The Healing Power of My Childhood Motor Stimulations

The Healing Power of My Childhood Motor Stimulations

 

        I had the most wonderful childhood in every aspect.  My parents were always busy and hardly home, but they made sure their children were well taken care of, and had plenty of friends to play with.  Our house was on a hillside, surrounded by the mountains. 

As a child, I remember that “playing” meant “doing things outside.” Everyday, it was given that some child friend of mine, often much older and stronger than I, would holler me and my brother to come outside and join them for some new adventure up in the mountain.  As a child, though I did not know at the time, was exploring the nature by using my “gross motor skills—walking, running, and climbing.  

In the mountains, there are plenty of fun things to do that require “fine motor skills” as well.  For one, I remember that few girls and I would go find red bits of rocks, grind them to powder, then sprinkle it to our painstakingly chopped and marinated “kimchee,” which we had prepared from only the most natural ingredients—the fresh weeds, flowers, and wild berries.  While the boys were practicing their “flying skills” like the “Six Million Dollar Man” (the TV hero of that time), using both their gross and fine motor skills (their legs for power and fingers for steering), we girls were busy making sure that the dinner would be ready for them—these hard working boys who came home exhausted and famished.  “Hmm, this is very good…really delicious,” they would comment as they ate when they came back to our make-believe home.  The more noise the boys made in their pseudo-chewing, swallowing, and commenting on how sweet, salty, or sour the food was, we, the girls, felt a greater sense of accomplishment and pride.  Though I don’t remember exactly how old I was then, I do remember that it was many, many days, perhaps, years of playing like this in the mountains before I was put into a kindergarten.

One day, when I was much older, my mom with tears in her eyes confessed to me that I did not talk until I was five years old, because I was born with speech impairment and weak muscle tones due to my mother’s drug overdose, when I was only a two-month-old fetus in her uterus (the real reason why she was overly obsessive with me).  Thus, she said that as soon as she saw that I was beginning to talk at the age of five, though it was a real stretch in her budget, she elatedly put me into the most expensive kindergarten in Korea at the time for my further cognitive development. 

I don’t exactly know how this transformation happened, really—from being almost mute to verbal speech and weak muscles to walking and running.  My mom thinks it is because I lived and played in a mountain area where air was fresh, and had fresh spring water and goat milk to drink on a daily basis.  She may have a point there.  In addition to my mother’s hypothesis, as a student of Child psychology, I think there was perhaps one more factor to this supposition—my early years of both gross and fine motor stimulations on a daily basis in the mountains.  If my speculation is true, then my family’s then shoddy demographics was a blessing in disguise, in that we had to live in the most impoverished mountain district where children had no toys or TVs in their house, so had to adventure out to the mountains for entertainments.