What I write tends to be from me, rather than about me. Ideas, questions, answers, stories, poems. That’s what I’m moved to write. That’s what I so urgently desire to write.
But I keep hearing, What’s your story? Tell your story.
That feels strange to me. But today, I’ve decided to start.
But where?
The encouragement is to tell a story of deep personal pain and eventual recovery, along with my solution. I can think of many stories like that. Addiction and recovery. Cancer and recovery. Plane crash in the middle of wilderness, days of struggle, and finally, survival. Seven years of captivity in hell-hole prisons in North Vietnam, and the lessons learned.
That’s not the kind of story that comes to mind, right now anyway.
Instead, I’m thinking of:
being puzzled. That’s been huge for me all my life. When I get a question it stays in my mind. For decades, even.
moving, at age 6, after a huge war, into an area where almost everyone else came from the other side. I don’t think any of the grown-ups around me had any awareness that this could matter. It did. That experience had a huge impact on my life. It’s been a starting point for massive explorations.
spending a lot of time alone as a child.
I’ll start with the last thing.
A pivotal experience. My mother went back to work when I was about 6 months old. There’s a photo of me and about 8 other little children at a daycare with 2 very young women. Then something happened. My father, rather than my mother, took me to the daycare one morning. I started crying when he left. The young women assured him that I just cried for a few minutes and then was fine all day. It was normal for children to cry for a few minutes.
My father did not accept that. There was a neighbor who lived very close by who did piecework at home. My father arranged that I would spend the days with her, instead of going to the daycare. I don’t have a true memory of being with her, just a kind of sense memory, of sitting on the window ledge looking out, or sitting under the table with scraps of fabric. No other children. And the neighbor was doing piecework.
That went on for about 2 years, until my little sister was born and my mother stayed home.
I don’t know how often I wondered where the daycare had gone. The other little children. The toys. The 2 very young women. Did I spend days imagining being at the daycare, playing alone or with the other children?
If I had any idea that my crying is what ended my going there, did I regret the tears? Did I say to myself, a thousand times over, if only I hadn’t cried, I wouldn’t have been taken away.
I have no memory of trying to explain this or even ask about it.
I’m sure my father would not have listened. I have so many memories of his having a fixed idea. No getting through.
I think back to that little girl, taken from a daycare to being alone with a very nice quiet grownup who was busy, with little time for the quiet child in her care.
When I was 5 we emigrated from Vienna to Montreal. It was November. My mother soon took me to the local school, where I would have gone to kindergarten. I remember going to the school, meeting the nice kindergarten teacher. My mother learned I did not have to go. It was just playing. My mother decided it was not important. She decided I would stay home.
I have no memories of that year before Grade One.
I can see it would have been a lot for my mother to take care of, on top of everything else in this strange new country. School clothes. Getting me to school every day.
I still missed out, from November to June, playing with the other children.
There’s something I may well have gained. I appreciate alone time. Reading. Thinking. Puzzling things out - that’s been huge. Writing and more writing. I can enjoy lots of alone time.
It’s also long been very easy for me to feel like an outsider - something that ties in with lots of other things as well.
On the other hand, I found it easy not to go along with mainstream views on so many things, from the recent virus, back to Islam and much else. And my knowledge of other people likewise outside the mainstream is that many of them were likewise outsiders (or anyway somewhat outsiders) as children.
And that’s enough for now.
Maybe I’ll come back to this. To bits and pieces of my story.
Next, back to thoughts and ideas.
Elsa
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Posted March 13, 2023
Thanks Elsa. Wonderful insight into your very early years. 1Love.