Mar 5/09. In this writing class, Regan led us into a meditation and guided us through different images we have of our childhood up until we were 12.
The first image that I saw was a 5-year old girl watching a bunch of dead bodies floating on the ocean within meters. She was very scared as she knew that she and her family could be the next 6 bodies to float beside them…
The second image that popped up was a how a policeman sexually harassed that same girl, then only 7 years old and how he threatened her not to tell her parents..
The third image was watching her mother dividing the good 1/3 part of the rotten apples for her little children because that was all she could afford back then, 50 cents for a bag of 8 rotten apples from Safeway.
The fourth image was witnessing her mother cutting small pieces of lean pork meat out of the pork bones to make spring rolls for dinner guests because she could not afford to pay for the meat itself.
The fifth image was a 12 year old girl sitting by the window, looking forward for her mother to arrive home safely from work. She felt proud of her mother’s choice to work the hard, long, late job in order not to go on the “welfare” route …
The sixth image was the concrete box for Dad’s coffin and which we could not afford to buy. Five hundred dollars was too much for us at that time but we wanted to put Dad’s coffin into a concrete box in order to prevent the wood from getting rotten over the years. The meager life insurance money we got was only enough to buy the cheapest location, which is at the bottom of the hill for his grave …
No wonder I always choose to start telling my life story from the time I was 12 and onwards…
No wonder why I don’t know of any childhood games to play with my kids. It is because I didn’t have a normal childhood life like everyone else had. There was nothing beautiful about it to be remembered but just a bunch of horrible and sad memories that I so wish I could have brain surgery to permanently delete it so that they could never pop up anymore … :(((