Writing Exercise: write for ten minutes. Write about your childhood. What did your home, your neighborhood look like? What games did you play? Take it deeper. What made you feel ashamed when you were in grade school? When could you identify and understand shame?
EXCERPT DRAFT FROM LOVE IMAGINED:
My fifties childhood wasn’t unusual. Yes, there were only three of us in my grade school whose parents were divorced, but that made us special, not weird, that made us friends.
Yes, I had experienced common childhood trauma. Not wanting to go to kindergarten. Scared of the teachers. Afraid to to tell the teacher or the librarian I had to pee.
But, I didn’t know I wasn’t white, not even sure if I knew I was poor, but being poor didn’t ostracize me, didn’t keep the neighborhood children away from me.
Kids liked coming to our home-it was lived in. We were allowed to play hard. The carpet was worn, the furniture second hand. Plastic didn’t cover our used davenport. Mom’s sewing machine was always in the dining room and pins and needles and patterns were always on the dining room Duncan Phyfe table. We had a television and a hi-fi. The neighbor lady whose husband worked for Wonder Bread supplied us with Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies. On summer afternoons we set up a card table in the living room and shuffled Maj Jong tiles (you could hear the shuffling of tiles a block away) or played Canasta or Sorry or Monopoloy. We had a second hand upright piano on our front porch that we all took turns pounding on, “Here we go up a row to a birthday party.” We played with our Barbies (mine was fake) our Tiny Tears, our Ginny dolls. We dressed my baby brother in our baby doll girl clothes. In the winter we had a skating rink in our back yard, in the summer we had a sandbox that covered one-fourth of the back yard, an enclosed playhouse that took up another fourth. We had a stone fireplace to roast hot dogs and marshmallows. In the front yard we played Captain May I and Red Rover Red Rover. We played baseball in the street, only to be kept in when they, once-a-year tarred our street, being caught ever so often with oily tar on our tennis shoes, shoes we didn’t usually have to take off when entering our home.
In second grade my writer’s voice appeared from nowhere. We were taught early to be charitable, even though nobody probably knew we were the receivers of charity, of turkeys at Thanksgiving and blonde blue-eyed dolls from the Salvation Army at Christmas. I wrote my first poem in second grade: save your nickels and dimes, Channel 2 needs you, bring your money to school! My teacher paraded me in front of each elementary school class where I recited my lines and solicited money for a cause.
Later, in high school, when the Church solicited money from our neighbors, asking to help the poor family who needed a new roof on their house, or was it to pay the mortgage? The good Christians gave generously, but that money was never given to my mother, and shame burdened my mother until the day she died. Shame isn’t an isolated incident, shame sneaks up on you, says you’re not worth shit, says it over and over and over again-even if you’re not listening. Even if it takes a lifetime to name it.
Sherry Lee
June 29, 2012
