The memory could go one of two ways. Three children in the back of a truck. One mud puddle. Did they have fun and beg for more? Or were they freezing, unbuckled, in danger of hypothermia and death?
The answer depends on who you ask.
One of the children has gone through years of therapy, and now even the bright spots look dim, unsupervised afternoons revealed as examples of neglect. Sylvie doesn’t enjoy the taste of canned clams like she used to, and processed foods turn to ash in her mouth. Her childhood diaries read like horror stories, but Sylvie doesn’t remember feeling sad... or scared.
Her therapist says, “when you’re a child, you don’t even know what has happened to you.”
What has happened to Sylvie? According to her mother, nothing. Sylvie and her siblings were free-range kids, allowed to run wild and safe – always safe – even in the backseat of a truck going 40 miles per hour, covered in mud on the cusp of winter.
It was all fun and games. It was all an adventure.
But Sylvie might like this book about a child who was abused. “Isn’t it inspiring?” mother says, “She escaped.”
Of course, everyone has to escape their childhood.
“Why don’t you come home anymore?” mother asks, though somewhere, deep down under the rose-colored glasses, she knows the answer.
We don’t have to play the blame game, Sylvie thinks, when everyone tried their best.
But now she’s an adult, and she cannot imagine allowing the things her mother did, no matter how much she loves her husband. She might sacrifice an errant friendship for love but never her children. Future children, Sylvie should add, because she’s not yet a mother.
Still, the mud puddle feels like something she survived, and a mother’s job is to protect her children – all three of them. Sylvie wasn’t even the biggest failure. Sylvie’s stepfather actually liked her, when she wasn’t being “uppity,” of course. Her brothers fared far worse.
No, Sylvie cannot imagine making her mother’s mistakes, but doesn’t that mean her upbringing was a success?
Isn’t the only thing a parent hopes for a child who turns out better than they did? Every generation a little further away from the trauma that precedes them, and there’s no one to blame because everyone did their best.
This is what Sylvie makes peace with, but if she takes off the rose-colored glasses, she wonders where it came from.
Who was the first mother to make a mistake, and how bad must that mistake have been to create a lineage of women scarred like this?
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