When Youth Was Wasted On The Young

When I was young my pocket money
made sure that I was not going very far.
I was not a greyhound, but the phrase
'treat them mean to keep them lean'
would describe well how my family
budgeted for my individuality. 

To add to the lack of funds
to go where I did not know
for being disallowed from asking,
the stories of wartime rationing
that my mother raised me in
became her idea of the adventure
that I was permitted to imagine.

She told me a cycle of vivid half-true stories,
that for being told from a child's point of view
lacked an adult's sense of safety and autonomy. 
Somewhere inside the words there was the story
that for her being the youngest girl everywhere
she was sent, she became the easy target
for older girls to bully, and pull rank on.

Her age and size made her unable
reply with sharp retorts to their taunts;
she thought too slow to answer back. 

What dismayed me most as I listened,
though I had no idea how to point it out, 
was how poorly mother recognised
that with her retelling how she suffered
she was replicating the power dynamic
of how she once suffered, but the roles
were reversed; she was now the bully
who, as my mother, disallowed me any exit from her.

I was too young to be able to use history
and language the way she did; I repeated
her former role as the submissive without her
being remotely aware of the role she led me into.

When she told her stories she spoke
as if I was predestined to suffer similar.
Mother knew want Calvinism was. I did not.  
Was she my guide? Or my trapper?

Mother was the first of many guides
whom I sought to safely steer me
through the eternal war against hope,
in which, whether I liked it or not,
I had to find my place as an adult.

Later guides knew better what distance
to keep from me if we were to remain friends.
They allowed me my follies, and even better
helped me escape the consequences. 
They were clearer guides to self-knowledge
than my mother could ever have imagined.