About Desire

I want THAT.

This is something I never learned as a child. To want something. In fact, I learned the opposite.

We had very little money. My father, with three children, a wife and mother-in-law, was struggling to keep food on the table and bills paid.

And in that environment I learned to only want what I could have.

I learned from an early age on that desire was bad. Bad. BAD.

Desire actually would have been considered a bad word. Desire was often associated with illicit sexual affairs. Or with overblown quests for possessions.

But desire was also connected with wanting something that wasn’t affordable.

I learned without asking, that when we were in the grocery store with mother, I couldn’t ask for things. After all, she was trying to feed a family of five on very meager earnings that came once a month. And that is when we would go to the grocer and stock up.

But there was no slight extra amount available for candy. I remember eyeing the Pez candies and those charming Pez dispensers. I never asked. I knew. The answer would be no.

And then there was the ritual every fall.  My mother would attempt to clothe her brood well by making the clothing from raw materials.  By the time I was grown up enough to notice, my brother and sister were mostly gone. And then it was September and me entering a new grade and a whole year’s wardrobe that my mother would need to create.

Could I want something? Yes. If it was in the Butterick, Simplicity, or McCall’s pattern books. But I didn’t like anything I saw there.

My mother, in a valiant attempt to decipher desire, would pull  me through the local department store. She would ask me what I liked there.

What I liked? What a question. I didn’t know that it mattered. I had learned to close my eyes, close my heart.

No way I was going to have the nice navy blazer or the kilt skirt that my classmates might be donning.

So I would say nothing, leaving it to my mother to decipher fashion and desire.

And I borrowed inside myself with the unexpressed desire.

So as a child, I learned to mask my desire with what was possible.

And as an adult that has presented problems. What do I want?  Sometimes I do not know. I am often more stuck on what I can have, rather than what I want.

The word want was a bad word. One that never learned to look down. And we quenched it in our own hearts.

I want . . .

This is sentences I never learned to say or finish as a child.

Something I need to learn as an adult.