A Memory That Wasn’t Funny After All

A distorted traumatic memory of my childhood

One day in therapy, I was talking once more about how my mother was emotionally unstable and abusive towards my siblings and me. As I was narrating some events, I told my therapist that, despite of all the negativity, some incidents were lots of fun. To prove my point, I started discussing a specific memory but I had to stop several times because I couldn’t stop laughing while talking!

This memory was of me and my sister. One summer, when I was about 7 and she was 12 years old, we decided that we wanted to pretend that we were in a music band. She was learning to play the piano, and I was learning to play the guitar. We began playing and singing together, while our mother was mopping the floors.

After a while, she asked us to stop. We said we would stop in a bit. We continued playing, and we were having lots of fun. Our mother started shouting at us to stop playing, but we were used to her doing that so we just carried on.

Out of the blue, a bucket full of water landed right next to my sister’s head, hitting the piano. I don’t remember what happened next, but I remember that later that day my sister and I were telling our father what happened and we couldn’t stop laughing. My sister said that it was like a moment out of a cartoon. We said that again and again, and even made a “ziiing” sound while describing how the bucket flew past her head and hit the piano.

When I managed to finish my narration (because of my excessive laughing after every other sentence), my therapist was just silently looking at me. I told him that this is a very funny memory that my sister and I recall from time to time and laugh about it. He then said “did it ever occur to you that the bucket could have landed on your sister’s head?”.

Well, it was the first time I was consciously thinking about it. The truth is that it barely missed her, and it was so heavy because of the water so who knows what would have happened if it had hit her on the head. I spent a few minutes in silence, until I started crying. I connected to that part of the 7 year old me who got scared.

I can’t be sure how the memory got distorted, or who initiated the distortion. In the memory, I remember my sister laughing right after the bucket hit the piano but I’m not sure if it happened that way or if I added that part (of her laughing in that moment) later on.

It’s possible that we simultaneously decided to distort the memory right after it happened (for more information about memory distortion, you can read my recent article here). This probably explains why we were laughing so much when we were telling our father about it. Probably we wanted to believe that it was a funny incident to protect ourselves, and we kept that going for all these years.

This wasn’t the first time I processed a distorted trauma-related memory in therapy, but it was the first time that I realized that one of the funniest moments I remember of my sister and me wasn’t funny at all.