Dana Trent’s favorite childhood memory, and also the worst, are the tours by midnight bicycle with her father and cousins in Dana, in the rural Indian: «In the streets of that city from where everyone ran away, my father He told us about the story of our family. There is nothing more heartbreaking than hearing a man recalling the violence suffered during childhood by the saddle of a bicycle ».
The 43 -year -old Dana Trent, Ora Pastora Battista and University Professor, tells in the moving Memoir The choice of budgies (The Pellegrino Editore, p. 304, Euro 17) his childhood of childhood neglected and denied, but also of tenacity and deep love. Because Dana, called budgies, instead of playing with dolls and trains as a child helped her father, drug dealer suffering from schizophrenia, to crumble marijuana with a blade and hide kilos of drugs in children’s rides, to deliver it in all the United States. “In the 80s my family sold drugs on behalf of a big trafficker,” he says. “My parents were educated but unemployed and with mental health problems, so my father decided to transform his addiction to drugs into a job.”
Dana child with her father and mother
Dana’s parents know each other in a psychiatric hospital where they both work; After “having lost everything” in Los Angeles they return to the Indian, to live in a caravan on a plot invaded by weeds and waste. Budgie is born there: “My first memories are the stench of marijuana and the blades on the kitchen table. Dad, too busy to deal with me, bound me with the adhesive tape the little little hands to the bottle of milk and cocoa. I sat next to him all day, breathing the smell of marijuana, while my mother smoked Spinelli in bed looking at the religious channels for hours ».
Dana’s father is a fragile person, victim of parents’ violence and a social context from the child where the other must be overwhelmed to survive; For this he teaches his daughter to not be afraid, to hit before being hit. «But a profound sense of empathy also instilled me to others: he came from having worked with psychic patients. An empathy that however missed towards me, leaving me a desperate desire to be accepted by others and the difficulty of knowing how to recognize my needs “. How do you survive a childhood that is not such, how do you become great without ever having really been children? Dana finds comfort between the school desks: “It was my refuge, the place where I had the body and mind; There the adults seemed to know how to be adults and the children were simply children. ”
Dana teenage with father King.
The sudden break between the father and the mother opens a new chapter in the life of budgies, which He lives his youth with a sick and alcoholic mother, obsessive but also loving. In fact, it is she who pushed Dana to study theology at the university: “My parents, in their own way, were very religious. God has always been present in my life: even as a child I felt his closeness with great clarity, which has allowed me to survive my childhood, and to forgive ».
What is most striking in Dana Trent is in fact the love for her parents, despite everythingand the painstaking ability to know how to preserve some memories: the bike rpm with the father, the discontinuous attention of the mother, the warmth of the grandparents’ house. «The death of my parents, after a few years from each other, allowed me to have a different relationship with them and to write this book: I wanted to tell what it was really to live in a horrible world, always in the balance between chaos and his absence. Only irony has allowed me to face reality: they are an English optimistic, otherwise I would not be here ».
Dana Trent today, 43 years old.
Dana still thinks about her parents every day. Less, he says, since he wrote the book, as if it were now safe from that childhood. Every day he experiences resilience on himself, “getting out of bed and choosing whether to give space to resentment or hope”. “As a child I felt deeply alone: for this reason now I always try to cultivate ties”-and meets children who only wait to be looked at and loved “.
And if he could speak to the little budgies of many years ago, he would say “that I love her so much, and that she is much, much stronger than you think”.
