Poptarts in the Dark: I
I think I will tell some stories about me for awhile:
TW: child abuse stuff n other traumatic bullshit
I was conceived on a holiday and born 9 months later, 6 minutes after midnight. I don't remember anything, obviously, until consciousness hit me one day in the 90's.
I'm 3 years old. It's fuckin cold outside. My mom just brought home a baby. Some months went by and he eventually was moved into a crib in his own room down the hall. I used to steal my mother's sketch pads and hide under his crib all day. I would make drawings of him. My mother would get so angry when she found out I had drawn in her sketchbook. To be fair I found it a few years ago and it was a fuckin' bienfang pad.
I was fascinated with how he just laid there, no pillow, blankets, nothing. Just sleeping. He was a quiet and very cute baby. I spent a lot of time in his room just being in there. My mother would come and I would hide under the crib until she left again. She would be angry if I was in there.
After my birth my mother was diagnosed with a progressive autoimmune disease. I was able to spend so much time in my baby brother's room because until I went to pre-school, I spent hours alone in our house. My other brother was at school, my Dad was at work, and my mother would be laying ill in her bed, every day. Shades pulled, fan on high, puke bag next to her bed. I used to watch her sleep from the cracks in the doorway.
Left to my own devices, I would climb on counters to get snacks in the cupboards, I took out every single toy I had, every book, every dress. I'd do little craft things for my mom. Color, sticker book pages, random other shit. She would wake up and I would have something for her and she would immediately yell at me about the mess I made for her. She would never even say anything about the present I was giving her. It was almost worse that I had done it at all.
She was always angry. She had to give herself medicine via injection. This eventually saved her, decades later, but they gave her flu-like symptoms. I saw this once when I was 3 and I cried. Today I don't fear needles at all. I have a ton of tattoos and piercings. I also still like giving presents, ironically repeating the trauma for a different outcome, but fuck people love the shit I find them.
Life continued like that for awhile. Alone all day, making messes and continually being punished upon my mother's waking. Sometimes she sent me to be with my grandma, who I found out at 10 was also a complete psychopath, but that's going to be a different post. Fuck my grandma, I can't wait to tell you the stories.
Anyways, eventually I was put into preschool. A significant memory at this time was when my mother was driving me to pre-school and she drove the van into the back of another car. She was speeding like a dumbass and then blamed the other woman, like she was outside a school dropping her kid off, what the fuck, you know?
Airbags went off and you COULD NOT breathe in there. I don't know what my mother was doing but my baby brother, couldn't breathe. It smelled like smoke in there and, gunpowder. I got out and whipped the van door open so my brother could breathe some air. Some police and a fire truck came and they took me to pre-school. I wanted to go play, I didn't want to go home.
This was traumatic in itself, I still get sick thinking about having to drive on the highway. What made it worse was when I was telling my mother how much it affected me years later, she had some shitty, selfish reaction, and then invalidated my feelings. My baby brother sucks at driving, he's a grown man now.
As an adult, I know there were 4 seasons in a year, but I only have memories of the summertime until I'm about 7. My first fuckin conscious winter. Different post.
So I'm about like, 5 now right? In pre-school. I miss that place. I drive by it all the time in the middle of the night and sometimes i just want to go look. Just stand back there where we buried the hamster (I can't believe my preschool had us have a funeral and burial for a hamster, we didn't even know what death was. What the hell was going on?)
Anyways, there's a ghost of me there in my purest form. Playing, laughing, running, hiding. I wish I could see her again. It wasn't long after 5 that she faded away into oblivion. My childhood was so traumatic, what I'm telling you feels as if I'm recounting the life of someone else.
Consciousness obviously hit me at 3, but I feel as if I was born when I was 18. Like everything before that was a movie or awful book I read. When I try to think about me being a child once, I almost like, don't believe it. When I see pictures or videos of myself when I was a child, it's like watching someone who died a long time ago.
I don't identify with that child. I know it's me. I think I can describe it as if someone showed me a picture of me as a child and told me a story about me, it feels as if I'm outside looking in at someone else's life. Then I put the picture down and don't feel anything else. Like it's a story about a long lost relative. It doesn't register as an experience belonging to me.
I tore up all my baby pictures, the majority of them, and threw them into the shred bins at my job one day a year ago. They make me extremely uncomfortable to look at. I do not like them. I was basically, born an 18 year old woman. Ragingly mentally ill, and still unhinged decades later.
This contributes to me feeling like a "bad" social worker. I have to pretend everyday that this is not my mental experience outside of work. People depend on me to be responsible, rational, and stable. It sucks. I just wanna do hoodrat stuff with my friends (that I don't have, because I don't like people, surprise).
Maybe the stories I've been writing haven't been that interesting. This is kind of some fucked up shit, but some of it is really crazy, like praying for big tits and then guess what happened. I'll tell you later.
Hope you find a good rocking chair to sit in, they're fuckin sick.
-thebadsocialworker