Most emotionally-scarring childhood experience?

One morning when I was out doing my early morning paper route I'd delivered my last paper was riding home on my 10speed. About 3 blocks from home I was riding up a steep hill, the kind where you gotta kind of stand when you peddle. Well the chain came off and I went face first over the handlebars and straight into the pavement. All I could feel was a terrible pain radiating in my jaw. A couple minutes passed in the pain was terrible, I tried to put my tongue behind my front teeth and they were missing. This panicked the living hell out of me. When I arrived home about 6:30 am screaming - my mom came in the kitchen got stick and my sister passed out. The skin on my chin was hanging there like a flat but not bleeding.
Running me to the hospital sitting there waiting to be attended we ran into my 2nd best friends family. My friend Tony had been decapitated at a drive-in movie theater on the back of his brothers old firetruck. All my problems sort of went away.

right. hard to be funny after edgar's post.

i remember three things vividly. no, four.

one: my sister claims I use to eat earthworms when I was about two. so not true! i was fascinated with those buggers, because we learned about them in pre-school. they're the same on both ends, but the belt decides which end is the main one. if you cut an earthworm in half, one half (longer) survives, other does not. i would never eat such a fascinating thing, i swear!!!

two: bibina, my dog, died when i was eight. the vet overdosed the poor little dog (chinchilla crossed with a pinch).

three: my sister, five years older, convinced me that in case of severe trauma (she was just starting med school. thus held a gigantic amount of credibility in my mind), one's front teeth exchange positions: they just sort of shuffle around. I have no clue why she ever even thought of this, but I do know that I went around my school for months spreading this theory. Until my sister found out that I actually believed her and set the stroy straight right away (she was quite alarmed at my naivete)

four: when I was thirteen, it was a happening time. the communism collapsed, i finally understood what my father was doing all those years and how difficult it must have been (he was a dissident writer, who spent months in prison during communism), and just a few months into the whole new romantic era of freedom and democracy, his best friend, and my very close "uncle", died of a massive heart attack. He was Vaclav Havel's close advisor at the time. The first death I experienced in my life. I still feel him around when I'm in need of a kindred spirit. When I was 22, I translated a few of his letters from prison (from 1981) for a friend (complicated story, but this friend is one of the vice presidents of Dow Jones company...and a friend to a few former dissidents) who then proceeded to pay for their translation in english edition....aaaaanyway....

Other than those, I was very sheltered. I mean, I didn't even know we have a tough life until I was 13, 14. Never dawned on me. My parents did a super job of hiding it as best as they could.

Shortly after my brother's demise, I began to go blind. Fortunately, I was able to play piano and work my way through the honkeytonks. A doctor friend cured my blindness when I was twenty three and I joined the Navy for three years. Off the African coast, our destroyer was inexplicably surrounded by Russian military craft- - two subs, a cruise ship and three destroyers. The subs torpedoed us and the destroyer sank with us all. We were killed.

Dag - You can cross a chincilla with a DOG?

are you serious, or just pulling my leg?

Edgar are you pulling Gussies on us?

Just being true to myself. Doody on Gus's Gussies.

I have just returned from hypnosis. When I wrote this thread last night and told of my trauma with the fox head in the church I had this nagging feeling that there was something much more traumatic that was buried deep inside -- something so suppressed that I was unable to dredge it up. I paced the floors last night and early this morning went to see my hypnotist.

He was just opening up when I pulled up. The neon light which says FRED'S HYPNOSIS SHOP lit up as I strode toward the door.

I told him off my repressed memory and he began to swing the shiny coin in front of my eyes.

The memory came to the surface. A young Ratzenhofer, probably about two years old, chasing butterflies in a field of flowers. The young Ratzenhofer giggled with delight at the elusiveness of the butterflies and when he reached up to grab a particularly bright yellow and black one the sun was blotted out and the sky was filled with diving, screeching eagles.

One of the bigger eagles grabbed the young Ratzenhofer in his razor-sharp talons and begin to climb in the sky, they young child's screams carried harmlessly into the wind, not a soul below, neither Mr. or Mrs. Ratzehofer, toiling away under the roar of a primitive printing press, trying to eke out a meager living, could hear the screams of their child.

The eagle carried Ratzenhofer to the top of a thousand foot cliff and began to rip into his head with a ferocity rarely seen in the eagle community. But Ratzenhofer's head was hardened beyond his years and the eagle, frustrated, once again took to the sky with the screaming child in his talons and, reaching a dizzying level, dropped the child toward a rock colony which was just a speck on the ground, hoping the collision would shatter the child's skull and make accessible the delicious brains.

The young child hit the rocks and his head did indeed split open, but, miraculously, the brains stayed intact. The eagle soaring downward to once again grab the lad was suddenly vaporized by the shotgun blast of Neil Ratzenhofer, an uncle of the child.

Gus was carried back to his parents shack, bandaged up and put to bed.


It all came back to me. It was strange hearing my voice on the hypnotist tape recorder. (aren't you always surprised by the sound of your own voice?)

But now besides the fox head I have to deal with the friggin screaming eagle.

I wish I would have left that memory suppressed.

oops, chihuahua is what i meant, chai. not chincilla

gus, wouldn't the eagle take care of the fox? have your memories fight it out in the open.

When i was about 10 we were watching a documentary about the 2nd World War at school.
The teacher said 'why not go home and ask if you parents were born in the 40's'.(I swear she said 40's as the war was '39-'45).

So I thought ok.
That night I asked my mum if she was born in the 1940's(I could have said 30's but Im sure I said 40's hence my reaction).
My question was met with absolutely hysterical laughter for about half an hour, I cried my eyes out and wondered what Id said wrong, and have since wondered why my teacher would suggest we do something which would result in such a scarring way.

My mum was born in 1943.
I have never forgotten that and to this day I hesitate in asking any question or I rarely speak in fear that I will be laughed at in such a way again.

Why did you mother laugh Material Girl?

mmm, i don't get it, mg. why was it so funny to ask if your parents were born in 1940's? i mean, i remember my mom laughing hysterically at these shoes that i bought when i was about 13, but in all honesty, they truly were ridiculous. but born in 1940s? i am missing something i think.

The lady Diane was born in '43 but I wasn't born until '44, they rationed everything in those days.

Now this is just a guess Dag, but I'm relating it to something my mother would do all the time...

For instance, I predominately do everything with my right hand, except write, hence people call me left handed, even though it's pretty much useless for everything else.

When I was little, I would get confused between left and right.

My mother would ask me, "Well, which is your left hand"
I kinda didn't know, because my brain was, I don't know, wired both ways..

Well, which hand do you write with?
hmmm....well neither one feels like the correct hand at this moment....

<SIGH> Well, WHICH hand do you BLESS yourself with?
mmmmm....I don't know, because I'm confused about which is left or right.

She never would just come out and tell me..."This is your left hand"

So, I finally gave up asking her anything.

MG, is it that she laughed and you didn't know why, but you were just supposed to "know"?

It was because she laughed at me and I didnt know why?
I see it as she thought that I asked because I thought that she was really old.
But as she WAS born in the 40's I dont know why it was funny.


I love my mum madly but some things she does/says can really upset me.I know its silly at something that happened years ago and she probably wont remember it but I can still remember how i felt at the time.

Even now I hardly talk for for the fear of feeling stupid or embarrassed.

When I was a teenager I said something in a group of friends and one guy replied(who I now think of, and has prooved himself to be a w*nk*r)'What a stupid thing to say'.
It wasnt, it was totally resonable(cant remember what it was).
I wish I could say that to him one day and make him feel tiny and insignificant like he did to me.

Ive struggled for a long time thinking Im inferior to people but I have recently thought to myself that my opinions are just as valid as anyon elses.
Its a struggle but Im getting there.

Oh honey.....

I know, things that were said so long ago still hurt, don't they?

Once, when I was just realizing that I was a girl type person, I was looking in a mirror, turning my head this way and that....My mom was walking by, and I said to her...."Look, I have a neck like a swan"

Without missing a beat, or a step, she just tossed out...."You have a neck like a duck"

I don't remember how old I was but I was at soccer practice you evening and having a wonderful time. Practice ended and all the kids ran to their parents and left for a nice meal at home. My parents were no where to be found.

My soccer coach waited around for a few minutes and then informed me that he needed to leave, so he got in his car and also headed for home. I was left alone which really didn't bother me so much until it started to get dark.

I found a suitable tree to climb and hid in the branches and waited for my parents to show up while the sun slowly sank below the the tree line to the west of me. It started to get pretty cold as well.

I waited and waited and waited but nobody came to rescue me from my birds level perch. I soon became very worried. Should I try to walk home? Which way was home? maybe I should just wait here.

I finally worked up the courage to come down from the tree and walk to a house a few blocks away. I interrupted their dinner with a push of the doorbell and asked in my friedliest voice if I could use their phone. They let me so I kindly informed my dad (who was at home but thought my mom was picking me up who was at choir practice talking because she thought my dad was picking me up) that I was still waiting to be picked up.

He came and got me but I never let them forget the incident.

Then once my mom told me my cat ran away when in fact she had dropped the cat off at a farm.

And once we spent my whole birthday driving home in a snowstorm from Toronto.

That's amazing, edgar. They ought to make a movie about your life.
Too bad you were killed, though.


When I was around 3, my mom accidentally slammed my finger in the car door. I'm not sure which one of us was more scarred by the experience.

Later, my brother pushed in the car's cigarette lighter and then convinced me to touch the bright, glowing orange end. Not sure if it was the same finger ...