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Children's Special Places, by David Sobel

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 8 months ago

Children's Special Places, by David Sobel

 

Over the past few weeks my life has come to feel increasingly mythological. I used to see the events of my life as "just happening to me," but now I'm able to understand them in a larger context. I'm able to retroactively find meaning in the events of my childhood and use them to gain insight into who I am in the present moment. I've been wondering whether this mythologising of experience might be the developmental stage I'm at right now. Is this something that's likely to happen to a 23 year old? Or, to use a catchphrase of the last few months, "Maybe it's the Kundalini?" When I cried about a traumatic experience of my four year old self, not long ago, the meaning of that experience was transformed for me. It was no longer merely an unfortunate event in my past but became something holistic that, as any part of a hologram contains the whole, has been contained in all of my life experiences before and after the event itself; and as that event was transformed, so was my perception of life as a whole.

 

Lately, and I can't give a time frame, but increasingly over the last few months or years, I have had a feeling of myself as I was born and growing up in those very early years. I see an image of myself lying in bed with my mother at a very young age, but it's the feelings that are most powerful; like when you know you've had a meaningful dream, can't put it into words, or even images, but can simply feel it. There's a sense, in these feelings and images, that I knew who I was; that I knew my mother (really knew her) at a very early age, while at the same time, still discovering her. I was self-aware but at the same time still growing in my experience and in the somehow painful development of an identity separate from my mother. I know I must be on to something here, because when I write about this, though I don't experience much conscious emotion, I get chills all over my body. Whether this is a mythology that has somehow been created for me, or these are real memories of my earliest years, my unconscious knows it means something.

 

The night before I left for New York, I had read in a book, Children's Special Places by David Sobel, that in our culture many children create self-constructed rites of passage for themselves to signify the end of childhood. Many girls, for example, have doll play rituals. There was the story of one girl who suddenly, without knowing why, decided to cut all the hair off her dolls, pronounce them dead, and give them a proper burial. I pondered this, not expecting to stumble upon a rite of passage experience of my own, but suddenly, a huge piece of my childhood fell into place. I thought about how, throughout my fifth grade year, probably the most intense and dramatic of my life (and right before puberty), I was deeply obsessed with Jesus Christ Superstar. I watched the movie almost every day. At school I sang the songs and felt the play in my heart; the schoolyard became the mythological backdrop of this rite of passage. The girl on whom I had a crush became Mary Magdalene, and I imagined everyone in the schoolyard had some role to play in this epic. At home, I played Jesus Christ Superstar with our new litter of kittens -- Minkis, Bigfoot, Charlotte, and Chloe -- and they represented for me the characters in the play to whom I was singing. Sometimes I would sing the parts of Judas, or Simon the Zealot, or Pilate -- I was able to play all these parts myself without contradiction, because they were all meaningful to me -- but ultimately, I identified with the character of Jesus. I lay in bed, thinking about this, and it occurred to me: I was sacrificing myself! Sacrificing my childhood and forging a new identity. I think I even said something to the school guidance counselor to make her think I was suicidal. I remember singing: "I will drink your cup of poison / Nail me to Your cross and break me / Bleed me, beat me, kill me, take me now / Before I change my mind." The day the guidance counselor told my mother about the talk about death, the kittens were born -- Minkis, Bigfoot, Charlotte, and Chloe -- and because they were born on that day, I called them "the cursed litter."

 

So, childhood events can take on greater meaning even years later and the last few weeks it's making more sense than it ever did before. I never thought that playing Jesus Christ Superstar would have been such an integral part of my development as a person, and I gave little thought to how my tumultuous fifth grade year might fit into a developmental context. Fourth grade I had my first dream of kissing a girl. In sixth grade my dreams became explicitly sexual. Fifth grade was a period of flux and developing sexual identity. I don't remember my crush on Meagan being overtly sexual. I do remember, probably towards the end of my fifth grade year, looking at Ashlie Morin and suddenly feeling something; a sort of incipient ejaculation -- just a trickle. By the summer after fifth grade, I was a lot calmer, and no longer acting out self-sacrificial epics of grand proportions. I was over my crush on Meagan Sinkis. I had a little bit of a summer fling with Sara Martellotta. I still listened to Jesus Christ Superstar, but not as much, and not with the passion or intensity of my fifth grade year. Things I remember from that summer: swimming and playing the computer game Midnight Rescue with lots of friends; eating chocolate under a tree with Sara and Melanie; trying to explain to them that I didn't think about naked girls (which seemed strange to them); searching with Sara and Melanie around the neighbourhood for Chloe who, shortly after we gave her to a neighbour, disappeared; learning to blow bubble gum; hanging out in a big tent, in my backyard, which was a really great place to get together and read and play games and socialise; and getting chicken pox (a rite of passage that should have come much earlier). Except for a bit of drama, where Sara stole my diary, in which I wrote about my crush on her (and which I didn't want her to see), my inner life settled down and I became more social.

 

I italicised the "hanging out in a big tent, in my backyard, which was a really great place to get together and play games and socialise," because that's another thing -- the main thing -- this book, Children's Special Places, talks about: places that are special to children at various points in middle childhood, an often neglected (but of course, crucial) period of development. Freud called it the "latency period" as though nothing of importance happens at this stage. According to the book, at about age 7, children begin to separate themselves from their families and explore the greater world. The author, who had children draw maps of their neighbourhoods and show their special places, found that around age seven the children's houses get smaller on their maps, and the world around their homes takes up more space. In Joseph Chilton Pearce's framework the child is transcending the family matrix and entering the earth matrix: the period in which children are most interested in exploring their relationship with the world around them. (57). Children tend to become interested in building dens, forts, treehouses, etc. around the ages of 6 or 7, and the peak of their interest occurs around ages 10 or 11 (at which point "private dens become progressively more important.") Children at this age are very protective of their special places; they have a need for solitude and privacy at this age and like creating a special "place of their own." Sobel writes: "We need to recognize and respect children's need to find a place of their own as a step toward becoming their own persons." (74) Around age twelve the function of these special places become less solitary and secretive and more social: children at they talk about using these places to play cards, or enjoy social activities with their friends. I was 11 1/2, I think, that summer after fifth grade when we began to use the tent in the backyard as a social gathering place. I don't remember much about my life outside of school in the couple years before that; I don't remember what my special places were.

 

I decided to come up with a list of some of my favourite places as a child, though I can only guess at my age when these places were important to me.

 

  • When I was very young, I remember digging in a big garden pot just outside the house, digging my way to China, and seeing a sliver of glass in the dirt which reminded me of a Chinese person's eye. I then told my mother, "I know why Chinese people's eyes look like that. From holding them there so long." My parents didn't want me digging in the garden pots, so they bought me a sandbox, but it wasn't quite the same because it wasn't that deep and I knew I couldn't dig to China. I played in the sandbox with my friends. One day Jonathan convinced me to put water in the sandbox, and we'd build rivers and streams and little structures in the wet sand. I didn't understand that, if we got the sandbox wet, it would take a very long time for the sand to dry out... and it was an eternity for a kid.

     

  • I was maybe a little bit older when Emily and I liked to play in the tree in the front of my house. It was surely our special place. One day, my father, and Emily's mother's boyfriend, Tom (I think), got together and cut the tree down. We protested. I don't remember how we protested, but we did, unsuccessfully. The tree was cut down, and I think Tom even gave us a hard time about wanting to keep a piece of the trunk for posterity. He thought that was stupid. I vaguely remember my mother conspiring to help us get the trunk piece, and in the end, we did manage to keep it.

     

  • We had a playhouse on the hill in the backyard. I imagined it was like the house in the Wizard of Oz, and we were flying high and away, over Cape Cod. I assume I had a map and I was following our course. I remember thinking, "We're over Sandwich."

     

  • One night, at a slumber party, we stayed up really late, and we imagined that the den in my house was an owl's house.

     

  • The pool in my backyard was a special place where a lot of fantasy happened. Sometimes I would pretend to be King Poseidon and create storms in the vast oceans. Sometimes I was a merman washed ashore and exploring land for the first time. Sometimes my swimming pool was the Nile, sometimes the Tigris, and sometimes the middle of a great ocean.

     

  • And I remember the day when my whole world expanded. My friends and I discovered the woods, and had Pippi-Longstocking-like adventures exploring it together. There were all sorts of special places in the woods. I remember standing at the corner of Walnut Street where the woods began (now it's a housing development), and thinking with awe: "Those woods go to Charlton." I don't know why I thought that. Actually, if I went in that direction through the woods, I'd be heading towards Dudley.

     

  • When I was 10 1/2, the summer before 5th grade, my whole backyard was a world of its own; my pool was the Tigris River, which I would swim down to explore Mesopotamia, or the Nile, which I would swim or raft down to explore pyramids, tombs, and good Ancient Egyptian Restaurants.

     

  • I don't know how old I was when I played Indian with my cousins and their friends. One day, Angela told us she was starting a tribe, and my brother and I became a part of it. The woods became our home; we gave food sacrifices; had pipe ceremonies. I remember exploring the log of a fallen tree, was special to me. I would guess I was about nine or ten when we played these games, but I'm not sure. I think somewhere between eight and ten.

     

  • After I joined Boy Scouts (which is an indication that I was probably about twelve or thirteen), I remember playing Viking when we went on camping trips. I don't remember if I played this in my imagination or with other friends. Probably I played it with friends, for a while, but they got sick of it long before I did, so I continued to play it in my imagination. There was something more territorial about these games than playing Indian. It was about conquest and staking out a place for ourselves.

     

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