There’s a body in the water north of the San Mateo Bridge. I don’t know about it yet, because there’s not enough wind to windsurf, so none of us are on the water. It’s hot, though, so I’m hanging out in the shallow water at the launch, waiting for wind. The wind will pick up, and a few of my buddies will find the dead person. A a couple of them will sail around the body while one guy goes back to the launch to call the coastguard, who will respond and go to where my buddies are waiting. But, like I said, none of this has happened yet. I’m going back to waiting in the shallow for wind. So many things are not okay in my world and in the big world. But here in the dirty low-tide water of the South Bay, everything is okay. What a privilege to be one with water, to let myself be alive in it. Even when there is no wind. Even when someone in that water was much less lucky than I am.
I just watched the replay of "Begin with a Deep Question," so I'm kind of combining assignments today... believe it or not, this is a shortened version of what I wrote for that...
[The longer story is, my mom found love notes to a boy in my backpack in 1st grade, but they weren’t mine. I’d been recruited to help a friend write love notes to her crush 😉 My mother didn’t believe me.]
At the end of the year, I was pulled out to be homeschooled. For three years. With no reasons given from my parents, I did what all children do: I played connect-the-dots with the main events I remembered to make a complete picture out of them.
Mom found the love notes. She believes they’re mine. All feelings are bad—this I already knew from six years of life in my family—but love is the worst of all. It is strictly not allowed. It’s so forbidden, I’m being placed in solitary confinement to cure me of it.
Over the next few years, I would hear my mom tell people that she was homeschooling me because I “didn’t love to read enough.” But I knew she was lying, because I’d been there: This was about the accused sin of Liking A Boy, and nothing else.
I turned 32 last summer and my dad casually mentioned my homeschooling. To hear him tell it, after each school day, they would ask me what I had learned. I would say things like, “Tiffany likes Kasey today, but yesterday she liked Devon. Becca was wearing green leggings and a purple dress and Ashley wore a ballerina skirt and five boys all wore red.” When questioned on math, or history, or reading, I couldn’t repeat a single thing the teacher had tried to teach us. In other words, my parents “punished” me for healthy social development and an interest in fashion, believing school was exclusively an academic pursuit—even for six-year-olds.
I think about this often and wonder how many people go to their graves believing the story their six-year-old self told. Is connect-the-dots an irresistible archetypal tug in the human psyche? Are we just such storying creatures that we can’t experience anything without making a picture-story out of it?
For so many years I saw my parents as anti-love. As I got older, I avoided talking with my mother about any of my crushes because I knew how she’d react. That gasp from the elementary school parking lot was the loudest sound in my universe. I knew. The other thing I knew, from my love-note-writing fingertips to my deepest soul, was that where boys were concerned, I would never be believed. And I had no sense of fashion.
Left with the other myths of my childhood, the asking cannot be avoided: What other stories of mine need redrawing, what other pictures can be excavated from the same dots? How many spells are not broken because we think they’re the story of the truth? What else do I not know about who I was born to be before I became who I had to be? Most of all, how do I ask the right questions to uncover truer versions of these stories before it’s too late?
Wow, Kendra, this is so emotionally evocative and heartwrenching. I really feel for the six-year-old girl here.
In response to the question about connect the dots, yes! There are multiple studies that show humans are bacically bound to try to make stories, meaning, and find cause and effect for everything that happens. It's part of how the mind works, especially for writers. Whether it is a literal truth you discovered or a more poetic truth, it still sounds like this reveals something true about your parents and their relationship to love.
Holy shit, Kendra! There’s some powerful stuff here. I can so relate because I had all the ‘wrong’ feelings—mostly about religion—when I was a kid. And now I’m watching my nieces and nephews being homeschooled for a similar reasons. I hope you make this into a book, I’m dying to read it.
There’s a body in the water north of the San Mateo Bridge. I don’t know about it yet, because there’s not enough wind to windsurf, so none of us are on the water. It’s hot, though, so I’m hanging out in the shallow water at the launch, waiting for wind. The wind will pick up, and a few of my buddies will find the dead person. A a couple of them will sail around the body while one guy goes back to the launch to call the coastguard, who will respond and go to where my buddies are waiting. But, like I said, none of this has happened yet. I’m going back to waiting in the shallow for wind. So many things are not okay in my world and in the big world. But here in the dirty low-tide water of the South Bay, everything is okay. What a privilege to be one with water, to let myself be alive in it. Even when there is no wind. Even when someone in that water was much less lucky than I am.
I love the contrasts, how you go big and small, okay and deeply not okay. Exquisitely written!
I just watched the replay of "Begin with a Deep Question," so I'm kind of combining assignments today... believe it or not, this is a shortened version of what I wrote for that...
[The longer story is, my mom found love notes to a boy in my backpack in 1st grade, but they weren’t mine. I’d been recruited to help a friend write love notes to her crush 😉 My mother didn’t believe me.]
At the end of the year, I was pulled out to be homeschooled. For three years. With no reasons given from my parents, I did what all children do: I played connect-the-dots with the main events I remembered to make a complete picture out of them.
Mom found the love notes. She believes they’re mine. All feelings are bad—this I already knew from six years of life in my family—but love is the worst of all. It is strictly not allowed. It’s so forbidden, I’m being placed in solitary confinement to cure me of it.
Over the next few years, I would hear my mom tell people that she was homeschooling me because I “didn’t love to read enough.” But I knew she was lying, because I’d been there: This was about the accused sin of Liking A Boy, and nothing else.
I turned 32 last summer and my dad casually mentioned my homeschooling. To hear him tell it, after each school day, they would ask me what I had learned. I would say things like, “Tiffany likes Kasey today, but yesterday she liked Devon. Becca was wearing green leggings and a purple dress and Ashley wore a ballerina skirt and five boys all wore red.” When questioned on math, or history, or reading, I couldn’t repeat a single thing the teacher had tried to teach us. In other words, my parents “punished” me for healthy social development and an interest in fashion, believing school was exclusively an academic pursuit—even for six-year-olds.
I think about this often and wonder how many people go to their graves believing the story their six-year-old self told. Is connect-the-dots an irresistible archetypal tug in the human psyche? Are we just such storying creatures that we can’t experience anything without making a picture-story out of it?
For so many years I saw my parents as anti-love. As I got older, I avoided talking with my mother about any of my crushes because I knew how she’d react. That gasp from the elementary school parking lot was the loudest sound in my universe. I knew. The other thing I knew, from my love-note-writing fingertips to my deepest soul, was that where boys were concerned, I would never be believed. And I had no sense of fashion.
Left with the other myths of my childhood, the asking cannot be avoided: What other stories of mine need redrawing, what other pictures can be excavated from the same dots? How many spells are not broken because we think they’re the story of the truth? What else do I not know about who I was born to be before I became who I had to be? Most of all, how do I ask the right questions to uncover truer versions of these stories before it’s too late?
Wow, Kendra, this is so emotionally evocative and heartwrenching. I really feel for the six-year-old girl here.
In response to the question about connect the dots, yes! There are multiple studies that show humans are bacically bound to try to make stories, meaning, and find cause and effect for everything that happens. It's part of how the mind works, especially for writers. Whether it is a literal truth you discovered or a more poetic truth, it still sounds like this reveals something true about your parents and their relationship to love.
This is so stirring.
Thanks, Tresha!
Holy shit, Kendra! There’s some powerful stuff here. I can so relate because I had all the ‘wrong’ feelings—mostly about religion—when I was a kid. And now I’m watching my nieces and nephews being homeschooled for a similar reasons. I hope you make this into a book, I’m dying to read it.
Thanks, T! I relate to the stuff about religion too... I'll keep writing and see what comes out!