Sorry that I’m so melodramatic lately, but trust me when I say, I need this.

All right. Here are the stages.

Stage alpha (ages 0-3) : Happiness. Innocent joy. My mom is home to raise me. She is warm and affectionate and kind and loving. She is a teacher and I am her eager little student, I am quite the little charmer and tend to be a hit wherever I go. This seems perfectly nature to me.

Stage 1 (age 3) : My mother goes back to work. I am entrusted to my babysitter Betty. I miss my mother a lot but Betty is pretty awesome so it’s not too bad. And every day, when my mother comes home from work, I am super happy to see her and greet her with a great big hug.

This is also the age at which I learn to read.

My best friends are Trish from next door and Janet from across the street. We are a single unit in the summer.

Stage 2 (age 4) : I am raped by a stranger in a shower stall in my father’s gym, a placed called The Spa. Dunno why my Dad took me there. I also had nearly drowned in the pool of The Spa earlier that day.

It was an eventful day. Dad was apparently not good at watching over me.

Stage 3 (age 5) : Trish and Janet are a year older than me, so they go off to grade 1, leaving me alone with Betty. Betty is still awesome, but I am a lonelier kid.

Stage 4 (age 6) : I go to school for the first time ever. No kindergarten for me. At first, I get on great with my fellow students. I am popular due to my charisma and budding abilities as a performer. Once more, I am a hit.

That all comes crashing down when a little shit named Trevor, jealous of me, starts pointing out how fat I am,I had no idea how to defend myself or my new status, so just like that, I slide down to the bottom of the pecking order and that’s where I stay for the rest of my life.

I honestly have no idea what it is like to be respected.

This is also when the bullying began. And my advanced level of intelligence means I am bored a lot of the time. I begin to dread going to school.

Stage 5 (age 7) : For the first time, I get bullied on the way to school. This is the final nail in the coffin and I am now fully agoraphobic. The only safe place is home.

Stage 6 (age 8) : My mother goes utterly cold on me. Previously I coped by telling her about my day while she did the dishes after supper. Often I would give her a hug when I was done. And this went fine for a while.

But after an incident in which she not only did not respond to anything I said, but when I hugged her she didn’t turn away from the dishes to hug back and instead just looked back at me for a moment like she had no idea who this thing assaulting her was, my little heart was broken and the last bit of love and life and light in my light was gone.

I withdrew into myself deeper than ever before. What else could I do?

And that’s about the size of it. Between the ages of 3 and 7, things just kept getting worse and worse for me.

I guess past that point, they couldn’t get a lot worse without involving something that might have actually engendered sympathy for me.

And clearly I did not deserve that.

More after the break.

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Shifting a mighty load

Freudian interpretations welcomed.

Nothing I have discussed before in this space is as big as this whole “Fruvous in the back yard” thing. Turns out the trauma that wrecked my childhood was not just being raped – although that was bad enough.

It sure as fuck didn’t help.

But no, the real trauma was something a lot deeper and more diffuse and hard to define. It was this feeling of being abandoned by everyone by degrees, starting with my mother going back to work and ending with her rebuffing me that one night.

She didn’t even look at me like I was human. She looked at me like I was yet another awful thing she had to endure.

Looking back, she was probably just incredibly tired from having to be a full time teacher AND a full time housewife.

I think she was depressed, too. It definitely runs in the family.

In fact, it got all six of us at one time or another. With my father, it manifested as rage. With my sister Catherine, it manifested as a high level of anxiety,

For Mom, I think it made her numb.

Nevertheless, that look she gave me hurt more than I could possibly express. It crushed me in a way nothing else every has. Not being bullied, not being betrayed by friends, not being let down over and over by my teachers.

It’s like that look was a knife that severed most of my bond with my mother.

Subconsciously, I kept her at arm’s length after that. I still loved her and cared for her, but I was never close with her ever again. Not really.

That look put a wall between us that has persisted to this day. I will probably die with it still there, even though I wish I could tear it down.

I love my mother. But the brutal truth, and it rips my heart in two to have to say this, but the brutal truth is that I don’t trust her.

Not in the sense that I think she’s a liar. In the much more important sense that I don’t trust her to be there for me, to care about me, to put my needs above hers, or really to be a mother in any really important way.

To be even more brutally honest, after that look, she wasn’t my mother any more.

She was just a nice lady I lived with.

Because if I can’t trust you to be there for me when I need you and I would never bring my problems to you and there is really no way I would ever rely on you for anything because whatever it is, it will be taken away and I will have to do it myself, then how much of a mother are you really?

I hate to break it to you, Mom. But you weren’t much of a mom to me.

Not back then, when I needed you the most.

And I think that hurt me more than even being raped did.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.