The thing about memories during traumatic moments, very early childhood, or both, is that they are not preserved like a movie. There is no “narrative flow” or complete replay of an event from beginning to end. There are, at best, “flashes” — moments in time, stray images. They may be fully detailed and vivid, including the emotions of the moment. But they are brief. More of a photograph of a second in time, versus a home video of the whole afternoon.
I have a series of these flashes that individually are just that — “photos of a moment in time.” But they are all, with one exception, from around the same time period when I was young. Whether they are related or have any cause-and-effect connection, I have no idea. I can only say that I remember these “flashes in time,” that they are odd, and that they haunt me to this day.
Memory #1 – I don’t want Daddy to come home
I have no memory of anything before or after this moment. But this spot in time, I still recall with total clarity. I had climbed up on the high chair that we kept near the stove. Mom was stirring a pot. I was filled with dread. Supper meant Daddy would be home soon. It was often not fun with him around, not like the daytime home with Mom. I wished it could just stay that way.
I shifted in the chair. Should I tell her what I felt? My stomach tightened. The words were clamped in my mouth behind tightly gritted teeth. I looked at her. Then decided to risk it.
“I don’t want Daddy to come home.”
Mom kept stirring the pot. She didn’t look at me. Was I in trouble?
“You shouldn’t say that.”
That was all she said. And I didn’t say any more either. There was no point.
Looking back on it, it speaks volumes. As a mother, if my child had said that, I would have wanted to know why. Asked what my child was feeling or thinking. But she asked nothing. She didn’t offer comfort, curiosity, or discussion. Nothing.
Maybe she didn’t have to ask, or want to ask. Maybe she felt the same way.
Memory #2 – The flu epidemic and the door
This was from a very young age, but I remember my Mother and one sibling being sick with the flu. I don’t believe my other sibling was born yet. It sticks in my mind because my father actually stayed home from work to care for them as Mom was really sick. Also, it was unusual and stuck in my mind because, both being sick with the flu, they shared that second bedroom so Dad could shut the door and let them rest. Looking back, there was a bad flu circulating in 1958 and 1959. So I would have been 3 or 4 years old then. But I remember it clearly, and I remember the shut door because I was worried about “Mommy.”
Memory #3 – The pediatrician visit
Early in my childhood, we had a pediatrician whose office was in a converted home, right up the street from our house. In fact, I believe we also went to that same house to visit the hairdresser for haircuts and the occasional perm, as her beauty shop was on the back side of that house.
His office was in the front of the house. The waiting room was on the first floor, and when it was time for your appointment, you went upstairs. In his examining room, he had a big wooden desk with a train lamp on it, and the linoleum floor was decorated with nursery rhyme characters — Mother Goose, three men in a tub, the old woman in the shoe, and others. On the side near the door was the examining table.
While he didn’t say a lot, he was a very quiet man. I remember his kind and sensitive nature. Even when he had to give a shot, he would smile and exude a warmth that made you feel safe, even as you knew the shot would hurt. It almost seemed like he was more upset by giving the needle than we were getting it.
I don’t remember much else about him because I was so young, and also, it seemed that not that long after those early years, he quit his practice to raise orchids. My Mom said something about a possible nervous condition or something. I can’t speak to whether that was true, just that I remember her saying that.
However, I have a very vivid memory fragment that even showed up in a nightmare as well, of a particular office visit. I remember amusing myself by looking at the nursery-rhyme characters on the linoleum floor mat, while each of us, in turn, had our checkups. There is a flash of an image on the examining table, and then of one where the doctor is having a serious discussion with my Mother. Further details are gone, but I clearly remember the energy of the moment — the tension, and that Mom seemed upset.
I have racked my brains trying to remember more from that day or the nightmare, but can extract nothing further. Just the sensation of the energy, and a “what-if” hypothetical question that plagues me:
What if I were a happy young mother who was just told “something” seemed amiss from routine examinations — what would I feel? A young mother, who has no means of income, no outside support system, and who might have had no expectation of what was coming — what would that have done to my world?
Memory #4 – The door question
Somewhere around the same time, I became aware of a change at home.
My bedroom, which was down the hall from everyone else, was off the kitchen and had a door. Maybe it was a way to keep from waking me if someone was in the kitchen at night. I don’t know.
Down the hallway was the bathroom and pantry, that second bedroom with a door, a large open room, a living room, and a small office at the end. My grandparents had the same setup in their apartment upstairs, and that large open room was a dining room. It made sense. It was open onto the living room and to the hall leading to the kitchen.
My parents, however, made that large open room their bedroom. I always considered that an odd choice, given the lack of doors and, hence, lack of privacy. I mean, my room had a door. The closets had doors. The bathroom had a door. But my parents had no door. The second bedroom, which had the door that was closed when my Mom was sick a couple of years earlier, had since been removed. I don’t know why. But removing that door took away any last vestige of privacy they would have had. Why did they do that?
Maybe the question that haunts me most in this is why was my bedroom the only one in the house with a door, privacy, and isolation from the others?
Memory #5 – Botany class
In 1973, we moved to the home my parents built, on land they bought with family friends. It was land they bought about 6 years earlier, but couldn’t afford to build the house until then. The land and woods were beautiful, and it was such a change from living down in town with the loud motorcycles racing by at night and traffic up and down our street all day.
The other thing that worked well for me was that I wanted to go to college, and the local Torrington branch of the University of Connecticut was only a mile away. I was grateful for that because it was inexpensive and close. This meant I could live at home for the first two years of college and save a lot of money. I had no money for college, and this was my only option. And I WANTED college. I was going to be something in life.
My second year there, I took a botany class. To my surprise, the instructor was my old pediatrician! Despite the passing of years, I remembered him and mentioned that when I walked into the lab that first day. He smiled, and I saw those same gentle eyes again. He was still on the quiet side, but did joke about how many of his former patients were now becoming his students. He didn’t say too much else as it was time for class. I just recall that he *loved* botany and was a devoted instructor.
The other thing I noted was that every now and then, I sensed being “scrutinized” or maybe just “observed intently.” Not in any weird way, but more almost a look of concern. I can’t be sure, and even then, I couldn’t put my finger on it. My gut sense was just that I was being “seen deeply.” Who knows if it was true or what it was really about? And, he never said anything more, nor did I.
Any one of these memories gnaws at me. But the combination of them all together, HAUNTS me. I can’t prove what any of it means. All I know is that the energy I remember from that office visit as a child reverberated in that botany classroom 15 years later. And the memory of “there was a door on that bedroom and then there wasn’t” won’t leave me alone.
Some might shrug it all off as imagination. But I am a history buff and remember reading a book on the Battle of Midway during World War II. It was a decisive victory for the US after the horror of Pearl Harbor, and was the much-needed catalyst to start the long journey to victory.
The thing about our surprise win there is that it shouldn’t have happened. We shouldn’t have known the Japanese fleet was planning that. The only reason we did was that Naval Intelligence experts had intercepted bits of messages and decoded them, at least enough, for Admiral Nimitz to risk his remaining aircraft carriers on a gamble to meet the Japanese by Midway.
And it was a risk and gamble because the intelligence staff could only decode and translate about 1 word in 10 – not much to go on. Some of the high-level Naval commanders, and even staff in Washington, questioned the wisdom of believing there was any significance in the intercepts. So the Naval Intelligence in Pearl Harbor sent a test message about the water distiller on Midway being broken. They figured if the Japanese mentioned that fact in their next message, then the Navy could trust their decoding enough to risk the battle. The distiller did come up in the next message. Nimitz risked it all, and we won a decisive victory. Sometimes even small bits of information are significant.
Do I have decrypted intercepts of my parents’ logic in what happened then? No. And I cannot run a test message to verify my thoughts. I am, instead, left with the deep gut-level haunting of “coincidences,” combined with more and more bits of revelations that surfaced as the years went on.
Abusive households run on subterfuge, smoke, and mirrors — things made to seem normal and easily explained — all designed to make you question your perceptions. But the accumulation of them leaves an aftertaste that something is “odd” and not quite right.
That is the aftertaste I have of those memories — something was not quite right. I will never have a definitive answer to the question of, “Why was I the only one who had a door to their bedroom?”
Yet, looking back from now, with what I know now…something wasn’t quite right.
Soul Mosaic 
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