writing

Sexualizing

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Trigger Warning: Child molestation

My clearest memories begin when I was about 8.  Things before that are just blurry snapshots of isolated events – none of them particularly memorable which makes it a mystery as to why I remember them.

Fifth grade is especially vivid.  At school, they had started a new program for 5th graders.  Funny, I remember the acronym SQ3.  It involved us going from classroom to classroom for different teachers.  I didn’t like it.  Though we didn’t know it then, I was ADD and that disruption of moving from one class to another was a form of sabotage.  While I remember my 3rd and 4th grade teachers, vividly, I have no idea who taught me in the 5th grade.  Mostly, I just remember moving from one class to another.  I do kind of remember the guy who taught us History.  I wrote an extra credit report on Marco Polo.  He questioned whether I wrote it or not.  He said it sounded too grownup.  I was shocked that he would think I had cheated.  I assured him I had written it. 

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The Lyrics Acquisition Stage (Piaget’s Theory Amended)

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The Master, Leonard Cohen, wrote this in 1984.

I’ll be 70 in 7 years and the 70s were my playground. I was 10 going on 11 when they started.  It was then that I discovered the power of music to inspire, soothe, invoke love, and provoke dance.

Piaget’s Theory of the Four Cognitive Periods of childhood development are Sensorimotor stage (0–2 years old) Preoperational stage (2–7 years old) Concrete operational stage (7–11 years old) Formal operational stage (11 years old through adulthood).  Piaget was a famous Swiss child psychologist.  My friend Dale always maintained that the Fourth Stage was The Lyrics Acquisition Phase followed by the Operational Stage as the Fifth.

I agree.

I came of age during the 70s and the early 80s.  Didn’t dive into real adulthood, whatever real might mean, until I was 25.  Before that, I was a party girl.  Party girl in the sense that I was out with friends all the time — all the time — loading lyrics into my brain.  We were dancing, we were at concerts, we were cruising around listening to the car stereo, we were in someone’s basement listening to Pink Floyd until 2, 3, and 4 a.m.

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I want to think again of nothing.

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Photo by Connie Kinsey

I want to think again of nothing.  There must have been a time my brain wasn’t churning, churning, churning.  The incessant monkey mind silenced.  But it’s probably a pipe dream.  I read recently, that even in the womb we dream. If we dream, we must think.  But about what?  Surely not the things I think about all the time.  Surely not.  Please. All that thinking just wears me out.

I want to think again of recess – that wonderful part of our day when we left it all in the classroom and went outside to the bright sun.  I usually played jacks.  When we came back in, the teacher would read aloud from a chapter book.  What glorious days were those.

I want to think again of the latest book I’ve read.  To ponder where the story is going and imagine the characters.  I want to be lost in that scenery, invested in those lives, living vicariously through both protagonists and villains.  If one is too busy to read, one is too busy.

I want to think again of the sounds of the forest and the garden.  I want to sit in my garden, close my eyes, and just listen to the wind rustling through tree leaves, the sound of animals scurrying here and there in the forest, and hear the heart-pulling yet peaceful call of the mourning dove.  Who is she mourning?  What is she mourning?  Does she too want to think of what was?

I want to think again of endless possibilities of what I might be when I grow up.  All the possible pearls one might pull out of the oyster.  The curiosity about where life might lead me.  I’ve been led and there aren’t a lot of years ahead of me.  I think of the inevitable things.

I want to think again of nothing. Blissful, peaceful nothing.  Still and quiet.  Feel the wind on my skin and sound of mourning doves and the scent of late-blooming roses.  I want to close my eyes so I see nothing—nothing that needs to be done or fixed or some other unpleasant chore.

Nothing.  I want to think again of nothing.

A riff on the poem Starlings in Winter by Mary Oliver

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