I occasionally get these memories that are so vivid, it feels like time collapsed for a second, pushing the past into the present, before it retreats back into the sea of time.
This happened last night, while I was watching The Toys That Made Us, about LEGO, of all things.
I was always a good student when I was a kid. I worked hard to get all As, I did my homework the instant I got home, I participated heavily in classroom discussion, and I *never* goofed off when it wasn't recess.
But in fifth grade, something changed. Suddenly, everything was incredibly difficult. I couldn't focus in class. I didn't want to do my homework right away when I got home. I still got As, but I had to work harder for them than I ever had to that point.
Except in math. I just did not get fifth grade math AT ALL. I couldn't wrap my head around it, I couldn't remember basic things like multiplication tables, and long division may as well have been hieroglyphics.
I've been trying my best to remember what was going on at home then, and I have a big blank page where those memories should be. Or maybe it's more accurate to say there is a dimly lit tableau that I can't see when I look directly at it. It only gives up shapes and colors, mostly obscured by shadows. I know that, by this time in my life, I had been telling my mother that I didn't want to go on auditions or be an actor. I remember telling her, almost every day, "I just want to be a kid", and I remember her dismissing that. She constantly gaslighted me about how I really did want to be an actor. She was so manipulative about it. She would tell me how selfish I was, because she'd sacrificed her own career to support mine. Please note for the record that when I was SEVEN FUCKING YEARS OLD, I did not say, "Mother, please abandon your tremendously successful acting career so that I may have one of my own." Please also note that, as I got older, my only request, ever, was to please let me be a kid and stop making me work. Until I ended contact with them, they gaslighted me about this whenever I brought it up.
So I can't remember if anything particularly memorable was happening at home then, something which would have made it hard for me to focus and concentrate when I was in class, but I suspect that I was becoming aware of just how much of a bully my father was to me, and how little my mother seemed to care about it.
In any case, it was fifth grade, and I was struggling like crazy to understand math. I was barely passing my math tests, and when I should have been getting tutoring, or being helped by my parents, my father was busy bullying me, and my mother was forcing me to go into Hollywood three or four days a week for auditions after school, which I *hated*.
This is where I stop for a moment and I tell you that it's okay for you to have enjoyed the work I did when I was a kid. It's unlikely that many of you have seen my work before Stand By Me, because it was mostly in commercials and a few movie of the weeks on television, and one entirely forgettable feature film. I've written about how unhappy I was as a child actor, and that's caused some people to share with me that they feel guilty for enjoying the work I did then. I'm here to tell you that it's okay, and I'm glad that you did enjoy it. That means it wasn't a waste of my time, and it means that I was good at being an actor, which I can feel proud of.
Okay, as Joe Bob Briggs says, back to the movie.
While I was watching this thing about LEGO, time collapsed and I was in fifth grade. My teacher Mrs. M., made me stay after school one day to do all this math homework that I hadn't done, because when normal kids were doing homework, I was sitting in traffic to or from Hollywood. Oh, and as it turns out, in the car is not the place to do schoolwork, especially schoolwork that a kid is struggling to understand.
The way I remember it (and this is an unreliable memory, because I am a writer and sometimes my brain invents things), I didn't even know I was going to be kept after school until the final bell rang, and she told me to stay in my seat as my classmates got up and got ready to go home. She told me she'd called my home and told whoever she spoke to that I was catastrophically behind in math homework, and she wanted to keep me after school to finish it.
This didn't feel like a teacher giving me the extra attention I needed to master arithmetic. This felt like I was being punished, which really sucked for me because I was a *good* kid who worked hard, and who just. Didn't. Get. It.
If she had worked with me, if she had tutored me, if she had sat with me and refused to give up until I understood the things I was struggling with, she would have been my favorite teacher of all time.
But that's not what happened.
No, while she sat at her desk and graded papers, I sat at my desk and struggled to get through was was probably a dozen pages of math homework, which feels insurmountable when you're eleven and can't seem to understand fundamental arithmetic for some reason.
Any question about the ratio of punishment to meaningful help was answered when she made me drag my desk out of the classroom and onto the terrace in front of it, facing the playground where all the after school daycare kids were playing.
Now, maybe she thought it would be nice for me to work outside, in the late afternoon sun (I know this happened in winter, because the light was golden and the sun was low in the sky by 3:30), and fresh air. But all I felt was humiliated and embarrassed. You know who eleven year-old me knew had to stay after school, sit at their desk, and do class work after everyone else has been released for the day? Fuck ups. Bad kids. Stupid kids.
And it wasn't just humiliating, either. It was offensive, because it wasn't even my fault that I was struggling in school so much. It seemed like I was constantly begging my mother to just let me be a kid, to stop making me do this thing I didn't want to do. I didn't have to words or maturity to express that the responsibility of learning lines and performing for strangers every day after school was giving me paralyzing anxiety and the early stages of depression, but I'm pretty sure that's what was happening to me.
Last night, while I was watching this delightfully nerdy dude talk about the LEGO system (if you haven't seen this documentary series and you're of a certain age, I can't recommend it enough), time collapsed for a nanosecond and I was sitting at my desk, in 1981 or 1982, feeling utterly, completely, entirely humiliated, and defeated.
I can see the beautiful, golden sunlight of the late afternoon sun. I can feel the warmth radiating off the walls behind me. I can smell that unmistakable stink of a fifth grade classroom at the end of a warm day, and I can feel in every cell of my body how humiliated and embarrassed and sad and awful I felt at that moment, thirty-nine or so years ago.
I had to pause the show I was watching, grab my journal, and write out as much of this memory as I could, because the alternative was to just cry for that kid, who I want so desperately to go back and protect. I wish I was his dad, because I want to believe that I would have given him the support, the love, the encouragement, and the help he needed to work through something he was clearly struggling with.
And I wouldn't have bullied him, because I'm not a dick. I'm especially not a dick to my own child. I also wouldn't have let my spouse bully my child while gaslighting him and forcing him to work when he doesn't want to, but I'm not my parents. Thank god.
But the world -- at least the world I lived in -- was profoundly different then. I was in a Lutheran school, with a principal and a fifth grade teacher who never met an authoritarian idea or practice they didn't fully embrace. It's no small wonder my father, a relentless and cruel authoritarian, and my mother, who I don't recall ever sticking up for me, sided with this teacher. I'm sure they all thought that just forcing me to endure humiliating frustration (remember, I didn't just have a ton of math pages to do; I had a ton of math pages to do *that I didn't understand*) would teach me a valuable lesson about the Calvinist ideals of hard work and bootstraps.
I can't recall how many pages of math I did. I do remember that I didn't get much help from my teacher, and that it was dark by the time I was picked up to go home. I wish I could remember a single thing about that ride home, but I can't, and I can't even talk to the people who could help me remember, because whenever I would ask about things like this, I got gaslighted, or told I was being too dramatic. Hey, at least I didn't have to go on an audition that day!
It's unsurprising to me that I haven't touched on this memory since the early 1980s. It's painful, it's upsetting, and it just pain sucks.
But wow did the time streams collapse into a brief singularity of memory last night, putting me right back into that desk, on that afternoon, all those years ago. It hurt then, and it hurts now. But I'm healing as best as I can, doing my best to work through the pain.
Maybe that's why I got this particular memory as clearly and powerfully and immediately as I did last night. Maybe some part of my brain knows that I'm ready to shine my own light into that tableau so I can remember more clearly.
Maybe I am.
