One of the absolutely horrific things that happened once my aunts started carrying on like a demented Greek chorus about my mother is that memories flooded back into my brain. Things I hadn’t thought about for many a long year. Like about my bike.

I cannot remember if I was eight or nine the year I got the fancy bicycle with a steering wheel instead of handlebars. But I suspect it was the year I was nine. You see, my memories of that time are mostly bad ones, and I have huge missing gaps in that memory. From the ages 7 to 9 I was being molested by the family dentist.

But I remember this bike! I’d seen it down at the Western Auto when I’d been there with my father, gleaming and twinkling with blue glitter flake paint. Every single time I was anywhere near the Western Auto I could be found, nose pressed up against the window, wishing, hoping, praying. So I did the next best thing, I begged my father for it.

I remembered telling my father that I needed no other presents that Christmas, just this bike would be enough.

Christmas rolled around and that bike gleamed a royal blue aura under the Christmas tree on Christmas morn. I remember being overjoyed with the bike, taking it out for an inaugural Christmas day ride around my small South Louisiana hometown. There was just one big problem, the bike was about four inches too big for me and I kept falling off.

My father adjusted the seat down as far as it would go, but I still needed to grow those four inches to be able to sit on the seat and have both feet on the ground. It was just simply way too large for the tiny child I was then.

After that first rather frustrating morn I started to experience something rather torturous. Every single blessed day it wasn’t rainy either my mother or my father forced me to take the bike to the local public elementary school’s paved playground and ride that stupid thing.

I fell off, a lot, and was constantly sporting bruises, bumps and scrapes because I hadn’t miraculously grown four inches over night. I begged and pleaded not to be forced to ride the bike. Take it back, I kept demanding of my father to no avail. After an hour my parents and I were beyond frustrated for very different reasons. It continued on for about two or three months before my parents gave up, and the bike was relegated to the flotsam in the garage. Eventually I did ride the sparkling thing, and rode it well, ,just not until I hit a growth spurt that summer and grew tall enough to place both feet on the ground.

I was so puzzled over this being the memory that came to me in the depressing slog that was dealing with my family of origin. I even mentioned it to one of my aunts. I was so puzzled by the memory, and it occurred to me that it was just a case of not being physically developed enough to ride it. Yet my parents acted like it was some moral failing of mine instead of the very real issue of the bike not being development appropriate for me right then. Why my parents could not see that, and simply put the bike away until I grew taller I could not say.

My aunt clued me in, telling me because both of my parents were obsessional about perfection that they took my inability to ride the bike as something that reflected poorly on them. It had nothing to do with that at all!

During my days with my aunt she filled in the blanks on a lot of things like this that happened during my childhood. I managed to fill in the blanks for her on something that has plagued her for years – the story that my mother tried to get my aunts and uncles sent into foster care, or to an orphanage when my grandmother died. Sadly I had to tell my aunt that it was true. I’d overheard my parents fighting about the issue more than once.

My parents were real battlers. They could disagree on damn near anything, and did late at night when the boiler makers and the pink squirrels were flying into their mouths. If I had a dime every single time one or the other woke me up in the middle of the night to ask which parent I wanted to live with after the divorce. They did this for years, to the point where I no longer paid it any mind by the time I reached ten.

One of the intriguing pieces of my childhood my aunt confirmed was the low energy attempts by my father to be a family annihilator. He threatened to kill us all, including my aunt, so many times. He finally took it from threat to action late one night by the LSU lakes. My mother and father was battling nightly in the front seat, my aunt and I in the back freaking out. My father shouted out that he’d kill us all, and promptly drove my mother’s Ford LTD right into the lake. There was just one problem, where he’d driven us off the water was no more than two feet deep. Once the cops should up and my parents lied about what happened Dad looked pretty stupid.

I guess the point of remembering those times when your parents seriously dropped the ball on parenting, or even did something against the law, is so that you can examine it, realize you did nothing wrong, it wasn’t about you at all, but about the pain and insanity within your parents.