The Overbooked Life

⚠️ Reader Discretion Advised
This post contains personal reflections of childhood trauma, including references to abuse, neglect, and violence. While it also touches on moments of resilience and hope, some descriptions may be triggering for readers. Please take care of yourself as you read.

When I think back to childhood, it doesn’t feel like one steady story—it comes in flashes. Some memories are sharp, like glass, others soft and sweet, like penny candy melting on my tongue. The good and the bad lived side by side, tangled together so tightly I can’t tell one without the other.

I remember laughter that didn’t always feel safe. We were chased around with purses, with creepy masks, the line between playing and fear blurred until I couldn’t tell which was which. My step-grandma had her own kind of performance—smacking herself in the face and groaning “my heart” like she was waiting for someone to rush to her aid. My step-grandpa wasn’t much different in his own way. Whiskey was his comfort, his “sleepy spoons,” and sometimes his excuse. He even took me to the bar once, where I sat quietly on a sofa in the corner while he drank his beers, trying to disappear into the smoke-filled air.

At home, mistakes weren’t just mistakes. They were punishments waiting to happen. Running water too long earned you screaming. My Step-Dad’s rage was always looking for a place to land—one night, he yanked me from bed and beat me for something I hadn’t done. When he realized his mistake, he rubbed my head like that could erase the pain, then turned on my sister instead. That’s how it always was: the violence never vanished, it just shifted from one of us to the next.

Even accidents weren’t safe. I once tumbled down the stairs with a glass in my hand, slicing open my palm. At the ER, instead of comfort, I got my mother’s screaming. Another time, I was too slow getting into the van, and the sliding door crushed my finger. I cried quietly in the back seat, knowing a doctor’s visit would never come. The lesson was always the same—be faster, quieter, smaller.

And still—there were escapes. There was the dirt hill with Ann, where we ramped our bikes until our legs burned, trying to stay gone long enough to avoid the weight of the house. There was the penny candy shop, only a few blocks away, where a pocketful of change could buy a meal’s worth of sugar. On those days, a bag of candy was enough to feel full, enough to feel like joy.

But the chaos always found its way back. I remember being woken in the middle of the night, Mom dragging us from bed as she fought with my Step-Dad. She loaded us into the minivan and drove us across town to my step-grandparents’ house, where we’d be left for days. I remember my sister Brittney being bitten by the neighbor’s dog, blood running down her arm, but no hospital trip to follow.

If there was a gentler side of childhood, it was in my step-grandma’s garden. She’d place a trowel in my hand, guiding me through the rows of vegetables and flowers, her voice soft and steady. “You will never be hungry if you grow your own food. You will never lack beauty in your life if you grow your own flowers.” Those words planted themselves deep inside me, stronger than any punishment.

When we moved away, she pressed her phone number into my hand, telling me I could call her collect anytime. I’d sneak out to pay phones, clutching the receiver, her voice carrying me through the hardest days. Of course, when Mom discovered the secret, the phone itself became the weapon. The beatings hurt, but they never stole the memory of those calls. They never erased the lifeline I had found in her.

So when I look back now, childhood is a strange mix of bruises and sugar, of screaming and dirt hills, of gardens and fear. It’s not all darkness, and it’s not all light. It’s both. And in those fragments—in the penny candy and the bruises, in the dirt hills and the gardens—I see the pieces that made me.

Those pieces are why I can still find joy in small things. Why I plant flowers now, even when life feels heavy. Why I laugh with my kids when they come home with pockets full of candy. My childhood may have been broken, but it taught me how to gather up the fragments, how to hold on to beauty even in the middle of pain. And maybe that’s what resilience really is: learning how to grow something beautiful from the roughest soil.