I haven’t had many experiences with the circus, outside of watching the movie Dumbo and that old Disney Channel show, Dumbo’s Circus. I knew there were a few things that made up a good circus, but the only things that really interested me were the tightrope walkers and trapeze artists. I liked the stuff that happened at the top of the tent, not on the floor.
One day, a small traveling circus came to the town where I lived. Mom took my sibling and I down to the circus and we watched stunts being performed in the rafters of the tent. There were no animals at this circus, just traveling stunt people and dancers. I was introduced to stilt walkers in the performance and wanted to try it out myself.
After the show, there was a small tent out back where kids could try some of the stunts. Sort of. They had a wooden balance beam and a bunch of stilts. I was disappointed to discover that I was still too small to get on the stilts, so I amused myself with the balance beam instead. I was pretty good at it, too.
When I was seven years old, I was bored during my sibling’s judo classes and went wandering around the sports complex where the classes were held. I discovered a room in the back of the complex that was full of balance beams, bars, and pommel horses. Some kids were doing gymnastics and I was completely hooked. I spent the rest of the judo class watching these kids and decided this was something that I wanted to do myself. This was way more amusing than blowing on the glass at the daycare center and watching the babies copy me.
I ran back to the judo class and got Mom, telling her there was something I wanted to show her. I led her back to the gymnastics room and showed her the classes that were still going on. She was just glad I’d found something that I wanted to do other than sit at home and conduct experiments with the things I found under the kitchen sink.
I started gymnastics a month later, where I was, once again, very good on the balance beams. I was also an unusually flexible kid who could bend at angles that no one else in the class could reach. I didn’t realize at that age that it was a connective tissue condition, I just knew that I was good at gymnastics.
My classes ended when Dad returned to the family and we moved to Florida. Though Mom and Dad found me a new gym at the sports complex in Winter Pit… er… Haven, the teacher wasn’t as good. Worse, Dad signed me up for the beginner class when I was clearly at intermediate level. He became some big expert in gymnastics and tried to tell me what to do, so I told my parents I didn’t want to do it anymore. That was the end of my gymnastics career.
Mom and Dad were always trying to find me things to join. They used my older sibling as an example of what was considered “normal” for activity load, not realizing that said sibling joined an unusually high number of activities to stay out of the house. The fact that I wasn’t interested in anything (other than gymnastics) bothered Mom and Dad, and they started pushing me into various things. Most of these activities ended in disaster.
When I was four, Dad tried to get me to join Indian Princesses. It seemed interesting enough until I learned it was some weird cult-like thing between fathers and daughters. You were not supposed to socialize with the other kids, you were supposed to sit with your dad as if you were married to him. We didn’t do any activities, there was just a lot of grown-up talk among the dads. I ended the night in tears and fiercely said I’d never go back.
Mom signed me up for judo when I was five. I had trouble sitting still for the meditation session, when the sensei rang this big blue bell and we all closed our eyes. Then for some reason I couldn’t do a forward roll. No matter how hard I tried, I always ended up falling flat. It didn’t occur to anyone at that age that it was physically impossible for me to do a forward roll due to a birth defect in my neck and back. (It was the one place where I wasn’t super flexible.) I just thought I was stupid, so I cried and refused to go back.
Later, Mom signed me up for horseback riding. She just assumed I liked horses because of my age, which I didn’t. I just liked playing with the riding teacher’s two young children. This was probably the biggest disaster of all.
The teacher selected the most nervous horse of the entire stable for my first ride. Just as I got on the saddle, the asshole stallion got out and released all the other horses from the stable. There were horses running in all directions, with people flapping and shouting. That’s when my horse decided to do the Zorro routine, whinnying and rearing up on her hind legs. The teacher shouted for me to hang on, but I really didn’t her encouragement at that point. I was gripping that horse like she was the last refuge in an apocalyptic disaster.
The minute the staff got things calmed down, my horse relaxed, but I didn’t. I slid off the saddle and informed Mom that not only was I not interested in riding, I hated horses. It’s true. I’m not a horse person and I never have been, even when I was at the age where I was supposed to like them.
Mom tried signing me up for Campfire. I enjoyed Sparks, where we cooked in the kitchen, did crafts, and played games, but then she decided to send me to camp. It was horrible. The water tasted like rotten leaves, and they forced you to drink it. The cabins were infested with bugs. Worse still, as the youngest group in the camp, we were forced to go to bed while it was still light outside, where we listened to the other kids still having fun while we tried to pretend we were asleep. The staff were obsessed with that Winnie the Pooh with a honey jar on his nose song, and we were so limited in the activities we could do that it was boring.
That doesn’t even cover the fact that my cabin mates were almost all like that brat girl from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. They stole my hat and kicked it around in the dirt. They called me a crybaby before they knew my name. One got in my face so obnoxiously that I knocked her over an ice chest and down a hill. That’s right, the bullying was so relentless that I actually had to beat a kid up to get it to stop. As for the counselor, she was too busy reading letters from her family to care.
I came home from camp looking like a storm cloud. I promptly informed Mom that I didn’t know why my sibling had such fun at that camp. This was nothing like Camp Blue (the family camp that I actually enjoyed), and I was never going back. It didn’t really matter, since the camp was sold the next year and disbanded. Serves those assholes right!
Then there was Awana at the church. Dad pretty much made me go, insisting that I needed to be with other kids, despite the fact that I had kids in the neighborhood to play with. It was nothing but religious indoctrination. Some of the staff were also assholes.
There was this P.E. session that kids were required to attend. It was held in the hottest part of the Florida afternoon, when temperatures soared to almost a hundred degrees. I didn’t want to run around in such heat, so I decided I was going to go back into the church and cool off in the air conditioning. The man on duty, some asshole named Dusty, ordered me to go run laps with the others. I told him that this was not school and he couldn’t force me to run in this heat. Dusty decided that the best way to keep me outside was to step on my foot and grind my toes into the pavement.
I told Mom and Dad about it later. Their response was, “And what were you doing?” They somehow made it seem like being abused was my fault. No repercussions came against Dusty and he continued to volunteer at the church, but I was done with voluntary P.E. in a Florida oven. I informed the church leaders that I would continue with Awana, but I wasn’t going outside for P.E. My face told them that there wasn’t anything they could do about it, so they let me stay in.
I continued with the rest of Awana. The musicals were fun and I started challenging myself to memorize the Bible verses they gave. However, I eventually lost interest in the activities. First I dropped Awana and just went to choir practice, but then I lost interest in even that. After the church was visited by members of the Christian Coalition, who threatened people to vote a certain way, my parents weren’t pushing me to go back.
This did not stop them from complaining. Whenever I even hinted at being bored, Mom would explode. She would go over the list of all the things she tried to get me involved with. I finally pointed out to her that, with the exception of Awana, those were all my sibling’s favorite activities. I was not my sibling by any stretch of the imagination. Why couldn’t they see that?
This put a stop to Mom’s nagging speech, but it didn’t stop them from trying to push me into things. I’ve spoken in the past about Dad making my high school career his special project for a while. He dragged me to boring football games and took over the Homecoming Parade and Key Club meetings, causing more embarrassment than actually helping me.
They wanted me to join band in the worst way, especially Mom. Both spoke of band as if it was just what I was expected to do when I got to middle school. I was forced to pick an instrument that I wanted to play, but I could never settle on one thing. Eventually I realized that band was an elective and that I didn’t have to do what my parents said. I informed them one day that I wasn’t going to join band, though that didn’t stop them from trying to get me to do so in seventh and ninth grades.
I later asked Mom why she was so big into pushing me into band. She told me that she had always wanted to be in the band and she thought it would be fun if I got to do it. I was furious. Her whole plan had been to live vicariously through me the whole time? It made me very glad I chose not to do it.
Dad tried pushing me into activities that didn’t have to do with my sibling. He tried to push me into a bowling league by pulling strings to get me in, then couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to do it. Then there was the time I took an interest in greenware and he dragged me down to the hole-in-the-wall full of old ladies and tried to get me interested in their little club. It got to the place where I stopped sharing my interests with him, because he would inevitably find some team, club, or lesson for me to join.
After the high school incident, Dad lost interest in his mission with me. He got involved in multi-level marketing and suddenly his sales cult was the most important thing in his life. Mom, too, forgot about it when she got her job in Portland, which soon became her life. These were the only things they ever talked about after that, and I was just glad I wasn’t their target anymore.
I was told by a few people that I would look back on those failed activities and regret my choices. Well, it’s been decades now and I still am glad for the decisions I made. These things were not me, and I knew it even at that age. Sometimes adults have good advice, and other times they have no idea what the hell they are talking about. I’ve found that with my parents’ generation, the latter is more frequent.
There are a lot of things that adults of their generation said to me that turned out to be bullshit. I was told that there was someone out there for everyone and that someday I would find my “someone” and settle down, no matter how I felt. I was given that destructive advice of “no one will love you until you love yourself” crap. I was told that someday I would be into dresses, jewelry, and make-up. I was told that someday I would want sex, “when you find the right partner” because “nature makes it that way.” Well, it’s been decades now and none of it has come to pass. This stubborn asexual, agender, aromantic is still just as asexual, agender, and aromantic as I was as a child.
To bring our original subject back to this blog entry, I guess the only advice I can give is that childhood is a circus act. You are standing on a balance beam, and on both sides of you are people who think they know what’s best for you. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Determining who is who is your biggest life lesson, and your biggest challenge.
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