Toys in the Attic

A Remembrance

I’ve written a few times about a particularly memorable Christmas when it looked very much like my brother and I were gonna only get one sweatshirt a piece.

(If you’re the type of person to interject “That’s more than some kids in ____ get” just do us both a favor and stop reading now).

Anyway, beyond that really weird Christmas, there was always a spectre of lack of money when it came to gifts. It hung so heavy that we were almost made to feel guilty about receiving them, lectured more about the sacrifice to purchase them than encouraged to actually enjoy the gift. It wasn’t that we were dirt poor (usually) or that my mother had been raised poor (she was not). I don’t know where the mentality came from, but it was there every holiday and every birthday.

It was one of those things that I knew would change for my own kids if given the chance.

After my divorce, I got a job at an auto plant, and soon after I made my 90 days we started working crazy hours. One could put in 70 a week without anyone blinking.

I had just about eradicated my drug consumption in the hope of making it successfully through my first 90 (when one officially becomes a card-carrying union member) and combined with all the overtime, I had way more money than I had ever had in my life.

My youngest daughter’s birthday arrived, and I decided that rather than agonize over what to get her or purchase a bunch of stuff she would wind up hating, I would do the best thing I could possibly think of for a 4-year-old girl: I took her to Toys R Us and told her she could have anything she wanted that fit in one shopping cart, plus a bike.

Her older sister was with us to help guide her decision.

I also included my mother, her grandmother.

As my daughter happily moved up and down the aisles with her own six-year-old personal shopper at her side and my mom pushing the cart, I went to pre-scout the bike display, see what was size appropriate and what kind of sweet accessories my kid could jazz it up with.

I ran back to join them in a game aisle after being gone for about ten minutes or less, and it struck me that the cart was less full than when I left.

There was a distinct look of consternation on my daughter’s face.

I don’t know what excuse I made to leave them alone to shop again but I made one, then ran off and snuck around behind them.

I could have storyboarded what I witnessed prior to witnessing it.

My mother was not only telling my child that she couldn’t have things before they reached the cart because they were “too expensive”, but she was also clandestinely removing items previously placed in the cart and just randomly placing them on the nearest shelves, simultaneously the bane of 4-year-olds and retail workers everywhere.

By the time I confronted my mother with my blood pressure at Space X launch mass, the delight of the day had been bulldozed, I had been made out to be a liar, and one innocent four-year-old girl was too frightened to pull anything from the shelves or even pick out a bicycle.

It was one of those times you simply don’t get a “do-over”.

In my fiction today, I wrote (as I often do) about addiction.

In recovery, you sometimes hear the phrase “relapse is part of recovery.”

I’ve seen people lean on that after multiple relapses within a few years.

The thing is, there is no guarantee that you will get a do-over, that you will make it back to the land of sobriety and sanity.

I don’t want a “do-over” on my childhood. All the experiences shaped what I am today.

The fact that I play a lot of terrible people on film may be a testament to how terrible it was but I am quite happy to be working in two industries I chose rather than being stuck back in an auto plant.

With different, more serene life experiences, I’d be a different actor and a different writer.

So I don’t ask for do-overs.

Except that day, as an adult, in Toys R Us.

I’d love to have that one back and see my kid walk out of that store with a smile on her face.

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Photo by Jose Francisco Morales on Unsplash