If I had been born in another hospital, things might have turned out completely differently for me.  But no, I had to be born in the kind of hospital where they give you to the right parents.  Damn that stupid hospital!  Oh, to have been switched at birth!  My childhood might have been a fairy tale complete with pony rides and pre-school and picnics instead of agonizing over math and proper utensil usage or nightmares about not saying, “hello” loudly enough for the entire neighborhood to hear.  I might have gone to sleep away camp instead of hearing the word “concentration” preceding it every time that word was spoken.  Read that last line again.  You will have to know this for the test.  Especially if you meet my dad.

Do you remember the house that everyone wanted to visit and hang out in because the parents were really cool and friendly?  Remember the split-level modern home with the trendy furniture, friendly dog, the great pool, a  “den” with a ping-ping table and a pantry full of Twinkies, Fritos and soda?  So do I.  It wasn’t mine.   

          Ours was a home that was always on display, prepared for a House and Garden photo shoot and visiting dignitaries that never arrived.  While we were pretending to be the Rothschilds, using silver and bone china and eating what were considered mysterious, multi-course meals that included European salads with homemade dressing, everyone else in the neighborhood was exploring the virtues of TV Dinners, meatloaf or Shake ‘n Bake on melamine plates and gleefully pouring something that came out of the bottle over iceberg lettuce. 

          We had Chantilly, not Reddi Whip.  Where people kept cold cuts, we would find blood sausage or a thick slab of bacon or peppers that were hot to the touch.  We made our own flavored soda using an old-fashioned seltzer bottle while everyone else basked in bottles of Coke and cans of Tab.  The invisible high wire of tension in our Hapsburg home cut at our throats when fish was served.  Those meals were filled with a different kind of silence.  The bones would choke you if the anxiety did not.

As a young girl, I bemoaned the fact that kids rarely came over to my house to play very often.  It wasn’t like I could entice the other neighbor girls by saying, “Do you want to come over and play ‘read a book’ this Friday?  We have head cheese in the refrigerator and my mom will talk about Proust while my dad will surely want to quiz us on geography.” 

          Mine was the house where the only thing that was out of place resulted in a three-day war of wills and the only mismatched items were my parents.  The plastic covering on the sofa that stuck to your thighs before air-conditioning was de rigueur was as common then as ten-year olds with iPods and credit cards are today.  We had not one, but three fireplaces that were never used and instead of firewood, were sometimes filled with books.  Yes, our fireplaces were libraries.  No happy hearth, stinky smoke or warm and fuzzy fireside chats for us.  Our fireplaces were cleaner than most houses.  Our garage was cleaner than most people’s houses.

There were two discernable feelings in our house:  Absolute silence and pee in your pants fear.  There was plenty of laughter too of course, but it usually took place at the expense of my parents behind their back.  This would all end quite abruptly if we made too much noise or laughed too loudly and we’d quickly revert to pee in your pants fear when we saw the wooden spoon or belt coming our way.  Rogue weapons have a nasty way of quelling your sense of humor.  This is why I’m a stay at home comedienne.

          At our house, if we weren’t busy trying to plan our escape from our childhood, we were hearing about Nabokov, suffering through the 24- hour cycle of the Holocaust News Network or learning about germs and how to eat correctly.  We had a pet vacuum cleaner named “Spotless”.  Our house was so strangely clean that it looked like it was wearing a condom at all times.  Unprotected visitors had to be cleared through an agency known as my judgmental parents before being allowed to enter our hallowed hallways.

           “What are you doing on Saturday?” my friend Sally would ask me.

“I’m learning how to shine and polish shoes,” was a less pathetic response than, “My sister and I are cleaning the mosaic tile in the shower with a toothbrush” or “I’m plotting my getaway from Cleveland as soon as I can figure out how to make money. ”

Unfortunately, all were true.

Now before you start assuming I’m embellishing all these stories from my childhood for the sake of entertainment (the truth rarely needs embellishment), let me say this:  Under the circumstances, my parents did the best they could.  We were not abandoned or sexually abused.  There was always food on the table and a sense of order. 

But there was also an Ibsen-like quality to the drama that played out in our home and lives on any given day.  We didn’t audition for our roles as much as they were assigned to us.  It was like an ongoing play in the theater of the absurd where as the players, we were rarely given the benefit of the plot or storyline.  Maybe I’m the crazy one for trying to figure it all out by looking back, but I am not rewriting my own history. 

I'm just allowing it to speak for itself.

* This is a revised version of a post from April called "I Was Born in the Wrong Hospital".   Some of those lines were just too good to let go!