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by Tara Overzat
For years, people have met me for the first time, or even the second or third, on one of my “on days.” Though I call them “days” they are actually periods of months, even a year or better, where I come off as charming, smart, accomplished, and pretty. These are often followed by periods, sometimes a day, sometimes much longer, full of self-doubt, weight gain, bad hair/clothes choices, and most harmfully, a meek and anti-social attitude.
I survived child abuse and neglect. When people are with me on my “on days,” if I divulge that I grew up poor and/or abused, I am immediately met with skepticism, and have had people tell me without preamble or explanation, “No, you didn’t” and then go on with their train of thought.
On those “on days” it may seem absolutely unbelievable that I was anything but loved, or that there was any likelihood that I would not succeed at something. My “off days” better tell the story. There are days when I do not want to get out of bed. Days when I could be sitting alone on a couch and suddenly burst into tears. Days when my TMJ flares up along with my other more embarrassing stress-related health issues, problems more usually associated with men and women twice my age. (All those years, I just thought I was handling my past better than most- turns out I was hiding it in my bones, joints, muscles and organs.) The worst days though are when I am completely furious at myself and my family for all that happened.
Why am I angry at myself, when clearly a child cannot be to blame? My exasperation comes from not coming to grips with the reality of the situation sooner, and finding people to help me out of my mess. I get angry at myself for letting my mentally ill mother back into my life time and again, only to sink back into believing her lies about me and again falling into depression.
For years, I was angry at the wrong person. To keep my sanity as a child, teenager, and later young adult, I had to believe there was something wrong with me that only someone close to me and living with me, like my mother, could see. Despite any praise I received from adults outside my immediate family (mainly teachers) for my excellent grades or good behavior, I had to believe that I was a stupid and poorly-behaved child. As my mother used to say, “They don’t know how you are at home!”
And how was I at home? Often quiet, curled up with a book. Sure, I had my moments as all children do (and only now do I realize that any yelling, or hitting my little brother, or causing a ruckus was normal, regular childhood behavior) but books were my passion and my escape growing up and spent most of my time becoming an awfully good reader. And thank God for that. Reading gave me the education I have today and is what has kept me from being completely stuck in a rut of poverty and massive debt like my mother.
Only in recent years have I started telling people about my dysfunctional upbringing. I got exhausted hiding the fact from everyone I met, and my body was showing signs of wear.
Along with the health issues, which I am fortunate enough to say are right now quality of life issues and have not re-emerged as anything major, I have pushed away so many well-meaning people- lovers, friends, mentors – and instead let close people who would end up using me and leaving me empty. I had to. It fit in with my personal belief that I was worthless, that I was the cause of every problem as my mother told me daily for years. I was the reason my father (a worthless, child-molesting alcoholic) left; I was the reason we were poor (not the fact that for years she refused to work, and then begrudgingly got a part-time job); it was my fault my little brother would not behave, not the fact that I was a child raising myself and another child; it was my fault when my father was late with the child support (child support that I was pimped out to retrieve). I was a terrible person and did not deserve to have friends who cared about and supported me.
In the end, I thought I could just “get over it” and pretend that nothing had ever happened. It is what Jane Eyre, Sara Crewe (the Little Princess), and Oliver Twist were able to do. And so could I. But life is not a book, and things are never quite that simple. The anxiety and depression are not the only things that have left marks on my body, and I know that my childhood is a part of me that cannot just be forgotten. And perhaps the only way to finally deal with it is to at last be as honest as possible about what some people have suspected and others would never have guessed.
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