up hill both ways

when i was a child...
we've heard all the stories of hardship when our parents were young. now as an adult, i'm able to look back on my childhood and think of how i was deprived.

of course i had a great childhood, for the most part. and now it's fun to tease my mom about how horrible it was growing up being me. aside from growing up in a broken home (inside joke), i missed out on what so many of my peers had. let me give you two specific things that have affected me even today as an adult.

ducky
my mom was (and still is) a bit of a neat freak. there was never clutter in our home. everything had it's place. if there wasn't a space for it, it was likely to be tossed out. each summer we had a yard sale. we would go through our closets and pile up the clothes we didn't wear or had outgrown to put into the yard sale. same thing went with our toys. sometimes mom took it upon herself to tag a few items that she felt were no longer necessary. one of those items was a pale yellow duck that squeaked when you squeezed his beak.
sure, he wasn't extremely sentimental. he was no gerald (my cabbage patch doll) or timmy (my small stuffed rabbit) but it was something that i knew was there. that was until the day that i saw a young child walking away with ducky. i'll never forget how happy that child was, holding MY duck in his arms, most likely costing a mere dollar. i bawled. i screamed. i begged for it back. but ducky was gone and now belonged to someone else. it's still traumatizing today, and that scene will be vivid in my life forever.

games
sure, i loved candy land, chutes and ladders, and memory, but i wanted the GOOD games. my cousins always had the best games. in addition to their atari (LOVED frogger and ms. packman) i loved setting up the contraption in 'mouse trap' to see the end result.
we rarely played the game as was intended. but, i could give up the atari and mouse trap for the two things i really wanted. hungry hungry hippos and lite brite.
i loved slapping on the lever to make my hippo eat the most marbles. it was high-intensity and even better when you were controlling two hippos in a two-player game!
and as far as lite brite, my creative and artistry were severely stunted as a result of not being able to place colored pegs in a board to then light up my masterpiece. you could follow the premade creations or come up with something truly unique. but, i never had that opportunity on my own. now i'm a hungy hungry hippo of my own and a horrible artist.

i should probably find a therapist.