Did you have a happy childhood?

Did you have a happy childhood?

For all intents and purposes, my childhood looked like the perfect life any child could wish for: a doting mother, an energetic and caring father who worked extra hard to provide for his family; an extended family that meant there were plenty of cousins, aunts and uncles around to keep one busy. My mother and father enjoyed each other and had few arguments – certainly they never came to blows or went ballistic. Yet I was very unhappy, so unhappy that I had an attempt at suicide at 15 yrs old. Not a real serious effort, just enough to let everyone know how unhappy I was and to ask for attention. So what was so wrong? My mother would blame it on the hippie era of the 60s. It still doesn’t answer why I would be so unhappy as to throw my whole life to the wind and wander off after some pipe dream looking for the pot at the end of the rainbow.

Though the window of our lives of our family looked polished and clean, I now realize there was much under the surface that would follow after me for years to come and would be the catalyst that would make me a perfect candidate to join an abusive, controlling group. Much the same as women who look for abusive controlling men to rule over them, thinking that’s how love is shown to them. The victim giving in to the abuser, becoming the bane of the rest of society that “has it together.”

What was wrong was much more than we would or could ever admit. No, there was no sexual abuse, no endless beatings, nothing you could put your finger on, and nothing so blatant and obvious on the surface, but it was there, nevertheless. So unobtrusive that it would slip through my fingers time and again while I examined my life with a magnifying glass, looking for that missing link in my personality that sent me over the edge. Why, for heaven’s sake would I down a bottle of my mother’s painkillers and wash it down with a bottle of aspirin?

The missing pieces in this puzzle slowly appear from time to time, sometimes ready to be put in place and then suddenly disappearing. A little grasp at clarity.

My family was an explosive, demonstrative family and it showed. My parents were immigrants and it showed. The culture clash was there, painfully apparent. Sometimes I think back to my room, my living room and it smells stuffy, dusty and stagnant, because that’s how I felt. I wrote a poem when I was just 15, about how my relatives pushed on me until I felt bloated ready to burst. My siblings were no help. We hardly talked. My sister was bent on being the prettiest, coolest and smartest girl in town. She even made Ms. Teen U.S.A. There should stood, at least 3 in. taller than me, prettier than me, all aglow and smiling for the cameras. I have a picture of it, me in my Girl Scout uniform eking out a crooked shy smile. You can see my body language, hunched over and hiding. I didn’t want to be there and I certainly didn’t want to be there for the camera next to my very elegant and pretty sister. My brother was a tyrant. He would run after my sister and I with fists clenched. I guess we tormented him once too many times and he would chase us into our room and punch the walls because we locked the door.

My father worked hard. He was a typical immigrant of the 50s. He wanted the best for his family but he had no idea how to relate to a young girl growing up in the U.S.A. We had little communication. He never read to us, rarely played with us and basically left child rearing to my mother. That was women’s work. I hardly remember any affection coming from him though I know now that he cared about us deeply.

My mother was gone a lot, out to the sewing club, the women’s club, the bridge club, just about any club she could go to. I can’t fault her for that, she was a people person and being tied down to the house and “women’s” work just wasn’t her style. She never did like housework. My parents had parties and they had lots of parties. We were the party family and we children were the wild children. I don’t know how we got that label. None of us really did anything wild – at least not until little sister went and joined the hippies and then, of all things, a cult. I think we were wild because my mother had no control over us since my father left it all in her hands.

Add to this unhappy home life was a very unhappy school life. We moved when I was 11 yrs old to a very rich part of town. There all the snobs were. The rich kids. The white kids. I was dark and looked Hispanic and they didn’t like me. I wasn’t stylish or trendy and still wanted to be a kid. I was snubbed almost immediately. This treatment shocked me and it would only get worse until I was subjected to a near rape, a sexual molestation at the least, by a group of teenage boys from my school. It wasn’t long after that I had the suicide attempt. Now that I look back on it, I’m sure it was related. I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know how to talk about it. I didn’t know how wrong that was. I couldn’t talk to my mother about it and I never, ever told her. Why didn’t I tell her? I was embarrassed. Somehow I felt it was my fault. If I hadn’t thought I’d be cool and walk pass them on the way to the store. How stupid could I be? I wanted to flirt - it was my fault. Of course they wouldn’t like me, what had possessed me to think that I could interest them in me? Worse, if I hadn’t been the laughing stock of the school, they would never have done that to me. Certainly, it was entirely my fault.

As a teenager, I longed for a brother or a father that would be affectionate. I looked for them to hug me and hold my hand. To talk to me and ask me how my day went. Instead, I hated everyone and became a loner.

I put the pieces together and it starts to make a picture. I was abused at school; I was unhappy at home; I suffered sexual molestation. I was the perfect candidate for the people made up of the Children of God, the Family of Love. A controlling group that would control my life and be my parent. I was looking for a parent to control me and to love me. And sadly, I found it, the wrong parent.