Painful memory

One of my remaining memories from early childhood is set in Düsseldorf. I don’t remember much about this period before age 4 other than the major highs and lows.

I had an older brother (brother 1) with “issues” who used to like to torture me whenever he could get away with it – i.e., when my mother was not at home. He used to tickle me to the point of my crying and screaming, with no hope for abatement, until my nicer brother (brother 2) took pity on me and interceded on my behalf. Brother 1 would proclaim himself the giant mosquito and make high-pitched buzzing sounds accompanied by pinching and tickling. I felt so completely helpless with this much bigger boy on top of me, pinning me down, bothering me, making himself deaf to my pleas.

One time, brother 1 held me upside-down out his second-story bedroom window because I spilled ink on brother 2’s pillow. He said this would be my interim punishment, until the police arrived and took me to jail. I remember screaming and feeling great terror. I remember the odd physical feeling, too.

The time I wish to write about now involves the digging of my premature grave (!). I had received a much-coveted pinwheel that I adored, as a reward from my mother for good behavior. I was allowed to pick out exactly which colors I wanted. I used to love to go out into the garden and look at it in action; she placed it among some of my favorite lavender flowers.

My brother (#1) waited until my mother went out. Then he said to me, “I phoned the police and they are coming to take you away and put you in jail, because you have been very, very bad”. By then I had heard that many times, and was no longer as fearful as I had been when I first heard it. This time he added, “I will dig your grave, because you have been so bad that you must die, and the pinwheel will be your grave marker”. That statement really got to me, and I ran all over the house, screaming in terror. Then he went outside and actually started digging with the big garden shovel. I realized I must become quiet, as it looked like it might be for real, and I hid behind the vacuum cleaner in the closet, making myself very small. I tried to stifle my occasional sobs of fear.

Many years later, my brothers and I, when together with our mother, would tell some of these stories of sibling-against-sibling, partly for the amusement, and partly for the shock value. There was one such story between my brothers in which a fist which was supposedly broken while reaching for a radio on the nightstand was revealed to have actually been broken while making contact with the other guy’s head (brother 2’s head, naturally).

This particular get-together, we told the grave-digging story, and the hanging-out-of-the-window-upside-down story. My mother shook her head in disbelief, and said, “How could those things have happened? Where was I?”

I replied, “That was exactly my point. Where were you?!”

This post ©reated by Ribonuff on September 16, 2007.