A Bad Five
This week in couple’s therapy I stumbled into a memory from kindergarten. My dad slept in, took a long shower and missed my first ever play. I don’t know if this is world ending stuff, but the therapist and Rachel gave me a look like “oh shit, that’s a lot”. Even at the time in kindergarten I knew how bad it hurt. I remember looking out into the surprisingly large classroom we were in and really knowing that he was not there. It was in the middle of the day, a lot of moms and dads weren’t there. But I’m guessing that a lot of those that weren’t there weren’t in a long shower instead. They were working jobs with a level of inflexibility that a professor of economics at an elite liberal arts college didn’t have to deal with. My dad was apologetic, but he also promptly informed me it wasn’t a big deal; there’d be other plays, and he’d be there, he’d just missed this one. It was probably 1986. He’s 38 or so at the time. A couple years younger than I am now. I guess I can say it was a big deal, whether it should be, or whether it makes sense for it to be. That memory is 36 years old. And it’s not just like it was yesterday, I don’t have a strangely photographic memory. I don’t remember the play, I don’t remember where my mom was. I just remember standing on some kind of stage for the first time in my life and looking for my dad and not seeing him.
The couple’s therapist, The couples therapist, I’m really stressed out about the apostrophe here. It’s not like it’s two couples.
The therapist, she has already been trying to get me to go into my own therapy for complex trauma. I have a hard time calling anything in my life complex or traumatic. So many boxes checked in my life; so much support, so many smiles, so much success. It’s hard. There’s trauma I’ve understood from others and haven’t faced myself, and my shit doesn’t hold a candle to it. But I’ve got things, things I don’t understand. Things that I thought were settled after doing a year of EMDR therapy. (Don’t worry, I didn’t know what it was either. Here’s a link.) But according to our couple’s therapist, that’s surgical. That’s working away the impact of one event. The event we focused on was also from that joyous rollercoaster of a year, 1986. I was allowed to go to church with my best friend Betsy on Sundays. My family wasn’t religious. I loved it, I loved going with Betsy. And yes, I fucking loved the snacks afterwards. And yes, I loved putting like six of those cube ass sugar-cubes in my tea. And I loved eating the Oreos and Nilla wafers they had laid out there. I came home one Sunday morning peppered in Oreo crumbles and my mom could see them from a mile away. She grabbed me angrily and brought me up to her bedroom. She stood me on the scale and told me if I was over 100 lbs I was never going to church again. I was 101. I still remember that green glowy digital scale reading it out. Spent a lot of time a couple years ago trying to make sense of that. Trying to talk to that young boy and tell him what grown Sean thinks of someone who would say that to a little boy. What grown Sean could tell him about what that Mom was probably going through at that time. Trying to give young Sean the love he wasn’t getting, trying to give that young Mom the forgiveness I had refused to give her even when she died.
I’m scared having a child who just turned five. Five is when I started gaining a “worrisome” amount of weight. Five is when my mom put me on the scale and said “no more Church”. Five is when Dad missed the play. I had a great childhood, good times, good laughs, good foundation. But I now understand that I had a bad five. And I had a bad six. And I had bad years dropped in throughout my childhood. I could take a long shower on Thursday May 12, 2022, miss a play at Sadie’s daycare and she could be blogging about it in 2053. We leave all sorts of shit in our childrens’ memories, nuggets of wisdom that will pay dividends for decades, and memories of bullshit that will also be on the emotional ledger sheet for annums. And somehow, realizing that my daughter is five, it’s all on the record now. I know it was on the record before, but I don’t remember much of my life before kindergarten. But now, the way I treat Sadie, that is part of her fabric. And I’m so scared I’ll mess it up. I’m so scared of what I’ll plant and I’m so scared of what I won’t plant.
I’ve got no answer, but it paralyzes me to think about it. In the moment, you do it, you talk with your children, you navigate their tantrums, you celebrate their joys. But when I pull back I’m so nervous that I’ve already planted something horrible, and of course I have. We all will, we all have. And that is paralyzing and there’s no stopping it.