Have you ever been blindsided by a memory from your past; a memory so painful that it left you in tears more than 40 years after the event?  I was, just this morning in fact.  I must have dreamed about it; even though I don’t remember the dream I woke up crying, thinking about this event regardless of the fact that it hasn’t crossed my mind in literally decades. 

This event, although not earth-shaking by itself, is a benchmark for my entire childhood.  Even though I was the lastborn, in no way was I ever the baby of the family.   My next-older sister is 5 years and 7 months older than me, but she was born prematurely… extremely so, and it truly was a miracle that she lived given that she was born in 1960.  She weighed only 2 pounds, 12 ounces at birth, and lost a certain amount of weight as newborns always do (she lost down to 1 pound 15 ounces).  She spent the first 40 days of her life in an incubator (these facts and figures were ingrained into my consciousness as a litany of sorts; not a week went by that I didn’t hear them in one way, shape or form) and so she became the “baby” of the family forever.   So it was only natural that there be a certain amount of animosity between us… I never got to be the center of attention, ever, and simply by being born I piddled in her Wheaties on August 15, 1965 at 10:55 p.m. and didn’t stop being an annoyance to her for the next 41 years.  It was only when my daddy died and my mother decided that she didn’t need me as a daughter any longer that I stopped being potential competition for this “sister”. 

Anyway, all of that is spilled milk, and definitely not worth crying over.  Neither is the event whose memory left me in tears this morning; tears which threaten still to betray me even as I protest that I am “fine, absolutely fine, no, it must just be my allergies acting up, I’m not crying, why would I be crying?”.  But I must give a bit more background before I get into that. 

 When I was nearly 5, my next-older brother was killed in a car accident on his way to school.  My family sort of fell apart for a time; if it hadn’t been for my paternal grandmother (who I miss desperately still, even though she died on my birthday in 1979), my middle sister, my oldest brother and his wife, I shudder to think what my childhood would have been.  Timmy’s death, aside from leaving a raw, aching void in my life (he loved me beyond all reason, indulged my every whim and never ever treated me like the pest I was) left me with a job at the ripe old age of 4 years and 9 months.  It was understood that I now had to be a “big girl”.  My job was to behave perfectly at all times, be available if a family member needed to cuddle, be the comedienne when the family needed a laugh…  but otherwise be invisible.  And so I did.  I became very adept at sensing others’ emotions, supplying the needed support, and then blending into the woodwork.  As such, my needs, wants, emotions… all became inconsequential.   “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” is a truism which entered my consciousness long before I ever saw an episode of Star Trek.  Largely forgotten, usually left to my own devices, I spent my time alone perfecting my reading, my handwriting, getting faster at the former and prettier at the latter.  One result of this was that I was an absolute terror to the other Sunday School students when it came to Sword Drills.  Give me book, chapter and verse while I hold my Bible high in the air, tell me “Charge!” and watch me fly my fingers through the pages and leap to my feet while the others are still trying to remember whether Galatians comes before Ephesians or after.   So a few short years after Timmy’s death, I found myself the undisputed Sword Drill Champion of Vacation Bible School, ages 12 and under (I was 7 at the time).  The prize was a plane ride!  Our pastor was a licensed pilot, and owned a small Cessna.  As an incentive he had offered plane rides as the top two prizes for VBS.  Each child who won would be taken up for a ride and could bring a friend along for company.  I was so proud and excited, and imagined being the center of attention for once.   I went to school that following Monday and naturally told all about it during Show-and-Tell (I remember that I even took my Bible to school as the “show” part).  For a very short while I was the star, the school darling, someone everyone wanted to be friends with… instead of being the strange girl who wore hand-me-downs and read books at recess.  I imagined that my new-found popularity would only increase as I decided who would accompany me on my flight.  For one brief, shining moment, I felt wanted. 

 I imagined wrong.  Instead of being able to collect my reward, it was decided that my next older sister and her friend Jody would be taking the ride in my place.  I never knew the justification behind the decision, and as with all injustices, the decision has always seemed arbitrary, unthinking, uncaring… just downright mean.   Even with the clarity of vision borne of many years gone by, I cannot fathom what would make a parent do that to a child.  I will never know now; the one whom I could have asked has been gone for 6 years now, and the other two who know about this event barely speak to me.  And I refuse to give either of them the satisfaction of knowing how deeply this wounded me.  Stubborn pride?  Perhaps, but it is all that I have to sustain me when memories such as this one pops to the surface like a deep sea diver hell-bent on getting the bends. 

And so this is the memory which blindsided me this morning.  It hit me like a rocket sled on rails, and left utter devastation in its wake.  In a strange way, I’m feeling the emotions which I denied myself for years.  For so long now, I’ve used the tactic “if you don’t think about it, it won’t hurt” to avoid painful childhood memories.  I guess I’ve stuffed the emotions down for so long that there simply isn’t room for any more, and so my psyche has decided to do spring cleaning a bit early (or a lot late, depending on how one looks at it).  I’m just afraid that if I let this continue unchecked, there won’t be a whole lot of me left when it’s all said and done.

Hours later, the tears continue to fall; fat, silly, useless tears which pour down my cheeks.  The more I concentrate on stopping them, the more determined they are to increase their already torrential downfall.  I’ve always hated self-pity, but this is much more than that.  This is a hurt which stands proxy for all of the other hurts in my childhood, times when I should have been put first, deserved to be put first, needed to be put first.  “Que sera, sera”, “It is what it is”, and volumes of other trite, very unhelpful sayings run through my mind now.  I don’t know what memory will be the next to surface, when it will occur, or what will be the aftermath.  The one thing that I do know is that the pragmatic side of me won’t put up with the emotional side of me for very long… it may come to blows, but one side of me will win out. 

I’m betting on pragmatism.