What is your first memory of unhappiness?
Yesterday, Martyn was talking about happiness. Today, I remember that I’m asking myself questions so as to populate my R.A.Q. page. And in that hazy place I call my mind comes a memory of a story by my friend Tom Saunders. The story, “Aerobatics,” is found in his brilliant collection, Brother, What Strange Place Is This?
In the story a father is talking to his daughter and he recalls the moment, when he was nine years old, that he discovered sadness. The father is speaking:
…one day I came home from school and found my mother sitting at the kitchen table crying. Breaking her heart. Tears running fown her cheeks. Hiding her face from me, twisting away when I asked her what the matter was…
…What I mean is that the second before I came in the foor I was happy, and then suddenly I was landed with this knowledge about my mother I’d never be without. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. For the uncertainty of it. Do you understand? I wasn’t prepared for a world where that sort of sadness was possible.
I’m trying to think about my first memory of unhappiness. I’m trying to remember when it was that I could first articulate that unhappiness existed in the world. When I remember I’ll answer the question.
Meanwhile - what is your first memory of unhappiness? How has that first experience of unhappiness marked your life? Has it come back since? Have you since used it, somehow? Articulated it?
UPDATE: I’ve thought a little more about my answer. Here it is: This is a very hard question to answer. I’m thinking that unhappiness in early childhood may exist more as a state of fear than anything else. Fear, I guess, results in uncertainty vulnerability, and I guess they are also attributes of unhappiness. I can’t think of any specific examples, apart from arguments in the home, my strict ballet teacher, my shadow, dark rooms. I was very scared of the dark and always had to sleep with the light on.
Posted by By: kathryn | 
2006/05/05 | Personal | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]
