Childhood Horrors

In fourth grade a friend told me that he was immortal. Claiming to be a demigod or wizard or alien in a highly realistic human suit had been a day-to-day occurrence with kids I’d known since Kindergarten, so by then I was more or less over it. At the time I hardly even listened to his rationale, though some part of it stuck with me, because I still remember it today: “My Dad hurts me so bad sometimes. Anyone else would have died over and over, but I didn’t, so there must be something special about me.”

Just before I moved to Minnesota I went to a fantasy play-acting camp with a paramilitary bent, where we learned to march in formation and fight with foam swords, while our councilors did acrobatic stunt shows fighting pretend monsters with real weapons. There was one kid I got to know pretty well who seemed to get special treatment: he got to hold a real mace once, even though he was barely strong enough to hold it, and the head-councilor let him talk to an ent in a vital scene for the plot of the summer, while the rest of us just sat around and watched. Once I asked him why he got to do all this cool stuff, and he just kicked at the dirt and said he didn’t know. I assumed he was just ashamed that his billionaire parents had bribed him into special privileges. And maybe that is really what happened. But he was bone-thin and entirely bald, so there’s another option too.

Maybe the first time I got a glimpse of this childhood horror, the kind that doesn’t really hit until you look back on it years later, was when my Dad took me to volunteer at our church’s evacuee shelter when Hurricane Ike hit Texas. But there wasn’t much a little kid like me could do to help, so instead I spent the morning playing with this boy. I don’t remember what we did, but we must have had a lot of fun, because when he went missing, I spent the entire afternoon running around looking for him. Eventually I found him in the quarters where the evacuees slept: a dim room full of snoring men and slowly leaking airbeds. The boy spoke to a man, probably his father, in hushed and worried Spanish. I knew I shouldn’t be there, so I left before they could see me. 

That was the only one of these examples in which I noticed the real despair of the situation in the moment. I didn’t put the pieces together just then, didn’t realize that their home might have been destroyed or they might have lost a family member in the storm. But I knew that something sad had happened, more sad than I could really comprehend, so I ran away scared.

For the most part, though, I was an oblivious kid. I thought child abuse meant spanking, couldn’t imagine someone my own age could get cancer, and assumed that all the families staying at our church would have somewhere else to live once the storm blew past. Probably that’s a good thing: the vast majority of my childhood life I was so far from tragedy that when I did see it, I didn’t recognize it. But I still can’t help but feel guilty. What really gets me is my friend who thought he was immortal: if I’d really listened to him and asked a few questions, I could’ve told an adult, and maybe they could’ve helped somehow. I’m not so sure I could’ve helped the other two, cancer and hurricanes are beyond my power to stop, and their problems are a little bit more ambiguous. Maybe the kid at camp just happened to be bald, skinny, and rich. Maybe the kid at the shelter’s Dad was talking to him about something different, and really they were safe and fine and well-insured. But at least I could’ve been a little bit more observant, and offered whatever sympathy and comfort a kid can.

But maybe I picked up on more than I’m giving myself credit for. From what I’ve seen, kids notice a lot more than most adults believe; they just can’t explain what they see, or choose not to. I could see myself seeing the darkness in all three of these stories, but ignoring it, then intentionally forgetting, because I wasn’t ready for it. After all, there was never a revelation moment when I exclaimed to myself, “Oh wow, that kid must have been going through so much!” It feels like I’ve always known, which means either I came to terms with it subconsciously, or I really did always know.

For the most part, I don’t beat myself up for not doing more. However I feel about it, though, they’re all in the past now, there’s nothing to be done. But even though I was never a kid to notice pain in my peers and heal it, that’s not impossible, and it’s beautiful when it happens. At my job working with second graders last summer, I saw kids hugging and comforting each other the day after some tragedy hit. I’m not saying that we should leave it up to kids to be each others’ therapists, or expect them to always know how to help one another. But it does happen sometimes, and it’s beautiful.