Impression
Sometimes maybe even without knowing it you wondered if this was how a family was supposed to be. If every home had the kind of noise behind its doors. If every child had to lie in bed at night and listen to the people they loved say things they could never take back.
Do you think your parents arguing every day ruined you for the rest of your life?
Yes as the author would say.. It wasn’t quite as simple as that word suggests. How can you explain what it means to grow up watching something you were too young to understand. Old enough to realize that those nights had become some of your earliest memories? How can you explain the feeling of remembering a childhood that should have been carefree when so much of your attention had been focused on the sounds coming from the next room?
Why you might ask yourself did those memories stick around?
Maybe you would look for the answer in the kid you used to be — standing quietly outside your parents’ bedroom listening to every raised voice as if the next sentence would finally explain what had gone wrong. Maybe you would wonder what the child was thinking what the feeling was, and whether he or she ever understood that none of it was to be fixed.
There was one question you had answered long before you learned how to say the rest.
Did you ever wish your parents would separate.
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Yes.
Since your 6th birthday every time that day came around you found yourself hoping they would choose to live apart. Because somewhere along the way the idea of two people separating had stopped feeling frightening. Started feeling like relief. It was a thing for a child to wish for maybe.. Then again you had already spent years seeing things no child should have to see. While other kids your age were thinking about birthday presents and blowing out candles you had begun to understand that sometimes the people who lived together could make a home feel like the place in the world.
You came to think of it like a piece of paper. Something that could be smoothed out with your hands. Pressed, but never really returned to the way it was. You could lay it under a book run your fingers over the creases and try to make it look untouched.. When you held it up to the light every fold revealed itself.. That was what had become of your parents. No matter how times they went back to the same house no matter how many times their fights ended and the silence settled again something between them had already changed.
You were too young to understand the truth of marriage. Too young to know why people stay and why they leave.. You had already begun to connect togetherness with the things that made you wish for separation. You had seen the tears. You had heard the accusations. You had watched anger take over gentleness many times that you could barely remember what it looked like when they spoke to each other with kindness.
That is what makes childhood strange. You don’t always realize what you are learning while you are learning it. Sometimes it is the things no one ever meant to teach you that stay with you the longest.
You had not yet learned how to define love. You had already seen what it looked like to disappear. You had not yet understood what a healthy relationship needed. You had become familiar, with the sound of an unhealthy one. Before you could recognize the beauty of two people choosing each other with patience and kindness you had seen two people who couldn’t talk without leaving behind another wound.
Arguing. Yelling. Hurting each other. These became the things you associated with a couple.
Maybe without anyone noticing it became your first impression of love.
Not because you chose to see it that way, but because it was the first version of love you had ever been given. Some things leave childhood with you, following you into years you have yet to live, becoming memories you never asked to keep. Eternally.
