Anyone else grow up in a museum?

[Devon Gibbons]

Furniture doesn't ever move, same pictures hang in place on walls for years, with maybe the occasional new addition to an old exhibit or display that isn't altered much, and in fact looks even more like it already did.

 

HEY, that doesn't go there! We're not going to rearrange and move everything around, that would be too much work. We don't got the time to do that. 

 

Timeless.

 

It does something with your perception of time, adjusting the speed of your space capsule-of-a-body so that 1 foot equal a lightyear. An out of place figurine is like a misaligned planet. Because the extent of the house becomes the extent of the universe.

 

What were your exhibits like?

[J. D. Stembal]

My mother has an extensive antique collection, and my father still owns the same high-fidelity stereo he purchased in the Seventies, albeit boxed up in the basement. I would have loved to have had a family photo hanging on the wall, but we weren't that into each other.

 

My perception of that time in my childhood is that I was an unwanted and ungrateful son who would rather be elsewhere. I was not as valuable as an antique or as entertaining as a stereo system.

[Mister Mister]

  Not exactly the way I would characterize it, but certainly I can sympathize with having a controlling mother who was prone to hysterical reactions towards any mess or damage to her house.

[Kurtis]

  Not exactly the way I would characterize it, but certainly I can sympathize with having a controlling mother who was prone to hysterical reactions towards any mess or damage to her house.

 

Also for me I would not describe it as a museum, but the "control" of things was/is certainly present.  

 

As an adult, before I de-foo'd, I would sometimes go visit my parents for a weekend.  After hours of driving, a ferry, and more driving I would arrive, put my backpack on the floor, couch, etc and go and greet the parents and siblings.  Instead of expressing joy at my arrival, my mother would get stressed that my bag was momentarily somewhere it wasn't supposed to be.  She obsesses with maintaining a clean house.  For my mother, appearance was paramount.  Real issues, mental health struggles, trauma, etc were ignored into oblivion, but it was very important that we appeared as a happy healthy family from the outside. 

 

My 'exhibit' was sterile and devoid of any real personality or feelings.  It was anxiety provoking,

[MeGrownMind]

I like your evocative metaphors.

 

We have one long hallway that runs and bends through the house, connecting all the rooms and collecting all the voices therein. The walls are pale white and unadorned. Pictures and frames and framed pictures lean against the baseboards. Years of dust and grime cast a pall over the clean faces and photogenic smiles, family portraits that had taken hours to shoot at a studio, with as many hours of arguing and bickering in between.

 

It's a general scene of waste and time and nothing to show for it.