BAD MEMORIES FROM A GOOD CHILDHOOD

In scientific terms, you might say that I am an abortion survivor. I wouldn't be here telling this story today had the chemicals in the pills my mother took back in 1953, worked as they were designed to. In many ways, I see this as the starting point in my life. When I was just a little zygote, I had no way of knowing what sort of future, if any, was in store for me. At that point in time, whether I lived or died had no effect on me emotionally. It had nothing to do with Jesus or God or praying.  This story is told from one person's memory, which could be sharp as a tack, or may be truly faulty and flawed. Either way, I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. It is a story of my very own childhood. Don't get me wrong--I had a very good childhood growing up in Eastern Ontario Canada. Here in this story I will mostly deal with the bad parts of that childhood, hence the name of this blog--Bad Memories from a Good Childhood.

Have any of you ever done First Memories Exercises?  It is a good way of finding out what was going on around you in your very early years as a child.  I didn't have to do any exercises because I have a pretty good photographic memory starting as early as one year old.  At 11 months of age I was speaking and walking.  The doctor told my mother that I was a very advanced and exceptional child.  My mother herself would recount stories about how surprised people were when the baby would start speaking in complete sentences.  Apparently this was freaky for my mother and for the people around her. My very first memory is that of wanting to be big and tall.  I was not yet tall enough for the top of my head to reach the bottom of an open kitchen drawer even while stretching.  I remember that I kept measuring the space between my head and the drawer with my fingers. The next vivid memory I have is at the age of two years.  I had a toy fishing rod and was fishing off a dock with my fath

In the early years our family lived in one unit of a 4 unit apartment building owned by my grandmother.  The units were mostly occupied by family members, ie., my mother's sisters and their husbands and children.  One bad memory from this time is of my uncle Paul who was married to my mother's older sister.  Maybe I was 4 or 5 years old and my 2 cousins, Ricky and Jan were a bit younger.  We were playing at their apartment when something one of the cousins did made uncle Paul furiously angry.  He yelled at the boy to go upstairs and take off all his clothes.  I knew what this meant because my cousin had previously shown me the red and raised welts across his flesh from the leather belt his father used to beat him.  The cousin left and uncle Paul just stood there like a big buffoon as I proceeded to tell him how wrong and bad this punishment was and how I was not in agreement with it.  I forget the words I used, but I didn't pull any punches.  When I finished he told me to g

It was a backyard playtime afternoon when I was about 6 years old that I learned where babies came from.  I was playing with a neighborhood friend who was maybe two years older than I.  She seemed to think she knew everything.  She explained to me her own unbelievable theory about how babies come into the world.  Something involving the belly button and not the vagina at all.  I had witnessed my cousin's dog giving birth to a litter of pups and was not to be conned. My guess was that the belly button version, just like the stork, was her mother's cleaned up version of a baby's entry into the world.  At the first opportunity I got myself to the library and confirmed what I already knew.  The library, unlike my neighbor friends, was something I could always trust and rely on.

My father was always very kind to me, but he shouldn't get too much credit in this story as he allowed my mother's abuse to continue unchecked.  Her abusive ways were so barbaric and violent that I began to play games in my head rewriting my story where she was not my real mother.  This helped me to cope with all the mental and physical torture she heaped upon me.  I was 3 years old when I realized that I would never love my mother and I certainly wasn't going to wait around for her to love me.  Just the thought of her physical presence could make me very ill.  If she came too close to me, her scent was so foreign and disgusting to me that I wanted to vomit.  I was thoroughly repulsed by her and with that I became more and more withdrawn.  I remember when I went to kindergarten the teacher told my mother that I was "a funny little monkey".  Well, that's probably because I never spoke.  And I never spoke because my speeches were always met with violence and abu

My new sister arrived when I was almost 2 years old.  I felt so much love for her and have loved her ever since. My manipulative mother tried to get me to hate my sister but it didn't work.  My mother would constantly praise my sister as being such a good baby, who ate well and slept well.  Unlike myself who had been a very big complainer, crying all the time and not sleeping.  Abortion pill side effects?  Very possible. As my sister grew I could see that both my parents were physically abusive to her and I would try to love and protect her till the day I died.  My father never hit me once in my life.  I always wondered why he hit my sister on a regular basis.  My mother's idea was that my sister just wanted attention and would push his buttons for that reason.  In my mother's world, even negative attention was good.  We are talking about one of the biggest attention seekers that I have ever known, after all. My sister was a very active and curious toddler.  She was n