I used to have a crazy old teacher in high school, with iron bosoms that hung to her waist and blondish white hair and eye bags that could have doubled as parachutes should she have needed to make a hasty escape from the third floor. Some people hated her, but I loved her, even though she once made me remove my black fedora hat in class and totally threw off my Sassy Magazine approved Sixteen Candles look, complete with black eye liner and white eye shadow and giant Robert Smith bangs. And during a teacher’s conference, she suggested to my mother that she put me on an all liquid diet. It didn’t matter. I still loved her. No matter how kooky and inappropriate she was, she was still the first person who ever made me realize that Shakespeare was accessible and that he wasn’t just a poofy iambie bunch of pentameter mismash but actually made sense in a truly wonderful way. And she would go off on crazy tangents during class about the most random things, stories about the Titanic or about her uncle’s haunted house on Porlier Street or about her great grandniece Briana. She was wonderful, that Mrs. Hoefts. Truly wonderful.
And during one of those tangents, she was talking about child abuse and about how kids who are abused will be marked by that abuse indelibly, that they become masters of sublimating it and on the surface, they may look as though nothing is the matter, but underneath, they will always be cowering. They will always flinch. I remember sitting there in class, staring into the spiral on my notebook, getting lost in the concentric circles, thinking about the sound it would make if I ran my pencil along the rings, trying to do anything but listen to her talk about what it does psychologically, about how they will forever be broken, forever have had something about them ruined. She kept saying “broken people” and “broken” and I kept imagining china that had been shattered and then glued back together. Broken. She kept saying it again and again. Broken. Ruined. Broken.
I’d like to think I’ve gotten past my past. I don’t talk about it. Or rather, I almost never talk about it. I don’t think it’s something I really need to talk about, quite honestly. I refuse to label myself. It’s something that happened. I lived. It’s over. I certainly don’t define myself by it. Continuing to dwell upon it makes you just as much a victim as you were when you were unable to defend yourself, except this time you’re choosing it. And I certainly don’t want to play the game of My Traumatic Childhood with anyone. No matter what, we all lose, so what’s the point?
Nietzsche said that which does not kill us will make us stronger. Maybe. But I think Mrs. Hoefts was right. No matter what, we are ruined. This morning, I was sitting in a crowded restaurant with Esteban and we were both eavesdropping on the table next to us and I was suddenly sideswiped by the memory of how I got the permanent burst blood vessel in my eye (which is my Dooce mole and I almost always photoshop it out of pictures). Sometimes such things sneak up on you, unprompted, and attack swiftly, like thought ninjas, or maybe winged monkeys. I started to tear up right there, right next to a gaggle of old ladies talking about which Packers coach had the nicest wife. Luckily, I was saved by the delivery of my pancakes and egg whites and could distract myself with delicious apricot syrup and inane breakfast conversation, with none around me the wiser.
We spend sixty years of our life trying to get over the first eighteen.
