Day 33 The Girl's Room

 I'm lying in a single bed between Gray and Eva in 'the girls room'. The girls I'm referring to are my three aunts, all over seventy years of age, some even older. 

We are in the original family home for the week. I write about it often, because I write about home often. Eva asked me this evening if I have more memories of being on the farm or of the homes I've lived in with my little family of Stockil-Smiths. 

It was a good question. I suppose the significance of my memories on the farm is that they are almost all painted with the brush of a brain that wasn't fully formed yet. The frontal lobe is only fully formed in one's mid twenties. The time I met Stephen. It comes as no surprise that the time when I was finally ready to commit to fully adult relationship was when I fully became an adult myself And so everything I have shared with Stephen has been through the lens of a person who literally knows her mind. 

But before then, my goodness, the lenses changed almost daily. And they blurred the world into many vivid, grotesque and magical colours. And the farm is where most of those memories still exist. There are still places here that live in a fantastical corner of my mind even though my adult brain knows they most certainly did not happen the way I chose to experience, and then remember, them. 

Lying in 'the girls room' this evening I think of my three aunts. All pivotal people in my life. All with their own narratives to tell. And yet this bedroom was theirs when things were as skewed and confusing and beautiful as they were for me. What was it like having three teenage girls all sharing one bedroom? I'm trying to remember what furniture was in here when I was a child because I know that my grandmother kept the room much the same, but this time the girls in the beds were her grandchildren. 

I suppose thats why our childhood homes become such legendary spaces in our minds. Because those legendary spaces were constructed and remembered by brains that were not able to reason or control impulses or emotionally regulate. Its no wonder we all need to see therapists and work through 'childhood trauma'. If you dont have childhood trauma then you didnt have a childhood. The two are actually synonymous with each other. It is vital that we make sense of our younger selves, and the memories we have forged, from the perspective of our older selves because we are one in the same person. And we need to treat our younger selves with a little more tolerance and forgiveness. 

And as I listen to the deep sleeping breath of my children I realise that 'the girls room' will become an anchor for them too. That they will also view this place, for a long time through the lense of a child. My only prayer is that one day, when they return to this space as adults, that they will feel as loved as I felt in this place, our childhood home.