How I Began Re-finding Me — Fifty Years On From Childhood Abuse
It took me almost fifty years to begin dealing with the abuse I experienced.
It made me who I am — for better, for worse and for what it’s worth — but let me be clear: I did not suddenly pull it from some hitherto repressed part of my memory to pin on the dartboard of life and hurl pointed excuses towards, and I am not looking to wear it like the emblem on some thread-bare T-Shirt at the reunion gig of my peers.
Starting to deal with this is not recovering or healing. It’s not closure or moving on. It’s dealing with what I am and how I got this way.
And I do not come to write this quickly or easily, without the same sense of shame that’s greeted me in the mirror all these years. That sense remains and will no doubt remain.
I write with resignation. Reluctantly but finally needing to see the self I have resisted forever.
For all of my ever.
There is a photograph I have of myself that was taken at school. It is posed. I am dressed in a shirt, tie and pullover, all neat and clean, and selected by my mother to give the right impression. My ice-blonde hair is short and combed.
The thick prescription glasses I wore cast strange and disconcerting shards of light across my face, magnifying and distorting my eyes. I am seven years old in that picture. My lips curl slightly, making a placid smile. Concealed within there are things a seven year old should not know.
I have another photograph taken in London beside the fountain at Piccadilly. It is a tourist snapshot of three children perched along the edge of the monument, with scarlet double decker buses and bulbous black taxis filling the backdrop. I wear shirt and tie once more with blue shorts and sandals, an outfit assembled to fulfill my mother’s desire to maintain the proper impression. I have on a mustard coloured cardigan with wooden buttons that I remember tweaking awkwardly until they fell off, and I would be scolded.
My face in that photograph is blank. Utter cold blank, in stark contrast to the scene in which it is set.
I am ten years old in that picture.
My first ever passport is one of those big old blue things we used to have in England, issued to allow me travel to Germany on an exchange trip at seventeen. As I packed my small suitcase, folded open across my bedspread before leaving, my father came into the room with his only words of advice; more a warning or an order, I suppose. “While you’re over there — no sex without contraception,” he said, as if he’d been assembling the sentence for a month.
I stared at the plain shirts and underpants, neatly folded in my case, all procured for the trip by my mother to maintain the proper impression, and made no effort to respond. Not that a response was sought, my father having already departed, relieved of his obligations.
The empty expression in the passport photograph is full of things that only I can see. The shutters I’d made for myself — rudimentary and childlike at that stage — they were there. Soon they would be shored up, made armour-like, then converted to battlements and ramparts, reinforced in steel and layered with titanium, over and over, year upon year, finally to be painted with the comic rictus of the circus fool to hide all comers from what lay beneath.
There are no other photographs in which I see myself.
A handful of shots of a grinning, mischievous toddler, full of laughter, bobbing, curling hair, exuberance in spades. A beach, a sandcastle, a garden — squirming, smiling — clutching at the handholds of life prepared to climb. To grow. To soar.
They say that was me.
I only remember seven, ten and seventeen.
