If you think about it, we build much of our adult lives on fragments of our childhood. No matter who raised us, or where we were raised, elements of those early years are more permanently imprinted on our brains than what we did yesterday.
Just try it. Think about yesterday, especially if it was a rather ordinary day. Then think about your childhood. What pops up first? For me, it’s always my neighborhood, though maybe that is truer now, because I am again walking the same sidewalks, passing through the same parks, and noting those street corners where in grade school, high school my friends and I would stand, chat while waiting for a certain group of boys to join us. This is certainly part of my past–as well as my careers, my marriage and my family.
Because I am a writer, I often focus on those life moments that helped create who I am, and it is also logical that they often make their way into my fiction.
ONE EXAMPLE: THE FACTS OF LIFE
SEX, learning about sex, is a major part of growing up. Even in the lower grades, I began to read or hear some strange words, not knowing or understanding what they meant. And because I somehow knew they were adult topics, I didn’t always ask my mother. Instead I looked them up in the dictionary. I looked up sex, intercourse; I also looked up rape after reading an article in the Chicago Tribune. I was trying to understand…
WRITERS USE PAST EXPERIENCE
Below are paragraphs from my novel, When the Cottonwoods Blew. In this selection, you’re in the mind of my MC, Ella Singleton. She is remembering an event when she was pre-adolescent; then later, we have her thoughts as an adult nurse who works in the maternity unit of a major Chicago hospital :
Sex, something about two people and genitalia? So look up that word..but why would you let anyone, except your mother or maybe your father, see your private parts, your genitalia thingies? Weird, scary. Was that why the boys tried to lift the girls’ skirts? And when Jean’s mom and dad were kissing, right in front of us, in their living room…was that sex?
Then, the kids at school: It’s not the cottonwood trees, Dumb Ass. It’s RAPE. A kid got grabbed off the street and raped, near the Courtyard building. Don’t you know anything?
But rape, the word, the sound so blunt, something you weren’t supposed to know or say as a kid, a word I did try to understand reading the dictionary… and now an adult, on the maternity unit, that unspeakable word, a violation that could disturb the smooth functioning of the unit, our patient care…something we could not control, something we were furiously angry about…
It’s true, that when writing fiction, we often pull from life experience. As children, my best friend Jeanie and I liked to pretend we were scared, so what could be better than pretending the rock garden in Jeanie’s yard was really a boiling oil pit, one that might kill us, if we fell into it. And to deal with life’s many questions, unknown answers…to feel freedom, push away fears, we explored our neighborhood on bikes. We became The Two Tornadoes of Wood Street and Our Country.
And do you REMEMBER: Step on a crack, break your mother’s back?
Once I stuffed Kleenex in my sweater to look like the my older cousin who had just been married. Come on Beth…I was in Kindergarten! Such decisions always come back to haunt…at the dinner table, my mother asks why my sweater is fitting me differently. Embarrassing?? Yes, and awful. But I was just a kid growing up with questions, and questions always feed our writing lives, and our fiction.
From Cottonwoods… Ella’s childhood memory…
She had looked up the word in the school dictionary: Rape: sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury.
Sex. Intercourse.
Okay, look up those words, try to understand…sex, something about two people and genitalia. Look up that word. But why would you let anyone, except your mom or maybe your dad see your private parts, your genitalia thingies? Weird, scary. Was that why the boys tried to lift the girls’ skirts?
But Ella grew up, became an RN, her patient on a given day a pregnant teenager…
And there was her patient Candy, young vulnerable, frightened, the older man with her, not her father, but maybe her abuser…maybe why she was pregnant. Did it ever end?
FINAL THOUGHTS
Because of our modern media, we have even more access to frightening stories that still happen to children, to young girls…but in some ways it also provides an awakening. We no longer live in a fog of what shall I do, a fog of worry. Instead, we can use our phones to report something untoward, some fear, what we have seen. Often we can photograph aspects of the evil that is occurring, or call the police. We can be women and men who protect children, both girls and boys.
Though this is a serious piece, containing some serious life aspects…LIFE IS OFTEN ABOUT EXPERIENCES, both good and not so good..THAT WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO FORGET. As parents, older sisters, brothers, even neighbors it is our duty to protect the young, the innocent, both boys and girls. In time, we all learn about sex…and we hope that the young have an explanation of what sex is before they experience any of it. Parents need to provide some explanation about sex before children might be faced with some decision; the explanation must be gentle, truthful, positive and not frightening. And because of what is available in media today, it would be better to bring up aspects of sex before our children and grandchildren encounter it with no preparation. Knowledge can be POWER, but also PROTECTION. Thanks for reading.
