I had a hard time getting to sleep last night. It happens; I was apprehensive about a couple of things and got to thinking about them, and then I started thinking about some of the things I experienced as a kid that were treated as "normal" or "you're too sensitive" that probably wouldn't fly today.
I've spoken before about being thrown in the deep end of a pool at the age of about six (by a swim instructor). It was the last day of classes, they were letting us walk out on the low dive board and then jump in. I walked out, looked down, and was like "nope."
A reasonable instructor - or at least, me, if I had been in charge - would have said "That's fine, honey, come back in. If you want to jump in you can do so off the side, or you can climb down the ladder, or you don't have to go in at all."
Instead, the college kid picked me up and threw me in the pool. Oh, there were other instructors in the water, it was safe, but it still scared me badly. (My mom says she was shocked, and was so shocked she didn't say anything, but later said she should have. That was the last set of lessons I had at that place)
***
But the bigger thing was in seventh grade, when we did "outdoor education." We went somewhere - I guess it was like a summer camp place? and stayed in cabins for at least one and maybe two nights (I've blocked some of it from my memories) and did outdoorsy stuff and....honestly it was kind of miserable.
I guess some of it was "wilderness survival" stuff which was kind of a laugh given that we were all pampered suburban kids and if we'd wound up alone in the woods the best we could do was sit tight and wait for rescue (this being the very early 80s, cell phones as a common thing were still 20 years off).
One thing I remember on the "survival" hike was being told you could eat the inner bark of pine trees for "emergency" nourishment (???) and also the instructor commented I'd be "valuable" to the group because I wore glasses and the lenses' refracting power could be used to start a fire. (I think that's bunk, I've tried it and it's never worked) and when I read "Lord of the Flies" a couple years later and shuddered and realized *I* wouldn't be valuable to the group, my glasses would be, and they could just as easily kill me and take them....
One of the other mildly abusive things they did, that I think would NEVER be done today, was the claim that a "deranged murderer" had escaped in the area and we had to be careful. I suppose it was a scared-straight thing, and an attempt to keep girls from sneaking out from their cabin at night, and boys from sneaking out of THEIRS and them meeting up in the woods for some late night "experimentation" but....yikes. Most of us were at least savvy enough to think "but if that were really true they wouldn't take us out in the woods, would they?" but some of us still worried.
One night they took us on a night hike (which puts further lie to "dangerous person in the vicinity") and that was frankly pretty cool but that was the only good memory I have of the trip.
The worst part was the other night they showed a movie in the dining hall. I do not remember the title - it was some terrible 1960s British horror film that was an "anthology" of shorter pieces; I think it was people who were condemned to Hell for some reason or other and suffered tortures (? this was school, not church, camp). I suppose if I saw it now I'd mostly find it dumb and campy - as I remember the acting was pretty bad. But. I was crammed in a dark dining hall with like 150 other students, most of whom were relishing shrieking at every twist of the plot (so it was very loud). (And I suspect at least a few couples realized there was cover of darkness for them to do a bit of canoodling, too).
But then, one of the stories turned on someone who died by being burned in a fire, and that was just....it....for me. Between the shrieking and that, I couldn't, I melted down.
Because you see: earlier that spring, my paternal grandmother had died after multiple months in the hospital, because she was badly burned in an accidental fire in her kitchen. Yes, the people running the outdoor ed didn't know that, but....at that moment it was too much and I somehow managed to push my way out the back door and found myself on the back steps, near the trashcans, and I sat down and just started to cry.
(ETA: It's entirely possible it was the original (1972) "Tales from the Crypt" - I remember the "homicidal maniac dressed as Santa Claus" bit referenced in a summary of the movie, and the one with the guy who thought he survived a car crash (but really didn't) could have been the died-by -fire thing that upset me so much. So maybe not so terrible and campy, but I really really dislike horror movies and always have, and I still argue it was a bad choice for them to show)
Interestingly - at least to adult me, teenager me didn't even realize this - NONE of the adults who were supposed to be watching over us cared or even noticed one of the kids had run out the back door and disappeared. One of my classmates, who was sort of a friend of mine, bless her, DID notice, and she went out back and found me and I tearfully explained to her what was wrong (leaning heavily on the "I lost my grandma to burns" because I couldn't really articulate that the noise got to me; I thought being sensitive to noise was an abnormal thing and I didn't want to admit to it). She sat with me back there and talked to me, mostly focusing on the cat my family had at that time (she knew about Sam because I'd talked about him at school) so I calmed down and we just sat out there until the movie was over.
But it was kind of an awful and isolating thing there, to be so alone in a crowd, and have something that was, in today's lingo, "triggering" for a recent situation I'd suffered, and feel like none of the people with authority cared.
Also now as an adult: why the HECK did they show us a horror movie? There are dozens of comedies that would have been perfectly appropriate, there would even have been some tween-appropriate action movies. (It may have been "what can we get a print of?" - this was even before widespread VCRs, and it was shown with an old style movie projector). But it was kind of a horrible choice for sensitive kids who were already discombobulated and unhappy about being away from home, who had been drinking "bug juice" and eating the kind-of-crummy camp food, and been not sleeping enough (it was loud and humid in the cabins), and everything else.
(Thought: I wonder if memories of that are why I flatly say "I don't camp" when people talk about doing camping vacations?)
Then again: when I was in graduate school we went "camping" as part of a field trip to see forest types in Southern Illinois for a vegetation-management class. And it was FINE. It was good, even. But there were some important differences:
- it was a much smaller group. I think with the students, our professor, and his wife, it was only about a dozen of us, and we split up (men and women) between two largish cabins so we all got a bottom bunk and we were able to space out from each other
- we were older: most of us were in our mid-20s, a couple in their early 30s, I think my advisor and his wife were in their fifties? Better than 13 year olds - 13 is a bad year even for kids without weird stuff going on in their lives.
- we all fundamentally liked one another and got along, unlike the massive group of school kids where several kids who were the kids who just bullied other kids mercilessly were present, or the mean girls who liked to act like they set the rules of how everyone else acted.
- our "evening entertainment" was different - one night we went to one of those sort-of- faux Italian mall restaurants, and I remember two of the women in our group re-enacted the famous "Bohemian Rhapsody" head-banging scene from Wayne's World (because the song came over the Muzak) and the other night we sat around a campfire and mostly told borderline-dirty jokes (instead of things like ghost stories). A lot of amusement over the fact that the person in charge of picking out snacks found a brand of mini chocolate chip cookies called "Scrumpies," which, at the time at place, a "scrump bunny" was what would now be called "a friend with benefits" so a lot of jokes were made about that.
I mean, I still didn't love sleeping on a mattress that smelled like mildew and was 1" thick, and I didn't love that the washrooms were a 100 meter hike from the cabin, but it was BETTER.
But I think about how people deride Gen Z for being "soft" and really I think maybe.....in general, they are a bit more humanely treated than Gen X was? There was a lot of stuff done to us in the name of "toughening us up" that I think just enhanced some of the anxiety some of us naturally had.
No comments:
Post a Comment