Welcome to Growing Up Weird

I often tell people that I “grew up weird.” I’ve used this phrase to explain my many idiosyncrasies, or my lack of love life, or my haphazard education. Naturally, people want to know what “growing up weird” means, so I thought I’d tell you a story to explain, at least in part, what I mean when I say it.

The summer I was 8 years old, we lived in a mobile home up in the mountains. The trailer was reached by a quarter mile lane that was steep, and full of ruts. That spring when we had moved there, the lane became so slick with mud that we’d all chant “you can do it! You can do it!” to our old Chevy suburban as we bounced up the lane. My dad would gun the engine, and the tires would spin out, before mercifully catching hold and carrying us further up the hill. (It should be noted that the narrow lane also had a steep drop-off on one side at various points, adding a sense of urgency to our hopeful chanting, none of us being keen on the idea of sliding down backwards).

So the mobile home had a long lane, and a beautiful view, but what it didn’t have was running water or electricity. The joy of being eight years old is you don’t analyze much about life; you just go where you’re taken, and don’t question how weird it might be that your parents have decided to move you to a home without amenities that most Americans outside of certain religious sects tend to consider basic requirements for housing. They were told they could live there rent free if they made it livable, and since my dad was in his “can’t hold down a job, but also won’t take government aid” phase that he was in for most of my childhood, that was a good enough reason for us to move there. 

Believe it or not, my story isn’t even about our strange living situation that summer, although it definitely fits under the “growing up weird” umbrella. It’s just that the story I thought about when I started writing this wouldn’t have happened had we lived in a more normal housing situation that summer. You’ll see what I mean in a moment.

One morning I woke up early and needed to use the bathroom. Of course, that meant having to go outside and a ways away from the house to use the outhouse my dad had built. My bed was a mattress on the floor, and I got up to head out, only to almost fall down again. My legs felt strange, and I had a hard time walking in a straight line. I braced my hand against the wall, and made it down the hall and through the front door. My legs got a little steadier as I went along, but I was still walking cautiously, never knowing when they might betray me again.

Now, at the time there was a large trench that started at the front of the trailer, and wound out past the outhouse. I think it was around 4 feet deep, and had been dug to lay plumbing lines at a future date. Since this trench was between the front of the trailer and the outhouse, a couple boards had been placed across it to allow access to the outhouse.

 

Nobody else was awake yet, and the morning was cool and quiet. I stood, my nightgown blowing against my legs, and stared down at the boards, uncertain if I could get across in my current predicament. Finally, I stepped carefully onto the boards, whereupon my legs decided walking in a straight line was for losers, and I promptly veered off of the makeshift bridge, and fell into the trench.  

Thankfully, I didn’t sustain any injuries beyond a few scuffs from the rough dirt, but now I had a new problem: how to get out of the trench? The sides of the trench were about shoulder height for me, and I wasn’t able to pull myself over the top. Finally, I walked in the trench toward the trailer, and discovered it was shallow enough at that end for me to get out. 

Unfortunately, I still had to pee, which meant walking back the way I’d come, and facing down the boards across the trench again. My faith in my own body’s abilities to do things normally completely shattered, I ended up half crawling on my hands and knees to the other side so I could finally do my business. 

Morning adventures in peeing done, I dusted myself off, and went inside to clean up. Whatever was going on with my legs faded away as the morning went on, and I don’t think I even told anyone what had happened to me until many months after it happened, being too embarrassed to admit I’d fallen into the trench. 

Anyway, this is the sort of thing I mean when I say I grew up weird.

Disclaimer: Memory is a fickle thing, and this I know all too well. I’ve relied on my mom’s memory for timeline details, and everything else is from my own memory, which is faulty at best. I’ve told the truth as I know it, but whether everything happened exactly as I remember it is uncertain.

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