I wish that my story could be happier, but one of my most important values is sincerity, and to tell my story truthfully it has to begin sadly.
Home stopped being a ‘place’ on the day that my mother passed away. I was five years old, months away from entering the first grade, when my father took my brothers and me aside and said, “Mommy is not coming home.”
Looking back, for the next seven years after that, home was the wonderful feeling that I got when I was pretending to be somewhere else with my twin brother. We called it “The Game.” In “The Game” we had the power to do absolutely anything. We created alter-egos as the demigod siblings Sar-Sar (that was me) and Teru (Max) Tamtan. We had a pet koala named Poponicus and we lived in the place where anything could happen. In reality we moved from apartment to house, to larger house to smaller house, and went through a series of stepmothers. My father worked himself into illness, partially because his notion of self-identity was as a breadwinner, but also because his notion of home was mostly from decadent home cooked meals.
When my twin brother and I were twelve, my father told us to stop playing “The Game” and he played us “The Logical Song,” which is an actual song by the band Supertramp. If you’ve never heard the song before, it tells the listener about the experience of growing up. Max took it seriously and immediately became incredibly somber, and for all intents and purposes morphed into an adult. That Halloween, he was forced to go with me, and not wanting to dress in a costume, he dressed as a business man. People thought that he was Harry Potter, so it was not as awkward as it could have been. Meanwhile I did what I had always done when darkness fell upon my life: I soared deeper into my imagination. Max and I never played together again.
Then out of nowhere, my father began to pretend. Another world was born with farmers, lambs, badgers, wolves, mice, and pigeons at its center. I played the farmer’s daughter, the lambs, and the pigeons, and my father played the badgers, the mice, and the wolves. Home was coming back from school and making stories while cooking meals for my father.
Unfortunately, years into the story, the logical song found its way in. Sometimes I wasn’t the farmer’s daughter. I was “Dullard Daughter” who could never do anything right and whose job was to appease her father, and he was “Footha”, the tyrant authoritarian parent. I never was a dullard though. In reality I had gotten into university and the time spent making stories with him, and cooking increasingly elaborate meals for him was eating into time for my school work. Even worse, I had never been allowed to spend time making friends. When I asked to stop playing, Footha came to life, and by that time I was in my early twenties.
I could not call on Max because he strayed from the dysfunctionality by quitting university and getting job that took up most of his time. I could not call on my other brother, Benny – who had left my family as soon as he was old enough to.
I had to escape.
As death seems to be a large factor of change in my life, serendipitously my grandmother passed away, and my father decided that he had to move to Vancouver Island to be closer to my grandfather. I had to continue my education, so I stayed behind in Vancouver.
After that my idea of home changed completely. I got my first boyfriend at age 24. I took time off from school to start a business. I went travelling. I FINALLY EXPERIENCED REALITY UNSKEWED BY CONSTANT IMAGINATION!
Home became my boyfriend’s laugh, my kitten’s purr, warm slippers, and prospect of future opportunities.
Now, I type here on this little island, with my fiancé nearby, planning to reassemble a relationship with my father through story, planning to begin my own family through adoption.
I don’t like to play pretend any more. Real life is much better.
(Values: Family, sincerity, the pursuit of reality, utilizing opportunity)
I’d tell you why I seek the truth, and why I try not to lie, but that is another story.
Works Cited:
Keller, Sarah. Studying. Drawing, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2012.
Keller, Sarah. The Badger And The Lamb. Drawing, Vancouver BC, Canada, 2012.
Supertramp, “Logical song.” Online Video Clip. Youtube. alberto meza, September 27, 2016.
Hi Sarah,
Your story is powerful, thank you for sharing it. I can tell by reading your words that, as you describe, you are very comfortable and accomplished in the role of storyteller. I think this impression of competence in telling stories can be conveyed in a number of ways, but in this case I’m particularly aware of a sense of strength and confidence. Though words may dissemble and conceal truth in some ways, they also reveal truths in other, sometimes unintended ways. So, despite the fact that your story is in many ways a description of loss and painful memories, I come away with an impression of your ingenuity and determination to move forward. As you state explicitly, a home, a physical house-like structure, is poignantly absent from this story, but in the absence of this particular element, your own presence and strength of will and character is emphasized.
Thank you for your kind words, Anne.
You’re right about my story concealing certain truths while revealing others.
While I agree that there was hard work involved in continuing my education whilst trying to keep my family life in order, I cannot take full credit for having ingenuity and will power all of the way through. To get into university I had to go to college for a year because my GPA was two percent too low, at one point I had to take a year off from university to work because I burned out, and I also avoided university for two years after my father moved away. There are countless instances when I curled up into a little ball and did not want to deal with the world. That isn’t perseverance – that’s fear.
It is only recently that I am beginning to find some confidence.