Rising For The First Time

Origin is the gritty mud from which our light rises for the first time.  It is the place we begin to keep track of self.  The place in the beginning where our memories would end if only we could reach them.  Some people can remember being a little lima  bean of flesh, needy, soft, crying for mama.  Some people remember the first time they took a bath.  Or what it felt like to take their first steps.  Point of origin is where we begin to live our lives as sentient beings.  Let everyone argue all they want about when life is really life but I want to meet just one person who has a memory of life in the womb.  Just one.

My mother has always told me I came to her to ask to be born and she agreed and I was conceived.  I try really hard not to think about being a spirit hovering over two people gettin' it on all sweaty, interrupting to say "Hello, excuse me, but, ahem!  Excuse me, but I would really like you to be my mother and, well, would now be a convenient moment for me to, you know... get growin' in your uterus?"

It sounds so preposterous.

Yet, I have always believed her.  It feels like a truth I know without knowing.  But from that moment until I was about five and a half years old I remember almost nothing of my life.  There are pictures and legends to map it out.  The truth is that I have exactly one memory from before my sister was born when I was five and a half.  One.  There's another amorphous ambiguous non-memory like felt wool muddled into the hot water of my brain.  Only one clear memory.  One.

Why should I feel there is some body buried in that expanse of nothing?  Why should it always feel as though there is a physical wall preventing me from connecting with my child self when I lived in the One World Family* Commune in Berkeley California?  Why should it feel as though I am missing something important?  Lost.  Lost like keys you never need but miss from your chain.  Keys that have had no lock for so long it would be meaningless to recover them from the gutter into which they've slipped.

I hear no echoes of children there in that space.  No half expressed memory of joy, pain, or childish self obsession.  Nothing.  There is exactly nothing but one memory to describe my entire life as a baby, a toddler, a little kid.  It begins with my sister being born and not only seeing her head crown between my mother's legs, but with the taste of raw onions I ate in front of a horrified babysitter.  Eating beets my mother grew in a garden I don't remember.  I remember the taste of the crunchy dirt crusted beet, making my face red like fake slaughter.

Before my sister there was nothing.

But pictures.

And legends.  I lived loudly enough to have been a legend by the time I was two.  That's when my brother arrived to replace me from my throne of adult nerve domination.  Before he came along I was known as "Devilina". 

There are pictures to prove the life I led.  That I was alive, having emotions, making adults angry.  They used to hold me by the ankles in showers to attempt to silence my screaming. 

I think it worked.  I have been a lot more silent than anyone could possibly believe.  The screams have been shut off and now undulate beneath the surface, just out of hearing.  Just out of nerve reach. 

I wouldn't take a shower until I turned twelve because they terrified me.  But I didn't know why until I heard the shower stories when I was twenty one years old.  I had no memory of this, just the ridiculous fear of showers I remembered having when I was a kid, not knowing why. 

Because I have no memories from my point of origin.  But the memories are there in my body.  I may not be capable of conjuring them at will, yet they have lived on in my skin.  Like a million subliminal signals they have erupted in mysterious anger, frustration, gut heaving reactions to people who rocked something like an echo memory. 

No matter how many stories I hear from old hippies who knew me when I was a baby, a toddler, a little kid, I never remember any of the people or any of the stories they tell from that time.  It's as though they were talking about a complete stranger.  A third party.  Not me.  Not me.  Not me.

It bothers me that people remember so much of my early life while I consistently remember only one piece.  A strange piece I might have dreamed.  A child's memory is largely fit into a framework of adults and my memory had no adults, like a twisted tie-dyed granola version of "Lord Of The Flies." 

I have a hunger to fill that emptiness with something tangible.  Something not scary.  Something warm and pleasant.  I know it could not have been all bad.  There are pictures of my mother and I making bean paintings.  My tongue sticking out as it always did when I was engaged in deep effort with anything.  It is only by extreme effort that I don't still let my tongue hang half out of my mouth when I am concentrating on something with my whole self.

There is a picture of me cutting vegetables with a knife.  Something I don't let my eight year old do.  That picture always reminds me that my brother drank mushroom tea when he was two, a memory that is like a nightmare to him.  I wonder if the picture was taken the same day?  We lived in a place where mushroom tea sat around casually enough for two year olds to drink it and have a bad trip.  As though two year olds aren't already on a permanent bad drug trip!

I understand the fear that people with memory loss must feel.  Vulnerable.  Like everyone always has something hanging over their heads.  Like anyone can tell any tale they want and you are left to question it for your remaining time on earth because without the faculty to judge for yourself, against your own accounting, how can you make any claims? 

I don't own my childhood.  My origin is built on stories I cannot corroborate and some of them  I think might be buried as carefully as Dexter's body bags in the Atlantic.  Not meant to surface.  Not meant to come face to face with my conscious self.  Packaged up in prophylactic grace to protect me from further harm. 




*It kind of freaks me out, but if you go to that link you will see a picture of the One World Family that was taken when I lived there and I'm in that picture but it's so small I can't tell you exactly which little kid I am.  I had white hair.  So did my brother.