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Trigger Warning: This blog contains sensitive material not suitable for children, including descriptions of attempted suicide. Reader discretion advised.

The act of reconstructing the story of my life, piece by piece, brings to mind the art form, kintsugi.

“Kintsugi, also known as kinsukuroi or ‘Golden Repair” is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather
than something to disguise.”

Kintsugi (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved August 6, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

 

This is a new way of thinking for me. I’ve been trying to hide my  imperfections all my life. I’d become adept at shape shifting. I was proud of being able to go into a room full of strangers and win their hearts.

Anticipating the moods and needs of others and ignoring my own became a way of life, and the source of my internal rage. I’ve since discovered that underneath that rage, is fear and paralyzing shame.

Here I am, a grown-ass 54 year old woman, still deeply ashamed about certain aspects of my story.

How can that be possible? I’m no prude.

I’ve had a baby, in a room full of people! Most of Jamaica has seen me naked! How can I still be ashamed about what I did to survive, when I was a little kid? This is what it’s like to be an adult childhood trauma survivor.

As I learn more, I understand why I still feel shame and realize two things.
First, I have no reason to be ashamed and second, I am not alone.

“One of the hardest things for traumatized people is to confront their shame about the way they behaved during a traumatic episode, whether it is objectively warranted (as in the commission of atrocities) or not (as in the case of a child who tries to placate her abuser).”

Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

The house on Rue Road was right across the street from Forest Hill Elementary school. Having missed kindergarten I was more than ready to attend first grade in August 1972. First I had to get my booster shot. I still have the dime sized scar on my left arm that marks people of my  generation. Now, I realize the reason why I didn’t go to school the previous year. I wasn’t vaccinated.

 

I fell in love with a boy named Donnie Robinson.

Every day I followed the little curly haired cutie down the halls. Every day he ran away. One afternoon, I followed him home and sat outside on the sidewalk in front of his house, waiting. Finally, his older brother came out and said,” He doesn’t like you, go away.”

Our new neighborhood had plenty of kids to play with. My new friends Randy Sue and Mary Lou easily convinced me to change the grades on my very first report card. Having no idea what any of it meant, I ended up lowering my very good grades! I was called up to the principal’s office and spanked with a very big wooden paddle for my offense.

When I wasn’t at school I was outside playing, like most kids did back then. I was the one who wandered off alone, singing “For All We Know” by the Carpenters, to butterflies in the backyard. I also spent a great deal of my time imagining who my boyfriend would be, Donny Osmond or Michael Jackson.

Thanksgiving break 1972 my stepmother gave birth to my baby brother, shortly after my parents celebrated their first wedding anniversary. In the blink of an eye she went from having one son to having three small children and a newborn in her care while my dad was at work all day. She
was 24.

There used to be a photograph. I can see it in my mind’s eye. The three of us, sitting on a couch with our baby brother across our laps. Our little faces, shining and happy. I hold it in my heart. The promise of what might have been.

 

 

I discovered the truth about Santa during one of my increasingly frequent sleepwalking sessions. I walked into the kitchen to find my parents  wrapping presents. Instead of getting angry, they asked me to sit down and help them wrap the gifts.

Another time I walked in on my parents in a compromising position. Lying on their sides, dad behind mom, they both looked up at me in shock. “I’m just hugging mommy,” dad said,”go back to bed.”

My parents finally sought professional help for me when the night terrors began. Lying in bed, just about to fall asleep, I could see monsters on the walls. Dragons morphed into demons in the shadows. I felt paralyzed, unable to utter a sound. Inside, my terror grew, until eventually I would cry out for help.

In the psychiatrists office the doctor asked me to draw a picture. I drew a lady, with long hair and a pretty dress. Then, I was asked to draw my family. “Of all the people here, who would you rather be?” the doctor asked as he motioned to the drawing. “The baby,” I said.

I was prescribed little green pills to help me sleep, to be taken after dinner. I recall one night, the pill ended up at the bottom of the glass. In response my dad gave me a beating as if I put it there on purpose.

Seven year old me was at times combative, fearful, prone to tears. Unable to articulate what had happened to me with the babysitters son, see blog Love Not Fear.  I walked through childhood forever changed. Broken pieces, innocence lost.

There were residual signs of my violation . My self soothing was very different from other children my age.

I had been prematurely sexually activated. Though my mind couldn’t remember what happened to me, my body did. Acting on impulses I could not understand, I knew how to make myself feel good, but I was unable to understand the harsh response to my age inappropriate behavior. I was questioned about why a little girl my age knew about such adult things. Not in a protective way, but in an accusatory way. I was punished. I learned
shame. I did not understand any of it, other than this: I was bad.

My parents did not recognize my textbook signs of sex abuse. I don’t blame them. They were fighting demons of their own.

I stopped singing to butterflies and started thinking of ways to kill myself. I had heard that lead was poisonous. I sat in my bedroom one night, crying. whittling my pencil down enough to break off a piece of lead about an inch long. I broke it in half and swallowed both pieces, laid down in my bed, said my prayers, and waited to die.

I was surprised when I woke up the next day,but not quite ready to give up. Mushrooms were supposed to be deadly. I found a few in the backyard and shoved them in my mouth, chewing and swallowing quickly.

I don’t remember exactly why I decided to stay with the living. Maybe it was because I ran out of ideas. Or perhaps I realized I was needed to help care for my younger brothers. By age 8, I was already an expert diaper changer, lullaby singer and peanut butter and jelly sandwich maker.

Meanwhile, the real life demons my parents fought were getting stronger. Poverty, alcoholism and mental illness began to make decisions for them. Those choices would soon change everything.

 

Naome Bradshaw

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