The Acceleration Of My Merry- Go- Round (I)

The Acceleration Of My Merry- Go- Round (I) - HELLO everybody, and welcome back to my weekly blog after a summer break which was just going to last shortly. All fairly relative, though, right? In fact, much more time than previously thought, planned or anticipated has passed since then due to our rather spontaneous decision to relocate to a farm where the house needed a considerable amount of work and TLC before we could seriously think about settling in, even. Without a doubt, a rather lengthy stretch, those past eight to ten weeks, and yet, in hindsight, I can't help but gasp at how fast that special interval has actually swept by. Up to this day, I most vividly recall my sweet late grandmother point out the phenomenon of time to us kids as something increasingly fast- tracking in an ever the more noticeable way, the older we got. - Alright, here I am, picturing myself as a six- year- old, who most naturally without any temporal concept whatsoever back then, wholeheartedly trusted in a day stretching into a period almost undefinable and therefore close to eternal. The reason for clinging on to it for dear life primarily arose from my very own perception of being in absolutely dire need of gaining more space between Today and Tomorrow merely to preserve my sanity. Downright ironic this classic contradiction or oxymoron! Anyway, not for nothing did I feel the urge to protect my fragile mind just as much as my sacred personal peace. Why that twisted stance, you may quite rightfully wonder? Well, what I principally created then was a hurried makeshift copying mechanism which seemed only logical to me after having - more or less over night - ended up embedded in a mentally endangering since highly toxic environment. In the light of an almost complete and unthinkable absence of a first or native language at such an advanced age, I quickly noticed in horror that I was running out of valid options with respect to lastly catching up with the complexity of a First Grader's daily scholar affairs. There had not been any talk yet as far as putting me into the professional care of a child psychologist or psychiatrist despite everyone's awareness that I had virtually just been ripped out of my nuclear family and swiftly transplanted into a patch- work type of familial group. Today, I can honestly say that to my very best of knowledge, I was trying just anything possible then, so that I would not drown in that overwhelming stream of duties, discipline, learning, adapting and well, delivering satisfactorily, after all. At that time, I often envisioned myself flailing my arms in sheer despair only to keep my head above the surface. However, this was also the time when I had to accept just another painful life lesson which was that my behavior of unintentional but still constant failure actually bore anything but gratifying consequences at home, the one and only place a child is supposed to feel safe. As a doctor, my father, who is deeply rooted in old- school ways of thinking, sadly understood nothing at all about the broken or traumatized soul of a child, much less about his own flesh and blood. I consequently felt it was imperative to my survival to fabricate excuses as to why my homework had not yet been corrected and assessed by my teacher. At first, I began to hide my thin test books literally scattering them all over my dad's office, and, sure enough, I would faithfully return every other morning right after being dropped off at school. Keep in mind, though, back then, time was not the only dimension apparently super flexible in my mind but distance as well. A way which takes me between 5 and 7 minutes today created the stressful illusion of half a lifetime at age six. Nonetheless, I would haste back to my secret vault and fetch my exam papers which were still unacknowledged or rather unsigned by my parents. Back in school, I would apply even bolder tall tales to answer for the alleged negligence on their part. Of course, my game had an expiration date, and exactly this mess was now approaching me fast and furiously. Still, it truly felt like an eternity away until it would finally hit me head on like a freight train at full speed. - To be continued next week.