Continued from "Breaking the Silence"
First Memories
Alexandra Windsong
© 2016 Alexandra Windsong, All Rights Reserved
It's hard to talk about these things. Recently, in "Breaking the Silence", I shared with you how I struggled over the decision whether or not to write about my brother and I -- the trauma we both experienced growing up, and his suicide earlier this year -- and how one sleepless night, when I cried out to him for help, the message I received was, "Tell our story sis".
Originally, the follow up article was going to be about something other than details of what actually happened to us as children. I was going to work my way up to that over a series of articles. But then I realized I was doing what most people who have been traumatized do. They talk around the bad thing, giving bits and pieces of the story, testing the waters, seeing if they are being judged, waiting to see how what they've told you so far has been received before they feel safe enough to tell you the worst of it. And even then, after the waters have been tested and seem to be safe, there is always a certain amount of trepidation when telling someone about these things for the first time. So, we talk around it. For a long time. Until we feel safe enough to tell you the truth.
I realized that this time, I needed to start at the beginning with the hard stuff rather than at the end and work my way back, but I put off actually doing it. For a lot of reasons. One of them being that I don't like being that vulnerable, putting all of my shit out there for people to see. Showing any kind of vulnerability hadn't been safe for me growing up, and I carried that belief into adulthood. It's been a hard one to shake, not only because of my past experiences as a child, but because, unfortunately, sometimes, that is a reality. It's not always safe to share these things. Some people will judge you. Some people will make assumptions about you and situations they know nothing about. Some people will say mean, insensitive, hurtful things. Some people will use it against you. Some people, but not all people. Some people are loving and supportive and help you to heal.
It's time for the pattern to change. More people must speak up, free themselves of the burden of guilt, and shame, and fear that they carry as a result of things that they had absolutely no control over, and find the support they need to heal. And who knows, in sharing your story, you may help someone else begin their healing process and find the courage to speak up themselves.
My first memory.....
Fear.
I was about four or five years old. It was morning. No one was up yet. I saw some pots and pans soaking in the kitchen sink, and I decided to entertain myself playing house. I pulled a chair up to the kitchen sink and was happily scrubbing away at the pots and pans with an SOS pad, when suddenly, out of the nowhere, I was overcome with an intense feeling of fear, a feeling of "Oh my god, what if she finds out!". I immediately set about putting everything back so she wouldn't know I'd touched anything. I put the pots back in the sink to soak like I'd found them and tried to rinse the SOS pad to get the suds out so it would look the way it had when I first picked it up. Unfortunately, I didn't understand how SOS pads worked, and of course the more I tried to rinse out the suds, the sudsier the SOS pad got. What I remember most vividly was the growing feeling of complete and utter panic as I tried and tried to get the SOS pad suds free. Eventually I gave up and put it back where I'd found it hoping she wouldn't notice that anything was different.
What stands out for me about this memory, is the level of sheer terror I felt that went way beyond the normal fear of a child being caught doing something that might make a parent mad, or incur some sort of discipline or punishment, especially since in reality, I hadn't really being doing anything wrong.
My brother's first memory . . . .
Neglect.
About five or six years ago, I shared the above memory with my brother and asked him what his first memory was. As it turns out, his first memory was from about the same time period. He was about three or four years old, maybe a little younger, and sitting on the step between the living room and the hallway next to a pool of vomit where he had thrown up, waiting for someone to come and take care of him. No one did.
When he told me this, my heart ached for that lonely little boy waiting in vain for someone to come take care of him. But there was more.
Our first shared memory . . . .
Psychological trauma.
We then started to talk about a memory we shared from the same time period. I was four or five. He was three or four. We both remembered pretty much the same thing, with one "small" exception.
My brother and I had two pet rabbits. One day, one of our mother's friends who was a hunter brought her some rabbits he had shot. My brother and I didn't actually know he had brought rabbits by for dinner, we just assumed that's where dinner had come from and didn't think anything of it when she served us rabbit that night. After my brother and I had taken our first bite, she started laughing and told us that it was our pet rabbits we were eating. Horrified, we both started gagging, screaming and crying, and our mother laughed even harder until she got tired of our crying and screaming and told us to be quiet, that it wasn't really our pet rabbits. Then, when we wouldn't calm down, she got mad and yelled at us.
What I remembered most clearly and found the most disturbing about the situation, apart from the fact that she thought something like that would be funny, was that when she told us we were eating our pet rabbits, I believed her. And when she told us that it wasn't our pet rabbits after we got upset, I wouldn't believe her until I went out onto the back porch and saw them in their cage with my own two eyes. Obviously, something in my experience at that young age led me to believe that she might be capable of something like that. Clearly I didn't trust her, and that's not normal. On a side note, to this day, I hate the taste of any kind of game or wild meat - deer, rabbit, squirrel, whatever. They all make me want to gag.
And the difference between my memory and my brother's memory of this incident? He didn't remember the part where she told us that it wasn't our pets. The memory he carried with him all of his life up until the time we talked about it as adults was that our mother had fed us our pet rabbits and then laughed at our distress.
These first memories set the tone of much of what our childhood was like. Fear, neglect and psychological trauma, or as one counselor described the rabbit incident, psychological torture. Yes, there were other abusers, other types of abuse and other traumas, but those are perhaps stories for another day.
For now, this is a start.
Click here for the next installment, "Telling Stories: Part 1"
Back to Article Index
Alexandra Windsong is a healer, intuitive, life coach, singer, songwriter and artist. For more about Alexandra, click here.