no one makes it to the top alone

Everyone who climbs high gets a hand up, or many hands up, along the way - people often fail to recognize the ways in which a teacher, friend or other interested party may influence the course of their lives. By seeing something in them that they fail to see in themselves; by sheer encouragement and faith, if nothing else.

I've always felt that I was meant to fly. Does everyone feel this way? I used to have dreams of soaring, like a trapped bird, in rooms that were too small, with ceilings too low, with crowds of people grabbing at me trying to pull me down. I had these dreams for many, many years. The people wanted to stop me, to keep me from succeeding. (I never knew why, I still don't.)

In the dreams I always escaped, though narrowly - I stayed as high as I could, up near the ceiling, then swooped out when I saw my chance, to freedom.

My mother once explained that she really couldn't imagine the possibilities of a life beyond what she had - I always wondered if she meant that her experiences constrained her to be limited to what was there in front of her, rather than what might be. She was never much with words; she preferred...actually, I don't know what she preferred. She seemed often silent on the things which most needed explaining. I always assumed that she was keeping a secret of some sort, hoarding her power; but I think in fact the truth was that she simply didn't know. She never learned, had no teacher, and thus was unable to teach, or show, me the way forward, how to move beyond her own limits.

My father was also trapped in some way I never understood; I think something deeply scarred him as a child (he was farmed out to another family when he was 16, if I remember correctly), and I've always wondered if he felt rejected, as if he felt there must be something deeply wrong with him to be 'sent away' to another family. Mom only mentioned it the once and I've never asked her again; dad never talked about it at all. She seems to have resented my need to know more about my father, as if I were somehow less interested in her in the process. Sometimes I think people really never grow up - the resentments of childhood, the slights, the unfairnesses, lurk deep in the soul and only grow larger as the years pass. Less distinct maybe, taking on the indefinite shape of the monster under the bed. Looming in the psyche like some strange beast, feeding on subsequent hurts until, like the horrible giant tapeworm in a comic we had as kids, it consumed its host altogether, finally bursting forth from the tomb leaving nothing but bones...(yes, I really did read stuff like that as a kid. Explains a lot, probably. Or, perhaps like religion, people gravitate toward stories that explain, or at least echo, their actual, real-life experiences? Archetypes and all that.)

I just watched National Velvet with Elizabeth Taylor (her acting debut, apparently) and Mickey Rooney. Remember reading the story as a child, had the usual adolescent female fascination with horses.

I cried, for what feel like lost opportunities in my life - an unwise mother, a harsh and often indifferent father. I read stories about immigrant parents who want their children to have the opportunities they themselves never did; who seek to lift their children up high, on their shoulders, to reach the heights the parents couldn't.

I had a little red step-stool as a child that said,

This little stool is mine,
I use it all the time
To reach the things I couldn't,
and even things I shouldn't!

I loved that little stool, dragged it everywhere with me, at least in my memory. Maybe it was the best stand-in I could find for parents who either wouldn't or couldn't see their way to lifting me to the next level.