november

This has been a strange month.

I didn't anticipate, back on the first day of November, that I was going to post the things I have posted. That I was going to pry open the door to my childhood and take an adult look back. And it isn't as though I have never talked about these things - with Brian, with my brothers and sister-in-law, with my therapists, even with my parents sometimes.

But this year it is different.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that my my kids are getting older. Miles is in first grade, and I remember first grade. I remember my older brother getting whipped with a belt when I was in first grade (something like this, it's true).

I look at Miles sometimes and feel pride that he has never seen violence in his home. That for him, the biggest crisis is probably losing screen time for a day. That he has a language for his feelings, and he uses it.

Which isn't to say he hasn't seen Brian and I fighting (and this year we had a couple of low moments). But I have to think that the sheer number of happy times will fade those arguments away, like the sun on a photograph. And when he looks back at his childhood, he will just see the bright silhouettes of our laughter, of reading Harry Potter at bedtime, of building legos together (I search for the pieces we need, he assembles). If there is fear in his memories, it will be from the time he climbed to the very top of the playground, or dared to go really, really fast on his scooter.

The one thing I want to clarify for the record: if it looks like my older brother was nuts at times, it is because he was the primary battleground of my parents' fucked up marriage. If there was a monster in him, they created it. He was a child like the rest of us, without choices. My mother and father had all the power.


We were just kids.