A Dirty Little Memory

In grade one a couple other guys and me were caught smoking out in the hedge that surrounded the playground. I can’t remember the punishment - write out some lines or something like that. Of course it wasn’t enough to make us stop, but I remember two things about that incident as clear as if it happened yesterday.

The first was, my dad said to me, “If I ever find out that you’ve gotten into trouble at school again you’re going to get it twice as bad at home.”

The second was this thought: ‘Then you’ll never learn or hear another thing about me, from me.’ To the best of my knowledge, he never did.

I suppose if that had been all there was to it then it would just be sad. Over the decades however, what could have been just sad turned to tragic. The decision to keep an awareness of everything important in my life from my dad, was transferred to pretty much everyone else including, as it turns out, myself. Not the pain of arthritis, not the confusion of continued sexual abuse, not the fear of physical abuse - nobody got to know anything about what was going on inside.

“Are you an angry person?” one of my wife’s friends asked me during discussion after having supper with friends, maybe thirty years ago. “No!” was my much too quick reply. I think I actually believed that was a correct answer. Trouble is, I knew so little of myself that answering truthfully in that moment was probably impossible. I said what I wanted to believe.

Somebody might be tempted to ask, "How could someone as screwed up as you ever become a counsellor?"

Let me tell you something. The idea of becoming a counsellor never occurs to the so called healthy. In the words of a great 20th century poet* only those who "Have bruises on their memory," reach out to those similarly banged around by life.

Jesus has brought me a long, long way over the years but, I just remembered all this during a nap this afternoon. A dirty little memory.

* Dwight Yoakam