A flash from the past

Seven or so years ago, I read a book by a psychiatrist and self-help guru named David Viscott. (I had the impression from his bio that he was the person upon whom the Seattle incarnation of Frasier Crane was modeled.)

Viscott wrote in the particular book I read about how people sometimes see an object that sets in motion a line of thinking that suddenly leads to a new realization totally unrelated to the original stimulus. The incident he used as an example, as I recall, was a patient who was studying the storm shutters on a house and whose discursive thinking about those shutters led to a profound realization about the state of his own life and the origins thereof.

I am not a huge believer in the concept of 'recovered memories.'

But tonight, as I was reading this Charlotte Joko Beck book, I had a sudden flash basically unrelated to the book itself.

She was talking about how she had been mistreated by her parents. As I've mentioned before, at least in conversation, I had a pretty crappy childhood, but physical abuse was not part of the picture. But when I read that, I suddenly had this flash of my mother slapping me. Not hard -- she wasn't physically capable of that. But I had completely forgotten it, or blocked it from my mind, and certainly hadn't thought about it since I was a teenager.

It happened more than once, and I can't tell you what it was about. What I recall is that my mother's temper often flared for reasons completely incomprehensible to me.

I could say something completely innocuous (like "What's for dinner?") and get a slap in response. More frequently, she would scream, "Don't you talk to me in that totem voice!" I had no idea what "totem voice" meant, and if I asked her what she meant -- well, I guess that's when I got slapped.

(Years and years later, when I was in my late thirties, and my mother and I hadn't spoken in fifteen years or more, I saw Meredith Baxter in a TV movie shriek at her daughter, "Don't you talk to me in that tone of voice!!" and it suddenly dawned on me that's what my mother had been saying years before.

My mother also referred to Premium® brand saltine crackers as "Preermum" -- she had trouble enunciating, I guess.)

Over the course of my life, I would see people get slapped in movies or TV shows, and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that I knew what it felt like to be slapped, but I had forgotten that I had ever actually been slapped, and that it was my mother who had slapped me.

(My stepmother, too, on one odd occasion which I well remember, but that's another story.)

Again, I know that other people have suffered far worse treatment at the hands of their parents. The point of my story is not that I was physically abused, but that I had blocked this repeated event from my mind completely for decades, even during therapy, and that this one passage from this book, which fell into my hands through a series of events odd in itself, suddenly jarred this memory loose from wherever it had been stored in my brain.

What else happened that I don't remember?

(For example: the Christmas Carol 'Silent Night' fills me with dread, so much so that if I hear it in a store or shopping mall during this time of year, I have to leave. Back in 1998 or thereabouts, I asked my dad if he knew why that might be. The color drained from his face. There was a long pause, and he said, 'Well, I guess something that happened during your childhood.')