I used to dread whenever someone would ask me about childhood memories. I’d learned from experience what they wanted to hear.
Warm stories about how my mother and I made cupcakes or how my father taught me to play badminton. Perhaps a memory of warm summer days at a local pool or park.
Oh, my family did all of those things. But not in ways that were pleasant or enjoyable.
When I was about four, my mother showed me how to make cupcakes. She muttered to herself as she got out the ingredients, about how messy it was to bake but how she “had” to bake something to show she was a good mother. So she showed me how to measure the flour and other dry ingredients, slapping me and crying herself in to a panic each time a bit of flour or sugar drifted onto the table or floor.
“You’re going to have to clean that up, youlittlebrat!” she snapped.
When we got to the part where the eggs needed to be added, she gave me a lecture about how to crack eggs.
“You hold them like this, see?” she said, pinching an egg between her thumb and fingers. “Then, you tap it on the side of the bowl, like this.”
She tapped her egg a tad too hard and yellow yuck splattered across the aluminum kitchen table.
“Get a rag, quick!” she bawled. As I rushed to obey, she turned away, holding her gooey fingers over her face and muttering.
When she turned back, she had what I called the deadly calm expression on her face. She had collected her wits, but this meant that the rest of the process, and any messes, were entirely up to me.
As a four-year-old, that was a huge burden to bear. Feeling like even everyday tasks were too much for the adults in my family and knowing that sooner or later, the burden would fall on me. I managed to get the cupcake batter in the oven somehow. Then my mother slumped into her chair and instructed me in making icing.
Of course, my icing was too runny, too gooey—too something. And the cupcakes burned. And she made me eat them anyway. And told the family that the lumpy little cakes were all my fault.
When I was seven, my father taught me to play badminton. He showed me how to hold the racket and how to hit the birdie, using his sweet-as-pie voice that I loved so much, even though I knew it would quickly morph into the sneering, sadistic voice.
Which it did, when I tried five or ten times to hit the birdie over the badminton net, only succeeding in getting the birdie stuck in the netting. When it was his turn to serve, my father’s chocolate brown eyes glared at me. His focus reminded me of a dog ready to charge, as if he was getting me back for something terrible that I had done.
Which was totally unfair, since at seven years old, I didn’t know how to do terrible things. I only knew that the expectation of me being or doing something terrible always hung like a rain cloud over my head.
My father tossed the birdie and slammed the racket down on it, sending it screaming over the net, hitting me in the chest so hard that I cried. The memory hung with me throughout childhood and into my adult years. When a college badminton instructor used the same move on me, this time slamming the birdie into my thigh, the tears I’d cried as a seven-year-old sprang once again to my eyes.
The world, even outside of my immediate family, really did seem too cold for me to navigate.
As you can imagine, warm summer days spent at a local pool or park were no more pleasant than baking or playing badminton. A change of scenery didn’t free my parents from their festering narcissism or make it easier for them to express their deeply denied sorrow at their disappointment in their own lives.
