CRITICA

My clients and I want to know how to remember our childhoods.

When they ask me how to do this, they look at me expectantly, waiting for the scientific formula for how to get memories to bubble to the surface of their minds. I explain that I have no such formula, but I do have something else—an inquisitive process that can remove the fog shrouding these memories. As a former journalist, it’s true I’m quite an inquisitive therapist, often asking clients many questions born explorations into Winnicott, Jung, and countless trainings. But inside, I feel fearful they’re about to discover my limitations.

What was my childhood like? I hardly know. Yet my mind attempts to weave the story together like my crochet needle hooking yarn, up and down and through and around, those summer mornings in front of the TV with our babysitter. Captivated as I was by Punky Brewster, Blossom, and Little House on the Prairie—the way those shows earnestly reckoned with the struggles of little girls—I also felt lost, like I was waiting to begin my life. 

When I watched Laura Ingalls run through the prairie, discover new things, then bring back her findings to those who loved her, happiness seemed so accessible, so easy. Yet inside my childhood living room with its rich green carpet and lofty, watercolor-patterned armchairs, I did not know where to put such desires. I felt there had to be more to the summer than begging to go to the neighborhood pool, succeeding sometimes, and swimming until my mother arrived home, beautiful in her white and black pinstriped skirts and blouses, to call us home for dinner.

I recall asking Ally, the babysitter, to bring us to Northwest Trek, a zoo-like place where you could view wild animals in their wooded habitat from the windows of a bus. Its sheer existence—disclosed by a previous babysitter—beckoned. Unsure of exactly what I wanted to see, I knew I needed something beyond the wallpapered walls of our house. The answer to my pleas was always yes, of course we would go, just not that day, and I firmly believed the trip was to come just a little bit in the future, just around the bend of the next weekend. We never went.

Often, it was the rain that stopped us. To me, the persistent drizzle felt acceptable—the way life had always been in our part of the world, but to Ally, the ask seemed heavy, piled as it was on top of her breaking heart. In the late morning, we often found her sitting in that big floral chair, whispering softly to her boyfriend on the phone, eyes birthing plump teardrops that spilled onto her cheeks and trickled down to the tip of her nose, where they would hang before dripping off. She would lament in muffled tones, then listen to his replies. Gradually, her chest would slow its rising and falling, and her voice would calm.

It felt as though she was emptying all those tears into the receiver as he waited patiently on the other end, catching each tear and evaluating it before returning the appropriate reassurances. Inside me, there grew this gnawing envy, strange as it was unmistakable, that even as she cried, he was staying, listening, offering what he could. 

The rain kept falling, and in the afternoons, I would ride my bike down the hill of our neighborhood to the busy thoroughfare, where I’d ride along the shoulder to the store for gum. At eight years old, I was allowed to do this as long as I stayed on the right side of the shoulder. Navigating the busy streets with multiple traffic lights, I’d imagine myself a fugitive in a movie, pedaling away from my captors to pull off a heist underneath the protective curtains of the tall, green fir trees, which hid me safely from view. I loved those trees, how their soft arms—covered in millions of tiny pine needles—looked so ready to embrace me.

Other days, I emulated Harriet the Spy, a character from a novel I’d read. She lurked about, jotting down the juicy tidbits of people’s lives in her notebook. I emulated her by constructing my own notebook from cardstock and computer paper I’d found in the study, which I cut into pocket-size before stapling it all together and coloring the front cover in a thick layer of purple marker. With my notebook in my pocket, I’d walk over the mound of smelly grass clippings from the lawn mower, shoes sinking into the mushy grass debris as thorns clawed at my stretch pants. I’d slip into the character of Harriet—sly, discerning, curious—as I entered the wide, stormwater drainage trail of huge rocks behind our house. Then I’d walk behind the neighborhood houses, scouting for dialogue. Maybe I wanted answers to questions I hadn’t yet put into words. Maybe I just loved the aliveness of the forest with its tall Madrone trees, bright orange trunks reaching high into the sky.

Every time I heard a neighbor talking, I’d quickly unlatch my pen to gather the words while imagining the voices of judgement critiquing my process. I imagined my mother seeing me, this lost kid on a futile escapade. I even thought Harriet the Spy would critique my findings as too boring or meager if she saw me. Yet I’d stay the course, remembering the lesson from my father to always “do what you say you’re going to do,” and I’d trudge on, the image of him coming home, weathered, like a soldier from battle, flashing through my mind.  

At school the next year, I took respite in Writer’s Workshop, one of the tables the teachers had set up during our “free hour” for creative writing. I spent all my free hours there, resulting in a 22-page story rich in absurdity and nuance. My parents bonded so heavily with my teacher over the humor in the story that they developed a lifelong friendship. I felt a high at finally seeing my parents reckon with something that originated inside my imagination, but my mother emitted a strange mixture of pride and concern. I was very good, she said, and also, writers do not make much money unless they are incredibly famous, and very very few are, and this involves a lot of luck. 

Did child me know that she was right in many ways about the workings of writing careers? I’m not sure. What I do recall is that these words, to me, meant that I was not good enough to invest too much in the thing I loved most.

Amid the murk of my mind, this message pulls to the surface a memory of writing and producing a play, “Lucy and the Missing Money,” the following summer. I enlisted my sister and several neighborhood kids as cast members, and rehearsals had commenced three days per week for a couple months. The day of the production, I went door to door to all the neighbors’ houses to invite them a showing that evening, where we’d be serving dinner. My mother had not noticed the play’s progress, nor did she know of my plans until I informed her about an hour before curtain call that the neighbors would be descending for the homemade dinner theater. She took in the news with surprise and a hint of horror as she began to cook the pasta. 

“What do you think? Red sauce?” she asked.

“That’s perfect!” I said.

My sister delivered her lines as the star of the show flawlessly, making up for the mistakes of others. After the cast members had bowed, received their applause, and gone home, I was left with an uneasy recollection of the performance—me throwing chairs off stage in a frantic rush to change scenes, feeling acutely my mother’s need for efficiency, losing the careful meticulousness my writerly self had enjoyed when writing the play.

As I helped my mother clean up in the kitchen, I asked if she had liked the performance. She said she had. I did not believe her, nor was I sure that I had even liked it. In my mind, I could see everyone thinking only about the mistakes until my mother’s voice interrupted.

“Next time,” she said, “Please ask further in advance if you want to have people over at our house for dinner.”

My throat tightened in embarrassment. “Okay,” I said.

Staring up at the purple and blue wallpaper in my bedroom that night, a sad emptiness settled in where my anticipation of the production used to be. I had thought my mom and I were so close. She seemed so excited for me when I brought home a good test score. But when I most anticipated her excitement, the floor would fall out. It felt as though she loved me but not my ideas, loved that I was her skinny little good-grades daughter but not that I wanted to write stories, visit wild animals, or buy a plastic melting kit to make beads from scratch. This memory peels back the curtain on a sense of loss hidden all these years, and more memories begin to flow.

Later that summer, after a trip to the lake cabin, I did not want to sleep in my parents’  house. I had spent the prior week preparing an escape plan—my own home, separate from my parents, in the form of a tent I had put up in the backyard. I had put my favorite blankets on the floor and constructed a bed out of pillows and sleeping bags. On each of the nylon walls were my oil pastel drawings, and at the head of the bed—above the five stuffed animals I slept with each night—hung a wreath made of puzzle pieces hot glued together in glorious purples and blues, finished with an iridescent pink bow.

My mother walked with me out to the tent. We zipped open the door, and I told her about my color choices for the interior. She agreed the decor was very pretty. After I climbed inside, she said “okay, well, good night,” with a sing-song tone on the word “night.” Suddenly I realized she was allowing me to leave her. I felt instantly orphaned, and a lump formed in my throat, so big I could hardly speak.

She noticed my pause, asked whether I really wanted to sleep out there, and offered to walk me back inside. I agreed, secretly ashamed that I could not follow through on my plan. I felt too sad to assert what I had fantasized about—that I was not really her child, that I did not want to sleep under her roof, that I was destined for a different life, and it was time to strike out on my own. Yet amid the creatures that lurked in the darkness out there, I needed not only the wooden walls she could offer but also that reassuring voice, those eyebrows raised to summon my attention, and her wide, dark brown eyes looking encouragingly into mine.

We left the tent up for two more weeks before I conceded to take it down. I felt frustrated to realize that I was not brave enough to run away, even to a tent 20 feet from the back door.

And now, I wonder—what could a little girl ask for that I did not have? I had a mother who would ask me, with genuine curiosity, “So, what do you have to tell me?”; who had a loyal tendency to take my side whenever rifts with friends arose; who gave me the “You are Special Today” plate to congratulate me on various school and sports triumphs. I recall her arriving at soccer to pick up my friends and me, snacks on hand in the car, questions about practice and soccer coming from the driver’s seat as she drove. And yet, somehow, I oscillated between huge, dramatic swings, painful and surprising, between feeling seen and invisible in my home. 

When I was 10, I went to camp, where I had befriended an energetic, adventuresome girl. I hoped she would see that I held the same energy buried deep inside me. We would shoot hoops in the evenings. One night, she came up behind me and gave me a big hug when I was waiting in line for my shot. The impromptu show of affection washed me in warmth and gratitude, calming all my muscles and releasing a tension that felt as old as time, as though she had answered my unconscious prayer to be closer to her soul. 

My clients want to know how to remember their childhoods. The next time they ask, I’ll tell them all we need to do is begin. Each granule of memory provides a yearning, a new question, another path to another memory. It is in these that we can see what was needed and not provided. Perhaps some of them wanted their creative wanderings to spring forth. What we need now is often more accessible than we realize, we just may not get it where—or when—we thought we would.