The Myth Of The Sane Childhood
Following last week’s fun and excitement with our little electrical fire (you can see my posts on it here and here), we had to move quite a bit of stuff around in the basement, so that the electrician could get in and work. In the process, we turned up quite a few odds and ends which everyone had pretty much forgotten about and which Dad then spent Saturday sorting out. One of the items he found was an old photo album, with pictures of my older brother and I when we were young, one of which is above.
Now, Dad has said before that the first thing people have to give up on in therapy is the myth of the perfect childhood. Having seen this picture, I think I may have to give up on the myth of the sane childhood as well.
To be fair, most of the pictures weren’t like this. Most of them were just the standard sort of pictures parents take, some of which will never see the light of day again. They say that you can tell what a child is going to be like very early in life. Many of these pictures show one or both of us building something and, as it turns out, we’re both very creative adults. Even the time we made the Sherman tank out of the picnic table could be hopefully interpretted as being simply the act of creative children. But this picture…I just don’t know. I mean, it’s certainly creative. I have absolutely no memory of these event whatsoever, but it’s certainly creative, creating a working guillotene like that. I’m sure that’s how my parents thought of it, when they immortalized our decapitation of poor Bert on film, but I wonder if it doesn’t show something else. I mean, what kind of children build working guillotines?
Maybe I’m over-reacting. We’ve both turned out to be relatively sane: I’m a photographer and floopy video artist and Greg just got his PhD in Zoology (yea Greg!:), but, still, it makes you wonder: What was the thought process going on here? What ever made us think that it would be a cool thing to do to build a cardboard guillotine and decapitate our stuffed animals? Maybe this shows a certain positivity on our parent’s part, a glass half full kind of attitude. I mean, some parents would look at this and see creativity. Some would look at it and see the need for a child psychologist. I guess we can only speculate…..