Flutterbye. A friend of mine who's a historian likes to remind people that the events of the past are written by who's remembering them. Our emotions color past events and our mood in the current moment has as much impact as our mood at the time. So I think it's possible to have multiple experiences of the same period in our history. I suspect there were blissful Leave it to Beaver moments in your childhood AND horror movie moments. There certainly was for me and it makes it hard to categorize our lives.

In a way, it would be easier if I could say everything in my childhood was bad. That abuse was all I knew. Or, for that matter, that I had an idyllic childhood and anything negative that I remember is an unfortunate anomaly in an otherwise uninterrupted progression of happiness and love. But that's not how it was. Instead I'm left pragmatically sorting through a mixed bag of experiences, knowing that I was an abused child, a child with a loving family, a freak, and a diamond in the rough.

This may or may not make any sense to you but if I had to guess, there's probably truth to both versions of your childhood.

Cyran0