Tonight I am wishing I were two.\u00a0 I’d like to start all over again, right with the potty training, even, and try to do everything right this time.<\/p>\n
I remember potty training, believe it or not.\u00a0 And for those of you that like to laugh at humorous yarns, this is not one of them so you might want to skip it.<\/p>\n
So there we are in Margie’s dooryard.\u00a0 Margie lives in the farmhouse across the hill.\u00a0 When it’s hot it’s always fun to walk through the barn and smell the hay and trampled dust.\u00a0 Hide and seek with the chickens.\u00a0 Swat flies with the cows’ tails.\u00a0 Big lumbering Murray, Margie’s youngest son, is milking the cows and he’ll squirt some warm milk directly into my mouth then laugh when I smile because I like it.\u00a0 He’s proud of me that I’m not wearing diapers and my nickname won’t be Stinky-lady-dink anymore.\u00a0 But it was my nickname for a long time after that, I think; my later memories bring feelings of shame.\u00a0 But not when I was two, that’s just what Murray called me, so everybody else did, too.<\/p>\n
So there we are at Margie’s.\u00a0 Everyone is in the kitchen that smells like coffee and sour dishrags.\u00a0 The adults are talking so fervently, I guess.\u00a0 I don’t know, I don’t remember my exact thoughts, remember?\u00a0 I do remember the panic of being caught behind Margie’s torn up chintz covered farm couch, the one all the cats were allowed to sleep on.\u00a0 There the cats were, lazing in the sun slant, and there I was.\u00a0 I must have felt like I had to go to the potty but I don’t think I really did anything until I got caught. \u00a0Behind the couch.\u00a0 But who knows?\u00a0 Memories from two to now sure can be tangled.<\/p>\n
So there we are in Margie’s bathroom, in the old farmhouse across the hill.\u00a0 It’s got lots of discarded clothing on the floor and lots of pictures of butterflies.\u00a0 I certainly won’t profess to remember what I thought or said during those potty-training moments, but I sure as hell remember the process, the why<\/em> I became trained.\u00a0 Anything foul, even your own soiled underwear, will make a lasting impression if it’s rubbed in your face, forced into your memory.\u00a0 The taste of your own piss when you lick your lips never goes away.<\/p>\n So there we are in the creek (“crick” as Margie calls it) down behind the cornfield.\u00a0 This is a vivid memory, because we used to go there all the time, all summer.\u00a0 Every summer.\u00a0 I remember being seven; Kristine, my sister, is four.\u00a0 Mum is yelling at us.\u00a0 “You kids put sneakers on in the creek!\u00a0 I’m not pulling any bloodsuckers off of you!”\u00a0 Margie wades out in her old-lady bathing suit with the funny looking skirt that just makes her legs look fatter than they are.\u00a0 She hands us our Keds, which we think are totally yucky, and screeches just like Mum:\u00a0 “I ain’t pullin’ off no leeches, neither!”\u00a0 I can already feel one as I run my hands over my leg.\u00a0 They’re probably all over my toes, too.\u00a0 I lift a foot up and wave it at my sister.\u00a0 She grins and digs her fingernails in to pull them off for me.\u00a0 We have conspired on this always.\u00a0 We love leeches.\u00a0 We throw them in her bucket and put just enough water in.\u00a0 Later we will dump salt on them and watch them explode.\u00a0 We do not think this is gross.\u00a0 Mum and Margie do, but they think we don’t do this any more since last time they hit us with the wooden spoon with “Mother’s Helper” written on it in black permanent marker.\u00a0 Mum and Margie sit under the trees and read books.\u00a0 They drink beer.\u00a0 We drink creek water.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So here we are up at the lot.\u00a0 Dad and the workmen are raising the frame for the new house.\u00a0 Krissy and I play on the lumber piles, throw sawdust at each other.\u00a0 We take naps in the little camper we borrow from Uncle Tommy.\u00a0 It’s so hot in there; I dream of wading in the creek.\u00a0 I would even like to see some bloodsuckers right now; they live in the cool underwater world where it’s not so hot. \u00a0I am eleven and I have small pointy breasts developing.\u00a0 The workman with the orange bandanna in his pocket comments about how fast little girls grow up nowadays.\u00a0 He stares at my chest in my too-small swimming suit top and I now know the feeling of being self-conscious.<\/p>\n So now I am sixteen and I am in high school.\u00a0 I am a shy overweight teenager and I am raped by a teacher I thought was my friend.\u00a0 He tells me he cares, he drives me around in his convertible MG, he buys me exotic ice cream.\u00a0 He takes me to his apartment one afternoon and pins me to the floor, I am captured in a slant of sunlight yet it feels so cold.\u00a0 He shoves himself inside me and he is shocked when I bleed.<\/p>\n I remember going numb, but not too numb.\u00a0 Not too numb to run into his bathroom and lock the door, wondering about how I am going to get home.\u00a0 I remember the pain, the physical, the deep inside where no one will ever invade again pain.\u00a0 The taste of your own fear when you lick your lips<\/p>\n never goes away.<\/p>\n So twelve years later I tell Ellen, my partner, my friend, all about this pain.\u00a0 It is only fair. She is angry with the jokers, the cruel schoolkids who never knew the real situation; they made it out to be all my fault.<\/p>\n So I think back to my mother, who never said she knew what happened.\u00a0 She had to know, didn’t she? Ellen says yes, my mum had to know; but she couldn’t, wouldn’t accept what happened \u00a0to her little girl.\u00a0 She blamed me, my mother did.\u00a0 She too thought I asked for it.\u00a0 When you don’t wear your sneakers in the creek the bloodsuckers know it.\u00a0 They’ll seep the life right out of you.<\/em><\/p>\n So here we are, my mother and I, arguing yet again, screaming nasties at one another until we cry.\u00a0 I am thirty-something and Margie is not here but she still has her chintz-covered couch. \u00a0And all the cats\u2014children of the ones when I was two\u2014still laze in the sun slant as perhaps they were trained to do.<\/p>\n My mother’s voice is abrasive, insisting that I’m a loser.\u00a0 She calls me many things.\u00a0 I shut myself in the bathroom, the only door with a lock.<\/p>\n She’s still yelling but I’m thinking of butterflies on the wall, back at Margie’s, wishing I was two so I could start all over again and do everything right this time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alysson B. Parker is a writer by passion but a secondary school teacher, freelance editor, and journalist by financial necessity. She has published work with Driftwood Press, The Binnacle, Northern New England Review, Ophelia Street, Scars, Kota, Deep South (New Zealand), A Room of Her Own, ExPat Lit, and other miscellaneous publications. A regular contributor to EnPointe magazine, she has lived in many different countries and a variety of funky situations, but right now she and her family \u2013 plus two cats and a mutt who should be paying rent \u2013 live north of Boston.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tonight I am wishing I were two.\u00a0 I’d like to start all over again, right with the potty training, even, and try to do everything right this time. I remember potty training, believe it or not.\u00a0 And for those of you that like to laugh at humorous yarns, this is not one of them so [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-nonfictionmemoir"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2125"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2138,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125\/revisions\/2138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}