Chap. 12 - The First 23 years
Those first 23 years were grueling. If you've read previous chapters, I trust you got the picture. However, there is a bit more to say about how those years evolved and what led me to the next life.
I wasnât raised in noise. I was raised in pressure. The kind that thickens the air before a storm. The kind that trains a childâs body to listen, not with ears, but with skin. I lived in the breath before the shouting. In the footstep before the door slammed. In the pause before everything broke loose again.
The one who ruled the house didnât need facts to justify her eruptions. She reacted to phantoms, distortions, imagined betrayalsâand we, the children and the husband, were the debris in her private battlefield.
My brothers and I learned to move quietly. To enter rooms slowly. To anticipate the unsayable. To disappear preemptively, so maybe, just maybe, the explosion might pass us by.
No one taught us this. We absorbed it. Like vapor. Like poison in the wallpaper. Like the tremble that becomes permanent.
This was the First Life.
Where I learned survival by disappearing into what was expected.
Where my nervous system was wired not for curiosity or joy,
but for readiness.
I began to fragment to stay alive. But even in that fragmentation, there were moments of hope. One of them came when we left the coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, where the sky carried a dull, heavy gray. I hadnât known it wasnât the real sky until we stepped out from under it.
đ I was six when we moved to Michigan, to start life over. My fatherâs sister had been urging him to leave that shadowed place, and eventually, he said yes.
We arrived in a neighborhood still being builtâraw land turning into hope. A brand-new house with clean walls, a wide green yard, and sunlight that felt like it meant something. The neighbors smiled. My mother, for a time, seemed content. And I, for the first time in memory, began to relaxâeven as traces of fear still clung like morning mist.
I made a friend just a few houses down, and we became best friends in the way only six-year-old girls can. I got my first bicycle. I remember my father running beside me, holding the seat, letting go. I remember the wobble, the balance, the speed. Once I got the hang of it, which didnât take long, that bicycle became my wings.
I rode around the long block again and again, wind on my cheeks, legs pumping, heart lifting. I felt free.
Life seemed normal. I was a young girl enjoying her lifeâmy friend, my bicycle. Not school so much. I felt distant from others, but I adjusted.
One day, walking home from school, it began to sleet. I had my winter coat on but no leggingsâthose lined pants that usually matched the coat. The walk from school always felt long, but that day, with the gray sky and stinging sleet, it felt endless. The icy pellets slapped my bare legs, and when I tried to run, it hurt more. By the time I got home, my legs were almost numb and bleeding in little spots.
What happened next surprised me. My motherâso different now from how she had been in Pennsylvaniaâdid something kind. She didnât hug or praise; she still lived in her own world, but she was no longer sharp-edged, no longer impossible to be around. Something in her had softened.
Even so, I still lived in fear. My body hadnât yet learned how to feel safe, not even in kindness. But this day, something broke through. She stepped into a different role. She ran the bath, filled it with warm water, and laid me in it gently to soothe my aching legs.
There are so few memories I have of being cared for like that. But there it was. It came thenâand now, it comes again.
Maybe that moment was mom's own soul peeking through, reminding meâreminding both of usâwhat love could feel like, even if neither of us knew how to name it.
âŹ
ď¸Lives Within a Life
âĄď¸Chap. 13: The First 23 Years (Cont'd.)
âŹď¸ Return to Hub List
đA Living Memoir
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