Free Association

This isn't for the faint of heart--those who can't stand Hallmark shows or those who can't stand mental vomit. In no way is this edited, properly written or planned. It just is.

A late night blurb discussion turned confessional with Michelle a while back got me thinking: I might have come to terms—maybe not resolved, but definitely come to terms—with the fact that my biological father was a useless, insensitive grade A bastard towards his firstborn, but I haven’t come to terms with the emotional, sometimes verbal, abuse I experienced at the hands of my mother and Uncle Z. Thinking about it now, I realise that I had focused so much on the issues involving my father that I basically ignored the ones I actually grew up with. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that I couldn’t acknowledge that I was being abused (such a strong word, but the definition fits) on occasion by the parent and pseudo-parent who were raising me at the time. Maybe it’s because I worried that if I gave any inclination to any discomfort at home it’d be ammunition against my mum in court. And really, that’s a very plausible reason considering some of the dirty tricks my father’s pulled out of the air before. Maybe it’s because the custody battle was a solid, legal problem to focus on instead of the abstract feelings of a pre- and post-adolescent child. Whatever it is, the issues are there and maybe it’s time to address them. I’m away from home, the volatile pairing of my mother and Uncle Z that spawned most of the problems in the first place is relatively resolved and I’m of legal age to make my own decisions so the custody issue isn’t a looming weight on my shoulders anymore. I have free counselling available to me, or at the very least an insurance company that will compensate for therapy sessions should I feel the need to have any. It’s a good time for repressed issues to come to the forefront. It’s a good time to address things. So I will.

Anyone who knows me well enough, and even those who don’t, knows that I’m an ass about control. I’m a grumpy Witch of the West who doesn’t smile enough, doesn’t make friends well, doesn’t like crying in front of anyone and am a stickler for certain rules. It’s a good bet that the quickest way to get on my shit list is to make me cry, a bonus to those who make me do so in public. I kid you not. My dislikes last, my grudges last longer. It all boils down to the one thing every fool who goes for a general psychology class will learn about human nature and motivation: the need for control. I need it a touch more than some, perhaps not as much as some others. Most of all, I need control over things that might end up with me feeling like a sack of shit about to be spilt across a very clean, very expensive ballroom floor. I don’t like feeling sad, I don’t like feeling embarrassed, I loathe feeling afraid. I’ve got baggage all the way from trust v. mistrust in terms of Erikson, and Maslow would peg me as having residual crap left over from the Safety level of his hierarchy if ever they adapt that theory into a psychoanalytic one. And isn’t that just the pits?

I don’t have a lot of memories of my childhood. A good chunk of it is missing from my toddler-toddling years and a good chunk of my middle primary years. Standard 3 isn’t even on my radar. Standard 5 and 6 are faint blips, and kindergarten is made up of a strange mosaic of certain events—like someone decided to do a bad art deco piece using my recollections. One thing I always remember though is the fear. Terrible thing that. The first fight my mum and Uncle Z had when I was in Standard 1. The first time I got slapped. Then the time in Standard 2 when they fought again the night before my final exams. My mother stormed out of the house, I got on the bus in the morning to school by myself and burst into tears when I saw her standing in the crowd of parents all rooting for their kids on their exam day. Ridiculous. I remember a teacher asking me why I had cried. I remember shaking my head and then crying again when I remembered the reason. She never asked me again. I never told anyone. She died two years later from cancer. A nice woman who scared the bejeezus out of most of the kids because she was strict, but a nice woman nonetheless.

I remember my mother always being the one who left the house when they fought during my early years. Uncle Z would yell and she would cry and she would leave and sometimes, he’d leave too. It never went on for more than a night. I would always cry back then. It was always a gut instinct to cry.

Then the pattern started to change. She would yell just as much as he would and he would leave the house. When he did, he would leave for maybe a day or two, but it soon became longer. One week, two weeks. Until the final day when he just didn’t come back at all except to get his stuff and go. She would hole herself out in her bedroom and wouldn’t come out. Then it got to the point where she’d throw his clothes out of the room and onto the floor. Things would break and stay broken. I remember my best friend giving me mug for my birthday back in the day. On top of being possessive, the thought in the back of my head when I got it was whether it’d last the year without being one of the many casualties. It’s still in the house somewhere to this day, but I don’t use it anymore.

As a kid, hiding in your room and wishing dearly that you could lock your door as some measure of protection is hard. It’s like you’re constantly on fight or flight mode, and it’s a Catch 22 because you’re too small to fight and you’re too young to run. I remember waiting for the quiet and feeling my heart in m y throat every time the screaming and yelling came nearer to the door. On top of praying for them to stop, I’d pray for them to leave me alone. If I got left alone, I’d wait for the noise to stop. I’d wait for the doors to slam and stay closed for a good while before I went out of my room. Sometimes, I’d try to go back to sleep. Not very easy to do. When I left my room, I’d still tiptoe my way about the place. It’s very confusing to a child to know what to do with the damage. Do you pick up the clothes off the floor? Do you leave them there as a sign of her anger? It’s easy enough to know to clean up the broken glass, but it isn’t easy for a kid to handle a broom and dustpan that’s as tall as she is. It isn’t easy to spot all the pieces in the dark when you feel too scared to switch on the lights. It isn’t easy to eat or drink or even piss when you feel like you’re about to throw up or suffocate on the tension and fear that permeates every square inch of the house. It isn’t easy to know that your neighbours know what’s going on. All that fear and embarrassment does something to a person.

It’s worse when they didn’t leave me alone though.

Now, when they didn’t leave me alone, the fear is a different thing altogether. It’s like a higher level of fear. You fear for your immediate safety, you fear for your mother’s. You fear making the wrong move and getting hit, or getting shoved, or getting kicked out f the house and abandoned. Most of the time when that happened, they’d come barging into the room screaming at each other and I’ll be caught in the middle. Gajah bersama gajah berlaga, si pelanduk mati di tengah. Felt that way during those times. Sometimes they’d demand I take a side. If I chose my mother, I’d fear getting hit by him; if I chose him, I’d fear getting abandoned by my mother. I usually just stood there crying when that happens. And hope to any god, spirit or devil that they’d just leave. Sometimes they’d storm in and one of them would start shoving or pulling me around. They’d be screaming and it’d be impossible to understand either one of them but I’d be astute enough to know that somehow I was one of the topics being discussed. Unfortunately, they’d be understandable enough for me to pick out “your fucking daughter” or similar expletives used in reference to me. I’d cry then too. Sometimes, my mum and I would get kicked out of the house. It happened once the week before my Standard 6 prom. I remember because my mother had come in declaring that I should pack my stuff and get into the car. I had enough sense to grab my prom clothes. We piled into the car and left the house. There’s no real way to describe how a person feels when they’re kicked out of their own home through no fault of their own, not knowing what will happen, whether they’d be back, having to leave their cat and belongings behind but hey, they had their prom dress with them. A lot of good that does. Several times when it happened before, my mother wouldn’t even have time to pack anything to bring with us. She’d dump us into the car, drive and then stop in front of an old, multiple story house somewhere in PJ that I knew belonged to my father. She’d tell me to get out and live with him instead. Leave one evil for an unknown, possibly worse evil. It normally ended with me shaking my head and crying to myself as silently as possible while firmly sitting in my seat. The fear, the disappointment, the sheer terror, a person can only take so much of that before she goes whacko.

Shrinks talk about trauma. I’d say beyond the repressed memories of my father, those events could be called trauma. Unresolved, unaddressed, perhaps unintentional but there. It’s fucking there.

I was never so glad, so relieved the day I got permission to lock my door. I was never so glad for the time we lived in this one apartment where my room had an attached, private bathroom. The same house also had thick walls. Good neighbours, but thick walls.

I can’t remember when I stopped crying and started to get angry. I don’t remember when I stopped crying and got irritated instead. I suppose it came the year I got to lock my door and refuse to open it no matter the pounding or screaming or demands from the other side during their fights. I learnt to keep food and water in my room. First the water in small doses, than bigger doses; then the food—tins of crackers, chips. The time my mother got me a small refrigerator, I was ecstatic. It turns out the things wasn’t very useful in the end, but I had hopes for it. In the current house, I dragged my computer table to the end of the hall where my room and bathroom were opposite each other. It caged me in and started as a way to get some ventilation from my room fan while on the computer, but I learnt to love the privacy and the security that makeshift barrier provided me. I learnt over the years, I prepared, and I made mental changes to my future plans. Move out as soon as possible became stay back to take care of my mum and the animals when Uncle Z left. Have kids and take over the business because never have human children and forgo the business. Human children are too fragile, too malleable; I’m too unpredictable to feel comfortable enough with myself having any influence on kids beyond the educational kind. People became too unpredictable to be around; societal roles and formalities were useful and readily wielded.

And all along this lovely road of rose bushes, I was shaped.

Crying didn’t work, praying sure as fuck didn’t work. So I stopped those and tried for something else. Silence and self-control seemed to leave me less emotionally drained than crying did, and indifference lent an added buffer that mere control didn’t. Dazed was perhaps more accurate, but practice turned it into indifference. Disappointment as absorbed as a valuable lesson—have less expectations of a person and one tends to avoid being disappointed. More grey areas and less black and white. Not necessarily more give and take, I wasn’t quite bred for that, but definitely more grey areas.

Forgiving hasn’t started, but forgetting isn’t going to happen. The brain doesn’t work that way. You shove a kid into a jungle and it’s sink or swim. It’s fight or flight almost all the time and the kid remembers. This scenario was dangerous, that scenario was dangerous. It got to the point where I could feel it in my gut when something was about to happen. Then it wasn’t just the adrenaline of the moment, it was the dread and anticipation beforehand. It stresses a person, warps her, jades her. I’ll probably never forgive them for what was done. I was a cynical, jaded bitch before I saw two decades of life with more hang-ups than downs. Self-respect was hard to earn and insecurities still haunt the seedy pubs of my head. I figure it one could strip a person down to their bare bones and see the sort of soul that person has, they’d see a warped little piece of something in me. Is it any wonder that I prefer light-hearted, trashy fiction with heroes and dames and happy-fucking-endings? It’s an escape, it’s a stupid hope, it’s an some semblance of sanity. No, I don’t think I’ll be forgiving them anytime soon. I’m not saying it’s all their fault. Because it isn’t. They provided for me, raised me, and they were human. But that’s the thing. They were human. Flawed and roughened and it showed. Too much.

More than anything though, I don’t think I’ll ever forgive them for the fear.

It’s an insensitive, stupid soul who suggests that a person just get over such hang-ups. It doesn’t work like that. You experience the baggage, you carry the baggage, and you deal with the baggage. You don’t just dump it. Because sooner or later, you realise that you’re made up of that baggage. So what’ll you do if you just dump it by the side of the road of life? Why not try chopping off your legs and arms in reality and see how that goes for you; that’ll probably be close to what it’d be like to just forget it, hmm.

Yeah, you know who I’m talking about, you know who I mean. Anyone who’s had baggage knows, and anyone who hasn’t and who’s thought such things knows now.

That fear, it’s as much a part of me as everything else. I’ll never forgive them for putting me through it, and I’ll never be able to just get over it. Never be able to just forget. It was born in the mind of a little, fear-stricken child, and it was engraved as the terror of a little, fear-stricken child.

And having been that little, fear stricken child, I can safely say, I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive or forget. Not by a longshot.