Losing your childhood

For all the abandoned daughters

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Disclaimer: This piece has been a long time coming. After a trip to my hometown, I couldn’t stop writing about what ‘home’ means to me. Since then, I haven’t been able to write about anything other than the complicated feelings of a lost childhood. Hundreds of journal pages have been filled over the years, trying to come to terms with it all, trying to find words for something too painful to say out loud.

In this story, you’ll follow me along a fictional drive from my hometown to my best friend’s birthday party. While made up, all my heart and soul is in this piece, because the story is all me.

But really, this story is about all of us: the abandoned children, the children of parents who never really cared, the abandoned daughters.

If you are reading this now, I have gotten over the fear of publishing it. I might slap a paywall on it at one point, but for now, it is free to read.

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Sitting in the garden of my childhood home feels weird. My grandmother’s flowerbed looks like it does every year, red and yellow with lots of green in between. We’ve been sitting here for a while, my grandmother and I, talking about life, the summer, the humidity that makes my hair go curly. The sounds of bees humming and ice cubes clinking in our glasses are the unmistakable sounds of summer. A universal experience. A normal experience.

It all seems so fucking normal.

Yet, nothing is. Not really.

I feel like I belong but shouldn’t be here. My soul is painfully aware of where I am. It screams for me to get the hell out, to spare myself from the pain that undoubtedly will come.

I also haven’t been here in two years. I used to visit more often. But now, I only visit when my guilt of not having seen my grandmother becomes too much.

I know that I am the one who said I don’t want to talk anymore. I can’t be angry that you are accepting my boundary, thank you. But quite frankly, you accepted it a little too easy. Like I was doing you a favor. Like you could finally rid yourself of me, of the responsibility to try. Finally, you didn’t need to be a father to a daughter who dared to request that you care. Finally, you could play father with children that aren’t yours, because they would never dare expect something from you. You took the easy route, you always chose easy over right. Chose not to care, not to do anything, because doing something would have required effort.

For years I told myself that asking you to care was too much to ask. Like I am asking for something impossible, because like you always say: “I am who I am, I will never change.” It took me years to translate that, to understand what it actually meant: “I am who I am, I simply don’t care.”

You
simply
don’t
care.

About
me.

My brain knows that people care. I taught my brain to know.
But my heart?
Not so much.

It took me five hours to drive here, to drive ‘home’. For my best friend’s birthday, but also to ease my guilt and see my grandmother. A person who raised me more than any other. Who stepped in when my mother didn’t want to, or couldn’t. I don’t know which is true. Not that I didn’t ask, but the answer was that I shouldn’t concern myself with the past. Because the past is the past and not important. That the past is the place that made me an adult at only six years old can be ignored, apparently. Like everything about me is ignored.

You love football, so you never watched me show jumping on a horse taller than you. Historical fiction is superior to Harry Potter, so we never went to the bookstore together. I got the reading bug from you, yet you told me that I would die fat and alone if I kept staying in my room reading and eating cookies all day. I still struggle to snack while reading.

The bees keep buzzing, and the condensation of our drinks drips down slowly, leaving a ring of water on the table. The table is the same as it’s always been, white and blue. It almost looks the same, but now its color is lighter, and it has tons of tiny cracks on it. Cracks that will never scab over; that will never heal.

Conversation is difficult, my grandmother keeps forgetting that we are talking, I keep drifting off, trying to daydream about something else, to ease the pain that this place is causing, trying to keep all the hurtful memories out. I keep nodding and saying ‘oh, yes, I remember’ while my grandmother confuses when exactly everyone was alive, telling me I must remember my parent’s engagement party in this garden, when the old plum tree dropped a plum on a neighbor’s dress and ruined the entire thing. She smiled so wide that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I wasn’t even born back then.

My brain can’t seem to accomplish what I am trying to do. Memories keep showing up despite my effort to scare them away with all the happiness I am creating in my head. I force myself to remember the good times here, in this garden, this house. The good times, so rare, that I burned them into my brain to survive, I embellished them, made them sparkly and happy. Lying to myself to keep going.

As casually as I can muster, I ask where everyone is. Let’s get this over with. Say my hellos and goodbyes, get in the car and leave.

“Oh, they spontaneously decided to leave for the weekend,” my grandmother says.
“Before or after you told them I was coming?” I ask.
“After,” she replies, matter of fact, with no emotion in her voice, but with hurt in her eyes. Hurt and disappointed in her own son for becoming who he has become.

I take a deep breath. Steadying my heartbeat, ignoring the tightness in my chest. This is good. Best case scenario. Really. Perfect. This is great!

We talk a bit longer, about the dog, the neighbors, the town. I barely know any of the people my grandmother talks about. Story after story, one more dramatic and funny than the other, I simply smile and nod. I haven’t lived here in well over a decade, yet in her mind, I never left.

With a big smile on my face, I tell her that I have to leave now, that my friend is waiting. She smiles, happy that I still visit my best friend after two decades worth of friendship. “Have fun, my dear, wish her a happy birthday from me too”, she says and gives me a kiss goodbye.

I get in my car and leave. Driving down the road I grew up on. At the end of the street, I see a neighbor pruning her roses. A sparkly, liberal, artsy-type woman, who I always loved talking to when I was a kid. She was different than most parents back then, more open-minded, fun, and loving. She smiles at me when she recognizes me. I wave, smile back, but I don’t have the heart to stop and talk to her. This place, this street—it all is a bit much today. I drive past, seeing her more clearly, and I am shocked by the grey hair and wrinkles all over her face. Somehow she has gotten older, while I feel thirteen years old, driving down the street in my big Audi SUV that I purchased with pocket money, nothing more than a child with a broken heart.

But I can do this with a broken heart.
I always have.
So I put my sunglasses on and hit the road.

Unsplash, by Thanos Pal

The drive isn’t long. Just one town over. Fifteen minutes across the vastness of the German countryside. Nothing but corn and wheat fields to my sides. I try to smile, to listen to the upbeat song on the radio. I sit up straight, stealing my spine, making myself taller than I feel. Allowing myself to be proud of having survived another hometown visit. I survived without a new scar, but the old ones never healed anyway.

My fingers find the volume nob on the steering wheel and turn the music up. Desperate to fill my head with something else than sadness. Forcing my brain to think happy thoughts, so that it forgets the aching heart. I need to keep moving, like always. I always moved, never rested. Never took a break, too afraid that the world would fall apart.

That I would fall apart.

Moving, pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, working—but never resting. A quality ingrained in my family for generations. We are the worker bees, we always find something to do. Something that was pointed out during my annual review at work last year. At least this ‘quality’ is of some use, because all it really makes me feel is tired.

I am tired of moving, of having my shit together all the time.
Tired of having to do it all.
And by ‘all’ I don’t mean the ‘all’ people on social media talk about.
By ‘all’ I mean just keeping myself alive.

Working to get money, paying bills to keep a roof over my head, buying food, doing laundry, showering and dressing myself, cleaning the kitchen - why do you always have to clean the fucking kitchen?

I am exhausted. All I want is to sleep and hear a parent say: “Everything will be alright”. I want to sob and cry, and want to be tucked into bed, with a gentle hand across my cheek, swiping my tears away, a parent smiling at me, and telling me that everything will be alright. That they will take care of me, always.

But I don’t have that.
I never had that.
No one ever tucked me into bed and told me that everything would be alright.
I tucked myself in, I told myself that everything will be ok.

“You’ll be fine. You’ve always managed to get through, you’ll be able to handle this too”, whispers my ten-year-old self into my ear.

I sigh and try to sit up straight again, focusing on the road. Positive thoughts aren’t as easy to conjure up in the same place that brings on the nightmares. I take a deep breath, shaking myself, shaking the imaginary eyes off of my body. I can feel the judgment, the rolling eyes of people telling me what a wimp I am. How they can handle life by themselves just fine.

For years I thought of myself that way. How weak I am, how fragile. But what people need to understand, what I am still working on accepting myself, is that without rest your own needs feel like a burden. When you’ve had to survive by yourself for the entire time you’ve been on this earth, you are more tired than most. You are exhausted. So fucking exhausted of always being the only one you can count on.

But I do understand where people are coming from. I truly do.
And you know what?
I am jealous.
I am so fucking jealous.
I could cry, that’s how jealous I am.

I sometimes do. Cry, I mean.

Now is not the time to cry, of course. I have mascara on, I can’t look like a panda bear at my friend’s birthday party. Another deep breath, sitting up straight, shaking myself out of my own thoughts. A ritual I perform every time I leave my hometown. With each kilometer that passes, my heart becomes lighter, my heartbeat slows down, my head becomes clearer. It is like a buffer, a necessary one, separating the old me from the new.

On the side of the road, I spot the old castle. It really isn’t a castle, more like an elaborate farmhouse I saw every day on my way to school. I would look out the window and see this house, with its ivy-covered walls, red window frames, and large oak trees all around. Every time I wondered who lived there because you never saw anyone. It felt beautiful, yet lonely. Even back then it looked a bit run down, but the property was taken care of just enough so you knew that someone must live there. Now, almost twenty years later, it looks worn. Empty. Abandoned. Probably haunted. I imagine my heart looking like that because that is what this town does to you. No lick of paint will make it look brand new, all you really can do is tear it down to the studs and start fresh.

Why my life has been the way it has will always be a mystery to me. Why do we have the childhood that we have? Is there a lottery that gives some the golden ticket and sends others straight to hell?

I stop myself, regretting these thoughts the second they entered my mind. Shame, that’s what I feel thinking this. It feels wrong.

I mean, there were happy moments, after all. Like ‘laughing until you cry’ happy moments. But if I am honest with myself, these moments were so fucking rare that I had to turn them into the happiest memories on earth. I embellished them until they didn’t even resemble the truth anymore. I faked this happiness to the point that I can turn myself into an optimist whenever I ‘remember’ them; when in reality, I am not. But to survive—your brain has a lot of tricks up its sleeve to survive.

The castle, now in my rearview mirror, looks even worse from afar than up close. I know I can’t take these thoughts back now. The shame and guilt of thinking them won’t go away, not for a while. I can’t put those in the rearview of my life. For now, they have taken root in my heart.

Really, how dare I think this way? But, how can I not?

I continue to fight against my own brain, my own memories and feelings for a few more kilometers on this incredibly straight road. Forcing myself to only see the positives is a well-trained habit. A long time ago I chose to ignore how few there are and smiled and went on, and on, and on. Because I want to be upbeat and positive. I want to be soft. I want to have had this happy childhood, I want to … I so fucking want to.

But anyone who had to pretend to be someone they are not knows that with time the softness will fade. But I can’t allow that to happen. These happy memories are sacred. Even if they are pure fiction, if they only exist in my brain. Because if they fade, forever, …

I think I might fall apart.

So, I fight with my own brain and my own heart. Holding on to the good memories for dear life, but never being able to forget the bad. I have to keep moving, always.

And, I blame myself.

I happily make myself the villain of my own life if it means that I can play pretend, to not have to accept the painful truth.

A truth so raw that I only ever allowed myself to fully feel it once.

I cried many tears, sobbed, gasped for air, on the floor—and I never made a sound.

The truth that my parents didn’t care, and never did, and never will. The fact that I was a societal obligation, a tax write-off, a retirement plan.

A small curve in the road takes me out of my thoughts. How is it that you can drive without thinking, somehow making it safe and sound to your destination? I shake my head, trying to forget that moment on that bathroom floor in the ugliest apartment I ever lived in.

I never asked for much. Or is it too much to ask that you call sometimes? Ask about my life and remember things I said the last time we spoke? Is it too much to ask that you remember how I drink my coffee? Is it too much to ask that you care?

All I ever wanted, all I ever asked for, is that you love me so I am capable of loving myself.
Is that too much to ask?
It is not too much.
I know that.

But apparently, you don’t.

I imagine you reading this. Somehow I know it will bring tears to your eyes, you were always the sensitive one, crying easily. I still don’t know what to really make of that. Are those tears real? If they are, why do you never change anything to prevent those tears from flowing down your cheeks ever again?

We’ve been there. The big talk. You crying. My face emotionless, but with plenty of anger and hurt in my heart. It always ends the same. You saying that ‘you are the way you are’ and that I simply ‘have to accept it’.

You win.
I am accepting that you are the way you are.
I am accepting defeat.

A few years ago I accepted that we are at the place where we are. I tore down the house, to the studs, only the foundation left. No roof, no power, no lights.

I built it again, brick by brick, with all the colors I could find. Made it bright and airy, filled it with love, and created a safe haven. I built every wall as thick as humanly possible. A fortress around my heart.

The worn castle is long gone, now all I am surrounded by is corn fields. A pretty sight, really. With the sun shining bright, not one cloud in the sky. In the distance, I spot the traffic light, the only one in town. I am almost there.

The street light turns green and I wait for some cars to pass to make a left turn and drive the curvy road up to my friend’s place. I put the car in park and take a very deep breath. I made it, safe and sound.

I am met by a wall of muggy and humid air when I step out of the car. Were summers always this humid? Or is this global warming?

I lift the gift out of the trunk. It is heavy. A basket full of pink hydrangeas. I would have picked white hydrangeas, but my best friend loves all things pink. I love neutrals, mostly black. We are a match made in heaven, I guess.

Standing by the door, she smiles when she sees me. I can see it in her eyes: glad that I made it in one piece, without crying. Her lips don’t utter a word, but her eyes ask the question they always ask: “Was your father there, did you talk to him?”

I give her a genuine smile. The only answer she is getting to her unspoken question, but enough for her to carry on with the mundane things of life; asking me if traffic was bad (it was), how nice the weather is (it is nice), and that she has Aperol in the fridge (she hates Aperol, I love it).

In the garden, I see a few people have already arrived. I smile and say my hellos to everyone. She loves her gift but asks what she needs to do with it. “Lots of light, no direct sun, and lots of water. They love hydration, go figure”, I say. Someone puts an Aperol in my hand, points me to a chair, I sit and start to talk with everyone.

For a few hours, I forget all about ‘home’. I smile and laugh, and my heart becomes light as a feather. It always blows my mind how heavy my heart can get and how easy it is to forget that I am actually this most of the time: a happy person with a genuine smile on her face.

But no smile in the world can make me forget that I am also this: a daughter with a hole in her heart.

XOXO
Annika