Baby
I want to tell you guys about baby.
She’s all I’m about these days, she pretty much runs my life.
I’m baby.
The past year was one of reckoning for the world at large, and I felt the seismic shocks on the most personal level in my life too. Walking away from all the toxic situations that were the foundation of my existence - the dissolution of a long-term relationship (and soul tie), a friendship breakup, and a work environment that had turned from cannibalistic to full on sadistic. And I embarked on a journey of healing that I realized was inextricably linked with the process of healing my inner child. It was not only going to be a process of recovering, re-grouping, but re-programming, and re-parenting.
So then, my early days were in my grandparents’ house. Those were the golden days. The first grand-daughter, I was seen, heard, doted on. My grandfather took pride in my keenness for knowledge, taught me how to read even before school going age. I would kill (judging by his raucous applause) at my older cousins’ reading assignments, get the juiciest piece of meat as a reward to their great envy. I was under my grandmother’s petticoat the rest of the time – sewing with her, cooking with her- I was her sparkling shadow, for I was affirmed and creatively nurtured, my brilliance celebrated and rewarded.
After my grandparents retired and moved out to pasture things shifted. My parents were great, but young, and the limits to their emotional bandwith were stark. My dad was gone – working his ass off to provide for us at jobs that often took him out of town – lowveld Eswatini for the better part of my childhood, out of the country in my teens.
And my mom was overwhelmed. My brother had also just come into the world that time, and she had also still been working, a single mother for all intents and purposes of this narrative. Anything I wanted or needed was, unfortunately for me, always coming at the wrong time. So I picked up a valuable skill – silence. I vowed no matter how complex the issue I must fix it myself. I had to find the ways to take care of it myself, to take care of myself. Those were the basics. The extended realm of feelings therefore was way out of touch. Holding space for or even acknowledgement thereof I had learnt were simply unhelpful.
And those lessons developed into a script of sorts – all I wanted to do was help: ruthlessly achieving so they wouldn’t have to worry about raising me. And for me it was also a way to be seen, accepted – everybody always seemed glad, hell, dad even would show up for the Speech and Prize at school where I’d be the number one student, year on year. Calmly killing bitches, dying inside all the while.
I took that script into adulthood. So my grand-parents passing I bared with- I had exams, there was shit to be done. But the crises of your early twenties hit different. I was crumbling from the edges all throughout varsity. Tears from the grief would spill in the most random moments. Picked up the concept of self-care and incorporated into my coping kit, but it was mostly a topical cream to the now blistering wound. Isolating with a glass of cheap chardonnay and mask on for the content. The center would not hold.
Took a while but in 20motherfucking20 when all things feel apart it became all too clear. In fact, one moment I remember literally hearing a little voice inside that I had been ignoring all along. Sometimes a soft whimpering but one time it screamed out “WHY DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT ME?” When people I held dear to my heart would reciprocate with abuse and I wouldn’t mind it, continuing to prove myself to them when they were proving nonsense and narcissism back, oh, she got BIG MAD – “You always put everybody before me, WHY?”
In rushing to be grown I had left someone very important behind. That little girl that deserved the world. No one could give it to her, and not for a lack of searching for that somebody, collecting trauma and disappointment one after another did it finally dawn on me that only I could fill that void that existed. That hole that was shot through my heart as a child, growing cavernous when my grandparents left me with overwhelming finality to fend for myself.
In crossing the rubicon of “adulting” to being a fully-fledged grown up this is the work that must be done first: Mothering. The most critical work of my time, to course correct my line. The inner child must first be healed, and she must be glad for life to feel whole again. And continuing to be there for her – listening to, acknowledging and encouraging her, protecting her – is the process of re-parenting. Honestly it feels like I’m a new mom and a new-born all at once, over and over again. I am baby. And I will raise me even better from here on out.
