A Home in the Heavens

The process of the move required us to change our living arrangements a few times. Most of this was necessitated by the fact that we were building the house, and the construction loan could not be approved until the first house we were living in was sold, and we had no other mortgage. At least that is the understanding I have.

When we made the first change, we went to live with an aunt and uncle. All of their children had grown up and moved away, so they had a little bit of room. I shared a room with one of my younger brothers instead of having a room of my own as I had been used to. That is not such a big thing, but I can remember resenting that -- and I still was not convinced that this move was needed. That is a typical self-centered outlook that a child of that age might have, I think. If that were the only thing that had happened, I would have been fine, I am pretty sure.

I nosed around the new digs and ran across something I wish I had not. My uncle (I don't suppose it was my aunt, although that could have been the case) had quite a collection of adult material. It was of both the graphic type and written type. It was stashed in various places, and actually pretty hard to miss. The former was quite explicit, and the later consisted of items of expository and creative natures both melded together. It is not that I had not seen such things before. I had. Other children had shown me the graphic material before, but I had not had this level of access where I could take it off by myself somewhere. That is not a good thing for a child.

I would consider this a point of damage in my life. Some damage we are born with. Some damage is caused by what befalls us. Some is a little of both. How this falls on that spectrum is something I can never be sure of, but I am sure that this event at the very least was a trigger point. The problem is that from that day forth, I have had something that I have to deal with from time to time that I am not sure I deal with as well as others who have not had that exposure, and I don't fool myself that the damage is limited to just such material, although that certainly still is included.

Don't try to tell me that products from that booming industry are at worst a victimless crime. I am not buying that line of crap. Nothing you can argue, despite the strength of your logic, will outweigh the truth I carry with me in pain and suffering. I am sure that can be said of the people involved in the production of it as well. Yeah, you gave them money. Yeah, they had a choice (although they may not have seen it that way if they were desperate enough) and did not have to do those things. Yeah, they were (for the most part, at least) adults, and supposedly, no children were harmed. If you talk about denigrating women, I see this as clearly head and shoulders above making it difficult to finance an abortion, and I feel sick at which of the two seems to make more importance in the political world to deal with. Yeah, I get it. Freedom. Without responsibility. I just don't buy into it that way. Bottom line comparatively is take responsibility! In one case it leads us one way. In the other, it goes another way.

From there we moved to living in a pop-up tent trailer. It was kind of like extended camping. It had a stove. It even had a toilet. But it was even more crowded, and it didn't take long to stop being a fun change. But I learned to deal with that level of deprivation. I think that experience made it easier for me to deal with deprivation that came later in my life in the military. Very little that I was asked to do was as bad as that, so I could shrug my shoulders and deal without complaining an inordinate amount. Others would pitch a fit. I could commiserate with them, but was not compelled to complain as much as they would. So, despite the fact that I found that experience unpleasant in many ways, I think I was actually able to gain something positive from it, that I was not aware of at the time.

Eventually, we moved into the basement. It was a walk-out. It had a full kitchen, which later became the summer kitchen. It had a 3/4 bathroom. I was old enough for showers, so that was not a big deal for me. It might have been for my younger brothers, one of whom was still in diapers. (I remember this because I got to change them from time to time) This was a step up. I was making friends at my new school. It was painful, and I was not nearly as popular as I had been used to. I also think I had issues of shame, which turned me more introverted and shy. But I managed to get past that and even remember having a birthday party while we were living down stairs, as I remember calling it. My parents had an actual bedroom, that later became mine. The rest of us had one big area that we all shared as our bedroom. We hung up blankets as makeshift dividers. It was better but it was still rough.

Eventually, the upstairs was finished enough to move everyone else upstairs. My parents had their bedroom directly above what was now my bedroom. One of my brothers had his own room. The two youngest shared another. My forth brother did not live with us, but was in a state institution at the time. That was actually less of a stigma than most people would have thought. It just was, in my understanding at least. I understood it, and anyone who could not, well that was just their problem.

With everyone else moving upstairs, I had privacy at last, although possibly too much. Life was starting to appear more normal, as all kids compare notes on their living conditions at some time or another, it seems. But normal was just an appearance. I don't know what could have been done to improve things for me, or my brothers for that matter. I am not sure what kind of damage they may have sustained in this whole thing. I am not sure if they even know for themselves, or if it is important to them. Landscaping, etc. was still a work in process. There was still a lot that made this place I lived in something that was not easy to be proud of and easy to be embarrassed about. I got past that with a few people, but never really got all the way past that, I think. It hampered me, for the good and the bad, in my social involvement. It wasn't a dump. It wasn't something for Home & Gardens magazine, either. It was just a little too rough around the edges to take a lot of pride in. I was aware of that in more than my own sense of it. That may have been where the problem for me lay. I cannot say for sure...