From outside the box

Recently I was presented with a new writing challenge. Two of my sisters are planning a family reunion for sometime next summer and one of them thought it would be cool if all of us siblings (all nine of us) wrote a book about our life. Each of us would write one chapter and they would all be condensed to make one book. So a couple of weeks ago I sat down and began to write. After three pages I was up to the part where I was born. My whole life? In one chapter? So I backed up and began to gloss over the years. This time it worked a little better, I got thru my whole childhood in six pages. That took me all of Sunday afternoon.

About four in the afternoon, with back aching and two dogs staring at me wondering why they hadn't had their Sunday walk yet, I put the project on hold and went out for a while. When I came back I was anxious to get back to the writing. When I read back over what I had written, I was a little shocked. I had just written six pages about all of the violence in my childhood! I hadn't realized when I was writing, how angry I was, how much unresolved crap there was that I obviously needed to get out. I knew I needed to think about this before I did anymore writing. Did I want to really tell that side of my story? Was it necessary and did anybody really care to read this stuff? Why was I leaving out all of the good stuff from my childhood?

After thinking about it, I decided to finish writing what I had been feeling and then delete it. It felt good to write about it even though I knew it was pretty negative. It also felt good to delete it, kind of like I was deleting the last vestages of whatever emotional attachment I still had to those issues. I chalked up the whole experience as a little self therapy. I have since started writing my story for the third time. Now I know what to do. Keep it short and to the point, make it interesting, keep it more on a positive note but don't skip all of the negative, maybe just mention it without dwelling on it.

When I look back on those years during the fifties, I really do have more good memories than bad. The bad stuff mostly had to do with neighborhood and school bullies. I was a tall skinny kid with red hair and freckles. We lived on the poor side of San Bernardino and the school I attended was mostly black and Mexican kids. They were poor and angry. I stood out. Not good. Then there was the family stuff. I was number eight of ten kids. My folks were pretty burned out by the time me and my two younger sisters came along, there wasn't a lot of patience. You'd have to read the parts of my life story that I've already deleted to get the whole picture, but who cares. I think it was just important to me that I wrote it. Maybe now I can truly move on. Maybe when I say that I have forgiven my parents, I will really mean it, mostly. I'm getting there.

There is, however, one aspect of those early years that I have resolved. That is the deep knowing I have inside that it really was ok that I experienced those things. They helped to make me who I am. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger....so true. Violence can lead us to love. Being in a powerless situation can be the catalyst that eventually brings you to your power. As a young adult, I had to take a good look at the part I played in attracting the kind of negativity I did as a child....that is if I wanted to change it. Sure, my dad was a bully, I don't remember him ever confronting other men the way he could a skinny eight year old boy. But on the other hand, I was a little wise ass. I loved to challenge other kids, as well as my father, to see just how far I could push them until either I backed off or got my butt kicked. It was a game with me. I played this game all thru high school.

As a young adult, I had decided that the game was no longer fun, I was tired of getting beat up, I wanted to relate to people in a different way. I guess we all go thru this off and on at different points in our life. It's called growing up. I've been growing up for a long time now. It's nice to look back at where you were five or ten years ago and see the areas you have changed, hopefully for the better. I hope that when I'm eighty five, I will look back at where I was at when I was eighty and see how far I've come in those five years. But still, how in the hell can you write about all of these things in one chapter? Maybe I'll be a better writer when I'm finished? Maybe I will be a better blogger? Maybe the readers of my blog will enjoy it a little bit more, maybe they both will!