Under Construction

The first time I went through our doors I was carried. The house was then a literal skeletal structure, bare bones, exposed foundations and frames in need of not a fresh coat of paint but every coat. I imagine before I was born there was no end to the similarities that could be drawn between my existence and this house. Possibilities wrapping around the foundations as the skin and cells coiled around my body. Personality and character simmering between the air in the rooms as I slowly became someone within myself, and little revelations in a finger or floorboard allowed us both to slowly take form.

                       Having a baby is a big step. For my parents, I was no longer an idea or a concept, I was a person. They didn’t have any time left to prepare, there was no going back, I was here and I would be for a very long time. Looking around at the house we were in just as deep. The money was gone, and we were drowning in copious amounts of potential instead, with the likelihood of selling being low even if we had a want and so building off a promise from my father of all the things that he could and would draw up from the ground and carve out of the walls, we lived in the idea, that this is, was, and will be, home.

                      When I was very small I could take my baths in the laundry sink. I would sit in the stainless steel tub and admire the way the water and the metal reflected light from the adjacent stain glass window. As I got older I had to upgraded to the tiny bath at the bottom of the shower bathtub combo, in which I was only able to submerge any one part of my body at one time. I would walk past the large room at the end of the hallway, which had been converted from the working progress of our second bathroom to an oversized tool box with a bonus medicine cabinet and exposed pipeline, and contently dream of what it might be and never be. I didn’t have a bathtub my size for the several years until that bathroom became itself, and when I plopped myself inside my first full length tub, buzzing with anticipation, my legs were too short to keep my head above the water.               

                     My family, to this day, has the most extensive DVD collection that I have ever seen. During one particular screening of Mermaids, featuring musical icon ‘Cher’, in genuine distress and with an inherent flare for the dramatic, I found myself emotionally incapable of continuing to watch. Instead I sat on what would become our lounge-dining room, on the wooden frame that would become the wall that divides, what would become the kitchen from the rest of the space. I balanced walking along the exposed wooden frame just as Cher’s daughter had on the water fall she’d fallen from and almost drowned. Trembling along the beam I tried to make sense of a fear and a pain that I knew was incomprehensible through a recreation of an experience I couldn’t endure but needed to understand, and I revelled in the idea that the house, foundations exposed, not fully itself, not quite anything else, might just share in my young confusion.

                      When the living room was finally available to be used as such, we would gather around the tv as some numbingly entertaining show like Better Homes and Gardens cast varying lights on the colour swatched walls. I would look around at all there was still to be done and should have been finished long ago, and aware my father, whose perfectionist personality was the sole reason for the monstrous delay, was sitting well within ear shot. I would say “I wish the people from Better Homes and Gardens would come to our house”, knowing both that their house completed was only half the impeccable standard of ours only partly done, and my father in sharing this knowledge, would met my eyes with contempt, as had been my desired response

                 My first memory, which I can’t quite differentiate between dream and a reality, is of me and my tiny body crawling towards the bare wood door that led to our backyard. All my life I would watch KFC and Aerogaurd ads of families enjoying glories mosquito free afternoons, dining on succulent fried chicken in beautiful backyards, playing backyard cricket, and sprawled across lush green lawns as afternoons melted away. I would step outside and gaze across our backyard, through the thick of tools, screws and putties sprawled across our outdoor dining area, at the vast dirt wasteland that stood in place of the fragrant grass I dreamed of. Persistently my father had dug out and planted and willed grass to grow resulting only in tiny sprouts my brother had trampled in a drunken state. To compensate I would sunbake on our second-hand trampoline that existed just above the dirt and inevitably broke, at which point I would have to squeeze between the tools and lay with my back against the hot concrete.  

If I stand from where I am now and look back at my life, perhaps the most peculiar thing about my childhood is the inevitable air of frustration that comes from a re-telling of events. Had I known any different. Had I been brought home to a finished house that was then torn down around me and slowly constructed with an agonizing inconvenience by comparison, perhaps I wouldn’t have known the peculiar luxury of building an entire childhood within the same walls. I have now, a kitchen, a study, a dining room, and a bathroom and I have memories seeped into these walls that are as unique to me as this house simply is. We are intermingled in each other. There are splinters of wood in my skin and dust in my lungs and my name is carved into the plaster.