Old News Made New: Abeyances

I realize now that I kept forgetting on purpose.

T. told me this afternoon that, when we were 11 and I was elsewhere, my mother told her some about what happened to me. T. said that as a child she repeatedly asked me where my dad was because I called D. by his name and not Father. She said I told her he was in prison. That he was a very bad man.

I have absolutely no memory of saying these things to her.

She asked my mother about it and my mother told her. First she told her I was conceived on an acid trip. Then, she told T. that I had been kidnapped by my father and that one night, when he was in a bar someone stole the truck with me asleep in the back. Etc., etc.

I can't keep in my head that T. heard this from my mother even though she has told me before. Many times. In fact she told me right after she talked to my mother. I, of course, don't remember. Then years later again and again. And then today.
My surprise is complete but also blurred with the shame of forgetting.

I remember feeling like that is what happened with me and the stolen truck. But, like most things in my childhood, I can't believe my feelings and memories. So I work hard at believing what I remember is wrong. To disassociate myself from myself.
I am afraid that anything I am told and then try to recall about that time slips away. I've never known this feeling before and I am writing it here. That should help?


The whole thing makes me feel faulty, like again I should have asked my mother about my dad. I never could. It never occurred to me. No, it terrified me. No! It didn't matter to me because what happens to me doesn't exist.

That is the feeling right there, exactly. All these things together: could not imagine it, airless horror at the thought of asking and realizing it was irrelevant: my past was not my own. It was a function of my mother's portfolio of happiness.


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