You know that "tough love" people talk about, which is supposedly necessary for destructive, rebellious and otherwise "troubled" youth? Yeah. I got a lot of that. Except, I didn't earn it. Maybe my parents were both projecting emotions from stuff they'd been through when they were young. Maybe they did it as a precautionary measure, just in case I screwed up. Whatever the reason, it's how I was raised. Or rather, lowered. I joke that I was "lowered" Catholic, made to grovel and beg for mercy for sins yet uncommitted. I am not sure if the religion had something to do with how I was treated, but it was certainly a variation on the same theme.
I had no privacy at all. My room was very messy all the time because I probably had ADD, and I had a hard time putting things back where they belonged after I used them. So there were toys and books and clothes all over the floor. But sometimes, the mess was a fortress. My room was regularly raided, my drawers searched, my diaries taken and read. They did the same thing to me at school. I was so brilliant, they supposed, that the only reason for me not performing well in certain classes must be because I was doing something terrible behind their backs. On several occasions, after bad grades happened, my parents went to my school, emptied out my locker or my desk into a garbage bag, brought it home, dumped it on the floor in the living room and made me explain every single scrap of paper and toy and crusty piece of gum. Woe to me if ever I hid a bad grade from them; that just added to their suspicion. And any drawings or writings they found that were not directly related to schoolwork were seen as evidence that I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing, which, of course, led to punishment.
But it's hard to ground a girl when she isn't allowed to do anything anyway. I was eleven years old before I was allowed to cross the street unescorted. I was fifteen before I was allowed to spend more than two hours away from home without a parent or grandparent present. And we never went anywhere as a family-- not a single solitary overnight stay anywhere other than Perry, Ohio in my entire youth. So when I got "grounded," it was usually just from the phone-- my only real luxury-- and I was seldom allowed to call anyone but my grandparents to begin with. In fact, if I was talking to anyone other than my grandparents, I could pretty much count on my mother silently listening in. I heard the clicks, I knew what they meant. And if I'd said something she didn't like, she would go silent for hours, or say unkind things, or her tone of voice would change, rather than telling me what was going on. I almost feel as if she was saving up evidence to use against me later, you know, when I finally revealed my evil plan to ... what? I mean, I don't even know what they suspected! I didn't drink, I didn't smoke, I didn't even know how to make friends.
You might wonder why I didn't rebel, why I wasn't a total delinquent, since I was being treated that way to begin with. It could have happened that way, but it didn't, and the reason is simple: I was terrified. My parents were the sun and the moon. If they treated me like this when I didn't do anything, what would happen if I did? So my rebellion did not come until I was 18, and my father had already left. I used the momentum of the storm of the divorce to carry me away from my mother's house. What happened after that was another story, but suffice to say, I spent quite a few years doing a lot of things I was told never to do, particularly involving sex. (Sex was, by far, the most heinous sin imaginable. When I was 11, I was immediately hauled off to church to confess when my mother caught me masturbating. Again, that's another story.)
I think that part of me is still trying to recapture what I missed. I take joy in things like toys and cartoons and silly computer games. Lots of adults do this, but for me, it's still fairly new. (For one thing, video games were forbidden in my house.) I have recently acquired one special toy. Her name is Shy Violet, and she was a doll from the Rainbow Brite series in the 80's. I liked her because she was smart and had glasses, like me, and purple hair, which was just cool. My parents bought me the doll when I was seven or so, and I loved it and took it with me to the strawberry festival -- where I lost it. I was admonished and punished severely for losing the toy-- most likely spanked, too, I don't remember. I mean, I felt bad enough that I lost something that I loved, but it cost my parents money, and the important "lesson" here was that if you cost us money, you're going to pay. I think it also stemmed from my mother's hoarding. She has always had what I consider to be a pathological attachment to things, and I am not exaggerating when I say she probably remembers every single thing she ever bought for me. She would ask me years later, "Where's that [thing] I bought for you? Did you lose it?" Sometimes she still does it. She can't detach love from objects, so if I lose or misplace or break something, it is a personal affront, an insult to her and her love for me.
I have the doll now, sitting on my desk. I look at her and she's just... a doll. But she's kind of a representation of me when I was little. Or at least, what I thought I wanted to be. Smart and magical with lots of friends. I'm closer to being that now, as an adult, than I ever was, and that's cool. But I wonder all the time what it might have been like to have actually grown up, instead of being forced to be an adult from birth.
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