Memories
are like a bumpy line and time is all wibbly wobbly. Sometimes those memories
come forward, jump up, cling to the mind’s eye and sometimes they dip down to
an abyss of forgetting. I remember the first time my heart broke a little bit.
Why am I being so honest even though it’s a bit embarrassing at times? It’s because
in trying to forget my mind became anxious. A lot of people feel anxious. A lot
of people don’t even understand they are anxious or that they have forgotten in
order to escape fear. They might feel fine for a long while. The mind is saying
it’s ok. The mind is saying its ok by forgetting what hurt so much. The mind
though is not foolproof. It has a habit of eventually remembering again.
Returning soldiers often become this cycle. In the wake of PTSD there’s just a
little too much remembering and those kinds of bumps are a war that may feel
unending.
I remember the
day my heart broke a little. It’s not so much the reason of course I had to
learn to manage anxiety in my life. There’s lots of reasons why I had to do
that. Remembering and more to the point reflecting and seeking help though, I’ve
decided, can be good.
It was a
beautiful sunny bright morning. The clouds were feathers and quills overhead
waiting to draw me some dragons and bears, mountains and snowy dreams. I was a
bit of a funny and strange kid perhaps. It’s hard to say. I had never thought
so until that sunny warm day when something changed for me. I was perhaps a
funny and strange child because I was a mixture of something very structured
and organised and of something very make-believe and free and I was super
sensitive. It was a planned play date with some children I had already met
before. We were going to have a picnic. I planned my dress and shoes according
to memories of a previous encounter with the same children. I was already
heading into the territory of nostalgia and I didn’t even know it yet
completely. I made a small list of activities for the day just because I was
excited and having a concrete reminder seemed to make my wishes more likely to
be eventuated. Also my mother was a very organised person and I think it was
learnt behaviour too. I was probably only seven years old or so. I packed a
little gift that I made from modelling clay. It had been a Christmas gift, a
DIY jewellery craft kit. The list was quite funny and went something like this;
Look at birds with my binoculars
together
Try and catch butterflies to study
and let go together
Make up a dance or play together
Roll down some hills together
Teach cartwheels together
Bit of singing together
Watch the clouds for a bit together
maybe hold hands
Give my gift
When we
arrived at the beach side picnic spot the children decided on a much different
plan. It involved collecting pine cones and throwing them at each other in a
game of pinecone wars. The adults were busy chatting a little further away.
Being a shy child, this game quickly had me sidelined to a distance of just
sitting and watching. I was pretty disappointed. I wasn’t angry with them. I
could see it looked like some kind of fun but in what seemed like a little
slice of getting older, it was the first time it truly dawned on me that I
might have different interests to other kids even though one of them, a little
boy had loved doing those activities with me once upon a time in suburbia. It was
the first time where I realised that a little boy I had played with was joining
in with more of a group and that sometimes the group would win, especially when
it was dominated by boys. One of the boys threw a pinecone at my head that day
quite hard. Another boy came running to kiss the top of my head sweetly. He became
the mediator, feeling a conscience around the casualty of a game asking the
other boys to apologise. Two of them refused. What we had was a microcosm of
war right there. There was a peace keeper, there were weapons, there was a
civilian. There was a refusal to call a truce. I of course forgave the children
in my own mind some weeks on. Children are still learning. Even as a child I
knew that. Still though I was a little girl among boys and I sidelined myself. There’s
a lot of reasons why I did that.
It was some
decades ago. There was a lot more gender segregation then. I remember also distinctly
being told by a little boy, a different boy, in our street who used to stop in
to do all of those activities on the list and more that he couldn’t play with me
anymore because his father had told him it was time he played with boys a bit more.
He had a cap gun in his hand at the time with a little mate standing beside him
trying to look pretty tough. He was a nice kid. I’ve fond memories of those
days too. I was bewildered by such a comment. I remember asking;
“WHY NOT? I’ll
be a cowgirl too! “Really though I wanted it all to go back to before, to those
interests laid out in my list but I was willing to give it a try rather than
lose a friend.
On the day I
was hit by a pinecone I could see stars and a few more heads than I was
supposed to. I cried a little and reported the injury which was probably a concussion
of sorts but in my embarrassment over feeling a little different hid my list
and small child’s handbag in our family car and lay on the grass for a while
without saying too much.
Years later
I found myself having a brain scan. Uncovered was a small cyst on the brain.
One of the doctors I saw suggested it was caused by a blow to the head by the
shape of it or that it simply could have been congenital. I was again strangely
embarrassed and went with the congenital option.
I asked
myself down the track why so embarrassed? The answer is because I didn’t want
to feel like the loser. It’s the same reason why the boys didn’t want to say
sorry. It’s also because I didn’t want to stare in the face, a history of
gender divisions that pop in by way of cultural norms which can bare completely
inappropriate messages to boys or girls. I didn’t particularly want to be part
of that history. It was easier to try and forget.
I attended an
all-girls Catholic High School. Fortunately, on one hand this gave me space to
be a young woman who was in lots of ways taught to speak and share my views and
learn and study hard but it didn’t give me practice around young men either
that much. When I went to university, early on, speaking publically with the opposite
sex present was a little harder for me to do. Again I felt embarrassed for a
while. I got better at it though. This was because the young men I met were
older, times had changed some, I had changed some and I found a few gentlemen in
classes that weren’t always trying to win. Even if there was level of
competition, there was more respect. We were then just all learning together.
Recently I
noticed a news reporter comment about her sons Halloween costume. She turned to
her male counterpart and commented:
“You’re a
boy would you have tried to spike the family in the rear end if you got a Halloween
pitchfork prop?
It struck
me that we still think in terms of boys and men being mischief makers, being
the naughtiest. We reinforce such ideas a lot. “Boys will be boys” sentiments
can in some ways lead to an unconscious permission for boys to be “bad” and
girls to be “good.” I don’t think we should counter these misconceptions with “nasty
woman” motifs either. In a world that needs more peace, in a world that cries
for reconciliation, in a time where there’s so much fighting in politics, where
people are displaced in the masses because people forget how to love
each other right, where people forget the ones who have been sidelined, we need
to teach our children about that small but very powerful word….sorry. Because
if you get to be an adult and you still can’t say it… then you’re really actually
the loser after all.
