Little round balls ... family of origin thoughts

LITTLE BROWN BALLS

I told my sister once that we weren’t a family when we were growing up.
Nope. Not a family. Not at all.
If by family, we mean not just white picket fence stereotypes but also harmony, communication and caring.
Of, sure, we ate all our meals together, but that was a surface event.
Mom talked about her work, her coworkers — one in particular — and other minutia of that social circle.
Dad talked about church parishioners, sometimes things in town, and other minutia of his circle.
Neither made much effort to enter the other’s circle, with a husband-and-wife version of Alphonse and Gaston playing out every night at the dinner table.
And certainly, neither one reached out to any of five children-siblings at that dinner table, not like Ward or June Cleaver.
I will not offer a simile to soften a metaphor.
We were seven individual balls of shit,
Not behind a white picket fence of outward family nicety,
But inside a swirling white commode of separate lives,
Or so it seems to me.
Although I still have trouble with expressing my emotions
As an adult, with hindsight, I look back and see one of my childhood “roles” as the family emotional sponge.
Maybe that’s part of why I have trouble expressing my emotions today.
Shit stinks and disgusts.
And a self-conscious ball of shit that “knows” it — that believes it and feels it — is probably going to hurt a lot, even if not self-conscious of it.
But flushing the mental toilet doesn’t flush all the memories. Or beliefs. Or perceptions. Of what life seemed to be.