Molly came over on Monday. We hung around and talked about our childhoods. And you know what I've realized? I had a sucky childhood. I mean, I always assumed I should be grateful for the fact that my parents never got divorced and that we've never had to worry that much about money. And I guess I should. But I also missed out on a lot of stuff that I guess other kids just think is normal. I never understand people who idealize childhood. Maybe that's just because I personally didn't have much fun during mine.
So let's start with where I live. It is a terribly, terribly depressing place to grow up. Right off the highway, about twenty identical apartment buildings are lined up in a grid. I live pretty much smack in the middle of them. In an obvious attempt to make the place more cheerful, mulch has been laid down around the buildings and trees and flowers have been planted. The trees are all pine trees. There are no leaves. The flowers are all extremely cultivated looking, ridiculous colors, and in neat rows. About half of the flowers and trees are dying from neglect. They look like they are shriveling up from being in such a stark, ugly place. The parking lots are vast. The power lines sag sloppily. The visitor parking says, in big white letters "VISTORS" and no one has bothered to fix it. There is a tennis court and a pool. No one ever uses either, and no children play between buildings. It's just understood. The place is inhabited mainly by druggies and old ladies, with the occasional single mom or immigrant. We have at least two sex offenders.
Our actual apartment has five rooms and four windows. My parents refuse to compensate for the lack of sun by turning on all the lights. They don't want to waste electricity. The house is almost always dark. Everything is old and beige. My mom often says that the bathroom must be haunted, because everything in it is always slightly broken, regardless of how many times we call the plumber. I have done my best over the years to make my room, at least, a pleasant place to be. It is. I spend most of my time there, with the door closed, and have since I was little.
I have never been homesick. Never. Not even when I was a little kid at summer camp. Sometimes I get sad when I am in an unfamiliar place, but I never think "I wish I were home now." I hate it here. It is the ugliest place I have ever seen, and I see it every day. Whenever I am coming home after going somewhere, I have this feeling of dread. I want the car ride to last as long as possible.
I had no brothers or sisters when I was little. I very rarely went outside at all - virtually never without supervision. I never really learned to ride a bike or play any sports. So I sat by myself in my room and thought about stuff and got completely lost in my own imagination. I made up my own games and stories, sometimes even inventing cultures with their own languages (which I tried to speak to other people.) I read a lot, wrote a lot, (I started both writing fiction and keeping a journal, if you could call it that, at five.) drew a lot, and wrote music. (I still have some of it. It ain't half bad.)
As a result of all this, I was fat, wierd, and antisocial. I didn't have any real friends until the third grade, and even then, one of them was extremely mean to me on and off (Jenn) and one was a pity friend (Toby). Third grade is when I started caring about what people thought of me. I knew I was ugly and wierd. I knew people didn't like me, or at least didn't take me seriously. (Fat kids, for some reason, are almost never taken seriously.) I hated myself. At the same time, people were constantly telling me that I was smart "This must be the fundamental difference," I thought, "between me and the people who don't like me. So there's nothing I can do about it. I'm just different from everybody, and it'll always be like that."
Then, of course, there were my parents, who were extremely overprotective right up until middle school. I went to daycare until I was twelve. I was never allowed to go to sleepovers. I could not watch certain TV shows, such as Rugrats and The Angry Beavers, and the only computer games I owned were educational. Everything had to be planned, prefferably a week in advance. Every minute of time that I spent with another child had to be schedualed, lest we "get bored" and do something bad. I never truly got a taste of freedom or spontineity until eighth grade or so, and I wanted them more than anything. I often considered running away from home, although looking back, I doubt I would have been able to pull it off.
Things started getting better in sixth grade. For one thing, since I figured middle school would be a chance to start over with people who didn't know me, I made a concious effort to be normal. I stopped saying wierd random things to people whenever I felt like it. I stopped getting excited about things like math. I even went out and bought normal clothes, and started listening to pop. This kind of worked, and I almost immediately had a group of generic, conformist middle school girls who were willing to hang out with me at lunch. I also made it a point to lose wieght in sixth grade, and I lost a lot of it very quickly. I probably would have become anorexic if my parents weren't so overprotective, since my basic strategy was "only eat when I absolutely have to." (In other words, when my parents were watching.) As it turned out, food never quite became an obsession, and I started eating normally again in seventh grade, when I became satisfyingly, but not unhealthily, thin.
Another thing which made my sixth grade year significantly better than any previous year in my life was meeting Molly. I say this mostly because she made me think, after my period of forced (and probably nessescary) change, that maybe I didn't have to be completely normal to be cool. Molly was also antisocial and kind of wierd. She didn't listen to pop or brush her hair much. Her clothes were different, and she was enthusiastic about math. But from the moment I met her (I was assigned to interview her on my first day of English class) I thought that she was the coolest person who had ever lived. If I hadn't met Molly in sixth grade, chances are I would have become even more "normal" and spent the rest of my teenage years trying to be something I wasn't. Which probably would have made middle and high school even suckier than elementary school.
Knowing Molly also allowed me to enter an entirely different world in the form of going over her house. Since she is the youngest of four children, her parents pretty much did not try to controll her at all, even when she was twelve. She walked downtown and bought stuff, watched R movies, drew on her clothes, and went to bed when she was tired. There was something else too - spontineity. I was in shock after the first time she called and said "Hi. Do you wanna come over?"
"Ok. When?"
"Uh... What do you mean? Now is good. Or whenever you can get a ride."
I had been expecting her to say something like "Thursday." I asked my parents, who were also shocked and immediately said no. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Thursday. But certainly not today. Didn't the O'Connells understand that we had to plan?
I guess Molly's childhood wasn't so hot either. "My homelife was always good," she said as we were sitting on the steps of my apartment building. "I guess sometimes I don't realize how lucky I am to have, like, a family and a nice house. Sorry but... Seems like this would be a really depressing place to grow up."
"Why are you sorry? It was."
"Ok. Yeah, but in elementary school I had no friends. None at all. I guess I could have had friends, but I was always just convinced that if I talked to people, they wouldn't like me. I was like 'I'll just stay away from everyone so that I won't bother them.' I remember for a while I would just sit on the playground and read during recess, and then for a while I would get sick every day at lunch and have to go to the nurse. I guess I was making myself sick, but I didn't know I was. My dad sat me down at one point and said, 'You know Molly, sometimes people get sick just because they wish they would get sick to avoid something else. The nurse thinks that's what's happening with your stomach aches.' I didn't understand. I was like, 'No, I'm not faking it! I really feel sick!' Because I did. I guess there was always Jack, [neighbor] I would hang out with him sometimes, but most of the time, I just remember being alone..."
Liz is going away to college this year, and Kate is getting an apartment. Molly is sad when any sibling leaves the house, but I think now that they'll all be gone, she is pretty much freaking out. "I'll have no one to be all clingy with anymore. You don't mind if I emotionally cling to you, do you? I am genuinely concerned about this." It almost seems like having older siblings made things suck for Molly the same way that having no siblings made things suck for me. I didn't know how to interact with other kids, whereas she didn't know how to deal when there was no one to protect her and show her what to do. Wierd. Maybe it really does come down to who you are.
"Sure you can be clingy," I said.
Loading comments...