I Hate My Naivete

Because of the negativity I reaped.

I was in seventh grade cooking class and there was a boy who was nice. We would laugh as we were making stuff and so one day I wrote him a note. I told him with some basic language what I was beginning to experience at home. I think I used the word 'hitting.'

I said in the note, "Can you help me?"
"No," he sent it back.
I wrote back and passed it again, "Why not?"
He slid it back and it said, "I'm sorry about that, but it's your problem, not mine."

(I started to wonder if others understood that on the day they said no and on every day following while they were treating me with uninvolvement, I was going home to misery.)

What did I need help for?

On a fluxuating basis, things could have been good or bad. Maybe one day I needed a place to feel safe, on another I needed someone to share a meal with me. But what I really needed more than anything tangible that passes away quickly, was a way to understand what was happening to me. Was it right? Was it wrong? Was it something I ought to be tolerant about? Should I trust my parents? Things like this, was what I really wanted to know. You see, perspective can mean everything for the sake of going through something difficult. If only someone could say to me how I should think about it in a fair way, then I could go on going on.

The truth of the matter was that people my own age were, while remaining uninvolved, simotaneously angry and surprised with me that I was so sheltered. Now I don't remember all of my former life; I have a patchy memory for some reason but I tell you that the most common and annoying and hurtful question I heard throughout till I was about 21 was, "What?? You seriously don't know what ____ is??" I can't remember any examples, I don't know why. Some of them were obscene things, so eventually I learned that when girls raised eyebrows and boys were snickering, I shouldn't try to understand what a conversation was about.

It is well known by my closest friends things like, for instance, that I didn't know that Santa Claus wasn't real until I was 14; my parents decided to break the myth and it took me a couple of days to believe it. I had only been to a restaurant once, till I moved out at 20, to a movie theater or the zoo or a museum or the carnival once, as well, until I moved out. I had been in the mall maybe three times, before 20, never crossed at a crosswalk and thought to observe until ten minutes of standing there, that the light would not change for me to walk until I pressed the button.

Once I went on a bike ride when I was 19 and used my limited mental map to explore the streets that connected around the housing development I lived at. I was gone 15 minutes and I went inside to tell my dad how excited I was to explore things for myself and he told me that that wasn't appropriate, and that I could only ride my bike in sight of the windows of our house.

I was furious (but hid it well out of fear). I couldn't understand what was so upsetting to me at the time. It's just that I couldn't give an answer for what exactly seemed to be wrong with what my dad had told me to do. Here are some other upsetting questions that rocked my normally sheltered way of life:

"Can I take you out to dinner?" -boy-friend-type, to me in 9th grade
"No, my dad would never say yes."
"Why?"
"I don't know."

The neighbor's daughter was my sister's best friend and also my friend too. One day she asked when I was 17 or 18,
"My parents were talking about it and they were suspecting your father has been sexually abusing you and your sister."
"What? No!"
"Well then how come you two are always washing his cars and doing yardwork, and cleaning the house all day long?"
"I don't know."
(I still don't understand this connection.)

"What? What do you mean, you can't go out for the afternoon? We planned it with your dad and put it down on his calendar, like two months ago! You did all your work."
"He said it wasn't a good day for him, that since he was tired that I should do it another day."
"Don't you think that's selfish of him?"
"I don't know."

"You've been talking about this field trip and how you were ready to go, for a couple months, Michele, why now this morning as we leave you're saying you can't go?"
"Well, I mentioned it again to my dad and now he says I can't go."
"Why?"
"I... don't know." That's when I was 18, for a Japanese class field trip, a discussion with my teacher.

"Why are you wearing your glasses today, Michele?" "Why are you washing your hair in the sink in the school bathroom?"
"Because my dad told me that as punishment I couldn't have my contacts or take a bath for a month."
"Why do you let him tell you what to do?"
"I don't know."

There are worse examples, describing worse and more disturbing things I experienced and my friend's reactions, than this, but I just can't handle discussing them publically. I found myself, in the beginning of my conversations, telling my friends about how my dad explained it all: what I had done wrong, what his reasoning on the matter was. They would get angry and eventually say their reasons why he was more than just wrong, but maybe even abusive, or at least that suspicion was always there with pretty much anyone I ever talked with. By the end of me listening to my friends tell me about how their parents did things or why they thought that something was wrong, I saw things from their point of view and walked back into my day-to-day life a little more dissatisfied.

There was a common theme developing of my own discomfort and dred whenever I found those words "I don't know" coming out of my mouth.

It was all very confusing for me. Of course, I wanted to do these things, desperately. It already hurt to be told, especially with as often as my dad did not follow through with his word, that I couldn't do them. But I just wondered, am I being selfish myself, to listen to my friends, and start believing that something was wrong with my parents just because it's something I'd like to have? I always gave the benefit of doubt over my own strong desires to my parents.

Along with the fear of punishment or losing whatever I did have, there were these subtle promises that my father made in his lectures and punishing conversations, that it was better that I lived different than the rest of the world, because I didn't waste my time on things that didn't matter. That by following through his higher vision for my life, that by following and trusting his parenting with all its difference, I would be a person with better character. I would be a person who was better than everyone else, I would be more educated and more prepared to live a better life. For instance, PhD. students don't stoop to marry college students, and PhD. students are given all sorts of privileges no one else will get. I saw every reason why he was right. I thought I really was going to end up better than everyone else if I just kept on doing what he said. As I approached adulthood this slowly was beginning to erode.

I began to hate his aspiration of wealth and education. I began to see that there were things to obtain that were just as important as money and knowledge. It must be true, I began to reason, that others were just as capable growing up morally sound, having perhaps no parents at all. Others were just as capable of obtaining money for college and succeeding at it, without having to give up every kind of friendship that came their way. Others were just as comfortable to be friends with people of minority or low education, even though they came from a different or "higher-class" background. I didn't have to be this way. I just simply... was. I was this way, but, I wasn't happy.

If only someone would show me any reasonably working way to live and achieve life's good goals. I needed to see another lifestyle, another life pattern. I began to desire this more than anything in the world. I wanted to see how someone else was becoming a good person, how someone else was loving their family and making friends and making money and getting educated with roughly similar success. I just wanted to see something else, anything else. Then I could compare and contrast what my father was doing, and feel right about staying in it or getting out of it. Another words, I could begin to be responsible for my own life.

I have been on a mission ever since my teenage years, to eliminate my naivete. There still are important things that I don't know much about. The other day my friend and Ben and I were having a long conversation and it turned to home loans and taxes, and for those five minutes I had nothing to say. It made me feel really bad. I just wondered like I did when I was growing up, "Am I just living life through rose-colored glasses, having no appreciation or understanding of these kinds of decisions, taking things for granted?" It upset me to think that it could be true.

Of course there are exceptions. There is a time and place for being innocent. As a woman, it is good to understand what the world is doing, but it isn't good to ponder or participate in all of it for the sake of preserving my morality. Childhood also should be innocent in proportion to age and responsibility. I've been thinking for a few years now, that if I am going to do adulthood right, if I am going to give the very best a mother can give to her children, I have to keep on ridding myself of ignorance. I have to be smart. I have to be aware. I have to be experienced.

I hated that sheltering. That portion of it that was way too much for my age and ability.

I learned to hate my ignorance rather than letting it be as it was for my father, a mark of the elite. I found everything unfamiliar, fascinating. I ate it up.

I saw my salvation, my sense of hope, my strength for survival, in being introduced to another way of living life. To think that someone would teach it to me or show it to me, well, that was all the more comforting, but even in the case that there was no guide or helper I knew that it would help me to be exposed by my own immersion nonetheless.

I long for introduction into the contrary, the unlikely, the unthought parts. I long to be able to understand and experience these things enough to be able to advocate them to the rest of the common world in the same way that I originally tried to explain to my father how I wasn't choosing to do things his way. He needed to know that I was going to be different than he desired and yet be okay, and the whole world needs to know that there are those who are different but are still just as valuable. It's just as beneficial for me, as it is for him. It's beneficial for my kids... for everything that I do and everyone who sees me.