And She Hit Me

In the years since I realized she was being silly, maybe even neurotic.  It had me plenty worried at the time, though.  In the summer between high school and college, I was nearly beaten to death by a woman who was upset that I didn't close my eyes during a moment of physical intimacy.  That's an exaggeration, of course.  I wasn't ever in any danger, but getting hit by somebody who wasn't supposed to try and hurt me went against many things I assumed were true.  

That summer, I was less than two years from the peak of my physical strength and development, and her tiny fists beating on my meaty flesh weren't much of a mortal threat, but it was a great surprise.  I wasn't even aware that I was supposed to keep my eyes closed or that not keeping them closed was some sort of rude crossing of the lines of polite exchange.  Without meaning to, I offended her to the point where she felt violence, ineffective as it was, was necessary to correct my behavior.  She also cried, which hurt me considerably more than her fists.

All boys are taught that they should never lay hands on a girl.  Boys my size are especially reminded of that rule.  There were two times when I broke that rule without meaning to.  One was a day in the fifth grade when, during the physical education period, we boys were playing and practicing moves we'd seen on MidSouth Wrestling on TV, mixed with a few Godzilla movies.  Since I was the biggest, I got to be the bad guy, and everybody tried their best to take me down as elaborately.  Being boys, we were playing pretty rough.  Young bodies are more resilient than older ones, so nobody gets hurt.  

Our games excluded girls.  Pretty much everything we did in the fifth grade excluded girls.  I never really considered that might be an offense, as they never showed much interest in playing our games.  Unaware as I was, at least some of the girls were watching, and wanting to be included.  

Among my many attackers, I felt someone smaller jump on my back.  Although I didn't know who it was, I assumed it was one of the boys who always played these games with me.  That was a mistake.  Without looking, I grabbed the arms grappling around my neck and threw my assailant over my shoulder.  They performed that sort of move on TV wrestling all the time.  I'd done it in the gym like we were then and on the grassy yards outside.  I expected whoever I threw to jump back up and come at me again.  That was the point of the game.  This time, once thrown, my playmate didn't move.  They lay in a lump on the gym floor, all arms and legs and gym clothes--girl's gym clothes.  I'd made a terrible mistake.

Her name was Tiffany.  Weeks before I admitted to some other boys, I thought she was pretty.  This started an argument about which girls were pretty and who we thought was prettiest.  She lay on the ground, frozen in shock and crying.  A teacher rushed to her and made sure nothing was broken.  Nothing was.  She wasn't injured, but nobody could believe what I'd done.  I was sent to the office.  

I tried to argue that it was an accident, that I thought it was a boy who jumped on me, that it all happened so fast I didn't know what I was doing.  The grownups tried very hard to make sure I felt guilty.  They didn't need to.  I felt unredeemable.  Playing rough with boys was one thing.  That was expected.  Playing rough with girls was just alien, a violation of the code kids lived by.  It was difficult enough just to talk to girls; they weren't for wrestling.

Later that year, I tripped someone, without looking, that I thought was another boy, my friend, but it turned out to be a girl who had run ahead of him.  After getting in trouble again for the same thing, my days of wrestling with anyone, boy or girl, were over.  Clearly, I couldn't be trusted to do it safely.  

Disciplining a child like me couldn't have been easy because, knowing I was wrong, I became frightened about what made me do these things.  I worried that it must look like I wanted to hurt people, which I thought wasn't true, but since I did hurt people, what really was true?  I tried to explain that I hadn't meant to hurt anyone, but that wasn't good enough.

These incidents were enough to change my behavior without ever really doing much damage to one of my classmates.  After that, I spent most of my life afraid to ever raise a hand in anger to anyone or lose my temper.  

That summer between high school and college, whatever events shaped my behavior hadn't shaped the woman who was angry at me.  Yelling at me, even hitting me, were permissible in her rules of engagement, even though I maintained that I didn't know I was supposed to keep my eyes closed.  I didn't know what I did was wrong.

It didn't matter that she wasn't physically hurting me; she was making me feel very guilty of a transgression, even though I didn't know it was a transgression.  In the moment, it seemed like my ignorance of the transgression was yet another transgression.  I should have known better.  

This wasn't the last time I suffered physical violence from a woman I was involved with.  We tend not to talk about this very much since it's less dangerous when it's a woman hitting a man.  It also makes the man look weak.  Women tend to be less inclined to violence, so it happens a lot less often than when the man is the aggressor, but It does happen, though.  Anyone can be abused.

People who suffer from any sort of abuse often feel like they did something to cause it, that they deserved it.  I certainly did.  Since she wasn't causing any physical injury, I usually just let it happen.  All I could think of was to take it quietly and just not call on her again.

Human interaction is terribly complicated.  We have all these expectations of how people should interact with us, and often, they don't meet those expectations, which can lead to frustration and anger.  It's not healthy to assume you're in the wrong like I did, but it kept me from acting back in anger, so it wasn't a bad trade.  Healthy interactions with others are required for life, even though they're sometimes challenging.  I was lucky that I was able to absorb an awful lot of abuse before it became a problem.  That's not ideal, but it helped prevent hurting anyone by mistake ever again.  

Leaving the Protection of the Playpen

I was still very young when we moved from Northside Drive to Honeysuckle Lane.  My sister only lived in the old house a few months before we moved.  All I remember of the Northside Drive house was watching my brothers play and being too young to join them, especially in the tree house my oldest brother and our neighbor built.  They nailed boards to the tree trunk to make a ladder, and I was too short to reach the first one.  

Seven people living in a three-bedroom house meant all three boys slept in one room, the baby girl and my grandmother in another, and my parents in the larger master bedroom.  I could make a lot of noise but had trouble making words.  I was too young for anyone to suspect I had a stuttering problem.  They thought I was just too young to make words and sentences properly.

Being in the middle often meant no one would notice me if I was quiet, so I was quiet often.  Even then, getting a lot of attention made me nervous.  Years of psychotherapy couldn't come up with many theories on it either.  I guess I was just born nervous.

Everyone wanted to see the baby.  That was fine by me.  The older boys had all the freedom in the world.  While it looked like fun, it intimidated me.  I wanted a piece of it, although I never got it.  With all this going on, it was often difficult to get Mother's attention.  With three other children, her own mother to take care of, and all her leagues and clubs, her schedule was pretty full. 

Playpens were fairly common then.  Essentially, it was a cage painted with stars, cows, moons, and other things that interested children. Parents could put their toddlers inside, and they couldn't wander off.  The baby was safe in their playpen, and whoever was minding them didn't have to pay so much attention.  Playpens are effective until the baby gets strong enough to climb out of them.  I don't know if they were supposed to leave a lasting impression on the children who were left in playpens, but I remember being in mine.  

My mother enjoyed telling about how she asked her teenage niece to watch over me.  It wouldn't be difficult since I was in the playpen.  She set my playpen in the front yard with my cousin Libby watching over me, which worked fine until some of Libby's teenage friends came to see her.  While they were busy talking about the things teenage girls talk about, nobody was paying much attention to me, so they missed the point where I threw off my diaper and began my climb out of the pen.  Libby snatched me up before I made too much progress from the playpen to the street, but it gave her a big scare, and she was mortified that her friends saw the whole affair.  

My father began spending less and less time at home as his career began to take off.  I remember him having uniforms to coach my brother's pee wee baseball team, and he had his own imitation buckskin tunic to wear when he took them to Indian Guides.  There wasn't time for any of that with me.  When I was older, I asked why there were no photos of my pee wee baseball team.  I could tell it hurt my mother when she said there wasn't enough time for me to play, so I never asked again.  

They signed me up for Indian Guides, but when I noticed that my dad was the only one missing nearly all the meetings, I asked if I could stay home.  If I diddn't go to the Indian Guide meeting, nobody would noticed my dad wasn't around.  I bragged about spending breakfast with him, which was true, but still not the same as having him there.  He worked to make time for me, but there was less and less of it to spare as his life became more complicated.

My place of refuge was Martha Hammond's kitchen.  The Hammonds lived behind us.  She had children, too, but they were older.  Some were even teenagers.  We would watch television together and talk.  Martha Hammond was probably the first person I ever really talked to.  I know she was the first person who ever much listened.  I don't know how much a four-year-old might have to say that's interesting, but whatever it was, she listened, and her listening made an impact on me.

Everything is potentially traumatizing for small children, but moving can be particularly confusing.  The house on Honeysuckle Lane was easily twice the size of the house on Northside Drive.  I had a semi-private bedroom where a large partition defined my space from my brother's, and we each had our own closet.   We had new neighbors, but I missed the old ones, particularly Mrs. Hammond.  Already an insecure child, something about moving made it worse.

One day, as he came home from work, my father found me under my grandmother's bed, crying.  

"What's wrong, buddy?"  He asked.

"I don't know where I belong,"  I answered, refusing to come out from under the bed.

Daddy laughed.  "This is your house, buddy.  You belong here!"

"No, I don't.  I don't belong here.  I don't belong anywhere!"  and, still, I refused to come out.

Hearing this conversation, my Mother sat on the side of the bed and asked if I would come out when supper was ready.  I said I would try.  My parents left the room, but I could tell they were amused at my predicament.  Children say the funniest things.  It didn't seem funny to me.  

I don't know what prompted this feeling of not belonging.  I think it was always there.  I think it's still always there.  I suspect moving had something to do with what made it worse that day, but it might also have been that my difficulties in communication were beginning to surface.  I was becoming aware that I couldn't say what I was trying to say.  The stutter made it difficult for me to string the words together in a way that expressed what I meant.

Without the sanctuary of Martha Hammond's kitchen, when not watching television, I began sitting in the window seat to the breakfast room, where I could watch my mother as she organized the household.  Without communicating, I could watch the actors cross the boards of this household drama as I became increasingly detached from it.

One day, my mother loaded her car to take my brothers to baseball and do the grocery shopping, leaving my grandmother and the maid to watch over me and the baby.  This wasn't all that unusual, but something unsettled me.  As they drove away, I ran to the window seat to watch her station wagon go down the driveway, then to the front window to see them drive down Honeysuckle Lane to turn on Meadowbrook Road.  

Something panicked me.  I ran out of the front door and ran to the edge of the lot, as close as I could to stepping a foot on the forbidden Meadowbrook road.  "Mamma!" I cried.  "Mamma!  Mamma! Come back, Mamma!"  If I screamed loud enough, maybe she'd hear me and come back.  "Mamma!  Don't leave me!" I shouted.  Hattie, the maid, heard the noise I was making and came out to find me.  

"Come on inside, Mr Boyd.  You know she'll be home directly."  She said, trying to pull me away from the street.  I dropped to my knees, "Mamma!  I'm still here, Mamma!  You left me!  Don't leave me!  I'll be good!  Don't leave me!"

The crying made it hard to speak, even hard to see.  I curled up in a ball on the front lawn.  Hattie picked me up, carried me inside, and put me on the bed in my grandmother's room.  Nanny sat on her rocking chair beside her bed and assured me that Mother would be home and everything would be alright.

This memory would come and go and change places many times in the conversation in my mind.  It's held different meanings for me at different times in my life.  First, Hattie, the maid, died, then Nanny, my grandmother died, then my Mother died.  Sometimes, this memory returns now as a nightmare when I remember my mother is gone in my dreams.  No amount of screaming or calling her name will bring her back.  Consciously, I know this and can deal with it rationally, but when I close my eyes to sleep, the rational world loses its grip, and I'm a little boy who hides under beds again.  

There have been times when I lost so much and lost so many people that I began to wish I would be the next one to go so that I wouldn't again be the little boy crying fruitlessly for somebody to come back on the corner of Honeysuckle and Meadowbrook.  Maybe I was an insecure child because, even as a child, I knew life doesn't last.  You have to live for the moment because the moment is all you have.  

Eudora Welty - A Visit of Charity

 Tomorrow's story for the Eudora Welty reading group is "A Visit of Charity" from "A Curtain of Green."  The story is about Marian, a little girl and member of an organization like the Girl Scouts (but not the Girl Scouts) who visits the Old Ladies Home to gain points for her organization and her reaction to the women in the home.

The Old Ladies' Home was a large wooden structure just east of the Jackson Zoo.  My grandmother was a contemporary of Miss Welty but a few years older.  My father's mother, she was deeply involved in the Girl Scouts most of her life, and in middle age, she and a group of women she knew became very involved in helping with the Old Ladies' Home.  As time passed, the City of Jackson became less and less interested in maintaining the Old Ladies' home, so it fell on private citizens to help maintain it and provide for the residents.  

Eventually, it became really difficult to maintain the old wooden structure, and only a few residents left living there, as most people had begun using nursing homes rather than the Old Ladies' Home.  Since I was on the board of the Zoo, she asked me to help facilitate giving the land and the building to the Zoo.  I told her we didn't really need the extra five acres (and another old building to maintain), but as the City of Jackson ultimately owned both properties, I felt certain there was a way to make it happen.

Sometimes, it's hard for me to read Welty's stories from an academic viewpoint because her subject matter seems so very familiar.  She wasn't family or anything, but it's really close.  It wasn't hard to imagine my mother or grandmother as Marian, the protagonist in this story, as both had stories about visiting the residents at the Old Ladies Home, as I'm sure Miss Welty did herself.

An avid gardener, she creatively includes her beloved plants in nearly all her stories.  For this story, she mentions cineraria as a small potted plant her antagonist brings as a gift for the ladies at the Old Lady's Home.  Sometimes called "climbing fig," you see cineraria in many Mississippi gardens.

Put on by the Mississippi Archives and History and the Eudora Welty Foundation, I'm really enjoying these weekly zoom sessions to discuss the works of Eudora Welty.  Many thanks to Catherine Freis for telling me about it.  

Raising A Gifted Child

I tend to see the world through a child's eyes.  Some people would say that I'm psychologically stuck and maybe trying to work through some drama.  I don't think that's the case.  

Behind what we think we are, we're all always just ten years old--as the years go by, we add experience to that and sometimes cover some of it up.  Sometimes we cover so much of it up that there's nothing of whatever made that ten-year-old amazing still visible.  

I look at the lives of the people I find amazing.  Most are artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians, but some are lawyers, scientists, educators, and pastors.  What I notice about their lives is that, without fail, whatever became amazing about them existed and could be discerned when they were just ten years old.  

Some had parents who recognized that golden seed of what their child would become and nurtured it, fed it, and told them that if they tried hard enough and believed in themselves enough, that golden seed would one day be a beautiful tree.  Others had parents who told them that this glowing thing inside them was "very nice," but they should find something practical to do with their lives because artists are poor.  

Both of these paths were taken by parents who loved their children more than life itself.  Sometimes, children are told they must find a more practical way to live than by using their gifts. When that happens, it takes longer to discover and develop what they really are, but they almost always find a way.  

If the parent of an artistically gifted child were to ask me for advice, I'd tell them that it's ok if they don't understand the path their child is trying to take.  It's okay if they worry that the path may not support their child or wish they chose something more practical.  To borrow a quote from "Gods and Monsters," sometimes trying to raise an artistically gifted child is like being given a giraffe and expected to know how to feed and raise it.  

Just do the best you can.  If you love them, they will know.  Your child's path in life isn't meant to be easy.  That's not your fault.  You'll probably never see their work for its greatness, because all you'll see is how much you love them.    

Life is a struggle.  Love makes it more so.  By the time you've had enough experience to do a really good job of raising your ten year old, you're too old to have another one and waiting for your grandchildren to turn ten.  That's ok.  They'll forgive you.