Take Me Home Tonight, by by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld
October 4, 2014 Martha Thomases 6 Comments
Perhaps this won’t shock you as much as it shocked me, but I’m still reeling. It seems that the world does not revolve around me.
Let’s consider the implications.
My memories of my childhood involve a lot of loneliness. I read a lot. I played by myself a lot. I stared out the window a lot. I talked to my dog a lot. At least, that’s the way it felt to me.
Memories of high school were even worse. Now I did all of those things, but I was away from home, surrounded by people with whom I didn’t grow up. On top of that, I hit puberty and didn’t know how to act around boys (whom I only saw on rare occasions, going to a girls’ school as I did). No one ever asked me out on a date (or what constituted a date under those artificial conditions). My dog was over 500 miles away.
What’s the big deal? All of this happened more than four decades ago. Why do I keep harping on it? Why is it so much a part of my identity?
Especially since it might not be true.
Recently, I went to a family wedding, where other guests included not just family and strangers, but people with whom I grew up, including my former brother-in-law. He kindly gave me a ride back to the hotel, and, talking to him, described a completely different version of myself.
Not someone so sensitive that every word, every breeze, cut like a knife. Not an outcast living on the edge of society, desperate for a kind word.
No, my brother-in-law described another kid, the one on the swim team, someone who swam and ate Jell-o powder right out of the box.
Add this to what my high school friends have been telling me. I remember being so lonely on Saturday nights that I thought my chest would collapse in longing. I remember watching the cute blonde girls hiking up their skirts so they could get tan legs in the spring, while my attempts just resulted in heat rash. I remember never getting asked out.
My friends don’t remember those parts. They remember me telling jokes in assembly. They say they envied my commitment to political causes. They say I didn’t seem to care what anybody thought.
(I desperately cared what everybody thought.)
So here’s the thing. Can my memory coexist on the same plane of reality as the memories of other people. Can we all be right?
And if we can’t, who is wrong? If I was actually accepted, tolerated, even enjoyed by other people as a child and teenager, is my life a lie?
It seems to me that no one has a great adolescence. The girls I thought breezed through high school have since confessed to me that they felt horrible most of the time. The boys I thought had all the power in relationships felt gawky and clumsy, just like I did (or, if not exactly like I did, at least parallel to what I did). Not one of us ever went to a malt shop or had any other Life with Archie experiences.
Does it make any difference at this point? If not, how can I stop dreaming about the town where I grew up?
Can someone retroactively take me to a sock hop?
Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, could go visit Riverdale if she really wanted, but she doesn’t.
Howard Cruse
October 4, 2014 - 7:14 am
It’s the same with me. I’ve learned (and to some degree realized at the time) that my inner world was very different from the generally successful-kid side that was apparent to others. I think, though, that my life as a kid who played by himself with his puppets and often felt like a sissy was much more formative to my true adult inner self. That’s not to say that the practice I had putting on a successful front as a kid didn’t help me to come across with some air of confidence once I was a grown-up.
Ed Sedarbaum
October 4, 2014 - 8:36 am
The veracity issue plagues not just our memories of ourselves but our memories of other people. I’ve recently become convinced that the memories of, say, a parent or sibling — changes over time. When I was six, memories of my mother doing something when I was five, for example, included the picture of my mother I had continued to develop over that year. When I remembered that incident at age 14, the scene was populated with all the things I learned about my mother in the intervening years. And so on through the ages. This was driven home to me when I paid a visit to the apartment I spent my first ten years in. As soon as I stuck my head in the door, I was struck by how much smaller the rooms and the apartment were than I remembered. And suddenly, when I pictured me family in that cramped apartment, I could picture my parents as a young couple, probably anxious about their ability to create a good home and future for their still new children. The difference between the young, hardworking, probably fearful mother and father I was suddenly picturing, and the mother and father I had usually envisioned in my memories (the parents I had come to know), was jolting enough to make me cry. Probably these were many varieties of tears, but foremost were the tears of compassion for that struggling couple and for the unfairness of my having stocked my memories with unrealistic pictures of who they were.
So if it was true for them, it was probably true for me. I will probably never know whether I was as fucked-up as a kid as I picture myself, or whether later traumas in insecurities have altered my childhood memories of myself.
PS — one thing I’m doing that helps the fucked-up second grader I remember is that I volunteer in a second grade classroom. It helps me understand who I maybe really was, PLUS, it gives me a chance to take second grade over with competence.
Rene
October 4, 2014 - 8:53 am
I don’t feel quite like you guys do, regarding the past. I don’t have a coherent narrative within me, and I’m quite aware of that. I mean, I do have a narrative in the way that I know which events left a bigger mark, but when I try to reconstruct my day-to-day experiences, they are so obviously inconsistent.
I changed a lot from year to year, from day to day even, sometimes. There was that one horrible year when I was the most bullied kid at my class, and then there was that other year when I was sort of popular and extroverted and had many friends. I don’t know how it is in America, but in Brazil we go to all classes with the same people for a year, and the next year everything can change, as people are assigned to different rooms, etc.
So that group of people that were horrible to you are replaced by a much nicer group of people, etc.
My life at home I remember having miserable parts (never got along well with my Dad), nice parts (my memories of solitary pleasures like reading books aren’t tinged with melancholy, they’re quite nice), and mixed parts (I sometimes got along well with my younger brother and my mother, other times not so well).
I can’t say if my life was a comedy or a tragedy, it changed all the time.
Martha Thomases
October 4, 2014 - 8:57 am
Howard, I find it impossible to believe that you were ever anything less than adorable.
Ed, volunteering has absolutely let me take control of my fears. I get to work out all sorts of inner conflicts and still get thanked for doing something.
Rene, I went to several different schools, so I hear some of what you’re saying. For me, at least, my self-image did not change much from one venue to the next.
Liz Haase
October 4, 2014 - 11:00 am
Martha,
As a fellow Youngstownian and your friend during those difficult years, I too, loved your humor and your political spirit but I also loved and love your enormous warmth and caring. Adolescence, like getting older, is not for the faint of heart. I almost went to a high school reunion and found myself transported back to all my awkwardness and envy of the popular kids of that time. Go figure!
George Haberberger
October 4, 2014 - 1:51 pm
The Firesign Theater says: “Everything you know is wrong.”
Swayze,
October 4, 2014 - 2:39 pm
I can vouch for your fabulousness in high school. In fact, you were slightly intimidating to some of us who were more interested in, shall we say, trivial pursuits?
Martha Thomases
October 4, 2014 - 2:44 pm
More trivial than comic books?
Mike Gold
October 4, 2014 - 3:13 pm
Wow. So your life didn’t suck. Geez, that sucks.
Martha, I don’t think you’re old enough to have been able to go to sock hops. My sister did all the time, and she’s now 70. By the time I was going to dances (my sister taught me how to dance), everybody was doing the Twist and the Twist was *not* done at sock hops. I could jitterbug — my chiropractor won’t let me to that anymore, nor will he permit me to jump out of airplanes anymore, damn it — but I missed out on the sock hop experience. And I’m a few years older than you. Not wiser, just older.
Oh, and George… The Firesign Theater was right.
Martha Thomases
October 4, 2014 - 3:19 pm
Mike, my prep school had sock hops. And that was one of the least backward things about it.
Mike Gold
October 4, 2014 - 3:21 pm
Oh, yeah. That makes sense to me, living in Connecticut. They probably still hold sock hops.
After all, wearing stockings is a sign of devil worship.
Tom Brucker
October 4, 2014 - 7:57 pm
I met a secure, worldly woman freshman year and she changed my life. Forty years later I am sure I am a better person. No sock hops for me either.
Mid life is all about rewriting your own history. And discovering a closer truth. I felt I knew everyone in my home village, but after so many years away I know very few. I too dream about going back and regaining the familiarity I deserve!
Mindy Newell
October 5, 2014 - 4:08 pm
We moved to Bayonne when I was 13. WORST time for a girl. Being a “tomboy” (which was not cool back then, 1967, made it worse. Having no breasts and not menstruating yet made it “worser.” Then I made the swim team, so all the boys liked me, which made all the other girls mad. Got made fun of, snickered at, all the “Mean Girls” shit. No friends until junior year, and that was only because one of the “cool” boys asked me out (just to get back at his real girlfriend, with whom he was fighting) and we”clicked” and he dropped the girlfriend and started dating me. Anyway, I went my own way and survived, as we all do.
The reason I bring this up was that about 15 years ago I went to a high school reunion night at the Jewish Community Center–not so much because I wanted to see anyone, but I didn’t want to stay home. And don’t you know all those “Mean Girls”came up to me and kissed and hugged me and told their husbands that either (1) they always admired me because I “just went my own way”; or (2) we were such great friends.
Assholes. At least they made me laugh.
Mindy Newell
October 5, 2014 - 4:09 pm
Oh, yeah, and I heard the word “intimidating,” too, that night.
R. Maheras
October 7, 2014 - 9:09 am
Martha — During a military training class I once attended, we were required to sit in front of a studio television camera and give a relatively brief (two-three minutes or so) on-camera statement that was broadcast on closed-circuit TV to all the training classes in the building.
At the time, even though the other students and faculty were not sitting in the studio with me, I knew as soon as the red light on the camera came on, they’d all be watching. So I was nervous as hell, since I’d never publicly spoken before an audience of any great size, and never to a large audience of mostly strangers.
When my turn finally came, I was a wreck inside. My fight or flight warning instincts were at DEFCON 1, my mouth was drier than a Sahara Desert alum factory, my knees were weak, and I wished I were anywhere else except on that stool in front of that camera. When the red light finally came on, I was pretty much on autopilot. I quickly babbled my piece, finished, and felt I’d totally botched things with the whole world watching.
As I walked out of the studio to let the next poor slob go in, I asked some of my classmates out in the hall how I did. They replied, almost in unison, “You did great!”
“Really?” I said incredulously. “Yeah! You nailed it!”
So perhaps you nailed more of your teen years than you realized, and simply never noticed during your normal teen self-flagellation process. After all, sometimes we’re harder on ourselves than anyone else.
Whitney
October 9, 2014 - 11:51 am
M –
What a GREAT lie to uncover and finally reject…Now what? What will it be like walking around eating Kool-Aid powder in a world where you are loved…?
Watch yourself at those sockhops. Closest thing to group sex that I have ever experienced. BYO-BC.