Marble Tit

I spent the first four years of my life living in a house in rural south Alabama that sat right next to my father’s cotton field. I was an only child so there were no older siblings around to notice if the baby crawled away out of the house. I’ve told this story before and don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the only child part. It’s there on this occasion because I’m trying to make this telling of the story a response of sorts, at least in some loose sense, to Alfred Adler’s ideas, one of which was about the importance of birth order.  So Alfred Adler is now part of this childhood memory, at least in the loose sense that the narrative is fixed in meaning by his frame of reference even though Adler was not anywhere in the frame of reference of the toddler whose memory this is or, at least, will be once that toddler gets to be your humble narrator.

I was not planned and my mom was only 17 when I was born. Everything I know about my mom would tell me that she did not want children. I know that she did not want to be my father’s wife. They were divorced when I was four. I don’t know when my mom began having an affair with her employer but this went on all through my childhood until I went away to college. My mother is so hateful and so dishonest that I will not allow her any place in my humbly narrated life except to curse the lessons she taught in making the wisdom of this current now as bitter and empty of comfort as suckling on a marble tit.

Looking back at anything, we look back from where we are, knowing and thinking what we think we know now. The past is not fixed and unchanging; it changes constantly in a pattern that keeps it current as a revisionist history of where we are now and who we think we are today. Previous versions of the past are seem as delusion, as error overcome, by each significantly different version of me that looks back from any one of a long string of successive nows that connect in loose continuity the story of our progress from cradle to grave.

I started crawling away from my mother before I could walk, much less run or muster enough words to say what I was running from or where I thought I was going. I made it to the tall cotton often and I had this dog that looked like Lassie but was named Poochie instead who would disappear into the tall cotton with me and I would think I had escaped to peaceful obscurity lost in the tall cotton just the way poor guys who just wanted to dis-attach from parole officers or alimony payments disappeared into the forgiving arms of the cannery biz up in Alaska.

Then mom would call Poochie and the literal bitch would go running right to her as if the two were in it together playing good cop/bad cop against my infant innocence and my position would be targeted. I learned early not to trust even my supposed best friend and that life was about being securely attached to everything really awful forever in spite of your own best effort; this was mostly due to the inevitable betrayal of any critter that claimed to love you and stuck close by trying to help. I always came out of that tall cotton covered with a thick dusting of DDT. Only later was DDT banned as a threat to all life on earth. I don’t remember a second head or any operations but I do have this scar on my left shoulder. I remember it all very clearly. It happened just this way and always will until my mind gets changed by life again.