When a kid carries shame of home
and the indelible marks it leaves on you as an adult
I was talking to my best friend today and we were talking about the imprints that it leaves on kids when you are ashamed of your home.
Now, I specifically use the word ‘shame’ rather than embarrassed here, because it goes much deeper. It also ties you to your family and self-awareness and acknowledgment that your home should not look like this to others.
It is not clean. No, it is filthy.
It is not organized. No, it is a dumpster, a pigsty.
It is falling apart. Stuff is broken.
It is a chaos, it is a mess. You can’t sit anywhere. You don’t go to parts of the house.
It reeks of smoke, the walls are yellowed from the tar and stain of cigarette smoke.
You visit enough people’s homes, friends or other relatives, where this is not the norm. So, you know. You observe and you learn— from a very young age to keep people out, at all costs, exercising whatever power you have to keep from having to face this immensely uncomfortable situation.
In previous conversations, over the years, my best friend and I have often made reference to each other, or this or that person, rare individuals who were “allowed in our houses.”
It became a self-preservation thing. And it wasn’t all without cause or legitimate fear.
I remember my mother also being frantic when certain people were about the come into our home, you knew to keep them out.
I remember on the rare occasion when a relative or a piano teacher did come inside and the looks of astonishment, or horror. (“This is your home?!!?” or “You live like this?” is that what their looks said, as they gaped, wide-eyed at the surroundings, of our residence. They felt badly for you, you felt badly for them…You felt badly for yourself, eventually, but first, you just wanted them to leave and to try to repress this memory, to forget about it.)
I can’t quite convey the looks they had on their faces. I was always a very observant and hypervigilant person, in regards to others moods and nonverbals, their mannerisms. Because I had to be. I grew up with mentally unwell parents and with a volatile alcoholic. You learn to gear the mood and temperament and actions of others. I find this interesting because in other areas, I’m not too observant. I rarely notice others new haircut or paintings on the wall. But I always notice people’s moods, facial expressions, their behaviors. It was a survival mechanism.
So, these people, who entered our home, they looked uncomfortable, embarrassed. And you, the child, got that sinking feeling, follow by that deep burning shame.
My grandmother and grandfather used to live in my childhood home. He built it for them when they first married. After he passed, and all while growing up, my grandmother would come up on Sundays to visit with the family. She was ‘allowed’ it, but I sometimes did wonder—even when growing up—what she thought of the home, so different than it was, so untidy, unkept, falling apart. Her loyalty and familial love was always too great; she would never say anything; she was just happy to have her family and us in her life, after her other son and husband died.
But a few years ago, after my father took his life in this home, and a dear great aunt wanted to see this home that her brother had built, I didn’t have it in my heart to take her there, to see what it had become, with the hole in the window, where one of the bullets from my father’s gun, had entered, shattering the glass.
She eventually made her way up there on her own, and I must admit, though I would do most anything for elderly folks, especially beloved relatives, but, in hindsight, I am still glad that I didn’t take her there, and that I wasn’t there for that. To swallow that shame, that was now compounded, because it wasn’t just what the house was and had become, but the point of shame that here, this home, condemned, is where he took his life. This is how my parents, my family members, had failed to care for their home, “bought” though not paid for, from my grandmother.
Whenever I drive by now, on the rare occasion, that I go back to the area, I do look at the home. And I am thankful that I am no longer tied to it, associated with it.
I often times wonder what the home was like before, when my grandparents lived in it. I have only a few vague memories of my grandmother residing there, before moving to Panama, Hyde Park. But when relatives of mine who weren’t so dysfunctional, traumatized and mentally ill, lived there, when it wasn’t dilapidated and ramshackle-d and falling down, what was it like? Was it more of a home? More homey?
I think about the ways then that this influence of my childhood home had on me as adult, how it has impacted my concept of “home” as an adult. To me, “home” was never a sanctuary. I have had to learn to make it as such as an adult.
Quite literally, and—probably because I am covering a poetry unit with my World Literature students right now—figuratively, my ‘home’ as of late, has been re-envisioned as both my own physical, tangible space, where I live, and within me, my body, my self. As I have worked to disentangle myself from my feelings of ‘shame,’ I consider the ways in which I realize that they branch from both familial relationships, as well as locations, both heavily influencing my ideas of ‘home’.