I want to share something I've been working on. This is the opening of the first chapter of the healing journey book I've been writing, the one where I finally go back through my family and name what happened instead of just carrying it.
Subconscious programming sets in before you're even seven. My first real memory of that is from when I was four. My sister Linda was three. We lived in a house in Garland, Texas. My mother worked nights, and during the day she needed to sleep while we played in our room. We were being kids the way kids are: loud. She came in over and over telling us to be quiet. Then she stopped asking. She came in and duct-taped our mouths shut.
We sat there the rest of the afternoon like that. Snot filling our noses. Tears running down our faces. Too terrified to peel it off ourselves. Two little girls looking at each other, unable to ask out loud what happens now.
My mother had a full hysterectomy in 1976, right after Linda was born, with no hormone therapy afterward. I don't say that to excuse what she did. I say it because two little girls playing in their own room isn't a threat to anyone by any reasonable measure, and she reacted as if it were. Whether that's hostile attribution bias, or something more chemical, more desperate, I'm not entirely sure. What I know is that by four years old, I'd already learned that my ordinary noise, my ordinary needs, could get silenced by force. That's the first entry in the ledger. Everything else in this chapter is what got added to it.
This is early. There's more coming as I write it. Thank you for being here, you first six. You're getting this before almost anyone else does.