So a stroll through this video triggered me.

So I guess it’s time for yet another dump of my emotions regarding my childhood.

As patient readers know, in my childhood, I just plain did not count and did not matter. I grew up with an overwhelming feeling that I had no right to be there. To be alive and have needs and need taking care of at all. I was given the clear message that nobody was going to go out of their way in the slightest on my behalf, even my mother, and the times when they had no choice because otherwise I’d die, they would discharge this nauseating duty very begrudgingly and only after making me wait and wonder if anyone even remembered me at all.

Inasmuch as anything whatsoever was expected of me, I was expected to shut up, never ask for anything, never draw attention to myself, and just exist as quietly and invisibly as possible.

To do my best not to exist at all and thus atone for my original sin of being born and alive when it was not convenient for my parents, or planned.

How dare I barge into their lives like that when they already had their hands full dealing with raising my three older siblings? Well just for that, we will treat you like an unwanted guest and completely ignore you most of the time, and resent every moment when we are forced to acknowledge your existence.

Oh, we might be a little nice to you now and then, when it occurs to us and we feel like reassuring ourselves that we’re actually parenting you.

But don’t hold your breath. We’re very busy with things that are far, far more important than you will ever be.

And that’s pretty much everything.

Of course, nobody ever TOLD me any of this. That would have involved remembering that I exist, noticing me, acknowledging my existence, considering me important enough to talk to, and (and this is the big one) saying words out loud that would kind of suggest they should feel bad about neglecting me most of the time.

And clearly, I deserved absolutely none of that. I mean, don’t be ridiculous. I should be happy they tolerate my existence at all and be glad for whatever they happen to feel like giving me on those rare moments when my being alive didn’t annoy them.

No wonder I spent all my time out of school watching TV alone in the living room or on my computer alone in my room.

Being alone beats the hell out of being around people who make you feel like you’re not even there, or shouldn’t be.

Oh, but my mother did eventually come to some dim realization that maybe I was not treated all that well as a kid.

I know that, because long after I entered adulthood, she made a point of telling me I was wanted and that she was glad I was around.

Too little too late, Mom. But um…. thanks, I guess.

More after the break.

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The saga continues

My relationship with my mother is…. complicated.

I love her more than I have ever loved anything or anyone ever. She’s my MOM, after all. There can be no other before her. After all….

Hmmm. I remember him asking her twice, the second time louder and more forcefully.

This love is, of course, non-negotiable. My mother is the best person in the world and that’s final. And so many of my best traits – my gentleness, my deep compassion, my love of animals, my sensitivity – come directly from her.

Heck, even my love of science fiction started when I read her copy of I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, and was fostered by watching Star Trek (mostly TNG, with a little TOS… she does not like James T. Kirk very much ^[1])

She started me on reading by reading to me at bedtime when I was a wee thing. She read me Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (children’s expurgated version), then both Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, and then the entire Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.

Somewhere between that and Sesame Street, I learned to read when I was a few months shy of turning 4.

And yet, she was part of the problem, too. She withdrew from me emotionally when she was the one person in the world I thought I could count on. She was all I had at that point, and she abandoned me.

She was fighting her own depression, I think.

And other things she did for me went away too. First she went back to work, and I lost a full time Mom. Then she stopped doing things for me, like the laundry, and buying my clothes, and making my school lunches.

She was so disconnected from me that when I just stopped eating lunch altogether, she did not even notice.

And she, like the others, just kind of assumed I would be okay with whatever. That I would always just adapt to whatever she did, no matter what it changed in my life, and what it meant I now had to take on.

And she wasn’t wrong, technically. I did adapt to whatever.

But not without loss. Sometimes great loss. A loss I could not articulate let alone tell anyone about because I did not feel like I had a choice in the matter let alone any right to have my needs taken into account.

Like a lot of children of Boomers, I grew up with the understanding that their needs and what they wanted came first and we the feral children of the suburbs would have to squeeze ourselves into whatever cracks and crevices we could find.

Until something else changed, and once we got over being squished or crushes by the shift, we had to do it all again.

The truth is that, despite her being very sweet and caring in demeanor, she was deep down never a particularly warm person to me once she went back to work.

There is a detachment and compartmentalization that is a bedrock part of her psyche that keeps her from wanting to be emotionally entangled with people, even her kids.

I feel like I’ve inherited that, too. But I am working hard to get over it.

I am working hard to get rid of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.