People suffer far too often and much too long from wounds inflicted by their parents when they were only children. I'm a bit weird, because my parents were awesome. They were loving, kind, reasonable, caring, and intelligent in their parenting. They were saints. No kidding. I literally would not change a thing about the way they raised us. While millions were scarred by their parents, I'm one of the weird ones that emerged from childhood without a single parent-inflicted scratch.
Our front door, however, was where the love and kindness ended. We didn't have this word back then, but I really believe I was somewhat autistic as a child. Maybe quite so. Reading the symptoms of autism online recently, I realized that I had most of them. I was really smart, but in a Rain Man sort of way. Couple that with being tall, incredibly skinny, and completely uncoordinated, I was just too easy a target for neighborhood bullies even before first grade. And so I withdrew into the elaborate imaginary worlds I would create in the windowless guest bedroom at the foot of the stairs in the basement.
Each world was created pretty much from scratch, beginning with my crash-landing on a deserted island. We never had a TV, so I learned to read very early… somewhere around four, I think. But they say I was memorizing the books of the Bible and the 50 states and capital cities by the time I was 18 months old. But back to the imaginary worlds… because books were my primary medium, these worlds were much more Robinson Crusoe than Gilligan's Island.
<more on this later… haven't finished this post yet>
