My Childhood Returns To Haunt Me
posted in Rantings, Shaping Up, fathers |I don’t like to write about my life in Anchorage. I always feel that y’all are gonna judge me based on it. But it was a long time ago, and things have changed a lot for me. However, somethings have stuck with me. First, most of my “formative” years were spent in a trailer park that was built on, what to all intents and purposes used to be a swamp. I hated it. Well, I didn’t really know different, so I can’t say I hated it, but looking back, it was pretty bleak.
The toilet pipes ran under the trailer, and would freeze once or twice a winter, and our toilets wouldn’t flush and the shower wouldn’t run. We had a small bathroom next to my room, and in the middle of it was the washing machine. It was almost always pulled out of where it was “supposed” to be, sitting in the middle of the bathroom connected to the bathroom sink. It was difficult to get past, my clothes didn’t get cleaned, and I rarely got a shower. So I was greasy and smelled funny.
I was embarrassed by our trailer. One time in Junior High school my Science Teacher (Sandra Dexter) took several of us to a science fair. I asked to be dropped off last, basically because I didn’t want any of the kids to see the trailer. I still can’t believe that my father brought up two boys in that single wide. “At least,” he would say, “it’s paid for. We couldn’t afford the rent on a house, and we have this.”
It’s funny; I never really thought of my dad, who would crawl under the trailer with a space heater or a hair dryer to unfreeze the pipes. It was “something he did,” and so I didn’t think too deeply about it. But it would be hard to get myself to crawl under there. Dark, closed in, smelly, muddy. I can’t even crawl under my car to change the oil.
Anyway.
I routinely violate the main tenet of working from home; I stumble out of bed, pull my pants on (usually the ones from yesterday), get a cup of water, and stumble downstairs to the computer, where I stare at the Internet until my brain works enough to start working. A shower isn’t really in that plan. If I don’t have anywhere to go, taking a shower doesn’t enter the picture. For that matter, I’m frequently in the same shirt I wore to bed. In this way, I’m repeating my childhood; I’m sitting in smelly wrinkled clothes and haven’t showered in days.
Some days I’ve turned around to see Miss B “ready to go to school.”
In the same shirt she wore yesterday.
I’m hoping it’s only a role-model thing and not a “totally uncaring” thing. At any rate, I have even more reason now to shower every morning, and change my shirt.
