Daily Excerpt: Blest Atheist (Mahlou) - Independence
Excerpt from Blest Atheist -
I do not remember when I first became an independent thinker, but somehow even as a young child, I knew I had to be, that this was the route to survival. Over time, the books showed me how.
I remember moments of independence dating back to very young years. One such instance revolved around a gift of seven dollars that Gram had given me for my seventh birthday. I wanted a bank account, and my parents had helped me put this money into savings. I wanted some day to add to the savings. Perhaps with a little money, when I grew up—or even before then—I would be able to leave the burning house. However, my hopes and plans were dashed several months later when my parents decided that I needed a new pair of shoes. The ones they wanted for me cost exactly seven dollars. Holding up my bank book, they told me to get in the car so that we could go to the bank and take out my money for the shoes. I resisted. I would rather have continued to wear the shoes I had a while longer than use all of the only money I had to buy new ones. My expression of this preference infuriated my parents, and both of them began hitting me. I fled the wrong way. With no way out, I crawled as far under the dining room table as I could and curled into a ball. Dad kicked my stomach hard over and over, trying to wedge me out. When he had budged me a little, my head came within striking distance of Ma’s high heels. She danced around my head, lashing out with her heels, her eyes flashing almost gleefully with excitement and rage. I instinctively covered my eyes, and Katrina and Danielle began screaming, “You’re going to make her blind,” to which Ma replied, “It’s her choice—seven dollars or her eyesight; I don’t care if I kill the little bitch.” Ultimately, I lost consciousness, and my parents pulled me out from under the table. When I came to, I was in the firm grasp of both. They marched me into the car and then into the bank. So much for the hopes built on seven dollars.
Since it was clear that I could not save dollars, I saved candy. I did not like the
taste of it, but it was among the countable things I owned. It became my treasure.
I kept it in a bag under the eave on the roof outside my window. I would sneak out
at night to check on the candy and count it. How easily I could have fallen on the
New England-style sloping roof! Somehow, though, I felt protected as I darted with
abandon along its slopes that circled the third story of our house. For four years, I
successfully saved Easter and Christmas candy, the only times that we got candy. In
that time, the bag grew big enough to attract Ma’s attention from the ground. One
day, she crawled out, retrieved the bag, and ate all the stale candy. All of it. Ma was
a big woman, but even so it was astonishing to be confronted with the bag, void of
its treasures.
“Beth, what were you thinking of, putting candy under the eaves and crawling
out there all the time,” Ma demanded to know. “You could have slipped off the roof
and been killed.” I could not even imagine slipping and falling. When I was on the
roof, I always felt safe from the exploding wrath that filled the inside of the house.
I looked at the forlorn bag, held up in remonstrance in Ma’s hand, and then at
Ma’s big belly. “My treasures are gone,” I thought. And so, from the age of 11, neither money nor material things any longer attracted me.
I began to prefer the less evanescent realm of books, thoughts, and people. Even independent thinkers and bookworms, though, need supporters, a source of comfort, someone who thinks you are always right. I found that support in the boy next door. Since we were toddlers, Bobby and I were pals. We played together nearly from the moment we could walk. At age two, I gave him a piece of my candy bar, and when he would not give me a lick of his ice cream cone, I knocked him flat on the ground even though he was considerably bigger than I was. He forgave me for that. We sneaked into Gram’s house and ate her doughnuts when we were three. When he was four, he swallowed a balloon at my birthday party—the concern from that I remember to this day. As he grew older, I think he knew a lot more about what went on in the burning house than he ever said because he was very protective of me all the way through school. In elementary school, he was one of the people who would walk me home when I was sure that a severe licking awaited me for something I had done or failed to do or be. In high school, Bobby sat behind me in English class. He would ask me questions about how to handle his dates. When he encountered difficulties with schoolwork, I would give him answers. In return, I knew that there would always be someone who would emotionally support me if I got into trouble at home that I could not handle.
By my high school years, fortunately, I needed far less external support. Physically, I was giving tit for tat in the home wars. Verbally, I was also giving tit for tat. “You will never amount to a hill of beans.” How often Ma told me that! What she did not understand was something that Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “No one can make you feel inferior except you yourself.” My response was always intentionally disrespectful. “I don’t want to be a hill of beans,” I would spit out at her. “I want to leave this bean farm, and when I do, I will make sure that the life of my children will be better than what you have shown me.”
I vowed that my children would never experience the torment of my childhood, and I kept that vow. All of us in the 8-pack, the name that Rollie gave to Ma’s eight children, made similar vows, and we all kept them. While we had to learn our parenting skills from peers, doctors, books, and conscious attempts at inverting our childhood experiences, which meant that we would, of course, make mistakes—I know I did upon occasion—none of us stabbed our children, abandoned them to the wilderness, allowed them to be repeatedly used to feed the sexual hunger of male relatives, or emotionally eviscerated them.
For more posts about Dr. Mahlou and her books, click HERE.
Sign up for the MSI Press LLC newsletter
Follow MSI Press on Twitter, Face Book, and Instagram.
Comments
Post a Comment