Do you know anyone that had a normal childhood? I guess the first thing that we have to do is contrive a norm: mother, father, siblings, no divorce, no abuse, didn’t move around too much, didn’t get in too much trouble, reasonably good health for everyone in the nuclear unit, economic stability, graduated from high school, and even got an undergraduate degree. That’s what Republican America thinks people should have, as far as I can tell; I made it up with the help of Leave It to Beaver.
Of my childhood friends, I think I know of one person who got close — his parents didn’t get divorced until he was in college. As children of the ’80s, divorce was the most prevalent deviation from the norm. Transplantation affected people in my larger circle, although both of the people I’m thinking of outwardly appeared to thrive in their new homes. I seriously cannot think of anyone from childhood whose history with which I’m familiar that can tick off everything on my shopping list. I thought of this girl who was the daughter of my boss my senior year in high school; I didn’t really know her and I was grasping at straws until I remembered that they probably moved from out of state. My best friend from primary school would have made it except his brother had Down Syndrome; even though his parents tried so hard, that had to completely re-define his family dynamic. I’m also not terribly outgoing so my sample set is small.
Looking up my own family tree, my mom gets closer, although only my aunt managed to make it through college and there were some health problems earlier on and then estrangement and maybe even some verbal abuse as she and the siblings got older. My stepdad fared better; both he and his sister graduated from college but I question the quality of his relationship with his parents even more. Extended family gets cloudy since we weren’t all that well connected to anyone else.
My mentors as a kid always had some sort of story to tell: moving around, early marriage, or spending time on a commune; you know, the usual.
The friends I’ve made as an adult skew away from the norm for the same reasons my childhood friends did; the age variation is bigger but the themes remain the same.
The children of my various coworkers all seem to fare better than my friends and I have; I know of a handful of families that fit my norm. I guess I found my way into a more stable circle, at least for a while. I hope the children of my last boss at my old job in the Old Country make it; those boys had the perfect storm going for them: good genes and good parenting. Although we both want them to succeed, both the girlfriend and I are convinced that they’ve done so well for so long, a flameout will probably befall one of them at some point. I realize that she and I have the perfect storm of the internet going for us: pessimism and cynicism.
I know the norm I came up with is perhaps overly specific; it is very much a WASP-y suburban stereotype. Would divorced parents be more common and thus normal? In the end, my norm is what I assumed other kids had and liked when I was younger and it’s still what I baseline against now.
I also have some trouble calling out some of my factors. What’s a heated discussion and what’s verbal abuse? Where does corporal punishment fall? I changed schools a couple of times but I never moved a great distance; I wasn’t originally going to call that moving but it has the same affect and it was very traumatic for me while the other nomads I knew dealt with it far better. I had friends that had bad childhood food allergies or asthma; does that count as poor health or did their successful work-arounds (survival) make it a non-issue?
I delude myself into thinking I’m more of an essayist, and that means I should have a take away from all this exposition and limited discussion. Unfortunately, I think the engine of that train of thought pushed the cars up to speed and then decoupled from them and got diverted onto a siding.
What’s your definition of normal and do you know anyone whose childhood would have met it? Would you trade places with them? How do we connect with people that have these different frames of reference? How do we embrace what makes us stronger and move beyond what holds us back? How do we tell the difference?
What price, and what value, can we place on normalcy?
This is not usually the kind of thing I think about.
Originally I was going to write something about something stupid I did today. That is, of course, a well that never runs dry.
Then I was going to write about something I hate. Not a weighty thing, but it is something I’m passionate about. I’ll write about that later as I’m still going to hate it.
As I was walking down the hall of the apartment building, my maelstrom of thought spit this out. I’m not sure how it turned out.