This decision couldn’t have been easy: at first it seemed that I might be left completely alone against the challenges of the world, and although it is so (to some extent, surely), the duty of every survivor is to take care of their inner child, who has already been subjected to an impossible number of trials — that’s some kind of good introect I absorbed after numerous attempts at touching this subject in therapy or books.

The good part is that I finally freed myself from strangers called family, with whom I once had the misfortune of sharing my genealogical tree, walls, blood and air. Now I could breathe freely without hearing comments about how I was holding my head at the wrong angle, breathing in the wrong key, or stealing the last breath from a hypothetical neighbour. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? However, many of us have heard comments of varying degrees of absurdity, taken them at face value, and literally lived for years with the feeling that we were the greatest evil in the world.

The Omen

My mother loved watching The Omen with me. I’m not sure if it’s a good movie choice to share with a small child at all, but she outdid herself by accompanying it with such caustic comments, implying I really was that damned child. ‘See, you’re like that too! Possessed by the devil, you are the omen,’ I still remember her saying many times.

It was strange from so many perspectives. First, why on earth are you even calling your child like that? Second, my family was never religious enough to have this kind of narrative.

I don’t know whether she did it consciously or accidentally, but the seeds of her poisonous words took root in my subconscious. Since then, there hasn’t been a single family event for which I, in my childish gullibility, haven’t taken the blame.

Was my father laid off? Oh, that’s definitely my fault. My mother had a miscarriage? I’ll take the blame. The deaths of my relatives, our dog’s illness, my parents’ troubles with colleagues, the stock market crash, favourite houseplant peril — I was always there for them, humbly taking the blame for everything. How come, one day, I looked around and realised that my only purpose in this family was to be some kind of scapegoat, silently doing the work of a sewer pipe?

The Miscarriage

I remember the day my mother had a miscarriage very clearly, though I was five years old then and had scarlet fever, as lots of children do at that age. I remember that regular morning, how she was doing her makeup before going to work, and then suddenly she was in pain and being taken away to the ER. My father would appear once a day, maybe, bringing food or water, vague and unreachable, never answering when I asked what was happening to her.

Mostly it was just me, alone in the flat, so weak from the fever I couldn’t get up off the floor — I’d just lie there. Since I was programmed to find blame, I was overanalysing the whole situation from top to toe, coiling like a tungsten wire in a lightbulb. It all felt like an eternal twisted dream. Looking back now, I don’t even know how many days I spent there alone. Call it loneliness or a surplus of time for a sick child, but at one point I concluded it was definitely my fault, because the morning it happened, I had been very persistent in asking for my favourite food. Eureka!

When she came back, I apologised profusely for ‘doing this to her’, and she took it at face value.

I guess it was the most prominent moment where I realised that as long as I could take the blame for their persistent life shipwrecks, I was of some use to them. And any child would do anything they could, not even to be loved, but at least not to be exiled.

Coming Back to Myself

But to see all this oddity clearly, I had to go through a long and terrifying path; I didn’t stand a chance of understanding it through the eyes of a little girl incorrigibly devoted to her family. Only now, being a grown woman in my late thirties, after four years in therapy and going no contact, can I fully see what I was for them, and what they did to me.

Though the past still haunts me, I’m meeting my real self, not the reduced version so meticulously crafted for me. Recollecting my memories, paying respect to my strengths, and mourning my past coping mechanisms is a fruitful journey, whatever it may sound like.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

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