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.