Failure to communicate

Years ago I started to see three primary events that had influenced my life: one incident of playground bullying in first grade (that we will get into tomorrow), one prolonged incident of junior high harassment, and the first time my father disowned me.

Later, I started to notice other clusters. For example, that playground bullying went along with two other things, making its own triad. It is not a hard and fast rule, but some traumas are worse because of the reinforcement.

Without saying that all three of today's incidents count as trauma, they did still reinforce each other into one clear message.

The first happened when I was about 3. We were heading into K-mart and I was crying. I do not know why I was crying. Frankly, 3-year olds can go off kind of easily, but it was probably something that happened in the car. My father spanked me right as we were going into the doorway.

This is actually pretty unique in that I know why he spanked me. We didn't get spanked a lot, but the common denominator is that while I rarely remember the offense, I consistently remember feeling that I was not understood. My perspective now is that my reasons wouldn't have helped, at older ages when I tried explaining myself more, it was always useless, and just used against me.

(As a side note, I think those little talks about "Do you know what you did wrong? could have really helped me.)

One spanking offense I do remember was a snow day when I was about 7 or 9. My younger sisters and I were playing in the front yard and I was supposed to watch them, but I started talking to the neighbor kid. I think I was still in the driveway, not far but not watching attentively. I got smacked in the behind with a metal clipboard for that.

That was not one of my three "Don't cry!" incidents, but it does go along with my belief that if your child would be too young to babysit the neighbor's kids, that child is too young to watch younger siblings, which leads to the next story.

The common thread in all of these is that I was crying, and I don't remember why I started, but I remember why I stopped.

In this case I was about 4, and Mom needed to do something for just a few minutes, so my older sister who would have been about 9 was watching me. 

While I don't remember why I was crying, I do remember why it was a problem: we were supposed to go to Wildlife Safari that weekend. She was afraid that if Mom came home and found a crying child, the trip would be off. 

She took a knife and threatened to stab me. It worked.

I do not believe now that she would have really stabbed me. I did believe it then. 

One of the other scary moments of my child was a different  time when she was watching me. Our younger sisters were getting into everything, so they were probably 2, and we would have been 7 and 12. Because of the younger ones, we had put a chain on our bedroom door to keep them from coming in and wrecking stuff. For reasons I do not remember, the chain went up while I was in the room.

Well, I was going to outsmart her. I went out the window. Unfortunately, on my way out I accidentally kicked one of her ceramic horses (I think the Clydesdale), and one of the legs broke. That gets horses killed, and I was sure I was going to die. I was out of the room - and house - but I also was barefoot and had nowhere to go.

I think the resolution was that a parent came home, and I just casually strolled in and it was never spoken of again, but still, having your older kids watch your younger kids is not automatically okay.

Here is your third and least interesting of the relevant three stories: when I was about 6 my brother gave me a candy bar to get me to stop crying.

I don't have any other anecdotes about that. If food sometimes became a source of comfort, that goes more into the next two posts.

I only mention it because as part of that theme, the overall message was that no one wants to hear about your problems. The bribery is nicer than the threats or the hitting, but for that child who always felt like I was not understood, and who often could have used an explanation of what was going on with other people, it added up to no one wanting to take the time. 

It is perhaps not surprising that somewhere in this time period I literally went through an anal-retentive phase. I am told that castor oil was involved; I only remember being taken on long walks and maybe one enema. 

I don't think it had anything to do with physical pleasure, Dr. Freud, man whose theories seem weird because you based them on deciding that the social cost of believing women was too high, but did it seem easier to keep gross things inside rather than dealing with them? Perhaps. 

Mainly, it became very hard for me to ask for help.

This is another point of sibling discussion: things that it did not seem worthwhile to ask adults about. We have concluded that in many cases our parents would not have known what to do or would not have wanted to be bothered, depending. I can see where it would help to feel like you could ask for help on difficult things, or at least reassurance.

Sadly, when I did give in and ask an adult for help, it tended to be disappointing. I eventually figured out how multiplying fractions made sense on my own; I never got any helpful tips on upper arm strength so I could successfully do the flexed arm hang or climb the rope.

That was really just reinforcement, because that was asking teachers in grade school, and it had already hammered home that if I came with problems, I was just a nuisance.

The best thing about me may be that I never decided that other people merited the same treatment. I became the helpful child that would assist with homework or if you needed a lunch ticket and was always very responsible about cleaning up work areas and getting group projects completed in a quality fashion.

But when there were times when I really could have used some help, asking never seemed like an option. This may be why sometimes in distress I literally lose the ability to speak.

It affected some things.