Hello my friends. I've been thinking a lot about what my dark tetrad parents stole from me. Would you believe I'm just now remembering at 60 years how much they took. And how I just accepted it without questioning to the point that I forgot all about it. I think that's the worst part of all. I just accepted it as normal for them to steal and that I deserved to be stolen from! And they didn't just take things like childhood innocence, sanity or peace of mind. I'm talking actual possessions that somehow just disappeared. Silly stuff like my cuddle toys, were there and then they weren't.
In fact, there are pictures of me with toys that I don't remember ever seeing after the picture was taken. It's as if they were props in a portrait studio. Which maybe in a way they were. I think now that my parents may have taken pictures of me with the gifts I was given to prove I received them. And then just disposed of them. And I think the reason I never questioned why they disappeared is that I got used to this strange and disturbing form of gaslighting.
I've said before I have no memory of beds, bedrooms, wallpaper, blanket patterns, decorations or toys, in a lot of places we lived. At ages when I should have. I don't remember kitchen tables, meals together or furniture. I remember my parents had a lot of things like a huge organ, a nice bedroom, sewing machine. They even bought themselves riding lessons and English saddles. While I was left to play with cardboard and the dog's ball.
I also don't remember either of them working much. I don't know where or if my dad worked. I know my mom didn't' work outside the home. And yet they were both always too busy to watch me. I remember being in lots of places alone and away from wherever we happened to live, beginning around age 4, with no parent around nor any idea of where they even were. This abandonment became my norm. I grew up having to navigate strange confusing and scary situations when I was far too young.
As I look back, I was in a lot of dangerous situations. Walking down at the docks alone at 6. Playing by the side of the road at four and touching a dead rabbit because I didn't know better. Playing in a park at 5 where a known pedophile hung out. Walking to kindergarten alone to a school up a steep hill that was accessed by a six story rickety old set of steps. Being left at a camp at 6 and then left with strangers while both my parents went I don't know where. I know now that this constituted endangerment and abandonment.
I was a latchkey kid at 7 or 8, before there was a word for it. I stayed home alone all summer long. People would "forget" to pick me up. I had no idea where my dad was for large periods of my life. I have been stranded many times as a child. No one in my school came home alone in an empty house. None of my agemates experienced any of this. One time, when I was 8, the police came because I found a bird in the house and went to the neighbor's to get help. I think my mom got called on the carpet because after that I went to a babysitter. But she was a nasty woman who talked about men's penises. That really creeped me out. But somehow I never got that my situation was completely different from other kids.
And then, ironically, after a life of being left out and left alone, my parents remarried. And suddenly they very much wanted Marilisa around because now they had responsibilities to people that they didn't want to shoulder alone. Now they had all kinds of expectations for me. I cleaned their homes like a servant. Homes I could never call mine. And doing tasks that were made needlessly difficult by not being given proper tools. Like having to mop floors with a rag on my hands and knees. Or climb snowbanks to get frozen diapers off the line. Like scrubbing toilets and dirty diapers in the toilet. Like ironing mountains of laundry because my dad's obese wife had a bad back. I had scoliosis, congenital hip dysplasia and spina bifida. But I still had to do all that heavy housework.
Like waiting on my dad's wife hand and foot. Or vacuuming with an ancient heavy vacuum. Not because we couldn't afford better. There was plenty of money to indulge their hobbies. There was money for cigarettes, expensive diet food, rings, his collection of expensive nautical stuff, while I didn't get enough to eat. It was just good enough for who it was for. I literally raised their children. They both had foster care homes at various points that I worked in like an unpaid employee. I made supper, cleaned it up, make lunches, cleaned toilets. I co-slept with all their children, getting up at night with them like a parent.
And was subjected to sick, unhealthy adult sexual things that have poisoned my mind and polluted my dreams. I had to see and hear disgustingly immoral and deviant behavior, all while my parents proclaimed to be not just Christians but ministers of the word?! I was molested, sexually harassed, subjected to pedophilia, told dirty jokes, made the butt of dirty jokes, told all my mother's gross sexual experiences with her various boyfriends. Was her sex therapist and dumping ground, and whipping girl, literally. Witnessed her get beat up by the wife of a man with whom she was cheating.
And if anyone says, well that's in the past, I'll say oh yeah? Then why did I just dream about it again last night? And the night before? And have done all my life? And yes, I've written about this before and probably strayed from the point. And probably will again, till I get it through my head how freakishly awful this all was. At the time, it never occurred to me that it was so unsafe, again because I was so used to it. I never wondered why it was that I was cared for and never left alone untended at Grama and Grampa's house. No one ever asked me about any of it. So I kept it in my heart where it has turned inward on me.
So why didn't I understand how wrong it was at the time? I was gaslit into thinking all the physical, emotional, medical, religious and financial abuse, all the neglect, abandonment, endangerment, exploitation, parentification, scapegoating, invalidation, shaming, mockery was what I deserved and God's plan for me. It was unsafe to even think questions let alone ask them. I was too sensitive, showing off, disobedient, disloyal, disrespectful, on and on.
Even now, writing this, their voices in my head are telling my I'm exaggerating. It wasn't that bad. Those things that happened aren't bad, that everyone experiences them. When I know that they are and everyone else didn't. Or they lie and say it never happened. She says she can't remember anything. She fakes dementia to get out of responsibility. I know it's delusional lies, now. But after six decades believing her, it's hard to overcome. Because gaslighting lies go beyond the head to the heart, to the core, to the being. The best I can do now is to try to fumigate my mind house without blowing it up.
No comments:
Post a Comment