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Old College Writings: Bits of Me: Personal Writings
Greetings all; Shardvixen here.
Resilience: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
My mother didn't have to work as my father made a very good wage.
So once upon a time; I went to college(well really a lot of college) and I had to do a lot of writing. (Can you believe that, writing a lot). So I figured I would edit them and rewrite them up as a personal blog. So this one is about my childhood based on research of resilience and attachment as development markers in one's life. Most of my college writings are about psychology with a few exceptions from my BA in Liberal Arts.
A part of me has a hard time getting rid of things I have written, so the compromise for me is to put them online. That way they are no longer cluttering up my house or storage area and I still have them to go back to look through to see if I still feel the same way. I know some students just write 'whatever' to get the grade where as I believe doing any exercise is good for the brain and for understanding of one's self and eventually others.
I figure this could be connected to my vlog" Bits of Me" this would be my life through my writings. This one was titled "Timeline of Childhood"; instead it will now be Bits of Me: Writing 1. There will be no order to the writings, just as I find them and when I decide to add them here. In case you were wondering- I got an A for the paper and it was written in 2011. Many of these papers hold sad or depressing thoughts, so be warn before reading it so not to be triggered. If you become trigger, discuss it with some one because you are not alone in your feelings.
Resilience: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
Sometimes memory isn't what we think it is. Most people asume memory is a clear or slightly foggy snapshot of one's life. For me, memory is things. Feelings that come and go and are attached to my senses, thoughts and emotion. I don't see pictures by themsleves but rather movement in time, object association to other objects or sense association. For example; the scents of overly ripe bannas, pine cones along with the sight and taste of pasta salad bring up scens filled with my grandmother doing various chores. When connected to other memories like my room at my grandmother's house, her in her chair crafting and sharing meals with my grandparents flash before my inner eyes.
My childhood is defined by secrets. from the moment of my conception to the day I left my childhood house just before my 18th birthday; secrets that exist today with no solving or closure ever to happen. Secrets as simple as " don't let othrs know what is going on" to very large and complex ones involving various other people and spread out through my life. (This now includes other people secrets that I have gather as a intern therapist and working with families). My past secrets cause a wall between my caregivers and me; secrets that should have been exposed but many of them are not just mine, so I can' not just ripped them apart and throw them to the wind.
I dont remember if I was attached well to my parents but now where in my baby book does it say I had an issue with strangers. ( My daughter cried the first 2 years of her life if exposed to strangers. After she could talk, she wasn't as shy about it. And my son really didn't acknowlege one way or the other that people existed beyound his personal bubble). My reaction to strangers may not have been acknowledge because as far as I can tell based on information from other relitives, I was rarely exposed to strangers. My mother was the oldest of nine siblings of which at the time of my birth eight were alive. My youngest aunt was only five years older and my youngest uncle seven years older. My maternal grandmother was a huge part of my life, as I was with her weekly. I think my younger self saw her as my mother and it was her face that I see in my early memories. My parents were considered to be young at the age of 21 years when they married. Since my mother was still needed in my grandparents home at time ( my maternal grandfather had Bi-polar Depression and was hospitalized a lot). Because of this, I had a lot of caregivers around me.
My mother didn't have to work as my father made a very good wage.
Interestingly, many of my relatives said I had no problem being seperated from my parents; I believe this to be true because I had my grandmother and many two aunts and two older uncles around me growing up. I loved to explore from an early age and was told I would move away from my care takers to explore beyound their sight. I had no problem moving away from my care takers even in areas not known to me. I also knew that there was always some one near who could take care of my needs. It wasn't till later in life that I had anxiety about being left.
There was a theory that "Infants are predisposed to direct their attachment behaviors to a single special person, especially when they are distressed" This has been argued against a lot as there is research that suggest that some children learn that there can be many who give comfort. For me that is true as I was part of an extended family and I would go to any of my relatives for comfort. This changed as I grew older. My daughter was the same as she also had an extended family to rely on while my son would only seek comfort from me, and my daughter if I was not around but would rather just soothe himself till I was around. There is a home movie( ;long gone now) where I got hurt at around 2 years of age and ran to one of my aunts who was in her teens for comfort.
I do beleive that my secure attachments in my early ages helped me survive my older childhood. I have a strong sense of what a good relationship whould be but due to other issues from my childhood, I was unable to create positive relations with my peers until I was in high school and then only a few one-on-one but not many group relationships.
Atachment secrue or not can't be the only factor that decides whether or not a child will develop healthy or not. My family and my mother remember that my mother was a very devoted, responsible parent who was a bit more authoritive(this may be because she was the oldest and she was responsible of her younger siblings while my grandmother was caring for my grandfather during his mood swings and hospital visits).
There are too many images of abusiveness in my childhood in my socail arenas and within the inner family infrastructure to pick ones to show examples of resilience. The best exampls is from my experiences of being a rejected child. I have images of memories of me picking myself up after being tripped, pushed or knocked down over and over again by my peers. I was bullied by my peers through out my early schooling (K to about 8th grade). I always had the thought that things would get better if I just kept pushing forward. Which is why I could always understand Dory's reference "Just keep swimming". (Finding Nemo).
There are many factors for resilience in one's life. There is the warm, parental relationship with at least one parent(caregiver) who provides warmth, appropriately high expectations, monitoring of the child's activites and an organized home environment. All of these are filled by my grandmother at the time. When I was turning four, my mother began to have issues with my sibling. Her whole attention was on him, while I was told what a good girl I was to keep me in line. My grandmother picked up the slack of parenting with me. I was rarely in trouble with my grandmother even though with my mother as my sibling got older, I was always in trouble. When I did get in trouble with my grandmother(I really can't remember very many times I ever was) she dealty with it effectively and quickly always explaining what I had done wrong, what her expectation were for me and how I should try harder to meet them in the future.
As I got older,mymother had a hard time with the concept that my peers didn't like me. She struggled with and finally I just stopped reporting to her the trouble I was having. I remember many timeswhere she got so frustrated with me and just refused to comfort me, rather she ignored me as that soon became her normal routine with me on this events. I was about nine years old and I had had a bad day at school during which my peers were more violent than normal and I came home with a bloddy nose. No matter what, I couldnot get my mother to believe I had done nothing to warrent such an injury and this was just something I had come to accept. I tried to explain to her as I am sure she knew on some level that while this didn't get this bad every day, there was many days in a school week that I came home crying. On this day after getting off the bus and being picked on the bus; I was trying to avoid my certain tormentor, another one tripped me and I hit the sidewalf clumsily causing me to hit my face which started a nose bleed and later a fat lip.
I remeber the tast of blood, I think I was in fourth grad because I remember I watchted the Addams family after my mother helped me clean up and that year, I would run home from the bus as fast as I could to be able to watch the Addams family and G-Force every day on time. With the sound of the snapping of fingers and "The Addams Family" chorus, I can still hear my mother's voice asking me "what happen?", "was I sure it happen that way?" and the million dollar question I alwasy asked myself, "what did you do to make them so angry?" I told her over and over while trying to enjoy the quirky family I fell in love with, "On the bus, they were making fun of name(something they never seem to get tired of, I had one of those names where other words could be made from it) and laughing at me till I cried. I was as my grandmother would say a very sensitive child though when she said it, it seem like a magically thing to be and when my parents, teacher and doctor said it, an evil, bad, weak thing to be. I learn early that I cried when I got angry or had some kind of immense emtional reaction. it was like the emotion was more than I could hold within so I cried to release it. When I refuse to reacte to the name calling, then my tormentors would say things like, "you are so ugly, no one can look at you. No one likes you and we wish you would die." I know now none of those are things to be upset about as an adult. They did hurt a lot as a child but it wasn't the words as much as the meaniness and even dislike or hate that hurt so much. The not understanding why the words were said, why such meaniness had to occur. And the laughter that occured when I was hurt.
Every day I would wake up and go to school. Every day I would tell myself "It will be a good day". I love school, I loved to learn. I loved being able to get away from my home, my parents and my sibling. Going to school for me was always good even on the days my peers were the meaniest. Some days they would ignore me and other days theymight even let me play and act like we were friends( these were rather confusing days) and the days I was as horrible as them because I would join in with them picking on another person. This was to deflect them from looking my way. On those rare day, I dislike myself as much as I dislked them. I would go home and hide in my room with my comic books and plot for the day I could become the hero and stand up to them and win. To protect others from the evil that surrounded us. Some day I would have power.
As I got older, I tried to find othr allies. I tried to involve my teachers but then I got labeled as a tattler who was need more attention due to lacking it at home. I was a good student but as they told my parents unable to connect correctly with my peers. Others like counselors would say I was an overyly sensitive(like this is a bad thing) child and I needed to learn to interact with my peers thus my other put me in Summer school and school groups with the same peers who tormented me at school. I did like the groups and as long as I just took the abuse all was good. Finally I just acted like it was my fault and did my best not to caused waves even if teachers and counselors asked. I learn to find good hiding places at school and became a good little helper to avoid recesses at certain times.
I feel my reiliency at this time was being able to get up each morning and jut keep going back to school. I learn to read ealry so I could escape into comic books my uncles read (around 1st grade) and then into books with heros who came from problem pasts, some like my own. I loved to play act and write plays. Eventually I settled on the idea of becoming a movie director when I grew up or a Forest ranger(so I could leave the world behind). I set my sights on UCLA at an early age, dreaming of leaving home to go some place to start over where no one knew me.
It was in middle school that I started seek knowledge to understand why no one liked me (I still research that even though I have a few good theories now to look at) I wanted to know if there were others who had the same experiences as me. At this time I didn't understand that part the reason was because of my mental illness and my way of interpeting how the world was for me. I wanted to know why my own father didn't like me, why my peers felt they had to keep me in "my place as the lowest of the low". I wanted t know if I could ever just be normal with friends and a healthy look at life. I started reading evreything I could get my hands on in the library. My mother was so proud of how well I could read and understand what I was reading. So much so she signed a release statement at the local library that stated I could read adult material.
As I entered 7th grade, peer interaction began to change. adults began to tell me that boys were mean to me because they liked me. That they weren't really being mean but rather trying to get my attention. Needless to say this didn't really help me because now I was to take pride in them being mean because they really cared and I was being set up for more serious abuse adding sexual abuse to my emotional and physical abuse that had been present most of my life. The only thing I knew for sure was everyone but me agreed that some how it was my fault. I refused to be blamed for this and based on the psychology books I had been reading that I needed to learn to stand up for myself and I came into high school with a vengance of dealing with anyone wanting to hurt me.
As I came upon my 16th birthday, my youngest uncle was killed and the extended family fell apart. My grandmother became unreachable and my mother was heart broken and in her grief stated that there was no way I could have any real grief as I wasn't close to him like she was. And because he was more important to her than he was to me or I was to her, my grief wasn't real. My parents were having issues and soon I was left alone more and more with no one to trust. Abuse in the home because even worse as my father tried many times to hurt my mother more than he had in the past.
My risk factors were may; Explosive, druken rages occupied my nights since I had been very young. Early memories of my grandparents coming in the night to pick up my mother, my brother and I as she left to escape my father who tried very to kill her and I fear us too. I remember many nights where loud crashs and yelling happened. One night in paticular involved a televixion being thrown through the front window and my mother on the coffee table so she could look my father in the eyes. She was a rather small woman and he a very tall man. She was yelling at him to stop and I remember thinking stop before he hurts us all because I didn't feel that yelling at an angry person was a good idea.
In my memory I am looking up at both of them so it is possible that I am hiding down uder something or laying down on the counch. It was dark and I could feel the wind from the broken window nad hear the sirens. My father was waving around the revolver that he inherited from his father. This gave the memory the date of sometime after my fraternal grandfather had died around when I was about 12 years old.
Another risk factor in my life was my own mental health which I didn't know was an issue and my parents believes of mental health. Even though both of my parents had one parent who suffer from mental illness, their own belief was that those parents weren't really ill. That any type of mental illness was just plain laziness. And my father had bouts of depression and manic episodes when he was drinking and not drinking and my mother had issues of pretending the world was all roses and rainbows. Add this with a huge secret that my father believed that I didn't learn till I was olde(he believed my mother had been pregnant with another man's child- me when he married her even though she says my father is my father and it is his craziness that cause him to believe any other thought).
I believe that it is my desire to understand my world and gather knowledge to be able to do so that has kept me going through my life. There were a lot of factors that caused misery in my life. When I explore my memories, sadness is what I see the most even though I know there were happy times. I feel I have hidden those memories away to keep them safe for the times I might need them. I have been through therapy to find them but they are still laced with the flavor of sadness, anger and fear. i have since asked my mother for some of her memories of me to help fill the gaps as I know understand that my mental health issues have clouded what I know or think I remember. Many of my reletives remember things I don't and I use their memories to jump start my own. I beleive many of my happier memories are what has helped me be a good parent to my own children.
So that is the end of that paper. I took out most of the quotes dealing with the book I was reading for the class and just left my memories. I hope it makes sense. Peace all Catch you all on the flip side, I am outta here.
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