Culture . 05/20/2008 04:03 PM . Aaron D. McGarvey

Today, in an attempt to more fully appreciate the life-giving nature of one of Spring’s first warm, sunshine-filled days, I opened wide the window in my two bedroom on-campus apartment. The apartment window overlooks a playground, and, as I opened the window on this no-less glorious day in which all seemed right in the world, I heard a loud and obviously quite irritated female voice:

“What the f___ do you think you’re doing? Who the hell do you think you are?”

It was the tone of someone who had completely lost all sense of rationality.

Expecting to see a previously private husband-and-wife “disagreement” gone public, I did a double take when a quick glance down revealed that the tone and the expletives belonged to a mother addressing her two children. Angered by their refusal to listen, the mother had lost all coherence, launching into a full blown assault on her children.

Neither could have been more than 3 years old.

With a keen awareness of their mother’s fury, the children carried on in their adventures on the playground, as if this particular rant had been experienced numerous times before – every time, imprinting upon their impressionable young intellects that this is normative behavior, to which one could only respond with complete numbness.

For me, and undoubtedly for those children, the peace of the sunny spring day was shattered. It might as well have been 20 outside. Strip all the buds off the branches. Bury the flowers. Winter was back.

It appalled me. The absence of love, or perhaps the presence of hate, in the mother’s voice—it was one of regret. “I wish I had never birthed you. You are nothing but a waste of my time. You are stupid, worthless, value-less.” She cursed at children that were only yet beginning to even comprehend human language.

There was a message that I needed those children to know. If I could, I would tell them “You should not have to deal with this. You need to know it wasn’t meant to be this way. You can choose to break free from this.”

Stop for a minute. Who are we? Who do people tell us we are? Even our parents tell us we’re worthless. What does that do to us? Your mother unleashed expletives at you when you’re three… do you think it would affect you?

We hear the lies over and over and over again, and eventually, we can’t help but believe them—often for the rest of our lives. We wander in the wilderness searching for purpose, community,identity, desperately trying to the discredit the accusations brought against us before we could even defend ourselves.
I think we spend a great deal of our lives trying to come to terms with the identity that has been left to us by our parents. We grow up never realizing their failures until after their images have been irreversibly branded onto our souls. Chances are, those children on the playground will never remember that day the way I do. It’ll just be another day in the life of what they considered normal.

See, in many homes today, identities are created in factories. Assembly lines piece together the mismatched parts, with no concern whatsoever for the individual. Parental expectations assure that the completed product has little or no say in the whole process. Then one day we wake up and realize we are the broken products of our broken predecessors and the choices from the broken lives that came before them.

It is rare that individuals raised in broken homes completely break free of the lies they once knew as playmates. Mostly, like their parents, they grow up and go to work in the factory, laying another brick in the legacy wall.

But there is a choice.

I think, above everything else, that’s what I wanted those children to know.
Through knowledge and learning and love, even the broken can fix others—can make certain their children aren’t manufactured and misshapen, just by learning to treat them with the love required fashion identity. They can burn down the factory, and the assembly line can sputter to a stop.

It can end with them.

Aaron D. McGarvey will attend Eastern University this fall. He is not the product of an assembly line.

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