Inmyhead

There’s something strange about childhood events you don’t remember until someone reminds you they happened. They feel dreamlike and almost transplanted, like you feel it and remember it but not being able to trust the memory because you forgot it in the first place or your mind forced you to.

The feeling of this innate sense of responsibility has loomed for the entirety of my life, now whether that be that I am the eldest daughter of the eldest son or one of the many other dynamics in play or a combination of it all… we are here to find out.

Five years old was the first time, I felt that need to jump into the responsible role. It wasn’t until much later in life, probably around my late twenties, I was reminded that even at a young age I had to jump in and be the responsible one.

Now, existing through a traumatic event at a young age can be life altering but somehow I never realized that it could be life altering while also never remembering that the event actually even happened. I mean, I’ve understood that as a concept but I have never applied it to myself and what I have experienced.

Now that I can remember it’s one of the things I bring myself back to constantly. A manic episode that brought my mother to the conclusion that the only way to protect our family was to store the threat away. She began to grab the phones from the walls and grabbed the ladder to the center of the living room. She looked at me and I looked at her said,

“ I don’t think that’s a very good idea mommy”

That was the end of the cheerful “story” of her overprotective overbearing daughter who has always been this way and that’s unfortunately the end of the memory as I can not remember what came next.

Being told this story as an adult and going through years of self -reflection, it’s truly incredible that while our memory can bury something so impactful, so altering, while still allowing it to structure the way we live and has really created this blind type of foundation.

It’s weird now because I can see it, I can feel it and I only remember a handful of things from this period of my childhood, but this is different.

This one feels pivotal to understanding myself.