Rememory

29 September 2007 at 3:15 pm (Family)

My mother tipped a dresser on me once.  I was very young, I don’t remember exactly how old, but young enough to be too short to reach the top of the dresser in my room.  Too short to properly reach the switch on the tall, ugly, heavy gray lamp perched on the rear right corner.

I think she’d been yelling at me to get dressed, or some such — I’d been doing something characteristically slowly or incorrectly — and I reached for the top of the dresser, to turn the lamp on or off.  But I reached too far, and my arms were too short, and turning the switch just below the bulb only yanked the lamp out of place, pushed it dangerously closer to falling off the dresser than it always was.  It teetered and I panicked.  Frantically I wrestled, one-armed, straining my fingertips to keep it from falling, but just making the balance worse and worse.  Finally, after terrifying and eternal seconds the lamp stopped moving, clanked heavily back into place, and I breathed a tentative sigh of relief.  Moments later she stormed back into my room, roaring something about how dare I be so angry that I would destroy her lamp, how dare I think I could throw things around because she yelled at me, so if I wanted to tip things over, here, tip things over, break them!  I was still young enough to think that protesting my innocence would make any difference, would accomplish something other than exacerbate the situation.  Maybe if I’d kept my mouth shut should wouldn’t have wrenched the cheap white Ikea drawers away from the wall and onto my legs before storming back out.

Then again, maybe not.