Weird tidbit about me: for a long time I never noticed anything about cars. Someone would give me a ride, and my sisters would ask what they drove, and I had no idea, not even the color. (I would remember if it were a truck instead of a car.) This could be inconvenient when you were trying to find someone in a parking lot.
I am better about it now, but what makes it more weird is that I have such vivid mental images of all of the family cars before my father disowned me.
While this whole thing is focused on memories, the absence of memories in some areas has proven pretty telling as well.
I would say this clash did more damage to my relationship with driving than my relationship with my father.
When I say we had been clashing more, I can remember at least two other instances in the year before where I had annoyed him and gotten the silent treatment for a few days. With one of those, it was again quite clear that he wanted to hit me, though he didn't, possibly because once again there was another person there.
I also remember a minor conflict about feeling that he didn't care about my PSAT score.
For the PSAT, SAT, and ACT, I was in the top one percentile on all of them. He was already not speaking to me when I took the other two, though, so this was about the PSAT.
I know we were never big at praise but I felt like it deserved some mention. After being upset, I kind of did get some recognition, but even when he did not get outright angry, I know I was always irritating.
As I type this, I think I understand my hangup where I always worry about being annoying.
As we had been having more conflict, it was kind of weird that I accepted this fight with my father as so final. It must have been because of him cornering me alone in the kitchen the next day to tell me how disgusted he was with me. Previous times there was conflict, and then there was just silence for a few days. This time, he wanted to deliver the killing blow. Mission accomplished!
I had a few bad dreams early on, mainly on the theme of adoption: either that I was not really his, and not accepted that way, or that he had given me up, so I had been rejected that way. The most haunting dream was one where he had stabbed me, and I was lying on the floor, just outside the kitchen. The phone was right there but he had unplugged it, so I could not call for help.
You're thinking the aftermath of a painful physical wound in the same place where a painful psychological wound was received seems pretty straightforward. Yes, but not having the ability to get help made it worse. Realistically, that part was not really new. My training that no one wanted to deal with my distress went way back. He had played a role in that, though that was not exclusively him.
When I first found out about Adverse Childhood Experiences, I did go through and score myself. The only thing that I counted as an event was my father disowning me at 17. Another year, and I would have been safely past the cutoff, except that there was that foundation.
(That is not to discredit anything about the ACE study, which I find very helpful; there's just always more. I would be interested in studies on trauma occurring between legal maturity at 18 and brain maturity at 25.)
This is why I said that the last really formative trauma was the thing that happened when I was 14. Here, at just a few days shy of 17, it was mainly confirmation of what I had already always known: there was something wrong about me and I could not rely on my father.
This may have been the first time where I was pretty sure that it was not all my fault, though. I knew that it shouldn't have been so necessary for him to be in control of me. Also, since he had said I did not have to drive with him right away, he should have stuck to that, but his ego was more important than my needs. As much as I was in the habit of suppressing my anger and taking all of the blame on me, I did still kind of know.
I did quit McDonald's, possibly unreasonably, but a short while later I got a new job at K-Mart. I kept up with my extracurricular activities. I did not throw myself into academics, though that would probably have been more productive.
Also, the extracurricular that became the most important was the one that kept me busy meeting other people's needs.
I went through a phase of over-preparing, which mainly meant not traveling light. Once for an away game with a longer drive I had four Walkmans on me, just in case some of the players wanted one. I also had a music book so I could use one of the practice rooms at the school while I was waiting for it to be time to leave -- because I was not going home in between -- and some homework books. I kept materials with me for doing homework far more often than paid off.
Concentration was probably an issue for a while.
I don't think the preparedness was in case something bad happened; it was too late for that. That was about trying to be everything for everyone, and also always having something to do. I may not have wanted to spend too much time alone with my thoughts.
I maintain that I was already on my way to that, but what had started off as nervousness about driving transformed into a much worse fear and a deep shame.
It is better, but I still don't drive.
Related posts:
https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2021/02/failure-to-communicate.html
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