One Single Impression: Two Prompts - Welcoming and Childhood Memories

(Please scroll down for the final Gratitude post.)


This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "welcoming." I missed last week even though I really wanted to participate so I have added a response to that prompt at the bottom of this post. I warn you in advance that it is very long and gloomy. Sorry about that.

Welcoming each day

My gratitude unbounded

How awesome is life

~~~~~~~~~~~

I have slowly learned

To welcome all life offers

Not always with grace

But with a desire to trust

To find beauty in all things

~~~~~~~~~~~

This poem for last week's prompt is VERY, VERY long. I just wrote it. I have not polished it. It took two weeks and a half dozen false starts to get anything, yet I wanted very much to respond to that prompt.... so I did, just a week late. My apologies for the length and the.... darkness of it. This is what I come up with after a month of writing about gratitude. What's wrong with this picture?

Childhood memories are rare and full of pain

Part of me thinks still that I had a happy childhood

I was more fortunate than many, I know that

I had a home, a family – crazy as they were –

I had food to eat, ideas and books

I wasn’t Unloved

Just badly loved

Not out of malice or malevolence

But my parent’s own woundedness

They meant no harm

I believe that

My brother, I think, did

He loved me and hated me both

I don’t know why

Some mis-firing synapses in his brain, no doubt

Doesn’t really matter any more

Though his cruelty, his madness

Has etched itself into my bones

Scarring them with the acid of his devious hate

Sometimes he was mean, you see

But often, his malice was coated with sugar

Always it was excused, explained away

By a mother who thought she could pretend it into submission

Then there were my two fathers

The elegant, brilliant actuary and the slobbering fool

Oddly, it was the drunk Dad who I knew best

I was his caretaker

We made music together Drunk Dad and I

Those close moments at the piano

Him lurching

Tuning and retuning his mandolin

Sitting too close on the bench

Breath strange, eyes red and glazed

Those are my “happy” memories

I didn’t understand until years later

Until my 40s

How afraid I was

Didn’t understand that life on watch

Is not normal

I remember watching him make drinks

(I was server)

Chugging shots as he did

Drunk before he had his first official sip

I remember watching him at dinner

Stuporous

Take all the food onto his plate

Before my turn

My mother’s anger simmering

I remember once my mother packing all her things

“I’m leaving,” she said

But she didn’t mention me.

What about me?
I remember that as being on my birthday

Though I doubt it was

Just my psyche’s code

You are to blame

They would have been ok without you

Be good

Be very good

You must atone for existing

Oddly, aware as I was of my father drinking

Of how he got so drunk

The power of denial is so strong

It took my sister’s anger one day

“You’re drunk” she yelled

I was in my 20s.

“Aha!” my brain cried at last.

“That explains it.”

It’s not that there were no happy days

I think there were.

But I think I wasn’t there

I lived my childhood

Both hyper-vigilant and out of body

It’s how I survived

I still feel guilty

Saying all this

(And there’s so much more)

My parents were good people

How can I betray them so?
They did their best

I have no right to blame them

To be sad or hurt or lost

Even now

I don’t know what’s the truth

Was I a lucky child?
My mother said I was

And ungrateful too

Certainly compared to her

I had a golden childhood

She reminded me of that constantly

As she spilled her own grief into my child heart

I listened to her story

And felt it as my own

In therapy years later,

I realized that her memories were so vivid in me

It was like they were my own.

They are terrible memories

Brutal and harsh

My life was so much better

How can I complain?

I don’t complain really

I try not to

The bad came with much good as well

And in the end I am who I am

Because of both

My weaknesses and strengths

Emotional Siamese twins

Operating for good and ill from the same source

This is long

Unpolished

I do not speak easily of the child I was

She is lost to me and she rules me both

I am still trying to make peace with her

With them

With pain

With shame

With love and loss and confusion

So tangled together

That at 60 years I still can’t sort them out

I don’t know why I remember the bad

More than the good

I am ashamed of that

But it’s how it is.