Maybe There Was Never an Order

For most of my childhood, I believed there were certain things that simply had to happen. Every summer, I went away for six weeks. I never thought of it as a decision anyone was making or something I could question. It was just part of my life, decided somewhere above me by adults who understood things I didn't.

I was four years old when all of this started. A four-year-old doesn't understand custody or know the difference between a judge ordering something, two parents agreeing to something, or an adult simply telling him what is going to happen. If everyone around you treats something like a rule when you're four, it's a rule.

So I went every summer, year after year, until I was seventeen. As I got older, I never really stopped to reconsider why. It had been happening for so long that it was simply what summer meant, and I assumed there had to be paperwork somewhere explaining it.

I assumed there was a custody order. I assumed there were visitation terms. I assumed at some point a judge had signed something saying where I was supposed to be and when I was supposed to be there. I never had a reason to question whether any of that actually existed.

Recently, I started looking for those records. There are things about my childhood I remember clearly and other parts that exist only in fragments, and I wanted to know what the adults knew at the time. I wanted to know what was reported, what was discussed, what decisions were made, and why.

The first records I found didn't answer those questions. Instead, they made me realize there was a possibility I had genuinely never considered before: maybe there was never an order.

That possibility has completely changed the way I've been thinking about this. When you're a kid, adults have an incredible amount of invisible authority. They say you're going somewhere, so you go. They tell you something has to happen, so you assume somebody somewhere decided that it had to happen.

You don't ask to see the paperwork when you're four years old. You don't ask when you're five either. By the time you're eight or twelve, something you've done every year for as long as you can remember doesn't even feel like a decision anymore. Eventually you're seventeen and the thing has been happening for so long that its origin barely seems relevant.

I spent more than a decade believing those summers were something that had been decided by a system much larger than me. Somewhere in the history of my life, I assumed there was a judge's signature that explained why I kept going.

There still might be. I don't know yet.

There are more records to find and more pages to read, and I'm trying not to fill the gaps with conclusions simply because I finally know enough to ask the questions. Maybe I'll find exactly what I always assumed was there. Maybe the answer will be something completely different.

If there was an order, I want to read it. I want to know when it was entered, what information existed when the decision was made, and what the adults involved knew at the time.

If there wasn't an order, then the question becomes much simpler and much harder at the same time: who decided I had to keep going?

I can't travel backward and change any of it, and no document I find now can give a four-year-old kid another childhood. But I'm almost forty, and for the first time I'm looking at something I accepted as an unquestionable rule for most of my life and wondering whether it was ever actually a rule at all.