Old Memories Through New Eyes

 February 2, 2022

Not long ago, in light of the #MeToo movement, I thought about the fact that I was lucky I had never experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.  I remember having a conversation about it with a friend of mine, since the issue was all anyone seemed to be talking about at the time.  I empathized with women who had experienced it, and was duly indignant on their behalf.  I said that no one had ever subjected me to anything like that before...except, they had.  I had experienced it, but I didn't realize it at the time--couldn't put that name to it.  Another friend of mine had said he thought the #MeToo movement all had gotten out of hand, and why did it take some women 20 years to report it if it had really been traumatizing?  How was it possible that people were only just realizing that abuse was abuse ? The speculation was that women were simply jumping on a bandwagon for attention, but hadn't really been traumatized by what they were claiming as harassment in retrospect. But I get it.  In the novel 1984, the government attempts to shrink the language in order to minimize the possibility of articulating, or even thinking about, rebellion.  How can you acknowledge it if you can't name it, can't recognize a context for how to label it?  What I experienced as a young college student was an assistant manager who lived by the 'boys will be boys' attitude--everything was just fun and games.  It wasn't assault; I didn't fear losing my job because of it, but by today's standards, what he subjected girls to in that place of business would absolutely be grounds for firing.  I didn't know, though.  Back then, we reserved that term for overt shows of force or threats to employment, not all the subtle ways harassment can manifest.  I knew he was inappropriate, but I also assumed my only recourse was to have a sense of humor about it, to give him wide berth, and to try not to find myself alone in the stock room with him.

Even more recently, I was talking with a friend about my home life as a child.  There was domestic abuse, but although I was witness to it, I was not the recipient.  Even writing that seems too black and white; I rarely say that what I witnessed was domestic abuse.  It didn't happen all the time.  It only happened when he was really stressed. There was only one time that I know of that it was bad enough for the police to become involved.  There were no broken bones.  But that's how we rationalize, right?  That's how people stay in those situations, sometimes until it's too late.  And then as we continued talking, my friend and I, I recounted a couple of other stories. The times he held us underwater in the pool until we couldn't breathe, fighting and kicking to come up for air, terrified of drowning.  The times he locked us kids in a room with him individually for hours at a time to lecture and intimidate us.   The way his anger led him to send subtle and not-so-subtle signs of destructive consequences when he did not get his way. The way he tried to wield his power to drive a divide among family members.  My friend, who continued to ask questions, finally asked me if I thought I had come from a background of abuse.  My immediate reaction was no, and he asked me why.  Again, I said I had only witnessed it, but not been the recipient.  Even as I was saying it, juxtaposed to the examples I had just given of some of my dad's behaviors, for the first time it began to dawn on me that I wasn't in proximity to it; I too lived it. I didn't name it because I always thought of myself as lucky that it wasn't bruises or broken bones--the face of abuse-, and therefore I couldn't name it for what it was.  At 54 years of age, I finally acknowledged that just because it wasn't as bad as many people experience, it doesn't make me 'lucky' to have endured that abuse.  No one should have to.

In Too Deep

July 7, 2017

Summer in July. If you’re from Fresno, that means if humanly possible, you’ll spend as much time in the pool as you can. If you’re a kid in the 1970s in Fresno, that means every day, all day, flaunting the scorching sizzle of 105 degrees of unrelenting heat by splashing, playing, and diving into the deliciousness of the backyard pool. We had sitting-on-the-bottom-of-the-pool contests, and races walking on our hands into the deep end. We belly-flopped and did back flips and cannonballs off the diving board. We took breaks to run in the house to pee if we thought Mom was paying attention; we didn’t run into the house if we thought we could get away with it, because it was so much work to drag ourselves out and away from the fun, dry ourselves off completely so as not to drip a trail of water through the house, and peel off (and then put back on) the cold, soggy suit just to run back out and rejoin whatever games were in progress. (I know you’re judging here; I also know you’ve done it too. And if you have kids now, you’re fooling yourself if you think they’ve never peed in your pool.)

We had a built-in group of playmates, since there were five of us kids. Our next-door neighbors had ten kids, some of whom were older and out of the house, but many of whom were right there with us in our pool every day. Around lunchtime, Mom would often appear with a stack of sandwiches and some grapes or oranges. We also feasted off of the two mulberry bushes that were in our backyard. (Until we moved to that house, I thought mulberry was just a made-up word that was used in a nursery rhyme.) We knew Mom was in the house and was only a yell away in case of emergencies, but she didn’t often come out to the pool to swim with us. She was scared of swimming, borne of the sink-or-swim lessons she had as a child, when her step-dad threw her into the lake and told her she’d have to figure out how to get back to land on her own. She never got over the panic she felt around water, but she wanted us to have a pool. (She also paid to take us to swim lessons so we could learn how to swim in a less threatening environment than she did.) Although Mom occasionally passed by the kitchen window with a casual “Be careful!” or “Watch your little brother!”, we were mostly joyously, raucously, exuberantly free from parents, from worries, from cares about anything more important than which kid got to decide the next game that we played. Sun up to sundown, that’s where we were. It’s a wonder we survived without drowning or sunstroke.

Today we wouldn’t dream of leaving our young kids to their own devices all day, especially not in the pool. The dangerous part for us, though, was when Dad was off for the weekends and he decided to join us in the pool. Dad liked to rough house and was impatient with ‘weakness’. He’d jump in the pool and wrestle and fight, pitting his 200 pound frame against his 12 year old son, his 10 and 8 year old daughters. On the one hand, we liked when he would join in our games; he was a busy man and spent a lot of time at the office during the week days. There was always an edge, though—the feeling that things could turn at any moment. They often did. Riding on Dad’s back was fun; watching him swan-dive into the pool, seeming to freeze momentarily mid-air to cockily salute and wave to an adoring audience—well, we loved those moments. But inevitably, Dad wanted to wrestle us, take us on precariously close to the deeper end of the pool where he could stand, but we could not. There was something strange that overcame him during those battles, a competitive spirit that could not be tempered with logic or reason. He played dirty, not one to let his kids get the better of him. His signature move was to suddenly swing around to face whichever kid was trying to ride his back to bring him down. He’d swiftly reach out to hold us underwater, the palm of his hand planted firmly on the top of his opponent’s head—the ultimate show of superior strength and agility. To this day I can remember the feeling of being held, firmly and helplessly, under the surface, just moments shy of far too long—arms flailing, panicked eyes casting about for some means of escape, feeling the burning sensation in my lungs and knowing I couldn’t hold my breath anymore. I remember several times thinking, “He’s going to forget to let me up in time. I’m going to drown before he lets me up!” Inevitably, when Dad did finally let me or my brother or sister up from his vise-like grip, we’d either be angry (my brother, my sister), or we’d be crying. Gary even tried to sucker punch Dad in retaliation once, but a swift, sneak attack underwater is difficult to pull off. It set Dad off even more, and Gary was pushed underwater once again in order for Dad to underscore his dominance. Dad’s victorious gloating grin after these matches would be eclipsed by that impatient, irrational anger. He’d call us babies, he’d rail at us for playing the game and then being sore losers. He’d become enraged and said he wouldn’t play with us anymore, and then he’d either banish us to the shallow end or tell us we weren’t big enough to go in the pool at all and would make us get out for the day. He’d brood and sulk for the rest of the day. There were always arguments with my mother, too, when she told him he needed to be more gentle with us; he needed to remember that he was bigger and stronger than all of us. He, on the other hand, didn’t want to raise sissies; he didn’t want to have weaklings for kids. We needed to get over it and toughen up. At the same time, he seemed to need constant validation that we acknowledged him as the strongest, the wiliest of us all. He needed to know that we knew he was the alpha male. Even as a kid I thought it was irresponsible—unparental, even.

Those 1970s summers were seemingly carefree and without purpose, but they taught me a lot, too, about what I expect, and what I accept, from those who hold positions of power in my personal, professional, and public world. Back then, I was willing to jump back in the pool again and again, knowing that danger and anger lurked there, for the trade-off of my father’s playful bravado and fun that always preceded it. But I what I eventually realized is that risking my well-being in order to feed someone else’s insecurities is simply not worth diving into. Is it selfish to not want to drown under the weight of someone else’s baggage? Those hot summer days taught me that being selfish is sometimes necessary for survival.

Nostalgia, Continued

August 11, 2011

I went looking online for a picture of the last home I had in Garden Grove a few days ago. Did you know you could find childhood memories on the internet? 11252 Ivanhoe--it was actually only our home for a few years (from my 1st to 4th grade year), but there were a lot of memories there. The living room where one whole wall was mirrors, and kids were only allowed in for special circumstances. (It was nearly impossible to talk to Scott in that room; he was absolutely incapable of carrying on a conversation without being drawn to his own reflection.) The huge den with the wet bar where we kept cream sodas for a treat. That was also where Mom held the Cub Scout meetings, for which the was the Den Mother. The huge fish tank in the hallway with mesmerizing Angel Fish. The huge walk-in playhouse that Dad built in the backyard. The sandbox and jungle gym right next to it, where we would climb up and watch the fireworks that Disneyland shot off every night. Our bedroom with the lavendar paint. Our across-the-street neighbors with the red door. (The mom and dad were Arlene and Charlie. Arlene chewed and smacked her gum all the time; Charlie was always very nice to us, and we lovingly named our pet salamander after him. ) The white rocks lining our driveway. Roses lining the front porch. Dad's red and white Javelin. The family car--the seventies-style station wagon that took us back and forth to Oklahoma each year for Christmas vacation. (Oh man, I was angry at mom when they traded that thing in for a dark green, luxurious Lincoln Continental. She, on the other hand, felt like she was moving up in the world.)

The pets who lived with us there were Maggie and Missy (dogs), Charlie the Salamander, Hansel and Gretel the guinea pigs, Charlie Green, my parakeet, a host of hamsters and more fish than I could possibly count. I took accordian lessons while living there, and Gary took saxophone lessons, and we both took piano. Laura was born while we were living in that house. Mom and Dad's friend Bruce lived with us in the garage for a time, and his sister, Janet, was one of our live-in babysitters. We also had a string of other live-in babysitters, one of whom had two kids (Victor and Janice) who also lived with us.

It's weird how interconnected the memory is. Every little memory brings you to another one. I could go on all day, I suppose, but there are very few people for whom these snippets have any meaning besides myself and Lisa and Scott, and even they were pretty young to remember much of this. Guess I'd better bring myself back from my reverie!