Trigger warning of strong emotion, uncensored child rage and other shit that is causing great anxiety. Another stream of consciousness from the littlest.
Not much I’ve done today has calmed her. I’ve tried the usual offerings to her and she’s swatting them back at me. Or throwing them to the ground. She wants to scream but it is stuck somewhere in her throat and it’s tight. It makes her choke. There was a point earlier today when a song came out but it was short.
The weather is the same, the light through the trees feels okay. I’m trying to straddle our worlds and see what prompts this child to begin the spiral. I’ve had no human contact today so it can’t be that someone said something. That’s not it. It has to be a thought from her, maybe she remembers something that is causing this scowl. She’s still tight, doesn’t really want to talk.
Maybe that’s it, it’s from before words. I think she wants physical presence. She keeps going over to the big chocolate lab because her mass is significant. She is the largest living breathing creature in our house. She can’t remember her last hug. That makes her very sad and causes her lip to quiver. She hesitantly remembers touch being such a tricky thing. She knows that many times she sought any kind of attention, she lacked discernment at that little age. She can still feel her hot stinging skin where she was swatted away with that plastic flyswatter. The appendage of most rednecks she grew up around. Everyone had a flyswatter and a cigarette whether you were outside or in. There were so many flies. Farms and filth bring flies. She hates flies. They drank from her sweaty skin.
The sting from the flyswatter would bring a raised welt to her skin but she grew used to it. At least she could feel herself when that happened. She knows she was conditioned to accept touch, swatting, beatings, and being back-handed. That was the signature move in my family. The back-hand. It came from no where. Why was it preferred to a slap? Maybe when the adult had something in their hand, they did the back-hand. Hitting was common. We got hit all the time. It’s probably why I, to this day, have trouble recognizing abuse. Or knowing that something isn’t right because it’s taken me a lifetime to figure out that this wasn’t right. In our cult and time, it was though. It was just fine.
I wonder why she’s thinking of being hit. Is her skin lonely for some touch? Does hitting count as touch? I think she wants to know that she’s not invisible. When you’re being chased and whipped as a child, you are not invisible. You are instead the center of the attack. You pay a big price for trying to confirm that you exist.
I’m not sure I know I exist now. These feelings have to be from the both of us. I miss the touch of my toddler who lived with her arms wrapped around my neck. I miss the open arms of my husband when he’d see me and instinctively throw his arms open wide. Those are experiences from the latter part of my life but she strains to remember a time when she was given loving touch. Maybe from her nieces and nephew, we held each other’s hands a lot. She feels a familiar pang that tells her that a child shouldn’t have to try so hard to remember how love felt. It shouldn’t be such a strain to recreate a tender moment. Maybe she’s trying to create something out of the ether, something that didn’t exist. So how can she miss it?
I don’t know if this helped, there are a lot of questions and doubt right now.
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