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Misfit

A short story of my childhood by Kevin Mitchell

By Kevin MitchellPublished 3 years ago 13 min read
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Misfit
Photo by Prashant Khanchandani on Unsplash

I was petrified. Frozen and floating lost in the mist. All these feelings all at once. This was the first time I remember recognising how out of place in this world I was. Lost floating in a mist of confusion, of newness, of nothing quite fitting with what I knew or what I expected. Yet I was in a perfectly everyday situation. At least for everyone else.

I could see the restaurant, my friends, and the mother of one of my closest friends who had taken us here to this restaurant. I could see it all. Yet it was distant. All the other side of the great misty divide I was floating in, unable to act, to touch any of it either with my mind or so it seemed my body. I was petrified, sat on a far too ornate wooden chair, unable to move, unable to talk. I was frozen, my insides frozen like concrete finally dried, all tight and bunched. Frozen because my brain would not function as much as I willed, waiting in the foggy mist. Frozen because the tightness of petrification had thrown my thermal dynamics off, I was hot and sweaty on the inside but clammy and cold on the inside. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to be asked what I wanted for dinner. Fear held my throat tight. I was a fish out of water, here in this strange new place. It was dark outside. The night was filled with terrors.

It seems so surreal to look back on this now, thirty five years later. The world has changed for the better. Despite what some fear, the world has grown. The society we live in, the norms we experience now, here in the south east of England. Also the world for me as an individual. My personal experience. Change in society as whole is slower than the mean. I am reminded it was only ten years ago that I went on a date with a lovely, polite and well spoken professional girl. White and English like so many I have known. This particular girl though during our laughing chat told me she had once voted for the British National Party. I was utterly shocked. I think now she intended to shock, and to share. I had never personally known anyone who had done such a thing, or that I would have thought likely to ever do such a thing. Yet there she was, in every other way a terribly attractive girl I really liked. We never met again. I have ever since asked myself how anyone who could think could support this anti matter to the gravity well of a progressive, thinking, learning society. I am reminded because it is the Euro football championships and some england fans are booing the england players when they take the knee before the match in support of the equality, diversity, inclusive anti discrimination agenda. They are booing being anti racist. Unfathomable to me how any one can think that is the right thing to do. Yet there are those who do.

Back to my story of my ten year old self. Petrified. I grew up in a council flat, as my mum had done before me. My family were poor, the poorest of the poor. Again something I look back on almost as though it was someone else’s life. I knew well before ten how poor we were. Knowing had a considerable effect. I hid it actively. I pretended. Pretended to have things. Pretended to have food and toys and whatever else the day may require. In my imagination yes, but also in tales I’d invent with friends. Mostly when I was very small, maybe four and five years old. But that caution about being poor, about giving the truth away to strangers or to anyone but the closest peers and friends, stayed with me. Right the way through my childhood. I grew up carrying the weight of it.

I don’t remember ever really going anywhere with my mother or my dad before we moved away from him. I remember only snippets of disjointed flashes through to about the age of seven. We moved away from my dad when I was seven. I have only one memory of going anywhere that wasn’t the local park, my grandparents flat, church or food shopping with my mother and before we left my father . That was a caravan in a caravan park. It was small and not modern even for that time. I knew we had been lent it by the church, that we were too poor to book and pay for a holiday. It was the only holiday I ever went on as a child.

My grandparents were in and out of my little life over all those years. Sunday lunch at my maternal grandparents is a strong memory. The best food I had for all those years. The soda pop machine that produced fizzy drinks and the dog, strong memories from my paternal grandparents flat. No strong memories of food, or fun, at home. I remember as a special treat my mother would sometimes take my younger brother and I to Mcdonalds. We had to choose between chips or a hamburger. There wasn’t enough money for both. That would happen at the end of school terms sometimes.

Back to the restaurant where I sat petrified. It was a good friend of mine’s birthday. I had been to the flat where he lived many times and he and I had gotten on really well since we were sat together by our class teacher at school when we were about six. He was black and I was white and it didn’t matter at all at school or between us. I am pretty certain this was my first time in any restaurant that wasn’t McDonalds or Wimpy. Wimpy was another burger chain. My maternal grandmother sometimes took us to Wimpy. It was like a higher class of Mcdonalds, with a more limited menu. As I said, we saw my grandmother sometimes frequently, but then there could be gaps years long. Not as she wished it but it was so.

So I was in this restaurant with my friend Robert, his mother and some other school friends. A restaurant I am sure was just a normal nice local high street restaurant, something suitable for your son’s tenth birthday. Memories are odd though, particular ones formed under stress. I remember better how it felt. To me it was totally alien. Robert’s mum was a busy professional working mum. The type you meet all the time. Unless you were me as a child, I knew no one like her. And she was black, and I wanted to please her. And I wanted not to get things wrong. And I wanted to enjoy the party. But I was petrified. Literally. My insides were so solid, all dried concrete, I wasn’t hungry.

I knew nothing of starters and main courses. I understood dinner and dessert. That was how it was at school and at Sunday lunch. A waiter came to take orders. I had a menu and read through it, but even though I was by then an excellent reader I couldn’t make sense of this thing. I’d never seen one before, it wasn’t like Wimpy. I didn’t really know what any of the dishes were. I remember the fear inside me, fear that I wouldn’t like whatever I ordered. Fear that I would let Robert’s mum down. I remember her leaning over a little, trying to get to the bottom of what I wanted.

I knew then and have remembered ever since what a kind act of hers this dinner party was. Taking a group of children in their last year of primary school out for dinner. To a reasonably fancy restaurant. The kind of experience a parent wants to give their child, wants to give as an experience to all young people growing up. Robert’s mum wasn’t to know I was petrified. She wasn’t’ to know I didn’t understand any of what was about me. Not the waiter, not the seeming poshness of the table setting and the restaurant . She wasn’t to know I felt deeply that I didn’t belong, that I was not safe, that I was exposed and would be found out any moment as a pretender who didn’t belong here.

Of course no one came to expose me and drag me out. Still that didn’t save me from being miserable. Petrified. I know today Robert’s mum probably couldn’t have known I had never been to a restaurant before. If I was in her shoes today being in a restaurant for me would be the most natural thing in the world, and like her I take my children to restaurants as often as I can. Yes McDonald’s sometimes, but as many other restaurants as my fiancé and I can as often as we can.

The fault for her not knowing I was petrified and in new uncharted space, was my parents not hers. I didn’t tell her either, but I could never have admitted such a weakness, even in front of my friends, at ten. I had to pretend all the time, ever since before I can remember. I blamed myself for not telling her for many years. It’s only fairly recently, in the last five years or so, that I have understood there is fault, but it is with my parents. My mother didn’t prepare me, didn’t coach me, didn’t give me these experiences and didn’t talk to Robert’s mother about any of this. All things I would do without hesitation for my own children.

Handicapped, reduced, squashed down. Petrified. Concrete inside and frozen outside. Robert’s mum must have wondered where the child who played with her son had gone. Who was this stock still statue, unspeaking, mumbling, in place of his friend.

I remember I managed to point at the chicken and say yes in a mumble when Robert’s mum asked if I wanted the chicken, and was I sure. Chicken was known. It was safe. I should be able to hide with chicken. Should be able to eat it. Chicken was Sunday lunch at my grandparents. The word “yes” hid me.

Everybody’s meals all came. My chicken came. The thunderous impact of its arrival shocked the concrete, vibrations running all through me. This was not chicken but in its place a terrible trick, the night’s dark jest.

It was of course, just a half chicken, a common style for restaurant plates. Cooked I think now in some marinade. It was most probably a lovely dish I would readily welcome to my table now. The ten year old me did not know what to do. I had never seen this, a chicken served like this. Worse, it was pinkish. Pink in my mind meant uncooked. Uncooked meant dangerous to eat.

I wonder now looking back whether the salmonella in chicken crisis that was all over the news happened somewhere around this time. It would explain why this pinkish, uncooked thing was so powerful. It was impossible for me to eat this. Terror gnawed inside me, shaking the concrete this way and that like being caught in the toothed jaws of a dog. The world was giddy, smaller. All I could see was on the plate. The pinkish half chicken. Danger. I recognise this narrowing of the world, this blocking out of everything outside a focus. It still happens to me even now, when under intense stress. The world beyond to all intent and purpose literally doesn’t exist. I didn’t know the rules, I didn’t know if I could not eat it, if I could say what worried me, if I could change it, if I could do anything at all when confronted with this dish other than hide.

So I hid. I resorted to school dinner tactics. Cut things up and push them in piles upon the plate. Make it look like you’ve eaten it, and are just full up. Hidden, a deceptive veil. But the terror didn’t abate. It was still there. Terror of being discovered, terror of upsetting Robert’s mum, of her being angry, or the shame of her finding out, of my friends finding out. So I didn’t eat my dinner in this restaurant. This lovely gesture by my friend's mother. She asked if I was ok. I nodded. Fear shaking the concrete inside me. Hide hide. I remember her asking if I didn’t like it. I had no words. I felt she was disappointed. I was quite empathetic even when young. I’ll never know if Robert’s mum was actually disappointed, if that feeling was just the terror rocking my petrified and frozen self in the misty fog that clouded my mind like the white veil capping the peaks of mighty mountain tops. Space onto which all the terrible dreams could be painted. I’ll never know.

I do know that if I was in her place now, I would feel some disappointment. I have to allow myself to acknowledge it, even though it brings shame swelling up. I have to allow myself a little disappointment that food is wasted, paid for food. Mostly though I would feel disappointment that my guest is not enjoying the experience or the food so central to it. Disappointment that I cannot find a way to help them, or really understand what is causing such dismay.

I suspect I looked quite a shocking sight all that time ago. Again I must acknowledge to myself I feel a sense of shame. I wonder what my face and eyes betrayed. Yes even now that sense I should have been able to hide it, to pretend and carry on through it, plays through my thoughts. As does the fear of wasting money. That scarcity mindset so impressed into me as a child. At least today I recognise it for what it is, and can adjust and learn and work on changing those underlying flight or fight responses. Relearning and redeveloping my mindset. I have come a long way but have a lifetime still to travel. Flight, stay hidden, the base survival response of a traumatised child.

Psychologists have studied the impact shame and childhood trauma has upon us. It impacts our ability to have boundaries. We can believe we have to please, we aren’t worthy. The purpose of having boundaries is to protect and take care of ourselves. If we do not have boundaries we can have trouble saying “no”. Sometimes we over-share personal information and we might hide our true feelings on subjects important to us. This was me throughout my childhood.

I want to be like Robert’s mum. I want to make sure my own children know the world, and are not left taking toddler steps as adults. I want to make sure they have bountiful mindsets, not scarcity mindsets. I want them to be open, collaborative, networked and comfortable living with others and with themselves. I want them to be confident. I can and will fight to be different from how the childhood me grew into a young adult. I do not want my own children to have to do the same. I never want them to feel out of their depth, to feel they do not belong.

This is how we as a society get better. This is how we slowly have less wonderful girls confessing as their guilty secret not some dalliance or secret desire, but that they voted for a party who wanted to divide us, to make some of us less than others, but importantly who told people like her that they felt less than themselves because of black, asian and other non white people. A lie that can only hold traction if people already believe they do not belong, are not equal. We must challenge that lie and transform our world so that everyone benefits. We can start by thanking and celebrating the pioneers, those who touched our own lives in deeply personal ways. Those like Robert’s mum.

humanity
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About the Creator

Kevin Mitchell

Fiction writer, explore the rivers of magik with me. Published author, poet and thinker.

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