more relationship rambles

 

Friday, December 01, 2006

i went to therapy today.  i have been tracking my dreams, and we have been talking about them.  today started off with a nightmare i had this week, and progressed from there.  one thing led to another, and we wound up talking about when i was a little girl.

when i was a little girl, i learned not to need much.  i usually would follow this statement with a justification of why my mother was the way she was, but i have to break that habit, and just face it for what it was.  i have to see this through my own eyes.  she was not a good mother.  period.  ok, i just went to justify it again, and had to delete that.  so i am going to work on just facing it for what it was.  i was a child with needs, and i didnt get what i needed.  my father was killed when i was five, and i came to live in canada with my mother and stepfather when i was six after not living with her for just over three years.  i came to live with my mom after a traumatic event in my life, and did not receive any emotional support from her.  she didnt even know how to feed me properly.  she wasnt a good cook, and sometimes didnt cook at all, so sometimes we didnt get fed at all.  i wasnt allowed to touch her as a child.  sometimes, she would let me brush her hair.  that is all the physical contact i remember with her.  i dont remember her washing me, or hugging me.  i dont even remember her petting me on the head.

before i came to live with my mom, i had spent a lot of time with my grandmother.  she loved me dearly.  she used to wash me, feed me, and hug me.  she would tuck me into bed at night.  i still remember the way she felt, and the way the soap smelled.  i always knew she cared for me.  it was hard coming to canada and leaving her behind.  canada was so big and so cold.  i came here just before the snow fell, and i lived in a town with a lot of snow.  in england we had only ever had smears of snow on the ground, nothing real.  in canada we had snow the size of myself.  so big we could tunnel in it when playing.

i spent a lot of time outside as a child.  hours and hours.  we moved to a village when i was seven with a huge bush and farm lands up a hill behind, and a valley with a large river across the road from our house.  i would sing to the woods behind our house, i knew all the plants names and the trees.  i had a fort built with sticks cut down from trees and placed in between two lilac bushes.  my stepfather helped me to make it.  i would go play down at the river.  sometimes i played with other kids in the village.  i spent a lot of time alone.  and i read books.  i read everything i could pick up.  we had boxes of books in our house, and i read my way through many of them.  i was reading adults books by the age of ten or eleven.  i quickly outgrew the childrens books.  thats what i remember most doing with myself...reading books, and being outside.  i dont remember much time spent in the house, nor much time spent with my mom.  one summer we read a book together.  we used to eat the cheese that comes in the red box on tuc crackers, lay outside in the sunshine and she read to me.  i loved it when she did that.  she made me a dress that matched her dress once.  white with tiny brown dots on it.  i was so proud to be dressed just like my mom.  that was when i was first here.  i think she tried sometimes to be good.  mostly though, she failed.  she just plain was not a good mom.  i was a kid and i needed feeding, and washing, and hugging.  i should have been read to to go to sleep, not reading to myself.  she hardly ever came into my room.  my sister and i shared the upstairs of the house.  my mom and stepdad were downstairs.

my stepdad was good to me.  he introduced me to books, taught me perspective in art, and to really look at things.  he taught me to be independent and to think for myself.  he tried to be good to me, and to instill in me the things he thought i would need as i grew up.  he was a decent man.  eccentric and decent.  i was lucky to have him in my life for awhile.  my mom left him when i was around eleven, and i hardly saw him after that.

ok...i am not going to proceed any further with this tonight.  my therapist suggested that i work on things a bit at a time.  i tend to jump right into things head first, and i really cant do that with emotional processing.  one thing at a time.

i am feeling very introspective tonight.  not sad, not depressed, just introspective.  pondering a lot, thinking about things that have happened when i was a little girl, things that are happening in my life today, and how the two are tied in together.  i definitely know that my relationship with my mom as a child has impacted my attitude towards intimate relationships today.  when i am in an intimate relationship, i often feel as though i am just waiting for them to walk out.  i am always ready to protect myself.

in daily life, i dont spend much time thinking about my childhood, not to the level i am today.  its usually something i try to shrug off, and put into the best light possible.  i used to have food issues and was mostly underweight in my teens and twenties.  i overcame my food issues sometime around the age of 30.  now i am chubby and am ok with it.  usually, in regards to my childhood, i tell people i was a lucky kid as i got to live with so many people that i had a lot of input and didnt just have two people formulating me.  the reality is that i spent much of my childhood very alone with very little love when i came to canada.  and i learned not to expect much emotionally from other people.  i also learned not to rely on anyone.  both of these lessons are detrimental to trying to have intimate relationships with other people.

i just went to justify why my mom behaved the way she did.  this is quite ingrained in me.  she wasnt good.  period.  she was emotionally and physically abusive at times too.  i am not going into that here.  but sometimes, home just wasnt a good place to be.  she was the adult, i was the child.  and she did not treat me well.