Talked about an aspect of my childhood today.

That last bit about being an unwanted child was really cathartic for me so I should probably dig deeper into that.

In hindsight, I feel like I spent my whole childhood apologizing for existing. The fact that I should not be there was woven into the very fabric of our family dynamic, and woven so deeply that nobody ever had to actually say it.

After all, if they’d said it out loud, then they’d have to own it. They would hear how appalling it sounded and be forced to confront how they treated me versus how they technically thought they treated me.

Better to maintain deniability.

But it explains why my father always seemed even more pissed off than usual when he had to buy me a winter coat or new boots or the like.

I wasn’t even wanted. They never planned to happen. I defied a tubal ligation to be conceived. I was unintended – an uninvited guest who had vastly overstayed his welcome but could not leave.

I guess that, like a Christmas puppy, I was supposed to disappear when I stopped being cute and started requiring effort.

Because I wasn’t always unwanted. My childhood was great up until the point where I was raped at the age of four. I was the center of attention wherever I went because I was so cute and precocious. And because I was so charming, people loved to take care of me and I felt safe and secure and loved.

And then I was raped and my world was shattered and nothing would ever feel safe and warm and secure for me ever again.

Because that day I learned that monsters are real and there was nobody to protect me from them and they could hurt me in a way too terrible for me to comprehend whenever they felt like it.

Later on, bullying would confirm this basic truth.

But back to my home life. I really wonder what those years after I was raped but before my first day of school were like.

Lonely, for sure, because my friends Trish and Janet were both a year older than me and therefore went to school a year before I did, leaving me all alone.

I wonder if they got to go to kindergarten? I have a fairly indistinct memory of them being gone in the morning and me being excited when they got home.

But mainly I remember being very nervous and fragile. Still a sunshine-y little kid, but in a way that was brittle and skittish, like Piglet from Winnie the Pooh.

Someone has to have noticed. Betty my babysitter has to have had some notion that I had changed fairly radically in a short people of time. Gone was my easy charm and effortless charisma. In its place was a jittery, skittery, painfully shy kid.

But nobody knew what a change like that meant back then.

Then there was the fateful day when I was sent to my first day of school and basically thrown to the wolves.

Maybe that’s when the feeling unwanted really began. Before that, no matter how much my family might ignore or neglect me, I had Betty. It was her job to look after me so she always had time for me.

But then she went away and there was nobody to take her place.

More after the break.

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You’re on your own, kid.

I guess my family spent so long either resenting my existence or forgetting me entirely while Betty was looking after me during the day that it never occurred to them that I could possibly need anything from them now that Betty was gone.

After all, I wasn’t even supposed to be here it all. They were barely tolerating me as is, and now I dared to actually…. need things?

The sheer gall of this unwanted and uninvited child, to show up and make demands of the people who are supposed to be alive merely by existing and having needs.

What’s next, actually wanting things?

Well then we’d have no choice but to take him behind the shed and shoot him.

I exaggerate, of course,

Our shed wasn’t big enough for that.

So I grew up with the very clear message that I wasn’t wanted and I didn’t matter and I didn’t deserve literally anything and I could never ask for anything, not even support or advice or even just a hug, because to do so would be to remind them of my existence and they hated that.

My birth was a terrible, horrible, massively inconvenient mistake and it was vitally important that I didn’t keep reminding people of the awful day by existing.

So I tried not to.

I learned to minimize myself as much as possible. To say very little, ask for nothing at all, stay quiet and unobtrusive, and be glad for anything that happened to fall from the heavens onto my plate because someone was feeling generous because I sure as hell wasn’t owed anything.

Certainly not an equal share of anything. When I came along, the (intangible) resources that sustained three kids should have been redistributed evenly to the four of us.

But nope. Nobody dealt me in. And I was certainly not temperamentally equipped to fight for what I wanted.

Then, as now, I tended to just adapt to whatever happened rather than taking an active part in making them turn out the way I wanted them to.

I really needed someone looking out for me. Someone who took on the role of guiding and protecting and advocating for me when I was too timid and small to do it myself.

Someone who could see that no matter how smart I was, I was still a kid.

Betty got that. She got a first hand view of how scary smart I was but she also knew I needed love and attention and the very occasional bit of discipline.

I still miss her to this day. In many ways, she was my real mom.

But to her, I was just a job.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.