Look at the picture above and tell me what you see. I see a young kid (me, the one on the left with the terrible haircut) who's mostly oblivious to some serious bad shit happening in my family. My oldest bother Tom sits in the middle with the crossed arms and enviable trousers. Our middle brother Mike sits beside him––a tough kid who looks ready to cry and is bearing the brunt of the pressure in our family. 

Neither of these two are happy campers, and they know that times are bad. But me? I'm not privy to the family secrets. I'm too young, and I'll always be too young. I can have my suspicions, I can have my memories––both the visceral kind and the things I know must have happened because I've woven them into my personal narratives of becoming who I am. 

But as for specific events, whole swaths of time––there's just a blank for me. Things I don't/can't/won't remember. The kinds of family dynamics that would make my first attempt at family photography look something like this:

Talk about a grumpy bunch of people who know damn well that things are not okay! But again, I was probably oblivious. I lacked the understanding of just how fucked up things were, and I think that because of this I got lucky and escaped whatever was poisoning my family.

What was it? Had to be more than my father's alcoholism. Had to be more than my mother whacking us on the ass with a belt. But even if I knew exactly what happened back then–if it could be implanted in my memory and I could be given complete access to it–the biggest question in my mind would remain unanswered: what's the difference between

don't remember 
and
can't remember
and
won't remember?

How does a lost memory end up in one bucket or another? And when it comes back out, does it behave differently depending on which bucket it was in? 

Lately I had a memory come up out of a bucket. My wife was out of town and my youngest son, Landon, was sick and had to stay home from school. I was do to teach that afternoon, but couldn't ask my fellow parents to take care of my sick kid while their own were in the house. I could've taken him to school with me, but he had a cold and it was winter and five degrees out. Then I thought maybe I could take him over to my mom's house for just an hour, and then I thought:

no way in hell!

Because one of those lost memories arose: me being alone with my mom and being thrown over her knees and being belted on the bare ass. I could feel its sting. I could hear the snap of the leather as she folded the belt up and threatened me with its sound. And no way in hell was I going to bring Landon over there, not even for a minute.  

I realize this is daddylabyrinth, not mommylabyrinth. (Trust me, she's not nearly so labyrinthine.) But if I had this kind of lost memory about my mom, what kinds of lost memories did I have with my dad? What would make them come up, and do I even recognize them when it happens? 

Maybe I don't recognize them. Maybe the "bad feeling" I get when I feel like I'm acting too much like my dad, or when I remember him in some vague way that I can't specify to save my life, I'm experiencing an old sensation bubble up from its bucket and enter into my bloodstream. 

But not entering my memory. No, it slipped straight through that. Just like it did when it failed to stick the first time around, or the time I put it in my trash, or the time it degraded to the point where I couldn't read it anymore.