Snap, Crackle and Pop: Cereal Killers

Child abuse. Those two words have such strong connotation. They evoke vivid imagery. Some of it is accurate. My mother detests the movie “Mommy Dearest,” in part because it probably reminds her so much of herself. I have never seen the film — I have a very difficult time watching things like that, for all the reasons you might imagine.

But it’s an interesting phenomenon. As a kid going through it, you don’t know any different. It’s not abuse, it’s just life, and you assume everyone else is going through the exact same thing.

I remember the first time I realized that perhaps my experience was different than most. It was shortly after college, and I was listening to friends swap stories about various childhood hijinx. I didn’t want to feel left out. I picked something that I thought was relatively innocuous and decided to share.

I would go into the living room every morning to pour my cereal so I didn’t make any noise and wake mother. I use the term pour loosely. In reality, I would sneak the bowl out of the cabinet and lift the spoon out of the silverware drawer like I was playing Operation. One false move and all hell would break loose. Sometimes I’d patiently walk back and forth in stages. Transport the spoon first, then bring the bowl, then the cereal. The milk was the final frontier, and that was fraught with it’s own kind of peril. Once everything was poured, I had to make the final trek back to the kitchen table without spilling a drop. Ever try to carry a full bowl of cereal with milk for any kind of distance?

As I’m sure you know, if you pour the milk first, you have less room for cereal. I needed all the cereal I could get, and we were not allowed to have a second bowl. She must have weighed the boxes every morning, cause she always knew if you did. But hard cereal hitting a hard bowl makes an awful lot of racket. The kind that wakes the slumbering beast. So I practiced the art of delicately lifting and placing small handfuls of cereal in the bowl every morning. I used to curse Rice Krispies, that loud cacophony of snap, crackle and pop. I was also keenly aware of the sound of the crunch inside my jaw (still am), and terrified that it was as loud outside my head as it was inside.

Why didn’t I just eat in the living room you wonder? That might be a reasonable thing for most kids. Morning cartoons, a bowl of Lucky Charms. But that’s the problem with Borderlines. There’s no right answer. The punishment for munching too loud at the kitchen table was the same as the beatdown for getting caught eating in the living room. So you mitigate disaster as best you can, and constantly think about what decision will lead to the least amount of repercussions.

Anyway, that was about as vanilla as I could think of, so I tried to tell the cereal story to my friends. I did my best to make it sound comical, light-hearted. I just remember the awkward silence and the stares. “Dude, that’s not funny. That’s fucked up.” Oh. Right. So it is. You mean you didn’t experience the same thing growing up? Huh. That’s odd.

What’s equally odd and disturbing to me is how people attach a stigma to being a “victim” yet are fascinated with hearing about abuse of any kind. It took me years to even get to the point where I’d admit to any of it. I remember my shrink saying to me once, “At some point you’re going to have to admit and accept that you were abused.” Who the fuck wants to do that? I feel broken enough already, now I have to admit it to the rest of the world, too? No thanks.  People like to judge. People assume that you’ve got some sort of emotional leprosy that will spread your “crazy” like wildfire to anyone that you come into contact with. Even the best intentioned folks can be patronizing and demeaning. I’m not an emotional cripple, thank you very much. In fact, I’ve probably got my shit together a lot better than you do, simply because I know exactly what all my shit is!

I will never understand why people enjoy all of the serial killer TV dramas and endless parade of horror movies. The more twisted, the better it sells to the bloodthirsty public. Want to really hook the masses? Combine abuse and sex, call it erotica, and watch all 50 shades fly off the shelves. When you’ve been abused, the last thing you want to do is experience anything that will bring all those memories flooding back. Real life is dark enough, I’ll take my entertainment with a healthy dose of happy if you don’t mind.