When I was young, perhaps six or seven years old, I had
a rather odd belief. I got it into my
head that each person was put on this planet with a word “bank” or storage
space. We were limited, in this
lifetime, to speaking only the words in the bank. We had unlimited access to words like “a” or
“the” or “and.” However, fewer and fewer more complex words were in the bank. There might be 1,000 uses of the word “train,”
and 500 uses of the word “participation.”
And forget about bandying about a word like
“antidisestablishmentarianism!” There
was only one of those in a lifetime!
According to this notion, what would happen as I got
older is that I’d go to speak a normal sentence, and a word here and a word
there just wouldn’t come out. There
would be dead silence. Gradually, over
time, there would be more and more silence, verbal Swiss cheese, until
eventually my statements, particularly complex or interesting ones, would be
unintelligible. So, looking ahead from
my second or third grade vantage point, I determined that I should stay as
silent as possible early on, so that at least I’d have some ability to speak in
an emergency once I was older.
There is no way my parents explicitly told me such a
thing, so this has to be a case of seriously misconstruing something they, or a
teacher, said. I had misunderstood other
things. For years, I was sure that the Episcopal
service of Holy Communion was referring to “meat and rice,” when in fact it was
“meet and right.”
And yet other childhood messages seemed to support my
word bank belief. My brothers and I were
to be “seen and not heard,” particularly when there were adult visitors in the
house. We lined up, came into the living
room to meet Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and then disappeared out in the yard to
play. Even with our parents, we were to
“speak only when spoken to.” It seems
positively Victorian from the standpoint of 2015, yet my parents’ own parents
were born in the 1800’s. These childrearing truisms survived two World Wars and a Great Depression, staying intact
into the early 1960’s when they were passed on to me. I think it was probably the social upheaval
of the late 1960’s that finally did them in!
There’s much more to be said about the long journey
toward self-expression, but for now, I will only say that I was astonished a
few years ago to meet another woman of my generation who had had a similar
childhood idea. The feminist in me has to wonder whether a young male, even
then, would ever have been able to formulate such a self-silencing belief. At the very least, boys of the 1950’s and
early 60’s must have seen the adult men around them in positions of power, and
known that eventually, their own words would carry weight. Why did I, a girl, see an ever-diminishing power to speak in my future?
Blogs have existed for a number of years, and yet only
recently did I drum up the courage to write one, and still, deep down, I find
myself wondering whether I’ll go to write something important and the bank vault
will close on me.
Breathe, Elizabeth, breathe. It’s not going to happen. Yet another inner hole in the ice to skate
around!
