‘iPoetry-Paper Poetry Prompt
Some of the Ghosts Are Good At Hiding
For prompt “The Ghost of the Past”
A dark spot in my memories? Where did my childhood go?
Welcome to my impromptu therapy session:
The girl was just being a little lightheartedly curious. “How did you feel as a kid? What was your Mom like?”
“It was okay. She didn’t kill me, and she kept me alive till I was 18.” I think that I half-smiled and had a deer-in-the-headlights look. It was the first time, at about 20 years of age, that I realized that I couldn’t, didn’t, didn’t want to, remember anything before my seventeenth birthday.
There were ghosts and demons lurking back there. Fear and hatred, confusion, disconnection, and failure.
Note: This took place in the 1950’s and 60’s and psychiatry and mental health were ridiculed topics in middle-class conversations. And my parents were products of an earlier, even less empathetic generation.
Maybe I should add a trigger warning here. Not that others haven’t been through worse, I was never physically abused. Psychological abuse is sneakier and harder to explain.
