that inner voice

I have been reading a couple of kinds of books over the past month (although less of all of them since losing my glasses ten days ago. grrr.): books about the high incidence of mania in people who emigrated and went to America; and groupie memoirs (one by one of the members of the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), who I used to listen to back when their album came out; and the other memoir by an East Coast girl instead, who has decided she is god's gift. Well, they both decide that, with much trial and error and in many different pairings, both concluding with great relationships with much younger men.)

In reading one of the groupie books, the West Coast one, I found a reference to a friend's son, and since I had recently got in touch with the friend I found myself thinking of her and her kid a lot. Wondering how they came through those years. And I kept hearing my little voice say, "Call K. Contact her." So I sent an e-mail, but haven't heard back and am not particularly surprised. She's in the middle of her life.

I wonder whether reaching out to Ms. K. is about when I knew her, I messed around with her then-partner's kid and his sister. I think I was ten or eleven. Between us the sister and I pushed the younger brother into doing things that really bothered him, without knowing he would be in physical (and emotional) pain until he was and it was too late. I have always felt bad about that. But just now I looked at myself and saw myself as a kid who did not know I was doing harm, who was just doing what I had learned from other kids and without much intervention from my parents.

I don't think some kids today, the ones who are micromanaged and thoroughly scheduled and under their parents' gaze from the end of school until bedtime, get as much opportunity for sex play as I did, growing up with my laissez-faire-in-that-respect parents. And those of us with kids now comment on having grown up a mere thirty or thirty-five years ago in places where our parents would just say, "Go outside and play," and we would, for hours with no one checking on us. The assumption was that if anything was wrong, they'd hear of it, but everyone was going to be fine on their own. And for the most part we were, but other times we raised hell and no one was the wiser. Now it feels like a kind of maturity, being able to forgive myself for not knowing better at times like those, for the hurt I may have inflicted and for the humiliations I put myself through not knowing it was okay to say no. I sure hope that one kid grew up okay, though.