Child Built Walls

Busy Is Bitter

The first thing I can recall about my childhood was that it was, "Busy." and that there was always something going on.

Though, I suppose as I got older, busy was a light term for brushing aside things that happened. A way to pretend the difficult things didn't happen in favor of remembering the good things. Busy is such a nondescript term, but I always just felt busy. Even if parents and adults would tell me that I was never truly busy. I was a child sitting on my ass looking at a TV screen, I had it good. But my head always felt busy and busy always felt like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So maybe I wasn't busy to them. I wasn't working a job, fending for myself or others. I was a child, I had no reason to. But I think I would have rather worked a job and helped pay rent than have to listen to the static buzz within my mind timed with the flipping of channels, or the soft incoherent chatter of cartoon characters as I stared through the TV, wondering if this is as good as it got.

Maybe that's why adults are always bustling around, calling children lazy and spoiled. Because they hate the idea of having time to think, time to look at yourself and wonder. Because if they started to think, maybe they would hate the state of the world too, or maybe they would be just as troubled as we are. Scornful of their parents and their actions, they would need time to lie down. Maybe that's why adults hate it so much because no one ever gave them the time to sit and listen to their heads and ask them, "How are you today?"

Regardless of the reason, I would still say to anyone who asked that my childhood was very busy. And whether busy meant going to work or working through something, I was still in my own way a busy bee. Putting on my mother's high heels and wandering around, calling myself a second Mom when the real one couldn't be home. I was busy, just not in the way some adult would rather me be busy.