Wearing Children's Underwear

Steven Douglas Baughman

My earliest memory is of being on a train at night; it’s just darkness, maybe a tunnel, with lights flashing by. When I was 3, my grandmother brought me from Chicago to my mother in New York. It’s probably a memory of that.

About 10 years ago I had a thing that they call a “recovered memory” while I was having a full-blown catatonic panic attack. I’d worked my first day at a group home for severely developmentally disabled adults, and the utter helplessness of the residents hit me hard. I curled up into a ball and silently cried for the rest of the night. I quit the next morning.

In the middle of it I “remembered” being a baby at my grandmother’s house–it would have been somewhere between birth and that train trip–and suddenly her boyfriend Emil was looming over me. Total fucking terror.

I have no idea what happened there. All I have are guesses based on my fright when I first heard his name spoken aloud as a schoolboy, a wide variety of trauma survival behaviors throughout my life, and my hair standing up everywhere while typing this.

By the way, I do wear children’s underwear. I recently lost over 30 pounds in a few months due to dietary changes, and my pants size went from a 38 to a 31. I complained online about the paucity of smaller underwear in Glendive, and a friend sent me 3 pairs of superhero briefs as a joke. But they fit, and I wear them.

For all I know they are actually for adults, in this infantilized age.