ethoughts weekly- Issue 146

Jan 27, 2007

I’ve been contemplating reality lately, with regards to childhood. It is amazing the details you can still remember from the earliest years if you give it time and focus. I’ve been reliving and exploring very early memories this week, as I work on my second book project. No, the first one isn't sold, but I have to distract myself in this waiting period. There are some exciting and promising leads for that. But, I'll save details for another day, when I have more of them to share, and I feel at liberty to reveal them.

I've come to a kind of conclusion that when a child first contemplates that reality exists outside their knowing of it, it's like a second kind of birth occurs. Certianly not a physical birth, but a kind of emotional one. I belive the roots of identity are tied up in this coming out from babyhood. A child only first perceives reality from his own narrow vantage point too. It’s skewed; it’s exaggerated.

There’s a story of a very young boy undergoing potty training. As he sits on the toilet, a medium-sized earthquake ensues, and shakes the home. His mother runs into the bathroom.

“What did I do, Mommy?” he says.

So much of life is determined in childhood, but with the lack of experience in living, the child can and will make some poor judgments about his world. He will feel, for instance, feel overly responsible for bad things that occur. He will judge his worth by the care, or lack out it, that he receives. He will see his identity as it is reflected back to him in the eyes of his caregivers.

What do the earliest memories plant for harvest later? How many of the fictitious assumptions are scratched out? How many grow into full-blown lies? These are things we can ask of our selves. I have been asking them.

As we take stock of our current, present-day identities, I wonder if we can ever really escape that wounded child that may have been injured so long ago, if we have an inwardly wounded child, I mean. Some of us would not be wont to admit that.

How we are formed is at lest in part, a mix of tangled strands and broken pieces, mended well, or glued poorly together, until we have who we are. We become in many ways the sum of our experiences, including the sum of our fears, and the sum of our hopes, and the sum of our self-understood worth.

Did our initial ideas of value come from a shaky source? Then we’ll have a struggle there. Were our fears confirmed, rather than mitigated, by those in authority? Then we will labor there. Were we protected? Were we esteemed? That child will still, in present day, from somewhere deep within, search for that understanding, and answers.

All these patchy or clear images, echo in the furrows of our mind’s eye, subtly or overtly making them selves known. How strange that such innocence prepares us for the wild reality of a hectic and damaged world. That wounded world encroaching too soon, can make the child hurt for a lifespan. It can be his undoing. Still, it can be the partial ticket to liberation as well. The whole ticket is gotten through the full journey itself.

Where is your child? The one you remember. Who is he or she? What were your defining childhood earthquakes? Do those earliest memories still imprison you and your dreams? Sometimes the prison door has been open for years, but we don’t know well enough to walk out and be free.

Lisa DeLay

©2006