I was six years old the summer I learned that money could get you hurt.
We lived in Millbrook, Ohio — one of those small towns where the Rite Aid closes at nine and everybody's grandmother knows your business before you do. My great-grandfather Owen had raised half the county through one thing or another, and by the time I came along he was already in his eighties, sitting on the porch every evening with a glass of sweet tea he never finished, watching the street like it owed him something.
Here's what I understood about money at six: if you wanted a thing, you took money and you went and got the thing. That was the whole equation. Nobody had explained ownership to me, or permission, or whose wallet was whose. There was a five-and-dime three blocks from our house, right past the Baptist church with the crooked steeple, and in the summer of 1994 nobody was watching kids too closely. So I'd go looking — my mother kept cash in a coffee can in the pantry, behind the Bisquick — and I'd take what I found and walk myself down to that store for candy, for a plastic horse, for whatever caught my eye that week.
Eventually, of course, the coffee can came up short and everybody figured out where the money was going.
My great-grandfather didn't ask me why. He didn't sit me down. He took his belt off — the leather one with the brass buckle he wore every single day of his life — and he beat a six-year-old for stealing. Because in his mind, that's exactly what it was: theft, plain and simple, a crime as serious as any he'd ever known. The idea that a child that age might not even grasp the concept of stealing didn't exist anywhere in his worldview. It wasn't cruelty to him. It was correction.
That was one of the worst things that happened to me as a kid. And then, for close to twenty years, I forgot about it completely.
It came back to me around age twenty-six, when I was doing something that had nothing to do with childhood at all — just trying to figure out why I froze every time I had to negotiate my salary, why overdraft notifications made my hands shake. I started pulling on that thread and found a whole tangled mess underneath about money that I'd been dragging around since I was a kid. I'd bet good money most of you have your own version of that mess somewhere in your head. You might not even know it's there. I sure didn't, not until my late twenties, when that memory surfaced out of nowhere — the belt, the coffee can, the horse I never got to keep. Money isn't something you just take and spend. Do that and something terrible happens to you.
Writing this out now, my chest still tightens. And I've worked through it — with a therapist in Columbus for two years, with somatic work after that. Doesn't matter. It's still in there.
That wasn't the only thing it left behind. Something in my body learned, that day, exactly what total helplessness felt like — and it filed that feeling away as dangerous. Starting around thirteen, I began getting headaches so severe that nothing over-the-counter touched them. The only thing that worked was a prescription migraine medication, and even that barely dented it — I've since compared notes with other patients, and mine were worse than what that dosage is supposed to handle. I went through every specialist my pediatrician could refer me to. Bloodwork, an MRI, a sleep study. Everything came back normal. The headaches kept coming anyway, more often every year, and some months they crossed the line into full migraines — the kind where you lie in a dark room and count your own pulse just to have something to do.
It got a little better once I graduated and started working a regular nine-to-five, sleeping through the night instead of cramming for exams. A little. Not much.
Around twenty-eight, I signed up for a weekend workshop outside Asheville — a body-based technique for finding where old tension gets stored and letting it go. On the first morning, they asked everyone to name one thing to work on over the weekend. I picked my headaches. Couldn't hurt to try one more angle.
On day two, I went under — somewhere between meditation and sleep, not quite either — and the belt, the pantry, my great-grandfather's face came back whole, like it was happening again instead of being remembered. The day after, an earlier memory surfaced, a different moment of that same exact helplessness. No way out, no one coming. That feeling — trapped, powerless — turned out to be the trigger. Every time my body landed there, it answered with a migraine. Fifteen years of that.
After the workshop, the headaches didn't come back. Not really. I still get a normal one now and then, the kind two aspirin handles in an hour. But the migraines — nothing since.
I don't blame my great-grandfather. Not even a little. He was born around the turn of the century in a part of Eastern Europe that spent his boyhood changing hands — wars, collapsing governments, a childhood spent burying people before he was old enough to shave. His family got him to the States sometime before he was twenty. The only thing he ever said to any of us, every single holiday for the rest of his life, was "work hard — you have to work hard." He made it to a hundred and two. We all heard that line more times than we could count, and every one of us loved him.
I think about him on that porch most when I catch myself flinching at a bank notification for no reason, my hand already moving toward my phone before my brain's caught up. Some Sundays I still drive past Millbrook on my way to my mother's, and the five-and-dime is a nail salon now, and the Baptist church still has its crooked steeple, and I think about a boy who buried the dead before he was ten, teaching a six-year-old the only lesson he knew how to give. He's been gone eleven years. I still have the plastic horse. It sits on my desk, one ear chipped, facing the door.
