Something
happened recently that made me remember something from my childhood, something
that lead to lots of therapy. My
childhood was far from easy, I was raised by a young single mom, who came from
an abusive background and had alcohol and substance abuse problems. My dad was present in my life maybe a day or
two a year. I am very lucky and blessed
to have a wonderful extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins who have been
there for me my whole life, but I remember asking myself, and God, often, why
did no-one come get me and take me out of the situation I was in?
I lived far
from this side of my family for most of my life, visiting a month in the summer
and march break. I remember my aunts and
grandparents crying when they came to get me, and crying when I left. I remember them saying that they wished I
could stay forever. I told them what it
was like at home, they knew, and yet, no one came to get me. Eventually I stopped talking about home, it
changed nothing, and I poured my energy into making the most of the little time
I got to spend in this stable, loving environment.
When I
moved here at the age of 22, to be closer to them and the support/love they
offered, I finally asked, why did they leave me there? They explained that they had offered to take
me when I was very little and my mom wanted to move away, but my mom refused,
and said that if they ever tried, she would run away with me and they would
never see me again.
They also
explained that this was in the early 80s, and the mindset at the time was that
a situation had to be extreme to get the law to take a child away from its
mother, hard enough if you were the father, nearly impossible if you were only
extended family. Since my father was
worse off than my mother, they weighed the situation, and saw that the chances
were remote that they would win, and that if they tried and lost, they were
afraid that my mother would make good on her threat and they would lose me
forever. They decided that it would be
better to give the best they could while I was with them.
I realise
now that they made the right choice at the time, had they tried, they would
have lost, and my mother, being a US citizen, would have been able to disappear
easily. The reason I am able to have the
life I have today was because of that decision.
I avoided the common trap of thinking that things were normal at home,
or that that was just how things were.
Because of that, I was able to get help sooner, and begin the therapy
process much earlier than most people coming out of that type of
childhood. I was able to have great role
models, and aspire to a better more stable life and loving relationships.
That is not
to say that it was easy, or that there still isn’t that little kid inside me
that doesn’t understand why no one will rescue her. I spent a lot of my life doubting other
people’s love because the people I loved, and who said they loved me, seemed to
just leave me there in a terrible situation to fend for myself. I was too young to understand how complicated
it was, how heart wrenching it must have been for them to put me back on that
plane every year, knowing exactly what I was going back to.
Now it’s me
who is the one wondering what to do, what’s best. The situation in question is not as dire as
mine was, but when does it become too much?
Times have changed, but the situation isn’t any simpler.
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