Telescopes and teleportation

On a road trip for work recently I drove through the area where I grew up. As I got closer bad memories crowded in like a thunderstorm over the highway. Flash! - my mom following me from room to room again, shouting - boom! - the time my dad punched me in the face for cursing after I tripped and split my toenail and bled all over the stairs - flash! me slapping my brothers so they wouldn’t wake up my mom from her nap - boom! my mom flinging her bedroom door open screaming just wait until your dad gets home and - flash! - my dad - boom! - gets home and we run out the backdoor pretending we just wanted to play and hoping she’d forget to tell him. I typed this at a rest stop and remembered many times when my dog trembled under the covers in my bed, I petted him, whispered that it would be okay, trying not to jump at the storm outside the house or the bellowing in the hallway or both.

There are at least two kinds of memory. Telescope memory and teleportation memory. Telescope memory looks back at an experience from a distance. Teleportation memory erases distance and recreates an experience. I have some good teleportation memories, I mean, I must, but mostly I have bad ones that happen when I don’t want them to.
My wife and I have our twentieth year together coming up over the horizon. We both had less than idea childhoods but in different ways. She likes to talk about childhood and family stories. I don’t. This was a disconnect for a long time. She would talk about a childhood story, I wouldn’t, she would ask me questions to get me to talk about a similar memory, I would change the subject. Over time we had those conversations less and I became just slightly more open to talking about my childhood.

One of my brothers, Tom, went to jail for a while between stints in rehab. On a sunny day after a good sleep and a good meal and no reminders of my childhood I would sometimes wonder why he couldn’t keep it together. I’m not proud of that. After a long night on an empty stomach and a voicemail from one of my parents I always get it, at least if I can stop thinking about myself for a while, and I think it’s impressive that he keeps it together as much as he does. Once when my mom was visiting, the visit before last or maybe the one before that, my brother melted down again. I don’t remember if it was drugs or jail or something else. My mom went over to his apartment, found it a total wreck. She cleaned it and called me over and over and over again as she read his journals and moved his stuff around and worried will be okay? he will be okay will be okay? to be okay he will need to first and I could feel the temperature drop and clouds rolling in - flash! boom! - and I’d try to find a way to get off the phone so I could walk quickly in the opposite direction of that storm.

I finally told my mom as gently as I could that I understood that she loved my brother but that he might need to not talk with her about some things until he was ready and she interrupted to explain that he needed family and I interrupted that I understood that but that he might have to choose how and when to talk about what and she interrupted that I always told her what to do and I interrupted with please don’t interrupt me, I’m just saying that he might be upset about bad memories that he didn’t feel ready to discuss with her and I don’t remember what came next but I think maybe she said something about wanting to talk to my brother about I remember the words coming out of my mouth that I didn’t like to talk about my childhood because remembering good memories made me remember bad ones – typing this, looking through a telescope at this conversation, this was just not something to say to my mom, certainly not at that moment anyway, because I was trying to explain something she was just not ready and willing to hear at that moment – and she interrupted me that well it’s not like you only had things in your childhood and I felt cold all over and my stomach dropped and I wanted to scream and to smash my phone against the glass of the window and I ground my teeth and scrunched my eyebrows and eyes tightly and took a breath and said I’m not arguing with you about my childhood, I’m telling you that I don’t like to talk about my childhood, that’s just the truth and I think it’s true for Tom too and that he might not want to talk with you about his childhood right now and you need to be prepared for that and to accept it if that’s what he says and she said there were some good times in your childhood – as I type this I empathize with her, imagining my own kids someday telling me anything remotely similar, at the time I was not able to empathize with anyone – and I said I can’t talk with you about this right now. That whole conversation was a proxy for ‘it takes a lot out of me to talk about Tom with you so unless it is absolutely necessary I would prefer not to do this’ though I didn’t realize it at the time. I hung up the phone and went for a walk until I stopped teleporting.

My wife and I really wanted kids. She had a miscarriage - we had a miscarriage - the first time she got pregnant. We were devastated. After our first kid was born our wonderful child rewrote the script. That miscarriage memory hurts when I think back to it but it hurts differently through a telescope, where it’s an unpleasant part of the trip to getting my amazing kid, than when it’s a teleportation memory, where it’s tearful nausea and feeling like nothing will ever again be okay.

After my first kid got older she wanted to hear stories about my childhood, probably because my wife told stories a lot about her childhood. I would sometimes try to change the subject but my kid’s really persistent. So I started telling stories from my childhood. Pulling good memories out of my childhood - driving to Texas with my grandparents in my grandpa’s semi- truck, going canoeing down the river and going caving with my parents, the first time I saw the older of my younger brothers playing imaginatively with matchbox cars and making them talk to each other - pulling those memories out for my daughter also pulled them out for me. It weakened the association between those memories and other, worse ones. I told those memories rather than re-experienced them, telescope not teleport, and that made involuntary teleportation into bad memories less powerful. It still happened some, but not as intensely.

Nowadays talking to my parents and passing through childhood places still upsets me. Reminders. Bleh. How well I manage that depends on how I’m doing otherwise. Over all I’m better - stronger than ever, ever before! - but it’s forward and back, not just progress progress progress. As I move forward there’s less teleportation, and less intensely, and more telescopes. And as I do that there are times when looking back still hurts, and in new ways. I empathize more with my parents, which is to say, I sometimes somewhat empathize with them.

I think when you have a fucked up childhood, one where your parents did fucked up things, it fucks you up in that it can stunt your growth in a way, like your parents maybe seem even larger than life to you than other kids’ parents seem to them. I mean, I knew from very, very early on that my parents weren’t always right - that’s an important thing to learn, I know adults who seem to only learn that in their late 20s or 30s - but at some fundamental level I still saw my parents as powerful and in control. I still experience them that way sometimes, today and in memory, and that’s part of my having these bad memories and having less control over those memories than I want to have. In those memories I remember, I re-experience, my parents as larger than life, as forces of nature. They feel powerful and in control in retrospect because they had power and control over me, but looking back understand now that to a large extent the real problems were more that they were weak and out of control - larger than life forces of nature like storms, rather than superheroes. I empathize with that more now, now that I’m older and now that I’m a parent myself. I can see how my parents weren’t dealt good hands and weren’t taught how to play, so it’s no wonder they threw tantrums and tried to sweep the cards off the table, so to speak. Seeing my parents that way helps with the teleportation memories, it swaps them to some extent with telescope memories.

I drove out of the region where I grew up, on my way out of state and on to the next work thing, planning to stop off and see a college friend. Earlier in the day and the day before I saw a childhood and high school friend, and college friends, and a post-college early 20s friend. It was lovely to see them. In conversation and after, and thinking about the friend I’m on my way to visit, I remembered good times, many many good times. I also remembered lots of dumb shit I did and said and regret. I do that easily, a mix of teleporting and telescoping, jumping back to another time but with a voiceover, “look at this dumb ass jerk.” Stepping back further I can start to let go of that, as look more expansively, telescopically, at who I was and why, and where I’ve come since.

For a while I said I liked to live with a six month event horizon, not talking about anything more than six months before or six months in the future. The future part was lack of direction, hope, and money. The past part was inability to manage memories, a habit of being continually embarrassed about who I’d been and choices I’d made, and, I now think, a kind of laziness and hopelessness and fearfulness. I didn’t think I could be different and better and I wasn’t willing to do the hard work and I was afraid it would hurt and that I would fail if I tried. This has changed a lot at different points in my life as I’ve gotten older. I think having kids helped a lot because the stakes went up - fucked up people fuck up their kids, so I gotta be better, stop being fucked up, my kids matter too much not to - and because having kids is so insanely hard that at some level I’m like “shit I could do anything now, bring it on world.” I also trust my kids completely. They love me and as far as they’re concerned I’m awesome, powerful and in control. I’m not, but I could be more so, and knowing that I could be more so helps me to become more so, bit by bit, swapping out bad teleportation re-experience memories of irrational chaos for telescopic stories that I control and where I understand what happened and why.

I like to end these posts with jokes, I wrote in another post recently about why I have the impulse to joke, so here’s a joke my older kid told me and then cracked up laughing and ran in circles around our living room, climbed on our coffee table and jumped off. “Once upon a time, a wash cloth. The end!” Someday we can all end up clean.