Someone Forgot To Teach Me

As a child trapped in the messiness of a difficult household, I couldn’t always accept things and move forward. There was plenty of anger and paralysis on my part, for I had a childlike perspective.

~ L. L. Barkat ~

The anger and paralysis were part of my life all the way into my forties. I was a five year old child, still trapped in the messiness of a more than difficult household.

My brother expressed it better than I, when he responded to a post I had written in the early days of The Whippoorwill Chronicles.

The following is an excerpt from my post:

The Hallmark of a Card

From where I am sitting I can see the clouds of indecision starting to swirl in from the outer fringes of the square. May always announces itself in a most distressing way for me. First there is Mother’s Day. Then in June my mother’s birthday. Then a week later, Father’s Day announces itself by stomach aches and migraines.

Each year on May 1st I proclaim….this year will be different. Yet each May finds me, not as strong as I had hoped. As the clouds move in closer I begin to question choices, I begin to doubt what is real. I begin to get caught up in the storm of anger and paralysis.

The following is an excerpt from my brother’s response:

Hallmark Doesn’t Have It

From where I’m sitting I can see a long string of lonely days and nights wanting to be a part of the noise outside, to be a part of the dance and be like those people out there who seemed to be able to do whatever they wanted and never felt the need to change who they were in order to be accepted.

I see the wall, thick and high, thrown up in an instant to protect emotions, to hide them for fear they’d be laughed at, not accepted, cause embarrassment. Protecting from the world but, at the same time, hiding the world.

Some children were never taught to accept and love themselves as they are. Because of that deliberate omission in their upbringing, they grew into physical adulthood with a singular ability to ‘pretend’ to be whatever was necessary to ‘fit in’, be accepted by the world and succeed.

As a result they spent that lifetime ‘playing’ a life, not being In it, LIVING it, FEELING it, but like an observer. The emotions of those times lost, for fear of them, bouncing off the walls so deep and so high. Left with an aching undefined sense that they had ‘missed’ something, though they WERE there, HAD participated.

Working through the reasons for their pasts, their behaviors, their fears, has been an arduous task, not easily started nor yet completed. To acknowledge these people as deserving of recognition as ‘parents’ denies the failure and the liability and places them in a category not deserved.

Hallmark doesn’t make a card to cover that, so I never disappoint myself by looking. I know that it doesn’t exist, just as I know that some children’s knowledge and understanding of love will never include the parents who robbed them of a lifetime of emotions.

Someone forgot to teach us:

• That if someone is angry it is not your fault.
• That we don’t need approval for just being us.
• That love should always be unconditional.
• That our opinion matters even if no one is listening.
• That money can’t make us do what you want us to do.

There won’t be cards this year. There are no cards for parents who forgot to teach. I did however get a Mother’s Day card from my father (another post for another day perhaps).

Now in my fifties, I have moved forward. Through and past the anger and the paralysis into a place of forgiveness. A place where, although I can never forget nor discount the hurt, it is a place where I can find more peace than I have ever been able to before.

It still doesn’t stop the stomach aches and migraines, but it does stop me from building walls and hiding behind them.

Least Heartbreaking: Turn Here

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams. ~ Jeremy Irons ~

And some land in our mailbox to leave me wondering which place in time would be the least heartbreaking to visit.

Many people ask me if my parents are alive. There are times when I say yes and times when I say no. It depends on which heartbreak I am able to survive with minimal damage at the time I am asked.

Then there are times when an ‘envelope’ arrives in the mail and I am unable to have a choice. Or perhaps I do have a choice and I continually make the wrong one ~ being driven by the need of wanting more than what has been given.

The ‘envelope’, was opened by a child.

A child yearning for a ‘warm and fuzzy’ hello from a father emotionally long gone. Instead an unfamiliar man had placed a drawing inside the envelope. No more. No less. No written words to soothe a child’s aching heart. A drawing done by the wife of someone this man liked and admired.

The ‘envelope’ was closed by a woman grown.

A woman who has come to understand that you can’t always get what you want - but you most assuredly always get what you need.

I closed the door to the time machine that would take me back.

I moved forward towards the door that holds all my dreams - a time machine I call home where there lives a husband and child that always greet me with ‘warm and fuzzies’ even when I believe I don’t want or need them.

The Whippoorwill Sings Her Song

From where I am sitting I can read the opening paragraphs in Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird:

“Start with your childhood…plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O’Conner said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible. But grim and horrible is okay if it is well done. Don’t worry about doing it well yet, though. Just start writing it down.”

This is sadly one of my favorite photographs. We were on a family picnic in Germany. My mother appears to be smiling. This is where I believe that it all began to fall apart.

I haven’t looked at this photograph since I last wrote about it in the original Whippoorwill Chronicles. It still remains one of my favorite photographs no matter how many sad emotions it continues to evoke. For I still believe this is where it all began…at least for us, my brother and I. The craziness that was to become our childhood and the emptiness that was to define much of our adult lives. I must however retract the misstatement about the above photo. Although we were on a picnic, it could never be termed a ‘family’ picnic. For we were never a family.

Several years ago my mother made the choice to deny my existence. This was not a new experience for me. There have been many times throughout my life where I have been on her (as her children lovingly called it) “sh*t list”. Years at a time, when I was disconnected from both my parents (because my father would always fall in line with my mother’s directives - even if it meant denying his children what they needed most) and the siblings left behind. Because of my non-existence in the life of my parents, what I write here cannot be interjected with their perspective. For this I am both sad and grateful. Emotions that are so tightly wound together for me when I talk about the non-relationship I have with my parents and my four siblings.

So this is my story. Strictly from my perspective.

Elizabeth Loftus (a psychologist whose specialty is human memory) states that we can ‘remember dangerously’. My theory is that we ‘remember protectively’. We piece together the puzzle that is our past so it makes sense to us in the least damaging way. There will always be those pieces missing where the edges are blurred and the memory is undefined. And our emotions will surface to fill in the blank spaces so we can feel whole. Flawed, but whole nonetheless.

I chose the title “The Whippoorwill Chronicles” to tell my story for the following reason.

The whippoorwill is defined as a “bird that nests on the ground, in shaded locations, among dead leaves…these birds forage at night…and do not flush from their nests unless underfoot”. “The whippoorwill is infrequently seen but it’s loud calling at dusk makes it well known”.

This is how I have felt much of my life. Like a whippoorwill. Seeking to camouflage myself so my mother could not find me. Wailing under the cover of night so I could be heard and not discovered.

Whippoorwills are known for their song. You may not see them…but you most definitely hear them.

This is my story. Song by song.