Memoir
The Love That Prepares You for Childhood Abuse
A weekend and a dream that changed my life
I grew up with a comically suppressed rage inside me.
It would come out in strangled bits at inconsequential things.
If I happened to stub my toe, I would yell red-facedly at the chair. If the computer screen took three seconds longer to load, I would curse at all the slow people and objects around me.
Sometimes my contorted face escaped in public when my impatience got the better of me. Then I would look around anxiously, in case the psychiatric hospital van that I was sure loaded people up was around me.
In general though, I didn’t think much of it, except to be a bit bemused at how much I take after my father in this regard.
I have watched him give in to his rage all his life. But he had reasons — a high stress job, needing to provide for his family of four, unhappy wife, ungrateful kids, etc.
I didn’t think I had any excuses to be this wretched though. I had most everything I needed to live a comfortable life, why did I pretend to be so pent up inside?
I lived a life of blessed ignorance of the consequences of my violent childhood— until I saw one of my cousins mothering her children.
A weekend to remember
Let me take you to Tampa, Florida over the memorial day weekend in 2018. It is safe to say that the few days I spent with my cousin’s family changed me on a cellular level.
I was able to witness what a functional family looked like as they interacted with each other, for the very first time.
A fight had broken out between my cousin’s babies - the three year old and the five year old. The squabble was predictably over who got to play with the new toy they had received, from the newest addition to their gift-giver clan; moi.
Their mother was not in the room as the fight sequence broke out in front of me.
Apoplectic screams quickly escalated to apocalyptic screams from both parties as I watched on helplessly.
I sat there with a slight sense of foreboding for what I could tell was coming for them in the form of their mother.
Soon (but in what felt like ages) my cousin swooshed into the room, immediately breaking apart her children and proceeded to upturn my world for the next ten minutes.
The softness in her voice, the gentle but firm stance she took as she kept the two of them separated, and the wisdom she imparted as she hugged each child — my mouth was agape the whole time.
What was that? A parent could just TALK to their kid as they bawled? The kid didn’t need to be slapped and yelled at for improper behavior? The child didn’t need to be ‘disciplined’ with loudness and force?
Observing the quality of my own thoughts, I turned grey as I realized the insidiousness I was unwittingly carrying within me then.
I needed to fix this and fix this fast. Before I had children.
Parenting in patience
That day, I saw my cousin perform some sort of sorcery, where she heard her kids out individually.
She first asked them to speak in human decibel levels. She got down to their level, and held them. She let them feel like she completely understood what it must be like in their shoes. She emphasized the importance of sharing and taking turns with the things both wanted.
It was ten minutes of a respectful back and forth between child and mother. Both ways (!!).
There was no condemnation, no judgement. Only an exchange of information, handed over in a loving format.
Her patience won them over. No wonder her children went to work on their ‘sharing’ project immediately. They took turns like they were asked, and the next time I saw them deliberately make an effort to ask the other how much time they needed with the toy. They did it out of love and respect for their mother and each other.
No wonder they would grow restless when she would leave the room. I could sense their discomfort when she wasn’t around and I, a stranger, was the only one there.
I thought to myself: They cannot make sense of a world without mother. She is their safe place. A place for them to hide their fears and bury their tears. She must hold volumes of love right below her bosom where they come to rest. They need her comforting presence, even if it is in the corner of their eyes, to know they can always run to her for help.
And I wondered what that might feel like.
That night, I dreamt one of my most vivid dreams to date, that further cemented my reality shift.
But before I recount that, I must write something out that just needs to be stated. And to the people who think I am just stating the obvious, I am glad you didn’t have to face this reality while growing up.
**Physical abuse disclaimer**
I think one of the most heinous crimes one can commit is physically punishing a child.
How it’s possible that hitting an adult is punishable by law, and yet physically punishing a mere child in your home is not and even recommended (in so many parts of the world), is unbearably absurd to me.
A child who doesn’t have anyone else in the world to turn to for help; a child who fully depends on you for a sense of self and safety; a child who considers themselves an extension of you.
You — the safe haven, the provider, their person, the bigger person, then goes onto hurt them and their little body.
There is such dissociation there, such fragmentation of relationship.
Who could I, as a child, have asked for help?
Who could I cry out to?
Who could I cower behind as the blows fell? There was no one.
And there and then you learn to not let trust into your life because you never know who will turn against you. You protect yourself as best as you can by completely blanking out when the physical abuse begins.
No questions asked — this is what someone who loves you has to do to you.
It feels utterly wrong, but there’s no space for your feelings here! Shove them inside. It’s all cramped with hatred toward the world anyway, and feeling like you are lesser than a human being. Nothing but a common street rat; having woken up on the wrong side of the bed, now has to get beaten to a pulp. Just the way it is.
The dream that will stay with me forever
The dream I had right after enduring the almost-apocalypse in Florida:
I am in Kolkata, India (my ancestral home), sharing a meal with my adorable six year old cousin whom I love so very much, and I know the affection is returned. Having taken care of her as a baby and watched her grow, the two of us have formed a special bond.
As we eat our food, she decides to take one more helping onto her already full plate of dal (Indian lentil dish). I instantly grow red with anger, knowing she won’t be able to finish all of it and will eventually throw it, uneaten.
She has just opened her mouth to eat, when I smack her on the head so hard, her teeth clamp down with a metallic sound onto her lower jaw. She can’t even cry out in pain. There had been no warning of this sudden attack.
She looks at me with her eyes widening in terror and tears as she registers that her attacker is someone she thought would always protect her.
In her face I see that she has absolutely no idea what she has done to anger me and is still trying to figure out how it could have been me.
I look down at the inconsequential plate of food, and then up to her mouth that is now lopsided, and feel so much revulsion at myself I almost throw up.
I know in my bones I can’t take back what I have done to this child. I have forever branded her memories with violence following love.
I can’t bear to look on anymore, can’t bear to be myself in this dream anymore. I need to get out.
I awoke up with a start, crying because I couldn’t take my anguish. I sat up, and wrote in my journal ‘I will NEVER lay my hands on my child’ around fifty odd times to get all my feelings out. The dream had been so real, the guilt was immense.
Thankfully, I don’t have children yet, but this seemed like a nightmare sent by my karmic angels to jolt me out of my ignorance.
I was to work on my anger, I was to let out all my suppressed trauma. I needed to make sure I saw it for what it was. This, so I could make sure I didn’t inadvertently continue the vicious cycle set by my predecessors.
Doing away with the loving violence narrative
For the past five years, I have worked hard at airing out the pandora’s box of violence I secretly held within me.
I find it common in conversation even now, for friends to flippantly discuss how they will discipline their children if they get too raucous, assuming the only way to do so is to use their bodies as tools for compliance.
Gaurav Dahiya writes: “For me, it was normal because I didn’t know there was something else.” This is just one such story among the millions who will resonate silently behind the screen, too afraid of their truth.
It is normalized among speech patterns to this day to use corporal punishment as a means to expose your child to the big bad world out there — the narrative that they won’t learn unless you beat them into submission.
Perhaps the punishments are getting progressively less severe as we move from one generation to the next. Perhaps a slap is resolution enough to us now. Perhaps it won’t get to the level of using a steel ruler to whack your thighs, or pull your ear lobes so hard your earrings cut through them. All because your child didn’t get their doctor recommended daily dose of studying done. Thank God I grew up.
As a country, India was able to achieve independence from the British Empire in the last century, but a lot of us are still stuck being prisoners of war in our own families. The ‘loving violence’ narrative still has hold of our psyche. Of course this story isn’t specific to any one country, society has allowed this to proliferate elsewhere as well.
In 2018, I had started examining these patterns in my life. While my body had long healed by then, there was an ache in every part of my soul for my parents, as I thought of how my childhood came to be.
I wept for my mother who thought that what regularly happened to her in childhood was ‘necessary’ for her to be a good girl. I wept for my father who didn’t believe he had it in his power to prevent his sisters and daughters from being thrown around in the name of love.
The person I had previously been was happily ignorant of her own reality. As she worked through her issues she transitioned to being unhappily aware of her flaws.
Now I am on my way to being consciously (and dare I say happily) aware of who I truly am. The biggest propellant for change in my life has been the questioning of the assumptions that I carry.
The more vigorously you ask for answers in life, the more vigorously you are led the way.
Here is Gaurav Dahiya’s heart-wrenching piece:
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