When you grow up without any guidance, you are always preoccupied to act normal. And you always ask yourself what normal is and you look around you at the other people who did receive guidance, to get a feeling of the specter of normalcy so you can copy the meter numbers and relax, because you have something to measure yourself by, now. You go to that meter from time to time, too, to see if you can add something to what you already put out there or if check to see if you went over the normalcy line. or under it. Anyway. I didn’t grow up without parents, but they were not interested in offering any guidance, not to us, kids, anyway. Other people’s kids, yes, sure, right away. And we, their kids, were so enmeshed with their toxic shit and we didn’t even know it, that we build our own survival mechanisms and our parents were using us as an example for their abilities to guide kids into being so independent that they don’t even need them.
Anyway. because I didn’t know what normal behavior is, at any age, I always felt like an alien, without age, just a blip in the existence, who was still expected to go through the stages of growing up, but only the ones that are measurable, like tests, exams, graduations, getting degrees, getting into college, the formal stuff. There were no emotional development dimension to any of these, we were always supposed to just figure it out, like it came with age, like you were just downloaded the skills or answers, or it just got activated by itself, as you unlocked new levels. That made me feel very alone, growing up, because I didn’t know if that was even normal, and that if I was the only kid who had a problem with that, with adapting to every stage, by myself. Who do the other kids do it?
Then, I saw them come to school with their parents, at parent-teacher meetings, and me, being the only kid with parents that didn’t do these things, I started to feel a little left out. I started feeling like my normal is not the actual normal. But I had no way of talking to anyone about this, because, at home, the normal was to keep thing to ourselves , especially emotional stuff like this, nobody was supposed to know that you have feelings, especially not the neighbors, those who were not ever invited to our house anyway, because that was the rule. No friends, no visitors. Mother was not in the mood of being a mother. That was our normal.
Now, as an adult, I find myself struggling to make decisions, still. i always try to take the right path, in context. Always looking at things as if my life was a big, long, narration, and everything should make sense, after I am gone. I am always checking in with the death-bed version of myself, to see if choosing Fusilli over Spagetti makes sense, overall. Then I feel judged anyway. Who is judging me? Myself, of course. Anyone else is too busy doing their normal stuff anyway.
Four years ago my then husband, divorced me, because, he said, he didn’t sign up for this, I was so sick he sent me away to die far away from him, so he could not see it. and now, living alone, with my kid, my brain found a solution to keep me feeling safe and functioning, doing the bare minimum – not going out at all. Walking sometimes makes me dizzy and it really is a good idea not to get myself to far from home, with a kid, in case I faint on the bus or the sidewalk. That never happened but the idea of it happening makes me dizzy anyway. Alex could wonder off into traffic, he is not really verbal, so staying home is the mature choice for both of us. The responsible one.
I just remembered the feeling I got when I managed to get left behind when the family decided to leave town, going fishing or whatever, and I needed to find a way not to go, because I didn’t feel like being dragged along again, stressed to fall asleep with my fingers stuck into my ears, so I could not hear my parents getting it on 1 meter from me. The relief, the peace, the freedom I felt when I managed to convince them to leave me home. I would bribe them with cleaning the house, washing the windows, or studying for my tests or finals. And i believe my brain is drawing the feeling from those times, now, to keep me home.
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