Innocence – part 2

Tags

1980's, Betrayed, Crying underwater, Diary, First boyfriend, Half-brother, Innocence, Love, Police, Runaway, Secrets, Self-esteem, Sex, Silence, Virginity

[Read part 1]

Packing

The afternoon of the day I ran away, my sister watched me pack… in the room we’d shared since she was born, throwing notes on scrunched up paper across the room, playing with dolls and toys, fighting, creating an absolute mess, giggling way past our bedtime.

She kept saying she didn’t think I’d really do it. And she never said a word to my parents.

The bag was stashed in our wardrobe, a place we’d spent time hiding to eat illicit chocolate. Where not too long ago, I’d leave out cheese and milk, hopeful faeries would visit.

I wrote a note – don’t bother trying to find me – about all I can recall from the rambling one pager (as if they wouldn’t think of where to look).

How terrifying for my sister to wake and see I was gone. How panicked my parents must have been (no one has talked about that time to me, ever).

Apparently this was the only time my brother showed anything resembling caring for me – taking to the streets on his bike, looking for me. Apparently.

What next?

Tick, tick, tick. I was hiding. Not in control. No idea what my life was going to be like. Police looking for me. All I wanted was to be with my boyfriend (though he was going back to England), just what my parents didn’t want.

I knew I was missing out on school. Would I ever go back? Would I ever see my school friends again? What about my little sis? Swimming training?

The cops took my bag of clothes, also containing my diary… documenting my childish fancies.

Documenting also, the night N indelicately erased my virginity… copying in my childish hand, in the style of some adolescent book I was reading then, the words were stark – As of tonight, I’m no longer a virgin. I don’t feel different, but I know I am… – can’t have been pleasant reading for my parents.

It was later I discovered they’d read it. If I was them, I’d have done the same. But that act still violated my trust and I was furious. Especially when my dad would say – you live in a world of fantasy most of the time, don’t you - based on what he read and held it against me as though I was retarded, for a long time.

But I hated him for a long time for reading my diary.

Before all that… I was hiding out in the next door neighbour’s house. In a bedroom. Under the bed. I didn’t get to see N very much at all. No one would let us be alone together.

I’m sure there were phone calls and discussions I wasn’t privy to. About me, not including me.

Night rolled in…

N’s aunt and uncle eventually convinced me the best thing to do was to go with the police. They knew I was there; they wanted to help make things right with my parents. I didn’t know how to, and I was scared. And angry. And worried I wouldn’t get to see N again.

Cop shop

They took me away in a police car to the local station where my parents waited. I knew by then about my diary. I spewed fury – I hate you – at my parents. Dad cried, one of the only times I’ve seen that, to this day.

At the station I was given two choices – go home with my parents or stay at a girls’ home. A place for juveniles. I don’t know if it was just a threat… but for a while I was seriously gunning for the girls’ home.

Much of the station time is a blur. I remember a police woman being very abrupt, and in return I was rude. Mum slapped my face, afraid I think, the police would make decisions for me.

I scowled. None of this would’ve happened if they hadn’t said I couldn’t go to the airport so as far as I was concerned, it was their fault.

Somehow, during some very tense moments, tears and anger, they all talked me down. Talked me in to returning home on the promise of being able to go to the airport for N’s flight back to the UK.

I shake my head in wonder now, thinking of the wilful young child that I was, the anger and destruction I created…

A night of reckoning

The car ride is blank. Back home, I think my brother and sister were in bed – perhaps awake?

My parents and I sat in the kitchen, looking at a calendar. Trying to work out if there was any chance I could be pregnant.

No mum, I haven’t started my period yet.

Doing the laundry she’d noticed some blood in my knickers, so she wasn’t sure.

I don’t remember much of what was said, the three of us sitting there. Tension, sadness, anger and frustration. At some point I shouted – What would you know? How could you understand what its like?

Things grew silent.

Teary and terrified, mum revealed her darkest secret – her first son, out there somewhere – taken from her for the crime of being pregnant and unmarried (a brother I’ve never met??). My first glimpse of the shame and grief she’d worn like an invisible coat, never removed.

I expect you think I’m a terrible person, she stated.

Oh my god mum, no I don’t! That’s… so sad! So horrible.

Sworn to secrecy, I couldn’t tell my brother or sister or even mention it again.

Went to bed at some point, back in the room I shared with my sister. Gone for one whole life changing day, I think.

Back to school the next, and no one knew. Now I had two secrets I didn’t tell anyone except M. And I only told her little bits. Done and dusted, I was left to live with the aftermath.

And then…

So long, goodbye…

Hazy tear stained scene of N and me at the airport. My parents, his aunt and uncle, hovering on opposite perimeters as we hugged and I cried inconsolably. We promised to write, to call, to stay together.

He went through the gates and he was gone.

I wrote the first of many letters that night. Pages of ‘I love you‘ written over and over. A long wait for something in return. A phone call or two. The promise of ‘a promise ring’.

Sputtered into nothing.

Realisation came slowly, then as with sunrise… dusk vanishes swiftly in the first rays of sunshine. Full daylight. Oh.

It was over. He didn’t really love me. Oh… He didn’t want me. Had he only wanted sex?? Oh!!

There was a silver pendant and chain my parents gave me once. I’d loaned it to N because he asked (though I hadn’t wanted to) and never saw them again. I wrote and asked for them back. Nothing.

Far away in another country… he didn’t want me any more.

Heartless

In recent times I’ve talked of feeling like my heart had been ripped from my chest. My therapist asked me if there was another time I’d felt like that before.

Sure was. When I realised I’d been used and discarded.

Felt like I’d been raped (though I hadn’t – just manipulated). Cheated and misused, certainly. Empty, sad, heartbroken and alone. Lost. Confused. Betrayed. Shredded.

Coulda driven a truck through my chest, the hole there felt that large.

Every notch my self-esteem rose on the back of being loved was gone. Worse, it was all a lie. Extreme pressure filled my head… would it explode?

But none of this was a topic of conversation at home. Just like my mum, I wasn’t allowed to express my pain. No privacy either, in my shared bedroom with a sister too young to understand.

I found solace in swimming training… diving deep and crying underwater where no one could see or tell the difference. For seconds at a time.

Struggling on at school and home, I was low. But you wouldn’t have known, ‘cept for the odd flare up with my mum. Arguments like a flash and gone again, core issues never addressed.

Two generations both limping in pain, but not solidarity… what could’ve brought us together just pushed us further apart as secrets often do…

~Svasti

Depression triggers – part 3

Tags

Cold Hard Bitch, Complaints, Crazy Cathy, Crazy neighbour, Depression, Jet, Landlord, Lies, Police, Prank calls, Revenge

It wasn’t just life at work that was on the unpleasant side. With my emotional landscape full to overflowing, I also had a crazy neighbour. And I was nearly arrested…

Crazy Cathy

Cathy was the bain of my landlord’s existence. She’d chased away more than one of my landlord’s tenants with her made up complaints and harassment.

When I applied to rent my flat at the beginning of 2005, I’d been warned about Cathy, but I’d thought – I like a quiet home, I don’t do many loud things or have parties. I’m clean, I’m hospitable… what complaints could she have about me?

But when you’re married and unintentionally childless, when you don’t work and have very little to do with your time… its easy to become a nutter if you have no other frame of reference except your own self-involvement.

Finding things to complain about turned out to be her forte. She claimed my cat’s hair transferred from my washing to hers on the shared washing line. My music (on my small Logitech iPod speakers) was too loud. That my clock radio was too loud. I left my washing on the line too long. I didn’t park my car properly. I left my rubbish bins in the wrong spot.

Some of the above may or may not be true. Mostly it wasn’t. But instead of dealing with me directly she would complain to the real estate agent or my landlord.

I deflected her crazy claims as long as I could. But eventually it was affecting how I felt and reacted, and I didn’t like it one bit.

The carport wire

When I came home from hospital after my bone graft surgery, Cathy had manifested a whole new kind of insanity.

She’d strung a wire up on the posts that separated her carport and mine – she claimed when I opened my door I’d hit her car and damage her door. Never mind that I was driving a fairly new car, and hers was an old bomb that would look more at home in a wrecking yard. None of it was true.

The wire meant I could no longer use the carport, as I couldn’t get the door open enough to get in and out (see pic). Even when I wasn’t walking on crutches like I was when I first came home.

I asked her to remove the wire but she wouldn’t. I talked to the landlord, the body corporate, police etc. To no avail. Technically she’d put it up on her side of the post and she apparently had a right to do whatever she wanted.

I had to park my car on the street.

Prank calls

A month or so later my landlord told me Cathy was now claiming she was getting prank phone calls and she thought it was me. I was amused more than anything.

Mum called on a Sunday night in April ’06 saying she’d had a call from the police. This was no joke. Cathy had the cops put a trace on her phone and apparently the calls were coming from my parents’ home number. The cops were convinced I was behind it. Not that I’d heard from them myself – they were calling the landlord, my mother… everyone but me.

Deciding to take the bull by the horns I called the police myself, utterly mystified at what was going on. The policewoman had that tone in her voice – the patronising, slightly abrasive one they reserve for speaking to a guilty person.

She asked me a lot of questions. I told her I definitely had nothing to do with the calls. I explained Cathy’s general behaviour and suggested perhaps she had managed to make it look like the calls were coming from my parents’ place. That was the only explanation I could think of.

I was asked to go down to the station the next day – a public holiday – to give a statement. I was freaking out.

When I called my parents back, Mum suggested I come over to their place in the morning and we’d go down there together. I agreed, and after a sleepless night I rocked up at my folks’ place.

To receive a confession apparently.

My mother had been making the calls!

And around the time I was having surgery, my sister suffered a miscarriage. It was a tough time for Mum with both her daughters hurting. Then the carport wire issue came up. I think, Mum used Cathy to channel her anger at and decided Cathy was a bully who needed to get some of her own medicine back!

She found Cathy’s name from one of the emails I’d forwarded to her and looked up her phone number. Thus began my mother’s war on Cathy.

According to Mum she never said anything threatening but Cathy claimed she was receiving death threats. Between my mother’s insanity and Cathy’s, I doubt I’ll ever know the truth of what was said.

Mum had finally told Dad what she’d been doing, and he insisted she tell me. I was furious.

Do you realise Mum, that prank calling is a Federal offence? You can go to jail for this sort of thing? There are countries you can’t travel to if you have a Federal conviction!!

No. She didn’t realise any of that stuff… Clearly she couldn’t see, either, that she was making my life more complex at a time when I least needed complications… She looked mortified at her own behaviour. And to be honest, I never would’ve guessed my mother could do such a thing!

So we went to the police station and Mum confessed. The cops decided not to press charges. The female policewoman was friendly now, and she claimed to sympathise with Mum. No doubt in part, due to her own dealings with Crazy Cathy…

It all came to nothing. Except I was now in a really bad position. The cop said she’d sort it out with Cathy. I had to tell my landlord and real estate agent something. So I explained via email:

I went to the police station yesterday and it appears that they didn’t really have any evidence. I didn’t have to give an interview, and the officer told me she didn’t expect me to be so sane based on what Cathy had said about me. Suffice to say the police are satisfied that it wasn’t me making calls to Cathy.

Cathy now tormented me whenever she could with claims that I had my “mummy” do my dirty work. I had no comeback.

When I returned from my trip to Bali it seemed Cathy and her husband were away somewhere too. And mysteriously, around that time the wire between the carports vanished!! I have no idea what happened to it! ;)

There were complaints about that of course, and she reported me to the police about the ‘theft’ of the wire. I offered my passport to show I’d been away and that I’d simply assumed Cathy had taken it down. I had no way of knowing any differently. Ahem.

And I was able to use my carport again.

This relatively one-sided war carried on for a few more months. But the more I tried to avoid Cathy, the more she tried to get in my face. Physically, in the end.

Time to go… again

Eventually I admitted to myself that I had to move.

So around November ’06 I was facing yet more packing of things into boxes. Another round of shuffling my possessions from one location to the next.

I really struggled to pack, what with depression and being stressed at work and in my home. When my family arrived to help me move, they had to do a considerable amount of packing themselves. They said nothing, and just worked.

There it was – clear evidence I was falling apart.

And my family was happy with the usual avoidance of the elephant in the room.

I had one minor bit of revenge on Cathy. When I was cleaning my old flat, I took my iPod and speakers and played a song by an Aussie band – Jet – as loudly as I could. The song? Cold Hard Bitch.

~Svasti