millysdaughter (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
millysdaughter) wrote2019-10-06 10:44 pm
millysdaughter) wrote2019-10-06 10:44 pm
Idol week 2
Idol 2
Living Rent Free in My Head
Some of my earliest memories involve training on how to hold a grudge. It was never called that, of course. Many things were never called by their rightful names, as naming something will make it real. Reality did not play well in our house.
My mom lived on Walton's Mountain with June Cleaver and Norman Rockwell. Everyone loved everyone. There were no discouraging words ever spoken. Life was good there. Deer and antelope frolicked gaily in the clearing. It was indeed total paradise.
I never found my way up to Walton's Mountain. She did not call it by that name, because the world in her head was the idealized version of the farm she grew up on, the timber across the road, Babbit school...
These are real places. At least, they were real ... once upon a time.
Babbit School was the only real place from the stories that I actually visited. The only place I had the chance to take away a memory of my own. That particular memory fits better into a Stephan King story than the Walton's Mountain version, so clearly I was seeing it wrong. The narrative my mom re-wrote of that day was much happier.
My entire life, the stories my parents raised us on were the stories from their childhood. Never did my parents look forward. Oh, we did hear occasional charming things like "you had better get that grass cut tomorrow OR ELSE!" Day-to-day life did happen in real time. Sometimes. But there were never plans made in future tense.
Until my own kids were in elementary school, I did not realize how odd this was. College plans -- and the funding thereof -- is discussed at the elementary school level here. My children were bursting with tales of friends and drama, hopes and dreams. We heard about assignments and projects, friends and frienemies.
The dinner table on good nights at my childhood house was filled with stories about camping in the timber (mom), tipping outhouses (dad), and assorted stories about farm happenings from both of them. I knew the names of all their classmates, their friends, and their teachers. I knew the names and the stories of everybody who did my dad wrong.
Because I didn't make it to Walton's Mountain, I didn't always take their stories the right way.
This distressed my mother to no end.
Alexander was a gander. A very big, very mean, very much alpha male that ruled his harem with an iron wing. The girls gathered their eggs when they gathered the chicken eggs, but the geese still managed to hide nests and set a clutch of goslings regularly. The girls were told not to handle the goslings, so they never approached their nests. They did handle the fuzzy chicks regularly, and had been taught the correct way to pick them up carefully.
One day, five-year-old Milly heard a pitiful noise coming from a coiled bundle of barbed wire. A small fuzzy gosling was trapped and crying. His webbed foot was painfully punctured by a barb and he was not able to free himself. Seeing his distress, she knelt down and freed the poor little guy. As she placed him on the ground, Alexander attacked her in a flutter of wings and pecking sharp beak. Prostrate on the ground as the gander tore her dress and drew blood, she cried out for her father. He stood there and watched as the gander attacked her. He shrugged and said "I told you never to touch a gosling."
She bore the scars of this attack until her dying day. She believed herself to be in the wrong. She believed her dad was "right" to not save her from a vicious attack, because she had disobeyed.
He was her hero.
He was my dad's hero.
I never lived on Walton's Mountain.
I think he was a jerk.
Living Rent Free in My Head
Some of my earliest memories involve training on how to hold a grudge. It was never called that, of course. Many things were never called by their rightful names, as naming something will make it real. Reality did not play well in our house.
My mom lived on Walton's Mountain with June Cleaver and Norman Rockwell. Everyone loved everyone. There were no discouraging words ever spoken. Life was good there. Deer and antelope frolicked gaily in the clearing. It was indeed total paradise.
I never found my way up to Walton's Mountain. She did not call it by that name, because the world in her head was the idealized version of the farm she grew up on, the timber across the road, Babbit school...
These are real places. At least, they were real ... once upon a time.
Babbit School was the only real place from the stories that I actually visited. The only place I had the chance to take away a memory of my own. That particular memory fits better into a Stephan King story than the Walton's Mountain version, so clearly I was seeing it wrong. The narrative my mom re-wrote of that day was much happier.
My entire life, the stories my parents raised us on were the stories from their childhood. Never did my parents look forward. Oh, we did hear occasional charming things like "you had better get that grass cut tomorrow OR ELSE!" Day-to-day life did happen in real time. Sometimes. But there were never plans made in future tense.
Until my own kids were in elementary school, I did not realize how odd this was. College plans -- and the funding thereof -- is discussed at the elementary school level here. My children were bursting with tales of friends and drama, hopes and dreams. We heard about assignments and projects, friends and frienemies.
The dinner table on good nights at my childhood house was filled with stories about camping in the timber (mom), tipping outhouses (dad), and assorted stories about farm happenings from both of them. I knew the names of all their classmates, their friends, and their teachers. I knew the names and the stories of everybody who did my dad wrong.
Because I didn't make it to Walton's Mountain, I didn't always take their stories the right way.
This distressed my mother to no end.
Alexander was a gander. A very big, very mean, very much alpha male that ruled his harem with an iron wing. The girls gathered their eggs when they gathered the chicken eggs, but the geese still managed to hide nests and set a clutch of goslings regularly. The girls were told not to handle the goslings, so they never approached their nests. They did handle the fuzzy chicks regularly, and had been taught the correct way to pick them up carefully.
One day, five-year-old Milly heard a pitiful noise coming from a coiled bundle of barbed wire. A small fuzzy gosling was trapped and crying. His webbed foot was painfully punctured by a barb and he was not able to free himself. Seeing his distress, she knelt down and freed the poor little guy. As she placed him on the ground, Alexander attacked her in a flutter of wings and pecking sharp beak. Prostrate on the ground as the gander tore her dress and drew blood, she cried out for her father. He stood there and watched as the gander attacked her. He shrugged and said "I told you never to touch a gosling."
She bore the scars of this attack until her dying day. She believed herself to be in the wrong. She believed her dad was "right" to not save her from a vicious attack, because she had disobeyed.
He was her hero.
He was my dad's hero.
I never lived on Walton's Mountain.
I think he was a jerk.