13. My Family

Although I have referred to different stages of my life as “my favorite”, I have felt the need to mention that my childhood was great. I just remember a lot of laughing. Our family was its own little unit separated from the outside world. I never did understand why everyone I lived with the first summer I lived away from home had all seemed to suffer some sort of abuse in their childhood. How did I fit in with this lot?

Fit In
My family never did fit in because we were never “bad” enough for the school kids and never “good” enough for the church kids. So it was just us. The church people couldn’t put up with the questioning, my mother’s dedication to taking care of her five children rather than leaving them all the time to run youth groups or things like that. Not that she didn’t do plenty of things with church. She had the unfortunate habit of smoking so she was kind of “ bad”, not allowed to join the church. On the other hand, if I tried going to a party in high school, people were like, “Mary what are you doing here?” So old sensitive me didn’t really feel a huge desire to associate with these tactful types of folk.

Monday Nights
And really I felt no loss. I didn’t care much about being left out of anything. My family was enough. Just great. We messed around all the time. I can remember my sisters just making me laugh and laugh. They had a talk show just for us that made the rest of us pee our pants. Our Monday nights when dad was working for dinner were a great time of letting loose. This was a ridiculous concept because most of the rules of decorum probably stemmed from my mom. No matter how we have turned out, she did bring us up right. So when dad was away we somehow had this freedom to talk about and do things at the dinner table that were usually considered impolite. It was always a riot. But I am certain dad never would have cared. I can remember us sledding triple-decker with mom on the bottom. I just don’t have a bad memory of being a kid.

Alienation
I think when I got to college, I was always looking for people who were as funny as my sister, Jenny. I was also finding people who I could relate to. But they were people who were alienated from groupthink in some way. Our completely opposing alienations brought us all together not as a cohesive unit but as all these individual opposite thinkers. We had a place we would all meet randomly which became referred to as “The Freak Wall”. I had a teacher who said I was getting in with the wrong crowd. But these are the people I love to this day. I did notice quite a few of these people had had negative experiences in childhood, unlike myself.

Happy
I am glad to be able to look back and realize the alienation I grew up with stemmed from the best thing I could have experienced: happiness.

10/2/04