Scarcity and Contempt

So I am 31, and still very clearly remember some images and feelings from early childhood- mostly the traumatic or triumphant ones, but this particular series disturbs and fascinates me more than any others.

I must have been in 3rd grade (sparing you boring mile-stone marker rationalizations for this conclusion). My mother baby-sat for a family down the street, 3 kids all younger than me, plus our family at the time had 4 kids.

The family was like the poorest I had ever known up to that point. I don't understand like, if there wasn't available welfare assistance in 1988 or thereabout when this occured, but everyone in the family was like Holocaust ribbed; big, sunken eyes and bony cheek-ridges, wiry, bone-popping torsoes and shit. They were freaky looking.

I remember hating the kids so much. But when I think back and picture their faces, they are often kind and smiling or welcoming and calm, and I have no memory of them ever doing anything mean to me or my family. But, I do distinctly remember my mother giving them roast beef and me being pissed off. She usually said no to me and my brothers if we wanted this or that good food before dinner, because of scarcity.

So I can still see their hollow faces on the stair-case watching me eat my lunch, all covetously and shit. They brought mayonaisse sandwiches from home and would haunt me while I ate.

Anyway I remember hating them so bad, and I reflect on this often. I think that I even had a crush on the oldest one, because she was very proud and graceful and dignified, in a developed contrast from her younger siblings, who just hovered like wolves. The boy especially (it was 2 girls and like a 4 year old boy) I just viscerally hated the sight of and wanted to hurt.



that's really the point. lol I have little insight about these memories, but I am curious how people interpret them. I attribute my hatred of wealth today though in part to how they made me feel.

so by the age of 8 or 9 you had developed a hatred for others base purely on physical presentation?

they were taking my roast beef!

and I believe that it is innate and related perhaps to the hardness necessary to practice infanticide and tribal eugenics, and probably also necessary to wage tribal war- it's not like I had many experiences with near-starved looking people by that age- it had to come from the basement, and not from my culture. It wasn't my environment, because my mom was trying to help them and was kind to them, and my brothers are all younger than me and followed my cues, or were too young at the time to have noticeably felt one way or another.

Well maybe it just was the fact that your mom was trying to help them. Maybe, near-starved or plump, you would've hated them because [I]your[/I] mom was babysitting them in the first place. Perhaps it is just mother issues, and you are particularly covetous of roast beef. Not so weird.

nah my mom always babysat a lot of people growing up because other moms on the block worked. I was cool with having more kids around, especially since they were on my territory and I thus enjoyed privileges.

so it was the usual greedy kid thing where you didn't like sharing?

Do you have visceral memories of faces and corresponding feelings over "usual greedy kids thing where you don't like sharing?" I don't really. It's way more fundamental than that.

haha yous are a disappointment. I'm gettin' at something basic to nature here.

I think kids can be naturally unkind. I mean, Lord of the Flies unkind. It sounds like in this instance, that was you. I assume you outgrew that.

what's more basic to nature than emotions from a random memory imprinting?

kids for sure can be dicks

i know, i used to be one