It’s scary how deeply embedded childhood experiences can be, how instinctual one’s resulting emotional and visceral responses to triggers that occur a half century or more later. No wonder conscientious parents can obsess about the smallest things, for fear they will “mark” their children for life. At the same time, children are generally quite resilient and can come to accept and live with quite appalling conditions. Only when their circumstances change, and they gain a different view of those conditions, do they experience noticeable emotional reactions to what they have lived through.
What triggered this reflection was one of those small, meaningless in itself, interactions with my mate. I had finished cooking a few slices of bacon, and set them aside while I used the remaining oil to fix a small serving of stir fried rice. Bacon is a treat from my childhood that I rarely indulge now. While I was stirring the pan, one of the bacon slices was scooped up and eaten.
I am quite happy to share everything with my husband, yet my first reaction was to feel angry and disrespected. Immediately, I was other where, my hand holding an ice cream cone, my mother taking half the scoop in one large bite, after she had refused to buy a cone for herself in order to “stick to my diet.” That scene repeated itself over and over, in various forms, throughout my childhood.
Whatever was supposedly designated as mine would be co-opted in part – and often entirely – by her, without “sharing” ever going the other way. I was forbidden to touch anything that was hers, forbidden to ask for a taste, let alone a portion, of what she was eating.
At Halloween, when I came in from my trick or treat foray, which was restricted to the 10 houses on two sides of the block we lived on, my bag of goodies was confiscated, to be doled out to me in small quantities for at most three days. “It’s not healthy for you to have a lot of sugar.” By day four, the stash was reportedly exhausted, even though I knew I had not eaten any of the popcorn balls or fudge I had been given.
Approaching a birthday when I was already into my teens, I was walking and window shopping with my parents when I saw a necklace in a window that I fell in love with. It was not particularly expensive and I risked pointing it out and suggesting that it would be something I would love to receive as a present. My father had asked me just that morning if I knew what I might like and I’d said I needed to think on the topic. My mother criticized the necklace design and suggested it wasn’t worth its modest price.“Don’t ask again,” she scolded.
I don’t recall what I received for that birthday. I obviously have never forgotten that about a month later my mother began showing herself off wearing “my” necklace. Apparently her opinion of its value differed when the purchase was for herself.
To this day, I am generous with my possessions, and very approachable with requests for sharing of whatever is desired – but also immediately bristling if, instead of being asked, my whatever is appropriated in the way that piece of bacon was picked up. I’ve learned not to voice the anger and usually can quickly talk myself out of the offended response. But I have never yet succeeded in not responding in the first place. No amount of reflection and understanding of the source of my reaction has been sufficient to excise the visceral memory of those many childhood hurts.
I dealt with the immediate situation by offering to cook more bacon, and sharing the fried rice. Would that it were equally simple to deal with that shadow mouth gulping down my ice cream!
Tags: breaking emotional chains, candy and ice cream, old habits, parental conditioning
1eclecticwriter 
September 3, 2018 at 4:06 pm |
We are most fragile when we reflect on past hurts.