Sweet Sixteen... a post inspired by LillyPotter's wise words : )
" i think. we do get stuck or stopped at the age when we experienced trauma - a particular trauma. not that we did not experience trauma before or after - but some particular trauma sort of stops us at this point until later on, we find counsel - someone we can trust well enough to help us back to that place to figure it out and grow on up out of it..." LillyPotter
Two weeks after my sixteenth (uncelebrated, of course) birthday I came home from school to find...
...the house was EMPTY. Now, I'm not saying "empty" as in no people... I'm saying EMPTY as in... all the furniture, everything was GONE! I didn't have to worry about their being no food in the refrigerator any more... because there WAS no refrigerator!
Apart from some dust bunnies the house was quite literally empty. Part of me just went into total shock... the rest went on holiday somewhere where family don't abandon each other, I wish! lol...
Two weeks later the landlord changed the locks and I was out living on the streets. I stayed out there for 18 months.
It later turned out my "mother" had met a guy she had fallen head over heels for and she'd decided to run off with him... Come ON, lol, whose mum runs away from home when they are a SINGLE parent!! arghhh
The good thing I have taken from this experience is... I will never forgive my mother. To me SHE is DEAD. For years I put up with her alcoholic rants, the strange men she dragged home who I inevitably ended up having to fend off... the mess, the chaos, the pain... NO MORE. She made her choice and she did NOT choose me... she chose a stranger.
Coincidentally, I also found out later that the welfare cheques she received for being a single "parent" had STOPPED when I turned sixteen. Her meal ticket was CANCELLED. After spending years listening to her whine and rant drunkenly at my brother & I that WE were "parasites" "who stopped her from having the life she SHOULD have had" the irony of that struck me particularly bitterly.
My childhood was a sad hallucination... I had pretended she loved me and that it was the alcohol that stopped her from SHOWING me she loved me... but, the truth is... she hated me, she resented me, she blamed me, I was nothing more than the thing she had to put up with so she could have the money to buy alcohol.
I died that day. I'd like to say I put on a brave face and stepped out into the sunshine determined to survive no matter what... but I didn't I curled up in a ball on the floor with the dust bunnies and I cried...
Two weeks after my sixteenth (uncelebrated, of course) birthday I came home from school to find...
...the house was EMPTY. Now, I'm not saying "empty" as in no people... I'm saying EMPTY as in... all the furniture, everything was GONE! I didn't have to worry about their being no food in the refrigerator any more... because there WAS no refrigerator!
Apart from some dust bunnies the house was quite literally empty. Part of me just went into total shock... the rest went on holiday somewhere where family don't abandon each other, I wish! lol...
Two weeks later the landlord changed the locks and I was out living on the streets. I stayed out there for 18 months.
It later turned out my "mother" had met a guy she had fallen head over heels for and she'd decided to run off with him... Come ON, lol, whose mum runs away from home when they are a SINGLE parent!! arghhh
The good thing I have taken from this experience is... I will never forgive my mother. To me SHE is DEAD. For years I put up with her alcoholic rants, the strange men she dragged home who I inevitably ended up having to fend off... the mess, the chaos, the pain... NO MORE. She made her choice and she did NOT choose me... she chose a stranger.
Coincidentally, I also found out later that the welfare cheques she received for being a single "parent" had STOPPED when I turned sixteen. Her meal ticket was CANCELLED. After spending years listening to her whine and rant drunkenly at my brother & I that WE were "parasites" "who stopped her from having the life she SHOULD have had" the irony of that struck me particularly bitterly.
My childhood was a sad hallucination... I had pretended she loved me and that it was the alcohol that stopped her from SHOWING me she loved me... but, the truth is... she hated me, she resented me, she blamed me, I was nothing more than the thing she had to put up with so she could have the money to buy alcohol.
I died that day. I'd like to say I put on a brave face and stepped out into the sunshine determined to survive no matter what... but I didn't I curled up in a ball on the floor with the dust bunnies and I cried...
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