A Childhood Unlike Yours

I thought about a million ways to open this text, ways to creatively introduce my abuse and to show readers that I feel somewhat distant to what happened to me.

Why I would like to create this impression is another topic. It took me weeks to get started on this second post, and here I am, finally, with no wi-fi and 2.5 hours of babysitting (with a sleeping baby) ahead of me. There is one way to start this part of my story. I want to go back to the beginning of it all, about 22 years ago. This was when my mother left my father. I was 4.5 years old. He was an alcoholic and had multiple affairs on the side, and so did my mother. I am not sure who started cheating, as I only know my mother’s side of the story. I also don’t care. Their marriage was doomed from the beginning, and this I can safely say even though only knowing her perspective. My mother never really did what she wanted or what some would romantically phrase as ‘she never followed her heart.’ I can’t really blame her — she had a rough childhood in a small town in the GDR. Her mother didn’t show her love, and her grandmother raised her in the most old-fashioned, strict way possible. Her father left when she was 13 and didn’t care much about her since. She was unable to develop her own personality in a healthy way and was mostly treated as labor force around the house. I guess I am telling you all this to excuse what my mother did to me. It seems I still have a little bit of love left for her. My mother went back to working (more than) full time when I was only a few months old. There was no nanny or any kind of babysitter to take care of me. There was a grandmother, but she was also working in the family business where the whole part of my father’s family was involved at the time. I was either taken with my mother to work or simply left alone in the trailer in which we lived. There were no baby monitors, there was only loud music. My family owned a fun fair business which meant we traveled and lived in trailers for most of the year. Nobody heard me crying; nobody paid me any attention throughout the whole night and most of the day. This would not change for the rest of my childhood, at least not on my mother’s part.

I was either taken with my mother to work or simply left alone in the trailer in which we lived. There were no baby monitors, there was only loud music.

After a few years of living with my grandmother, back in the small town where my mother came from, she met my stepdad. This was in 1999. He seemed nice enough to me, plus I just wanted a dad so badly. He had a daughter around my age — her mother had left the family when she was four years old. Everyone in this whole new patchwork family was messed up enough on their own, but together it was a toxic mixture that was destined to explode sooner or later. I didn’t get along with my stepsister because she had a different way of coping with loss. She was quit, she cried, she would stop talking. I was loud, funny and screaming for attention. At the beginning of 2001, my mother announced her pregnancy and we were all too excited to realize that another person might be one too many. It went okay for about three years, we tried really hard to be a family. I can’t remember the exact day of when it all changed. I think my stepsister and I were off from school for a week, and she spent that week with her mother who only lived 15 minutes away. Her mother didn’t bring her back after that week and had her move in with her and her new boyfriend. She was 12 years old at the time, and so was I.

My mother announced her pregnancy and we were all too excited to realize that another person might be one too many. It went okay for about three years, we tried really hard to be a family.

When she moved out, my stepdad changed. But more on that next week.