Read this article and see if it doesn’t make you want to move to The Netherlands.

Of particular interest to me is the section where it talks about how Dutch mothers are some of the most relaxed mothers in the world. This connects directly to the stuff I wrote about not that long ago about how relaxed, calm mothers raised confident, risk-taking, exploratory kids who make friends naturally and grow up to be stable, healthy adults.

Now imagine a whole nation of such people. Astounding.

Like I have said before, I am the nervous child of a nervous mother. I can’t say what I was like when I was born (obviously), but by all reports, I was a quiet baby. Didn’t cry much, happy on my own. And I was definitely a happy preschooler at one point. Oodles of natural charm and cute as all get out. And precocious as well. It was quite the package.

Then, the abuse happened.

So in that sense, I don’t know how much of my mother’s nervousness I inherited. A case could be made that I wasn’t born with a nervous temperament. As for her influence in raising me, that is very difficult to track, because while I have lovely memories of time spent with my mother as a wee one, most of my conscious memory of preschool life I was being raised by my babysitter Betty.

My parents had me nights and weekends, of course, but the nights didn’t really count, as they were always busy and/or tired. Thus the pattern of emotionally absent parenting began.

So while I did not have a nervous parent looking over my shoulder, instilling their fears into me, and keeping me off the swings, I also didn’t have a calm, confident parent I could run to when I was upset and needed comforting and reassurance.

I just had Zombie Mom and Angry Dad, and siblings who had little time for me either. I didn’t even have friends. When I contemplate all those years of loneliness, I feel an arctic wind blow through my soul.

I was so sad for so long. And I didn’t have the words to express it. And nobody knew, because if anyone asked, I said I was okay. I was far from okay, but I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be not-OK. My parents and siblings made it clear that I was useless and weak and should just stay out of the way, and I was to never, ever, ever ask for anything.

And so helplessness and hopelessness became the norm. I was miserable and couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t even know I was sick. When you are a kid, you don’t know what is normal and what is mental illness. If you had asked me if I was mentally ill, I would have said no, because my picture of mental illness would have been formed by TV and I knew I wasn’t like the crazy people I had seen THERE.

To be honest, I had never heard of depression. Few people had back then. I had literally no idea that being sad and scared all the time was an illness. I knew there was something wrong with me, but like a lot of depressives, I just assumed it was because I was worthless and useless and awful.

After all, that’s how the world treated me. And here’s the result : here I am still trying to process my childhood at the age of 42.

If only I had been born in Holland.

It’s a childhood that is hard to digest. I withdrew so far into myself that I am still trying to find me way out. Instead of breaking out of my shell like the baby chick I saw at Rainbow Valley, my shell just got thicker and thicker, and I lost my ability to feel safe.

To this day, I have trouble expressing my pain to anyone in realtime. My reflexive response is always to say everything is fine and I’m okay (so leave me alone and go away). It is wrong, deeply so, but it is the path of least anxiety. I have a deep seated fear that something terrible will happen if I open up.

It a vulnerability thing, at least in part. I feel like saying there is something wrong would expose me. Partly it’s because admitting it to someone else means facing the fact that I have a lot of problems, and part of me is still in deep denial about that. As absurd as that seems.

But I guess there’s still a part of me that thinks I will just snap out of it one day. That I will wake up, shake the depressive fog out of my head, and stride out into the bright and beautiful day of mental health like nothing ever happened.

And part of it is that I feel like if I admit there is something wrong, I will get in trouble for it. That opening myself up and making myself vulnerable like that will result in rejection, punishment, and shame instead of acceptance, comfort, and reassurance. I tried to open up many times as a kid. Every single time, it ended without my getting any of the help or at least sympathy I needed.

Why? Because they didn’t like me either. So like everyone else, they didn’t have time for me and honestly just wanted me to go away and stop bothering them.

I am seeing a real pattern here.

No wonder I ended up crazy. I was a little kid left all alone in the world. Orphans got more attention. No wonder I ended up with a feeling that nobody actually wants me around and everyone wishes I would just go away. That was the entire message of my childhood.

At least now, I am on the path to recovery. I don’t know if I will ever heal completely, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now, anyhow.

And if it’s a train…. so be it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.