How were you raised, and how has that affected who you are? And, perhaps more importantly, how has it affected how you are raising (or have raised) your kid(s)?
These are questions that I am asking myself. I think that in general my parents were good (great?) parents. I think, as all humans, they had their faults, and in some ways I either act or react due to these faults, as do I from their strengths. I think that the environment in which I was raised also plays a big part in who I am, and how I am raising my daughter - and whether you can accredit that to my parents or not is up to you.
When I think about my parents, when I was a child, the word I think of is “present”. My parents were always present for me. From a very young age I can remember “hanging out” in my dad’s office, using up vast quantities of his hot melt glue stringing “webs” across the room, using almost equally large quantities of solder making towers of molten metal. I can remember excavating little buildings out of polystyrene and running electrical circuits inside to poke bright LED lights out of the windows. Playing “Jill of the Jungle” on an ancient PC.
Most weekends (in my memory) we would either go places or do things “as a family”. In an environment where so much was communal/shared it was important to my parents to ensure we were a well knit family unit. In the summer we used to picnic at the “water hole” where we swam in the deep red-brown water, coloured from running through the peat bogs in the mountains. We found a dead sheep there once, and the sandy shallows were often decorated with fresh (and not so fresh) sheep droppings. One of my brothers tried to drown me there - my memory, probably not his. He held my head under the water until I managed to get him to let go by scratching and biting, coming to the surface panicked and screaming. As an adult, I have a strong fear of being trapped or cornered - I wonder if that experience could have something to do with it? As my brother was many years older than me at the time, I wonder whether my behaviour had caused his action? Of course, I have no memory of any of this, only of the trauma - and unfortunately sometimes the trauma is the only thing that sticks with you, despite all of its happy surroundings.
I can remember going to the shopping centre on a Saturday with Mum. She would often drop me (and sometimes my older sister) at the library and I would spend hours engrossed in our books - my favourites being Biggles’ books and the Chalet School series, so I suppose I could’ve been anywhere from 10-15. After the library, I would walk over to the Square and buy myself a snack (often chocolate or Mighty Munch) and a soda (Club Orange, Lilt or Cidona, three things that Australia sadly lacks). And on the dot of 3:30 I would go to our assigned meeting place outside Bewley’s to meet Mum.
If you asked my sister, or either of my brothers about our childhood, they would have very different memories than me. Their childhoods were busy, and full of people and children, while I can remember being lonely, of not having anyone, and turning to books and the internet in a bid to find some connection. Listening to Simon and Garfunkel to somehow share their loneliness.
“Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me…
I am a rock, I am an island.
…and a rock feels no pain,
And an island never cries.”
It wasn’t always like that. As a young child, there were around 5 children my age in the community. My best friend as a very small child left the community not long after I had started school. I can remember when their family left, they strapped a washing machine onto the trailer, I suppose it was a gift from the community. I can’t remember much other than that. Then we were down to four - two boys about a year older than me, and a girl 2 years older and we were all in the same class. We were technically home schooled, but as it was a community and all of the children were home schooled there, it was more like a very small private school with set teachers, subjects and lesson times. Holidays were rostered and when on holiday, you were assigned to an adult and put to work - weeding, cleaning, or whatever the task of the day was.
I don’t think of that part of school as a negative or a positive memory. It was, and therefore it is. I never particularly enjoyed school, I would have preferred to be in the great outdoors gambolling with my pet lambs or climbing trees and damming the stream. Unfortunately in Western Society at least, school is something We Must Do and therefore We Did It. My parents felt strongly and negatively about the public/state school system, about what it taught both societal and educational, and so they made the decision to raise their children away from all of that. “In the world but not of the world” was a popular Biblical phrase. We were called to be “set apart” and set apart we were. And for my younger years, being set apart wasn’t all that bad.
It was somewhere between the ages of 10 and 14, I would say, that being “set apart” became more apart than it was before. The community began to change more than it ever had previously. People had always come and go - it was never a case of community being forever. Families were free to leave, although it wasn’t encouraged. There was a sense that the people who stayed were doing it right, listening to God and their calling, so there was definitely an us versus them undercurrent. But in my tween/early teen years, almost everyone left. And when I say almost everyone - the community dwindled to just 11 people - and I was the only child left. One after another, my classmates (who I wasn’t very close to anyway) left.
My then closest friend, outside the community, also homeschooled (I presume my parents were aware that I needed a friend) moved with her family to the UK. Of course, my memories are just memories, so the timeline is probably not entirely accurate, but once it was only me I spent a lot of time in my room. I played some games on the internet, chatted in chat rooms to strangers (somehow always safely, but WHAT were my parents thinking???) and read an insane number of books. I studied alone, and took my exams in a tutorial centre in Dublin.
If you had asked me then, I wouldn’t have known that I was lonely. I don’t think I would have asked to go to school - not that it was an option. I don’t think my mind would have computed that anything at all was wrong. And of course, this hasn’t even touched on the religious part of our lives.
Every August there was a Youth Camp for the teenagers, 13 and up. My birthday was in September, and the year I was going to turn 13, all of my peers (the ones who had left, the ones who remained, ones from overseas…) went to Youth Camp, and I was not allowed to go. I sat outside the closed door during meetings, listening to the speakers preach. I watched the kids in their group activities, sports, I watched as they all trooped downstairs to eat in the long tables set up in a separate room from everyone else like me. I think that is my very first oh so vivid memory of being “apart”, being “different” - and this was just because of age! It made such a massive impact on me because I was the only one left out. In future years, kids who “barely missed out” were allowed to take part - but it was too late to change that year for me.
I am not an only child. I am the youngest of four - my brothers are 10 and 8 years older than me, my sister is 5.5 years older than me. When I was 8, my eldest brother left home, and when I was 10, my second brother followed him. My sister was my playmate for a short time as a child, but she soon grew too old for dolls, barbies and the like. My female classmate, 2 years older than me, worked for awhile until she “grew up” too, moving on to boys and makeup, two things that never interested me, before then moving to America.
The boys used to make me do trials in the community grounds to prove that, as a girl, I was tough enough to hang out with them. Although as a girl I was forced to either wear dresses or skirts (trousers were forbidden for females), I still managed to climb trees with the rest. I would walk tightropes of thin branches, climb trees and jump, on a rope swing, to plunge into holly bushes to prove my worth. I would never, ever let anyone think that I could be scared - or a GIRL. Being a boy was so much better. Boys got to wear shorts and trousers. Boys were the heirs, and kept their father’s name. Boys got to work outside the community in real jobs, boys were tough and never had to clean the house or cook community dinners. When I grew up, I was going to have boys, lots and lots of BOYS. I had all their names picked out already.
Did my parents think boys were better? I doubt that was even subconsciously their thought. They surely supported me when I decided I wanted to become a pilot. They had my back when an elder disagreed. My parents always had my back.
So, why the negativity? Why the anxiety, why the PRESSURE? Why the overwhelming feeling, the fear of never being enough?
My teenage years were rough. I never rebelled. I went to school and I passed my exams and I took over the farm at age 15 and raised sheep and goats and I loved it. At age 17 I finished school, and at 18 I started flying. So how was it rough? Why was it rough, and what about my parents?
And I think this post has gotten far to long…
So TBC…
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