Developed

my childhood

The first place I ever lived was a condo beside a highway in north Ohio, thirty minutes from the lake. When I learned to speak I called it the ‘garage house’ because it had no front door. We left when I was five and I only have dreamlike memories of it, its beige carpet and grey laminate kitchen, the slope of grass I kicked a half-deflated rubber ball up as invisible cars hissed past from behind a high stone wall.

There’s a home video from this place starring Mom, my little sister and me, our faces blurry from digitization. It’s Easter. The date stamp reads 2000. I’m three. Dad, excited about his new camcorder, is filming. My sister and I have finished gutting the plastic eggs we found hidden around the living room and now I sit and run my hands over their treasure, nickels, Tootsie Rolls.

Mom tells me I need to go take a bath.

I say, ‘Mommy, maybe I don’t have to take a bath today.’ I don’t like baths; I feel weird being naked and I hate the transition from cold to warm to cold again.

Mom says, ‘Don’t you want to see Grandma?’

‘No,’ I say, upset.

‘Alright,’ Mom says with finality. ‘We’ll just tell Grandma you don’t love her.’

I’m silent. I go stiff. My face twists. My mouth opens. The video dies.

On the phone with Mom last October, when I was just beginning to remember—to chart the onset of my discomfort in the body, the constant pain in my shoulders and neck, my decades-long misunderstanding of what love is, how it’s given and received—I ask her about this incident, only confident enough to do it because there’s footage. ‘Well,’ Mom says flatly, ‘it was the only way to get you to do anything.’