Nightmares

As I mentioned in a previous post, bad memories stick, for me. I'm not quite willing to have amnesia to get rid of them, but I would really like to have good memories that are that sticky.

One of my really horrible ones is actually quite simple. My mom was in the hospital (again) and had been dosed with Haldol, and perhaps other things. Dad took me for a visit, and I remember this long hallway, and a stiff, drooling, staggering zombie shuffling down the hallway towards me. Dad and the doctor both told me it was my mother, and tried to encourage me to go and hug her. I couldn't imagine anything I wanted less. I wanted, desperately, to run away screaming. I was probably four years old.

Another shouldn't have been so awful, perhaps. My parents had a record cabinet, a box fitted for LP's, perhaps twice as long as it was wide, on casters, with a padded lid to sit on. I had to have been small, because I was crouched behind the cabinet, curled up small enough that a glance would not see me, and mom was sitting across the room talking with a friend, laughing over some silly thing I'd done or said. I don't remember what action of mine was being discussed, but I cried with the shame of being ridiculed. Did she know I was there? Did she realize it hurt? Would she have cared if she did?

A third that has really stuck with me was the time the teenage babysitter pretended to have a fatal accident. She eeled through the railing of our second story deck, dropped down, and pretended that she'd fallen. I even remember the hollow-sounding thud, like thumping a ripe watermelon, she managed to make, out of my sight. I ran around and took the stairs down, crying and tugging at her, trying to get her to wake up. She played dead convincingly (how hard is it to fool someone four or five years old, really?) and I ended up running across the street to the my best friend's mom for help. When I dragged Mrs. S back to see, the babysitter was gone. We couldn't even find her in the house. In point of fact, I don't know if I ever saw her again. I suspect that she was tired of babysitting daily. Mom was in and out of hospitals for roughly three-quarters of the first two years after my brother was born. Dad has always worked extremely long hours, and I'm sure that was true then, as well.