My Younger Years

From a prompt in a series of journaling I am doing presented by TheDailyOM.com

I am the oldest of five, 3 of which are half siblings. My first 10 years were the precipice for the greatest decline of a halfway decent life. The first 10 years were just OK. My biological father left me when I was 18 months old, my mother remarried a minister who adopted me and my brother when I was about four years old. They had two children in rapid succession and we moved seven times over the 6 year period they were married. Both of my parents were profoundly depressed and were hospitalized just prior to the divorce. Those first 10 years sadly qualify as the best, most stable part of my childhood.
At age 11, my mother sent me to live with my (adopted) dad and his new 19 year old wife. It was horrible because my mother was abandoning me and I was afraid of my dad-he was mean when he was unhappy and that was the standard. I never lived with my siblings again after that except for a brief stint with my brother living with us, but he was invited back to Mom’s. I never was, even though I begged on more than one occasion. Luckily, I didn’t have to change schools (yet) as the years of age 11-13 were extremely formative in terms of adolescence, physical and emotional growth, etc. I was shorted a mother’s guidance and I floundered. But I always had my friends. Until we moved.
I attended two different schools in the 8th grade alone, as we kept moving and moving back. It was excruciating every time I had to leave my friends. I never got over it. If there was any resilience-building time period in my life, this was it. I was able to make friends easily and did well in school. But I learned to not be able to trust any relationship or situation in any given moment which was off putting to the people I cared about and it was just chaos the entire time. I graduated high school early after a move to NC to live with yet another person, my maternal grandmother, and worked full time at a diner then a retail store until I turned 17 and then I quietly slipped out of town, basically unnoticed, to move to another city with a man I would marry at 18 and divorce at 19.
My childhood sucked on so many levels and I didn’t even realize the extent of the damage until I was a mother raising my own children in a happy home. It is truly astounding how important those early years are and how critically they shape your entire life. Add to that a group of adult caretakers who seemed not to have ever gone through childhood at all as they had no handle on what was happening to their own children. I have trouble trusting any of my parents, I suffered physically and emotionally from untreated anxiety and depression, and I didn’t know true happiness until I got help with a great therapist and medication.
I resent everything that happened to me in my childhood. A parent has one singular job when they decide to have a child: Keep that child safe. I never felt safe. I never felt loved, I never felt wanted, and I didn’t even know any different. The older I get the more resentful I become because I’m constantly realizing something new, every day it seems, about how shitty my childhood was when compared to others, including my husband and my own children. I lost out on so much. And I blamed myself for so long. I was unlovable, therefore I was doing something -everything- wrong. I’ve spent my whole life trying to buy love and I’ve failed miserably. I give too much away because I’m striving for that acceptance and validation but still not getting it. The past can’t be undone and there are no do-overs.

Right now, at age 60, I’m on a very difficult journey of trying to learn forgiveness, not to benefit those whom I’m unable to forgive, but to release myself of this burden and find peace. I fear I will not be successful in this journey, and I’m fighting it completely alone, abandonedment issues rearing their ugly head as I delve deep into myself and try to heal. I’m not even close and time may run out before I am blessed by the grace of God by that peace I so desperately covet. But I’ve learned a few things, mostly about boundaries, mindfulness, and who I am as a mother. This, along with a patient, supportive and loving husband, who understands that he can’t fix me, has been helpful in this continued journey. I just don’t know if I have the time left or emotional energy to see it to its fruition.