There are some questions that I will never find the answer to. We all have questions like that.
The Little Rascals gang provided a lot of comfort to me as a child. They didn’t seem to have parents, yet they lived an exciting life with adventures every day. As a child, I dwelled in that non-parent fantasy world and it helped keep me strong. I also knew there were other kids like me, somewhere, who lived in that same world and I knew that they were part of my gang. I felt connected to Spanky, Alfafa, Darla, and Buckwheat, and all the other real kids who had a life like mine. I still feel that strong connection and I carry it inside my heart.
I lived in a world of verbal violence. My mother would make me stand in the kitchen, or in the living room, or anywhere she would find me in the house, make me stand, and yell for hours about how worthless I was. I tuned out most of the words and imagined myself in the clubhouse with the gang, but some words were so sharp they penetrated my shield and ripped into my flesh. I’ve been able to wipe most of those words from my memory, but the thing I still remember was how my feet would start to ache, then tingle, then throb, and I would sway. I would have to use every ounce of my strength to force myself to not fall down. I knew that if I fell, she would make me stand back up, and it would anger her so much that the torture would be prolonged. Once the pain in my feet became intense, I was so immersed in it, that the shield protecting me grew stronger. I yearned for that pain the instant the yelling started.
When you live in a world of verbal violence, you feel like you are in a parallel dimension different from the kids you go to school with. They would talk about eating supper and fooling around with their parents, being silly, and I would fell so disconnected. I believed their world was the fantasy world, and my world, the one carefully constructed by my imagination, was the real one. I wrapped this fantasy world around me tightly, disappeared into it, and it protected me.
When it got really bad, I would disappear for real. I would slip out of the house and spend the night in the woods underneath a tree. The Tree would "talk" to me and I would curl up around the roots and listen to the sap run inside it. When first light came, I would sneak back inside the house and crawl into bed so my mother wouldn’t know I had been gone. If it was too cold to go outside, I would spend the night inside my closet. It was comforting to be in the dark with the walls hugging me. During the day, if I was afraid the yelling was going to start, I would slip into my closet and hope my mother wouldn’t find me. It often worked.
And this is the question I will never be able to answer. Did my mother ever know I disappeared? She had to know I was gone, at least during the day when I was inside my closet. She never looked for me. Perhaps, having me out of her sight calmed her down and the need to hurt me would go away. I can never ask her this question. She’s wiped so much of this past out of her memory as well. I don’t ever bring up any bad when I am with her. It would hurt her more now than it ever hurt me as a child. I have forgiven her as she was simply a woman who should never have had children. Her psyche is too fragile to have the chaos that is children in her life. Yet she lived in an era when getting married and having children was the only thing women did. I don’t blame her. So, I will never know the answer to my question.
