My children want to know. How did I behave as a child? What did I do to entertain myself? What was it like back in the olden days? They’re curious about how my parents raised me and how that differs from the present day. They want to avoid any mistakes my parents may have made.
It seems to me that childhood memories are sketchy at best, invented mostly, and largely based on what pissed off your mom and dad the most.
“For heaven’s sake, put on some shoes.”
“Why don’t you play with a girlfriend? What do you do outside alone all day?”
“Get off those monkey bars. You’re going to fall and break a leg.”
Up to age 11, my parents labelled me as a tomboy. A truth. I was a feral little creature. I hated wearing shoes, and even with the thistles and rattlesnakes in southern Alberta, I was outdoors and barefoot much of the time. The calluses on my feet — thicker than shoe leather. I could run on gravel roads without wincing. There were other kids to play with, but mostly, I preferred to be with my horse or off on my own. Despite sinister proclamations pervading the Internet of late, being alone is not a bad thing for some humans.
Being stuck inside was torture to my eight-year-old self. Because of that, winters in my hometown were gruelling. Not only did the minus 20 weather force boots on you, but the freezing wind and 6-foot snowdrifts made the world smaller. My horse pastured on a farm during the winter. And it was almost impossible to get to my make-believe castle in the coulee. Coulee comes from the French word coulée, for lava flow. Gives you a picture of the terrain not far from my childhood home — rippling hills gouged deep into the flat sweeping prairie like some volcanic wound.
Yes, I had a castle — only a single room, a cavelike indentation in a rock cliff and, as I remember it, very high up from the coulee’s bottom. A space scooped out of the side of the cliff as if formed by the impact of a meteorite. You had to traverse a narrow ledge to get to this site, which made it the perfect private hideout. During the winter months, the coulee collected drifting snow, and you couldn’t even find that slender ledge, or my one-room castle.
My castle room was strewn with rocks of various sizes and shapes. A table, complete with rock dishes, an armchair with a smooth stone seat and back. It faced the coulee cliffs, and a view almost all the way down to the South Saskatchewan River. I sat there most summer afternoons, chewing a piece of speargrass, contemplating the marvel of my private spot.
A shrine took up the rear corner — two rocks leaning against one another in a triangular shape, which might’ve done as an oven, but I was a tomboy. Back then, cooking was never foremost on my mind. It became an altar where I left bouquets of dandelions and thistles to no god in particular, admiring the arrangement as I swept my castle floor with a branch. I allowed nothing from the house in my castle. I was a purist in that way. Nothing allowed that might jerk me back into the real world. Even my ornaments were stones.
Despite the dreamy sitting around in my castle, I was a physically active child. In the summer, when we holidayed at my parents’ hometown of Manitou Beach, I spent hours on the monkey bars. They were situated right on the beach, stuck in the sand. I would hoist myself up, contort my skinny body through the rungs, and sit on top. Perched up there, I’d admire all the people below, women lathered in baby oil lying on blankets with their eyes closed, men swinging their babies at the edge of the water. I entertained these same sorts of contortions back home in Redcliff too, in winter, wearing one of the many frilly dresses I detested, shimmying up the inside of the door frame — a foot and a hand pushed against each side. At the top, I became taller than all of them. A feat that my dad found fascinating. Mom, not so much so.
“That’s not very ladylike,” she’d say.
My parents got me a doll for Christmas one year. They insisted Santa had left it, of course, but I was aware from a young age that he hadn’t. My brother, who was five years older, had gleefully let me in on the secret before I started school.
The doll was almost as tall as me, and it walked, a jerky, unnatural walk. I found it scary with its fake blue eyes and yellow hair. I could never imagine it as a cheery little girlfriend. Could not conjure life into it at all, so it had no use to me. Not like my magical branch broom and the flat rock dinner plates in my coulee castle. That Christmas morning, I held its plastic hand and led it into my bedroom closet where it tipped over onto a jumble of clothes. And there it stayed. No one ever bought me another doll.
I never named that doll or dressed it up, but I did love dressing myself up.
“How many times a day are you going to change your clothes?” Mom’s brow would furrow. “Do you know how much laundry I do?”
I used to think it was because she always bought clothes on sale. That they were girly, frilly, never in fashion, and garments I did not like, which made it hard to choose. Even today, I detest frills. But I still change clothes three or four times before a night out, and these are clothes I chose myself. The difference is — I now hang them up once I’ve given them a no and never toss them on the floor of my closet.
I was well-behaved girl. I didn’t talk back. I just did whatever I wanted to do. Nothing much has changed.
While writing my book, Deep Song, I reflected often on the age-old question of nature versus nurture. The story is about an adopted woman looking for her roots. On the one hand, our Moms and Dads dictate our behaviour. But do their rules or their genes have the bigger impact? Is criminality the result of poor parenting, or some critical flaw burrowed in a person’s brain? Are over-achievers spawned by manic parenting or by some force born deep within the soul? Maybe the coulees of our childhood have some impact. Maybe there are no simple answers, and maybe that’s something that will also never change.