My physical beginnings....

 

I was born in Boston, three months after Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland, initiating WW2 on Sept.1st 1939. A week after my second birthday, Pearl Harbor was attacked and the US entered the war. Sirens sounded when blackouts occured. I remember Mummy telling me she had to crawl on the floor at night with a flashlight because we didn’t have blackout curtains on the windows. However, one night a policeman hollered up to our second floor apartment saying, “Douse that light.” 

I'm certain Mummy suffered a good deal of stress during the war, caring for me plus becoming pregnant with my brother while a world war was in progress. I no doubt began to experience my mother's worry, anxiety and stress in utero. Plus after being born I was not fed when I screamed in hunger because there were strict rules back then from doctors. Mothers were to feed their babies on a strict time schedule, which Mum told me about later. I can imagine I probably cried or screamed in hunger, but wasn't fed until the next scheduled feeding time. I subconsciously learned that my feelings didn't matter. 

My brother was born when I was eighteen months. I then had to watch him every day receive what I no doubt still wanted, but couldn't have anymore. My mother, being a practical woman, probably said things like, "You're a big girl now, you don't need to nurse anymore, you can eat grownup food. But I had no mind developed to be able to understand that rationale.

It must have felt to me like he took my special place at Mummy's breast nursing, feeling bonded, safe, comforted and loved. I am sure I felt "thrown out of my nest," so to speak, where I'd been my whole life until then.  I'm certain I felt angry and scared. I couldn't fight nor flee my painful situation, so I had to keep the pain inside me growing up. I'm certain I felt resentful and believed my feelings didn't matter to her. However my body remembered that pain for almost a lifetime. 

My earliest memory was no doubt quite traumatic because I remember it so distinctly and it felt shocking for me to watch. It was probably around the time of Pearl Harbor because my brother was sitting propped up to my left, so he must have been around six months and I had just turned two the week before Pearl Harbor was attacked. I can still see Mummy in my mind's eye, sitting  in a chair a few feet to the right of us and I in full view. She  was just sitting and crying, seemingly uncontrollably. I didn't understand why and I felt confused and scared.

I'm sure the unknown future of this country frightened her quite a lot and she just had to cry from anxiety about it. I'd never before or since seen Mummy cry, let alone as hard as she did sitting in that chair, in full view of her babies. It was probably the only way she could cry extensively and keep an eye of us at the same time. Daddy had an ice and oil business and was working.

Comments Mummy made to me growing up served to confirm my feelings. She told me that I never let her pick me up or cuddle me ,"like my brother did." So, in my mind, it felt like my fault for feeling rejected, abandoned, not wanted and unloved. Being picked up and cuddled was not for me ever again, because something inside was convinced I'd be rejected and abandoned again.

In retrospect, with what I've learned about how our brain develops, it seemed like my left hemisphere protected me by not allowing my emotional right hemisphere to develop naturally, as it would have, had I not suffered such painful rejection. This seeming lack of right hemisphere development left me incapable of experiencing what love and bonding felt like. Even though I'm certain my parents loved me I didn't feel loved.

When I was three or four I remember Mummy putting "hot stuff" on my fingernails at night to keep me from biting them. As I stood by her knee she said to me, "Run and get the hot stuff," which I did and then watched as she put the clear bitter tasting liquid on my nails before bed. It didn't work. I got used to the bitter and continued compulsively biting them throughout childhood and into my eighties. I did not discover the reason why a three year was so nervous and anxious, she would compulsively bite her fingernails, until I was seventy.

I entered kindergarten during the latter part of the war and began first grade in September 1945 just as the war came to an end.

I became unable to feel or give love and wasn't able to become emotionally close to another human convinced I'd  be hurt again. Not only that, but I was terrified of showing, let alone sharing an emotion, so I kept my feelings buried deep inside for most of my life. As a young teenager, I just knew I couldn't ever share my deep love of Nature with my mother, because I was afraid she would poo poo or belittle it and me somehow. My internal body memory of my babyhood experiences was still alive for me.

During many scoldings growing up I was told by Mummy to, "Take myself out of myself and look at myself," "You should be ashamed of yourself." Daddy often said, "Children should be seen and not heard." Not receiving positive mentoring from anyone, I continued to feel unloved, sad,  scared and angry for the first forty years of my life, at least.

I was seen as "shy," which in actuality means, "very frightened." It wasn't until the turn of the 21st century, that I began to realize the negative effects from suffering emotional trauma as a baby and toddler.

I grew up believing the worst about myself; that I was flawed and defective and my feelings didn't matter to anyone. I kept them all inside and lived a life of "quiet desperation." All I could feel was anger, sadness, depression and loneliness, which I began to realize after I became an adult.

 

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