance ride to the hospital and several stitches that we should have probably received, we walked down the street and went home, screaming our heads off the whole time. To their credit, our friends' parents asked my parents if they were sure we didn't want to go to the hospital or treat the wounds at their house. Nope. We'll just walk the 300 yards home, go to sleep and forget it ever happened.  

I'm not one of those "if that happened now" guys, but...if that happened now, we would have sued, DCF would have intervened, and I would have owned that damn house. Instead, I have mental scars and an irrational fear of cellar doors to this day. Thanks mom and dad!

I Love You All...Class Dismissed. 

More Life Lessons With Louie: Childhood Petitions and Regrets

Once again, this is a post about how a Louie episode made me reflect on an event in my life and feel like a piece of shit.

The other night I was watching the latest episode from this season and it featured my favorite character, Louie's daughter Jane. In this episode, they are walking to the doctor's office and she is explaining to him that she has no friends. Louie asks her about a girl he thought was her friend and she replies they aren't friends anymore. In fact, the girl started a petition at school asking, "Who hates Jane?" The whole class signed it.

I will help you destroy them, young one.

Kids can be so cruel. It's a cliche for a reason. The thing is, they're cruel in such devious ways that it's almost impressive. Who would think to write a petition like that? And actually have people sign it? That's cold on a massive level.

That's Louie. Although it is often completely absurd and surreal (the rest of this episode featured a horrifying monster stalking Louie's dreams) it is brutally honest about real life issues.

In this case, it was honest about kids' ability to be complete assholes. Which brings me to...me.

From Kindergarten through 8th grade, I attended E.B. Kennelly School in Hartford. In 5th grade, my teacher was Miss Calhoun, a tall, young, blonde hippy. At one point she made all of the students create our own lunch trays out of cardboard to protest the CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons--I'll give her this much, I never forgot that) in the styrofoam of the cafeteria trays. One day we simulated a biosphere, as seen in the Pauly Shore/Stephen Baldwin classic Bio-Dome. We were unable to leave the room for the entire day. We had to eat at our desks and we were allowed to go to the bathroom only once throughout the day.

One day she told us that we would have an exchange student from Israel in our class for a couple weeks. It was cool because we learned a little bit about Israel and the Middle East (the Gulf War occurred that year, too) to have some background knowledge of this new student in an effort to make his experience more comfortable.

His name was Ariel Bailey. He was quiet but friendly. I always liked him, but some of the girls in the class started to feel a certain way about his presence in our class. They felt Miss Calhoun was giving him too much attention. We were her real students and he was only temporary. Why should he get all this extra help just because he spoke a different language and was in a new country and his home country was in a perpetual war?

Sure enough, the girls wrote a petition saying Miss Calhoun spent too much time with him and asked everyone to sign it. I remember about 4 girls coming to my desk and telling me to sign it. When I asked why, they thought it was obvious. I didn't really understand it, but they were persistent and I wasn't, so I gave in. I didn't think much of it,  it was just a way to keep them happy and away from me.

Well, Miss Calhoun was definitely not happy when she received the petition. There was a parent teacher conference soon after and she told my mom how devastated she was that my name was on such a hateful list.

My mom was pissed of course, but even worse, she was disappointed.  My mom's method of expressing her disappointment always had the effect of making the recipient of her disappointment question their very purpose on this planet. After making sure I knew how disgusted she was, she told me I was going to apologize to Ariel.

I did, and I felt horrible. He wanted to know why I signed it and I gave him some half-assed excuse I can't even remember and I'm sure he didn't believe, but he forgave me. The truth is, I was just an average kid, and kids can be assholes, knowingly or unknowingly. They just don't fully think through their actions because they are mentally incapable of doing so yet. Children don't understand the impact of their cruelty and often don't even think of their actions as cruelty, just honesty. The problem is, honesty from their point of view is often skewed because they don't understand shit about life yet.

As an adult looking back at it, I'm upset with myself for not being strong enough to stand up to what I knew deep down was wrong; however, I'm happy my mom made me apologize and I'm proud that I went through with it. It was a little late, but it took courage. A little bit anyway. A very little bit. Whatever, it set the wheels of courage in motion.

I have often thought about this incident and I use it as motivation to stand up for myself and others. As a kid we don't know any better, but as an adult, there's no excuse for not standing up for yourself or standing idly by while others are picked on. It's not always easy. It takes mindfulness, confidence, and a willingness to withstand ridicule. For myself, I've realized that I hate regretting my own actions, or lack thereof, much more than I hate insults from bullies or people I disagree with. In fact, it feels good to stand up for yourself, and even more so to stand up for others. Give it a try!

Also, watch Louie.

I Love You All...Class Dismissed.