Snoopy, Come Home? *content warning for childhood trauma

while checking the statistics on the differing popularity of my various posts, it becomes clear that you sick bastards that tend to read them prefer the ugly, sordid details to the positive, happy vibes I try to bring to my life, my writing, and the world.  so I'm going to indulge you with another story of personal trauma, because that's what you like - my pain and suffering.

enjoy ~

the summer I was 11 years old, I lived the popular joke at the time that 'our' parents would move away while 'we' were at sleep-away camp.  I'm not sure who started 'the joke', the kids or the parents, but I remember getting the letter from my mom that my parents had bought a new house, and we would be moving.  she drew me a sketch of the floor plan which didn't make any sense, and it occurred to me that I was living the nightmare of not actually knowing where I lived, now.  it was mostly just preteen melodrama, because of course we still lived where I had called home for the past 8 years, but the situation was a bit disconcerting, and I felt somewhat adrift amid the news (which of those rooms in my mom's sketch was 'mine'?).  at the end of the summer, my parents not only came to pick me up, they took me back to my room in our 'old' house, and all was well, though we must have been in 'moving mode', because we began living in the 'new' house sometime in December.

one of the cool things that came along with new house was that we teens got our own phone line, because my dad didn't want to have to compete with us to make and receive calls.  not much trauma so far, right?  I mean, my parents, who loved each other, were married - they not only owned a home, they sold it and bought a new one (it was probably mortgaged to the hilt, and they later lost it).  they also sent us to sleep-away camp, and all kinds of other good stuff.  none of my other friends had their own phone lines, I don't think - it was a long time ago, who remembers?  but we had our own line, and our own phones, in our own rooms, which were right next to each other - talk about luxury (we had our own bathroom, too, with two sinks).  as a teen, I definitely fit the stereotype of yakking away with my friends for hours on my Snoopy phone, so I guess my dad's foresight paid off for him, until...

the summer after 10th grade, I started dating a guy I met at the day camp we both worked at who had graduated from high school, and was going away to college.  after our amazing summer of falling in looove, we said 'goodbye' as he left for school, but decided to stay together as he was only going to be 3 hours away, and planned to come home frequently to visit, which he did.  while he was at school, though, we spent Hours on the phone.  HOURS.  half the time, I don't even think we talked, we just held the handsets to our ears and savored the connection between us.  the other students who lived in his dorm nicknamed him 'Pa Bell' as he could frequently be found tucked into the phone booth, listening to me breathe as I listened to him.  what the hell did we find to say to one another?  I guess that's just how it is when you're in love for the first time - no need to say anything, just being 'together' was enough.  I'm old and jaded, now, but I do remember how I lived to hear his voice, and how it felt to know he was as enamored of me as I was of him.  he did make some of the calls, but since he had to use a pay phone, the majority of them were billed to...my dad.

that first month that my boyfriend was away at school, my dad called me into the kitchen one night to 'discuss' the phone bill.  it was $500.  $500!  what would You do if your teen racked up a $500 phone bill in one month?!  at 16/17, I was busy struggling with chemistry homework, making sure my double-spike-belt went with my parachute pants, having my driver's license suspended for speeding soon after I got it, and had no idea how much a local phone call cost, let alone a long distance one.  my dad was no Ward Cleaver - he was a child of the Holocaust, and an Israeli soldier - he demanded my phone, which I ran to my room to fetch, and placed on the kitchen table in front of him.  as I assume you can see from the pictures (and in case you can't, I'm about to describe it anyway), the Snoopy phone I had had a yellow handset that Snoopy held in his hand at the end of his outstretched arm.  well, my dad picked up that yellow handset, and used it to smash Snoopy's head into oblivion.  poor Snoopy...it wasn't his fault.

I'm sure I must have cried, and eventually managed to explain to my dad that I didn't know anything about local vs. long distance billing, or peak vs. off-peak calling times.  I'm sure he grounded me from phone use, specifically calls to my boyfriend...but I know he didn't make me pay the bill.  in fact, he even took me to the mall, with poor, beheaded Snoopy in a shopping bag, told the salespeople that the phone 'fell off my desk', and that he was looking to replace it.  sadly, Snoopy was a limited edition item, and I ended up getting a plain brown trimline to replace him.  the next month, the phone bill was only half of what it had been, but I was still called into the kitchen (where all family conferences took place) to explain myself.  I hadn't been on the phone because I was grounded, but there were still residual charges for calls that had been made before Snoopy's assassination that hadn't been billed yet, so I was let go without further punishment, but with another stern warning to mind my usage.

my boyfriend and I resorted to writing letters, which wasn't a bad thing, in retrospect, but I did write a good deal of those letters during school, when I should have been taking class notes and paying attention, I suppose.  I had a shoebox filled with his correspondence up on the shelf in my closet, which seems romantic in this age of texts and emojis, and I guess it is, in a sense, though our 'relationship' only lasted two years, as we broke up when I went away to college, in a town too far away from his college to easily visit each other.  in any case, I told this story of my father's violent nature (along with several others) to my teen at some point, as either an anecdote about the late grandfather he never knew, as a cautionary tale to avoid inciting my own rage-like anger, as an illustration of how much less trauma I try to inflict on him as a parent than my parents inflicted on me, or just because the memory struck me.  about a year or so ago, as we were browsing through a newer local shop that sells some vintage items, I was stopped dead in my tracks as I came face-to-face with a Snoopy phone they had on display, for sale at an exorbitant price.  my teen came up beside me, saw the phone, and asked if that was the same one I had had that my dad had smashed.  when the owner instinctively sidled up to me to try and make a sale, I heard my darling offspring volunteer that I used to have that very phone until my dad destroyed it because...I quickly slipped my hand over his mouth and hugged him to me while grinning at the owner that he had a way of not necessarily knowing what information was private, and inquiring after the price (as I said, way too much for my budget, but probably quite affordable for one of the tourists who vacations at the spa near where we live).

later, in the car driving home, the teen asked if I would really buy that phone if it was in my price range, and I said that I probably would.  I really liked that phone - it was cute, and fun, and though I'm not really into Snoopy or the Peanuts cartoon he came from, or 'branded' merchandise on the whole, I would have put that phone on my desk with a smile on my face, remembering the feeling of being in love for the first time, and being an entitled teen with not a thing in the world to worry my pretty, empty head about, and my dad, scary as he could sometimes be.  it would stand there as a testament to my having survived some of the harsher lessons of my youth, and a reminder to transcend the impulse to destroy my son's things when he uses them in ways that I find irresponsible or annoying, because I know how deeply that wound can cut, even though we know 'things' are just impermanent physical objects that are not necessary to our survival.  I'm anthropomorphising here, but it was shocking and brutalizing to watch Snoopy get his head smashed in for something I had done, and it gave me a real sense of my own responsibility towards others, and since then, I have never let another person take the blame for some wrong I had committed, even if it was as simple as accidentally ordering more apple pies from the bakery than we could sell at the farm market that week.

so take my silly little trauma to heart - while I believe there should be consequences for our children's wrong actions, brutality shouldn't be one of them.  neither should violence.  my dad had some serious trauma of his own, and while he tried to keep it in check, he sometimes failed, and often made up for it by buying me things.  I hardly ever wanted the 'things' as much as I just wanted to be 'good enough', and I would have traded all the material objects for a few more hugs, and to be told that I was worthy of his love.  in the end, I understood that I was, and we managed to reconcile our relationship before he died, thank goodness, but it was a long road to get there, and many horrible things in my life could have been avoided as a result, but...selah.  here we are.  I'm a parent now, doing my best (and often failing) at treating my son how I wish I had been treated, but I'm doing it without a partner, and a lot less money, so the rules aren't quite the same.  the truth is, I have threatened to smash my son's (hand-me-down, outdated) iphone for something I can't even remember at this point, and that's not ok - but this blog is my way to work through my issues, so here I am reminding myself why that's not ok, and to find better solutions in the future.

have you passed any of your early traumas on to your children, or perpetuated any needlessly negative familial patterns in their lives?  have you corrected the situation?  how?