pieces of a broken childhood

When i was in 4th grade one day I came home from school to find a kind looking lady standing outside of my door. She said she was called by my mother's boyfriend because she had swallowed all her medicines full packets and was trying to commit suicide. 

Horrified i opened the gate with my set of keys and i let her inside where i found the half versed half cried letter written in pencil where there were a few lines only, a line about loving her daughter, which is supposed to be me, a 10 or 11 year old girl confused about this behaviour of hers. She had been in a bike accident on her boyfriend's bike a year before and had brain damage from it. Lost her job and was in depression. As a very young child it is really hard spending your formative years in that environment. my brain has blocked out the rest of the memory about how this doctor lady sustained her back to life, because i cannot remember anything beyond seeing her in that half unconscious state in her dingy room and having to explain to a stranger that this is a mood i deal with often.

I wish this was an isolated incident. It was not. As a child I had not realised the things my mother was doing indicated that she was highly unfit to parent me at that time.

She would have fights with this boyfriend of hers, who was also to some extent mentally deranged because he tried to teach me mathematics and when i couldnt understand anything he would beat the shit out of me for no reason.

One day my mother had a fight with this guy, it was diwali and the three of us were going on his bike somewhere while both of them were fighting. He stopped his bike midway because he saw some friends of his on the road and wanted to say hi. My mother got down with me, she made me walk back to our apartment with her from wherever we were. She started shouting at me to ask him to come back and telling me why i exist and its all wrong because of me. She kept saying she has no purpose here anymore and that she is going to kill me first and then she will kill herself. 

I did not know i will have to protect myself from her. She grabbed me and started to bang my head heavily on the metal rod on the windows of her room. She hit me repeatedly as she tried to kill me. After about 5 minutes of me screaming, the diwali crackers drowning out my voice and me struggling to break free, i kicked her in the stomach as hard as i was able to, grabbed her phone and rushed to the balcony, locked myself from outside. She came after me running, banging on the grilled door and demanding, screaming at me to open up the door. I did not open it no matter how much she screamed. Now that I think, instead of calling her boyfriend I should have called the police that night. I however did the former. She had left me in that balcony screaming, saying then she will go and end her own life. I stood there, called her boyfriend and sobbed on the phone saying repeatedly "she is trying to kill me, I have locked myself out" I thank god everyday for his existence, because he did come immediately and rang the bell until my mother came out of the room with a knife and opened up the door, tried to swing it at him. I saw all this from the balcony as i looked into the dark living room, he held her against the wall and shouted at her, until maybe she was back to her senses. 

I came out of the balcony, rushed to my room and sat there in my room's tiny balcony with my knees to my chest. It seemed to be over, there was no shouting or screaming anymore.

Since that day, it has been a dozen years, that boyfriend of hers broke up with her after a few years which was natural given her behaviour. I still live with her. I am still afraid she might try to kill me one fine day.

I have no one else to turn to, my mother herself never wants to hear the account of this night from my mouth and when i bring it up to tell her how much it has affected me, and it will remain with me throughout my life, she tells me i am trying to make her feel guilty and why i cannot let it go ever. in my defense it seems really hard for me to let it go.

one of the events in the same lane, that i remember vividly during these years is how she stopped this streak of trying to end her life, she told me once that she felt jealous if i spent any time with her boyfriend. this statement was followed by the events of one night that went like this:

Her boyfriend had come back from a thailand work trip, he brought back chocolates for me, most of which i hated and threw away. For my mother he got expensive alcohol, which i do not know why anyone in their right mind would do. Again, as is obvious, they had a fight, i was watching tv in the dark outside and in my mother's room a soft yellow lamp was glowing. I could hear their argument from the living room, during this she swallowed a very large amount of alcohol from one of those bottles, she swallowed a bunch of her medicines and then she was or pretended to be unconcious, after which she threw up in the entire room, all over, again leaving me and her boyfriend petrified beyond imagination. An ambulance was called and he told me to be in the house, I begged and said that I cannot stay there, the stench of vomit and the screaming that was still ringing in my ear would make me go insane. He did not argue with me and i went to the hospital, my mother was admitted to the ICU, outside which i lay the whole night on a sofa, thinking why i deserve this? thinking why am i never important as someone to take care of? i was barely passing my classes in school, now that i think, i imagine they passsed me in the 4th grade becuase they were aware of my condition at home. 

At the crack of dawn, some attendant placed a copy of that day's Times of India on the coffee table in front of the sofa on which i was lying, the headline read: Delhi CM resigns after 42 days.

It is easy for people to quit in the face of crisis I thought. So easy. 

Later that day, my mother's much trusted doctor told her "if you do this again, we will refuse to admit you in this hospital." She did not try these activities again. 

We moved to a different city a few years later, I saw my mother abuse her mother, I saw her abuse her own brother, I saw her practically having no real connection with anybody, everyone she knew was keeping their acquaintance with her out of the obligation of being a family member, most of whom called her crazy and in need of an asylum. 

My grandmother passed away of a broken heart I think, her son had abandoned her for what it is worth and her daughter behaved worse with her than a stranger, she absolutely hated her mother for everything. I was the last to give my grandmother a glass of water. 

A day before she died, I told her that I was afraid of my mother's behaviour and how she was treating both me and her, my mother had restricted me from even talking to my own grandmother. While I was  giving my grandmother her evening tea the day before she passed away, as i told her this fear of mine she looked at me and said "as long as I am here nothing will happen to you" which brought me to tears because this frail woman who had no means to protect herself, somehow wanted to protect me.

My mother often tells me that if she did not look after me I would have been in the 'gutter'. She openly tells me that I have what I have because she gave it to me, I would be absolutely nowhere without her. While I agree with the fact that after her divorce with my father she worked a very draining job to take care of me and her mother, I do not agree that I would have been in the gutter. Maybe I would have had more or less very traumatic incidents in my life despite her absence, but I wouldn't have to live with the fact that my mother had tried to kill me when I was a helpless child. 

As i have grown older, people have told me that my mother has always been this way, her colleagues, her family members. She married my father against the wishes of everyone in the family, she apparently wanted to escape from her life which is why she had done this. It landed her in a way worse life where she faced domestic abuse by the man she had fallen in love with and married. She told me that she had me in an attempt to save her marriage, and I became a collateral damage of her whole life. My father is a horrible person, I do not have much to say about him. 

I have realised that most of my life my mother has not loved me at all, it has only been when she needed me. When she wanted to feel like she has somebody. The moment she feels she has found somebody else she wants to leave everything behind in a mess and run away with this person, who, again, ends up betraying her in some manner. Not that I blame them, my mother has very little empathy for anybody else and she says very hurtful things to people most of the time without even realising it. She has never stopped abusing me mentally or physically, for all her own mistakes. 

I breathe with more ease when I am away from her. Life feels easier, lighter, happier. It is true that as you grow older, older memories start to have newer perspectives in life. Things that you had not realised before. These realisations make you question everything. My mother hates me for my life even, me having a stable boyfriend, going to have a stable job in a different city, someone who loves me.

As children we feel things even before we realise or know what this feeling is called, it only becomes clear to us when we are older, what we actually felt. 

 

dynatroy

I lay on the paper-like hospital bed of the emergency room. a hole in my left arm let drops of Dynatroy surge into my body like blood. slowly draining away the pain. as i silently and half sleepily lay on those sheets, a daunting realization washed over me. "what is the biggest fear of my life?" a resounding answer came from the parts of my brain not busy processing Dynatroy was "being left alone."

However, this realization was not scary or new. I knew it in the back of my mind, from where the answer came. I realized something else. what makes the fear so big?

It started when I was 4 and unmindfully asked my mother to promise me she would never leave me and to do anything the stay demanded in the upcoming years. The little things I would always do to please people no matter how badly things were going for me underneath all the concern. I would go out of my way to help others and always be the better person, the bigger person or the smaller person, whatever the sacrifice was for not being alone.

sacrifice. the bigger the sacrifice, the bigger the fear. the sacrifice of going out of your comfort zone for years for a person, the sacrifice of being vulnerable to them that you wouldn't be to anyone else, the sacrifice of sharing everything you had hidden. the sacrifice of laying down all your weapons and then prating to god that you are not judged for it. slowly it builds the fear and feeds it even more. for someone to leave after having witnessed those parts of you and your life. 

when i lay on those white sheets alone i wondered, i have been good at making people happy, making people love me and yet here i am alone in this hospital bed. without anyone. crying alone at the reception. nobody's son and nobody's daughter. just laying there and surrendering to the Dynatroy which helped me drown my pain in a way humans could not.

often i have wondered that there must be something wrong with me. and lately i have begun to take that as a "so what?" thing. yes something is wrong with me, what about it? let it be wrong. if everything was meant to be right then i would have been god. 

but i am no god. nothing is godlike about me.

the Dynatroy was almost over but my pain was not coming back. i wondered if that is what relief would feel like in the life outside my body too. but it never did. what is my life's Dynatroy?

i dont know, and maybe i never will. maybe something will come someday and straight away pierce my skin and shoot up my veins with such relief that slowly drains out all the trauma i have ever endured and all the pain i have cradled so long that my brain hurts.

and may i be left alone, for the sacrifices i and others have made by being vulnerable were never sacrifices at all, it was just part of being human

sleep well