In the melting pot of my upbringing, there is a complex array of privilege and deprivation. The blend has the sharp aroma of grapefruit and a deadened taste of dry meat. It oozes with lack of care beneath make believe goodness. The thickened brew is laced with lies and the barest smidge of facts. On top, a fatty layer of grandiosity and pretend manners overwhelms chunks of bitter secrets.
Childhood was an overfull pot, missing vitally important ingredients.
There’s a bare-minimum story I was told about my earliest years. I have little means to flesh it out and only a few scattered memories to assess its truthiness. The primary people I grew up with kept most of their stories silent, allowing the mud from the past to internalize, facts becoming less important, and the mud providing sustenance for lies.
As it went, they met in the military. The reason for their enlistment was similar: escaping from the condition of their home life was worth a few years of service. Neither was inclined to do anything without some form of payment; benevolence rarely bubbled up from their historical mud. There were occasional glimpses of the imprint the military had on them, though I’d find it difficult to accept that it came from true care for the country rather than remaining elements of what they might have told themselves to sign enlistment papers. When it comes to understanding another person and their motivation, one either has to be given access to more truth than lies or see them exhibit behavior mimicking their story. With the people I grew up knowing as “parents,” I was not given enough truth or behavior to lend credence to their caring for anything but themselves and their own survival.
The rest of the story is that they were released from enlistment contracts due to one of them being pregnant with me and the other becoming a police officer. Those were the facts offered as to why food was scarce. A short time later, the police officer was no longer employed for unnamed reasons.
The environment silently exuded a sense of scarcity beyond those early years, perhaps the aftertaste of a significant lack within their own childhoods. It is difficult to assess since both adults perpetuated a myth of wealth for friends and extended families, even when they were living with relatives and without the means to live on their own.
I have a clear-as-yesterday memory from when I was two or three years old. I was in the enclosed backyard of a cement block house, where we lived up until moving in with my grandparents. Grapefruit had dropped from a tree. I rolled them into each other on the sandy ground. The primary caregiver told me to stop ruining them; they were meant for supper. Lunch had been a naked hamburger patty and half of a grapefruit. Dinner was to be the same. The dry meat and taste of the intensely sour fruit slide more easily into metaphor than they did going down my throat.
The entire collection of memories from my upbringing is structured by a lack of care. A tripod built with fractured financial, emotional, and logistical supports. In many ways, I raised myself. When I had turned thirteen, it had been decided by the adults that I would oversee the weekday hours of the household. For the next five years, I was responsible for ensuring those of school age made it to school, had lunch money, did chores and homework, the house was clean, and dinner was put on the table.
Lack is a loss of “enough.” Being without something—perhaps something vitally important, like care. A retreating wave of possibility that is unable to return.
One night recently, I became aware I was dreaming while seated on a couch and looking down at an upturned face in my lap. I recognized them as a person I had been in a relationship with in my twenties. As I took in the environment of the dream, the man pulled the mask of a respirator from his face. I noted there were flecks of building material left behind in the cage. I mentioned that he should change the filter before returning to a carpentry project. In this dream, he was upgrading a house I lived in. He replied by talking about the project and what he planned to do that afternoon. His voice was the same. His features were exactly as I remembered. Never having photographed him, I cannot imagine how memories generated his exact replica in a dream so many years after we last saw each other. Yet, there he was, staring up in a way I’ll never be able to think of without the wisp of yearning it used to elicit.
The dream moved on, moving from the couch to a vast space with a sky-like and complex element above. Clearly, not the sky itself, something relatable and also meant to convey that it wasn’t representative of life on Earth. The landscape was barren, yet it felt warm and purposeful. I was spoken to before I understood I wasn’t alone. A being—not a man or woman—hovered an inch or two above the ground. They wore chunky boots and an array of dark and weighty materials that contrarily came to me with gossamer airiness. The hues ranged over a spectrum of colors that weren’t specifically discernible.
“There is a special place in heaven where beloved versions of us live.”
It took a moment to realize they were referring to the moment on the couch. As that awareness came over me, I woke up in my dark bedroom.
“There is a special place in heaven where beloved versions of us live.”
The sentence seems to carry immense space—a meadow without an enclosure. A childhood that wasn’t scarred by scar-city. It comes to me as an endless space gently holding yearning, ache, and possibility.
When my memories are unruly, they bump into each other. Grapefruit in a dusty yard, a lone tree standing over fallen fruit. Occasionally that tree rises in my thoughts, as does the game I had been playing—aiming one sour orb at another, the bruised flesh on my plate at supper.
It is a wonder if that special place in heaven exists.
A place with tender yearning and beloved versions of who we might be when the space is vast enough to hold it all.