on the morning of April 22, but they were wrong. She survived the surgery but a clot got her anyway. I always remember the anniversary of her death as it is now World Day.
I had no way of knowing at the time but that would be the end of any parental love for me. My father, who was never a warm and fuzzy person to begin with, got lost in alcohol after my mother died. I truly believe he never got over the loss of his own parents as a young child. His father died when he was 2 of a brain aneurysm and his mother committed suicide when he was 4. I believe the death of my mother, whom he loved dearly, was the end of any kindness to be found. I believe when my mother died, he went to a place deep inside of himself and just never came back. He remarried when I was 4. My step-mother wasn’t warm and fuzzy either so they were the perfect match.
She liked me as a small child. I assume that because she never yelled at me before the age of 11. My first memory of her is being 4 years old and sitting down in the basement of our house doing a puzzle by myself. I also remember dragging a kitchen chair to the cupboard to get cereal for breakfast. For the life of me, I have no idea why my stepmother didn’t fix me breakfast in my childhood. I always fixed my own breakfast. I can’t tell you how many strawberry pop tarts I ate on weekends watching cartoons. I actually don’t remember interacting with my stepmother except for meal times. Even up through grade school, I remember coming home from school and fixing myself a snack, usually graham crackers with peanut butter, and just entertaining myself. I never saw her. I have no memory of either my father or step-mother ever asking me about my school day or anything else for that matter.
I have to admit I was fortunate though. My early childhood memories, ages 5-10, I had my friends. In fact, I spent all my time with my friends. My friends loved me. I had my first boyfriend when I was 10. I will never forget Michael T. He was so cute and he came up to chest. I am grateful for those early years. I may not have had parental love but I had love. I did get to play and I was free. I didn’t have any parenting but I also didn’t have any overt abuse.
As far as ADHD, I remember absolutely never sitting still. I have no memory in those early years of ever sitting and reading a book. I truly never stopped. I also remember many times waking up early, being wide awake at night, and overeating. I always assumed my overeating was a lack of parenting. I loved sweets and no one ever told me to stop eating. My love affair with Alka-Seltzer began when I was about 7 years old. I remember many nights making the long walk down to my father and stepmother’s bedroom because of a belly ache (my bedroom was at one end of the ranch house and they were at the other). To this day when I am sick, I want Alka-Seltzer.
I also remember always having very poor handwriting which can sometimes be an indicator of ADHD. I was also a bit aggressive at times. I remember at age 4 telling my first best friend Deirdre H. that if she didn’t give me food, I wouldn’t play with her. Who says that? I wasn’t starved as a child. I remember at 8 and 9 years old my friend Laurie M. and I would chase the boys on the playground, sometimes holding them down and kissing them. That truly seems not right to me now. I was not sexually abused as a small child so I believe that excessive energy was my young motor that never stopped. It is documented that children with ADHD can sometimes struggle with boundaries. I have always been a hands on kind of person. I always had to be doing something with my hands. I used to think I was just caring. Now I believe I truly didn’t understand boundaries.
Now unfortunately my childhood came to a screeching halt at age 11. My stepmother had my younger half brother, I started my cycle, sexual abuse began with my father, and my slave days with my stepmother began. And the icing on the cake was my stepmother basically handing over the responsibility of my half brother to me. Plus she knew on some level what my father was doing so she started raging at me almost daily. I truly believe she was so emotionally/financially dependent on my father that she had to vent her rage at me. I also believe that from that point on she saw me as the other woman. She never saw me as a child again.
So here I am, just a child, and the world I knew was over. My father broke my heart and my stepmother just stomped on it and crushed it to pieces. I truly believe I survived with the help of 3 things; enormous quantities of sugar from the time I got up until the time I went to bed, television whenever I could sneak it in, and creating a rich fantasy life. I used to think about the life I would have had if my mother had lived. I would have done sports, taken music lessons, had lots of friends, spent time as a family with my siblings, etc. I call 11-18 my survival years. It was just non stop misery. Between taking care of my brother, daily lists of chores on yellow lined paper (to this day I hate yellow lined paper), trying to avoid my father, and somehow getting school work done, I just survived.
There is a myth that if a person gets through school with decent grades they couldn’t have ADHD. That is totally false. I made it through school with passable grades. However I remember absolutely NOTHING I learned in the 12 years I attended public schools. That is no joke. Four years of French - notta thing. I couldn’t do a basic algebra problem if my life depended on it. I only read 1 entire book for a paper my sophomore year. It was a research paper on Virginia Woolf. Thank goodness the book was easy to read. I was fascinated with her because she committed suicide in her 30’s by putting 2 bricks in her pockets and walking into a river and drowning herself. The first year I passed the paper in I got a B. My junior year, I passed in the same paper and got a C. My senior year, I passed it in and got an F. It makes sense as I had the same English teacher all 3 years!
I ate enormous amounts of sugar all the time to cope. Thank goodness I had access to sugar. It was my lifesaver. Every year felt worse than the last. Nothing changed. Chores, babysitting, somehow getting school work done, and some escapage. I credit my surviving high school to my best friend at the time Sue Kane (now Sue Monahan). She was a year ahead of me and was there for me my freshman through junior year. I truly believe without her support and her family I would have committed suicide. We reconnected a few months ago after not seeing each other for over 20 years and it clicked just how much I enjoyed her company. Sue has a gentle and kind nature. Now I understand how I made it through those last 4 years of prison and why I loved spending so much time with her.
I find it interesting that all the years I have spent in therapy (many, many, many years), I never addressed the worse abuse of all. I always thought the sexual abuse and the daily verbal lashings from my stepmother were the worst. Now that I am centered and rooted in a deeply calm place, I realize the worst pain was something I couldn’t even acknowledge until now. I wasn’t strong enough. Now I realize I am strong enough to face it and I want to let it go.
For the last 7 years of my childhood, I was completely alone. My father and stepmother either completely ignored me or abused me (stepmother daily screaming/cruelty or father wanting something sexual). I learned to be as invisible as possible. If they didn’t acknowledge me then they wouldn’t abuse me. As I look back on that survival thinking, I realize “ Wow I can’t believe I went through that.” The other piece of the puzzle is the fact that I feared for my life. My stepmother’s rage was so intense that if she could have killed me and gotten away with it she would have. I believe that with every fiber of my being. She absolutely terrified me. My father’s hatred was a little more covert. I remember stumbling across these True Detective magazines my father always brought home when I was about 11 years old. They had pictures of dead women strangled or tortured. It was really shocking the first time I looked at them. All I remember thinking is “My father likes to look at pictures of dead women. He must hate women.” I always had in the back of my mind my father was capable of killing me. I truly believed that. Between the two of them, I ALWAYS had my guard up. Intense fear and anxiety were roommates in my psyche until my diagnosis/medication and then I kicked them to the curb :)
When I think about the child that I was, being ignored day in and day out, my heart just breaks for her. To sit at the dinner table night after night for 7 years and NO ONE talked to me. I spent 7 years with no one ever connecting with me. How do you ignore a child day after day? That has to be the cruelest thing you can truly do to a child. I can’t even connect with the level of agony that caused because it is just too much. I reverted to fantasyland to cope. I think to a child having one parent hate you is bad enough but there was no way I could have handled having both of my parents hating me. In my mind my father loved me. He had to. I created an illusion to survive.
I think now