There must be something to this stuff, because I don’t want to write it and I don’t want to remember. I picture who the people are who know me and read this and I imagine what they will think. It’s all terribly silly. It’s nothing I wouldn’t say at a meeting or to a close friend.
The first one is not as awful as the second. My birthday party in I think third grade was a barbecue in the backyard. Before my father died, he had grilled famous ribs for my birthday and other times. My birthday falls around Memorial Day. Maybe they were trying to keep a little of that atmosphere, but when he was alive, my parties involved relatives who wanted to get together and gab. Third graders who spent all day with each other were not so keen to do that.
I have pictures of this party and I’m wearing outrageously floral, unfortunate pants. Some of the girls are wearing ponchos, which were fashionable at that time. My mother’s side of my family did attend. My father’s did not. The trauma for me involves the fact that beyond eating, there were no planned activities. For a bunch of eight year olds.
Now I’ve raised my own children beyond the age of kiddie parties and believe me I understand that are a truly awful duty of parenting. If I had my life to live over again, we would have had a no party policy, as I know some others had. In my experience with these things, there are bound to be awful moments, if not an awful whole thing. But why my mother didn’t plan any activities is beyond me. I guess she probably didn’t think it through, and realize that eight year olds just don’t like food and each other enough to spend a few hours with food, each other, and nothing else.
So the memory there is more the memory of the feeling that everyone was dying of boredom. My mother’s sister, my aunt, did pull it out of the awful by quickly devising a scavenger hunt. The kids then ran around the neighborhood looking for ……. stuff. Imagine doing that today? Not likely.
The other awful party memory involves my birthday in fifth or sixth grade, or I may have combined them in my memory. This was the time of the sleep over, and it was also a time when I had friends. Two awful things. Maybe three. One was playing some kind of stripping game, in sleeping bags, of course, and threatening to (I hope we didn’t actually do it) deprive one of the girls of her sleeping bag. I hope she’s over the trauma, since clearly I am not. The other was a girl that we (it was my party, I should take total responsibility) invited just to pick on. How awful. Memories like this fill me with fear for people in general. I’m a pacifist, as peace loving as I can be, but I participated in this. I remember taking her glasses. I know we did other stuff as well.
The third disturbing memory of the two parties during fifth and sixth grade may actually tie into my loss of those friends, though probably not. The first year my mother’s husband totally lost his cool about the noise all night. The next year, either my mother had told him to cool it, or he spent the night elsewhere, but he didn’t complain and I yelled at my friends all night to be quiet.
I’ll try to make some sense of this later, in terms of drinking, sobriety, and oldtimerishness. Now I’m going to go somewhere to cry!
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