The thing about shit stuff happening to you when you’re a
child is that it doesn’t just fuck up that one thing. It fucks up everything, in variously different ways. Your relationships, how you see yourself, your inability to trust, how you then behave when you become a parent, just... pfft. Everything.
That’s what it does, see. It’s not so much about what actually
happened to you, as what surrounds it. Firstly, the circumstances that
allowed a young child to wander off from her siblings whilst on holiday. And
then what comes after. In my case, I was never asked what had happened. My
parents were annoyed with me. I told them ‘I went
looking for you, I got lost, I met a man, but he wasn’t very nice.’ And
that was it. I was missing for forty minutes. And they left it at that. As a
sign of how seriously they took it, I got accidentally separated
from them again a few days later. I got told off.
Subsequently, years later, I found out that they guessed
that something had happened to me. But they didn’t ask. To them, they didn’t
ask because they worried about upsetting me. But at the time, I took it as a
lesson. They didn’t ask, because they didn’t care. That’s quite a big thing to
take in at such a young age. I know I never thought of it like that, children
can’t articulate their feelings in that way. But moods, feelings, suggestions
have a way of sinking their hooks into your mind, and distorting the way you
view the world and your place in it.
They didn’t ask, because they didn’t care. They didn’t care,
so they didn’t notice how I changed. They didn’t make the connection when their
loud, stroppy, confident youngest daughter, unfazed by anything, became a girl
who cried and clung to her mother every school morning for the next four years.
The girl who refused all invitations to play at friend’s houses. The girl who
wouldn’t attend sleepovers.
The girl who, when asked how her day had been, replied ‘don’t
worry, I know you’re busy.’ Not accusingly. Just with a shrug and an
understanding smile. I was six. Still makes me cry to think of it. I don’t even
remember that conversation, that’s how unimportant a moment it was to me. A dagger through
my mother’s heart though. The girl who used to get into her parent’s bed every
night. The girl who asked her sister two questions. ‘How many months does it
take to have a baby? And how many months is it since we were in Tunisia?’ The
girl who escaped into reading instead of staying in the real world.
The thing is, I can look back on all of this now. I can
understand that my parents were trying to protect me, in their own way. But by
trying to protect me, they reinforced the opposite. I thought they didn’t care.
I thought that the people who should have loved me most, who should have
protected me, who should have cared, didn’t. And I just accepted it. I wasn’t
worth caring about. I’m not worth caring about. And I can be as logical as I
like about things, I can tell myself that’s not true, I know it’s not true. I
do know it. But it doesn’t change the fact that to the core of my being, I am
not worth caring about. That's me, that's how I feel, that's how I've spent most of my life feeling, and that's why I'm not robust, that's why I'm oversensitive, that's why I get so hurt and disappointed when I cautiously trust people and then they let me down, or hurt me, or ignore me. Because it just reinforces that.
And I’m not writing
this for attention, or because I want people to swoop in and shower me with
affirming things, because firstly, your words won’t change what’s in my head.
And then I’ll have to pretend that you’ve made me feel better when you haven’t,
and it’ll get all awkward and you’ll offer to listen if I want to have a chat,
and I don’t because there really isn’t any point, but I’ll thank you again, and
then we’ll feel a bit uncomfortable, and nothing will have changed. I’m writing
this to get it out of my head, where it’s been sitting for a bit too long. I
have other, happier, better things to write about. But until this fucker gets
fired out there, all’s cheerless, dark, and deadly.
I've just written a post on fear in parenting and I realise now that I've totally focussed on fear of the external threat but now, reading this (and, cliched as it is, my heart goes out to you - I really don't know how else to say that) I feel more a fear of getting it wrong as a parent. I guess you have that too - you're a mum yourself now. None of us are perfect but some things we could do or not do are so much worse than others...
ReplyDeleteI think the thing is that as parents, we're always going to get it wrong, in some way. No one is ever a perfect parent, even if you keep your children in a bubble where real life never intrudes. We won't ever get it right, not completely, not 100%. But we can try and get it less wrong, as much as possible.And I think the crucial part of that is talking and giving time to our children. It might not solve anything, or change much, but (I hope) it gives them the belief that their feelings are valid, important, and heard.
ReplyDeleteAnd the fact that you worry about getting it wrong pretty much tells me you're a good parent, Sam. And yes, THIS is a massive cliche, but it's not our mistakes that define us, but what we learn from them xx