theresilienceinsilence-blog

[theresilienceinsilence-blog]

[theresilienceinsilence-blog]

Here, if you’re interested, you will find my own blog that plays with the harsh realities of my life where I share what I observed and learned.

[theresilienceinsilence-blog]

[theresilienceinsilence-blog]

The Days I Forgot

How do you remember the days you have forgotten?

I was going into eighth grade, and that summer my mom got us evicted from our luxurious double-wide trailer in a fairly trashy neighborhood. This meant it was time to initiate yet another move, out of how many? I am unsure at this point.

We moved just down the main highway, within a fifteen minute walking distance, into an even trashier neighborhood that contained the trashiest single-wide. That wasn't even the kicker. The single-wide trash hole smelled of urine, lacked any central air system, was growing black mold, and still contained the remnants from the disgusting tenants before. The worst part about all of this, was we lived in southern Georgia where summertime was sweltering, and we had to clean out this trash pit with no air conditioning.

I loved to clean with my mom growing up. I was her little shadow. We would always throw on some old raggedy clothes and blare my mom's "Cleaning Beats" mixed CD that she burned illegally. So when my mom told me we had to clean the new home I had already grown to loathe, I somehow overlooked the disdain and threw myself into the cleaning project that was set before me.

Fast-forward two days' worth of cleaning, and the trailer was ready to move into. This meant that my mother, my four brothers under the age of seven, mom's boyfriend James, and our room mate Bethany would have to throw all of our belongings onto an open trailer and move down the street. This is where I began to realize the reality of our situation.

Once we were settled in to the new trailer, all of the adults (this included me, as I was an adult starting at the age of seven) sat down in the living room and began to discuss the draw-backs to our new home.

Lack of Air Conditioning

Black Mold

Broken Washer and Dryer

No Running Water

Pee-Stained Carpets

Sewage Back-Up

All of these words were thrown around like they were common household terms. My mother wiped the sweat off of her brow as she heated up hot dogs and took a long drag from her Camel Light. The twins screamed because Kaden kept bothering them. Andrew sat by the window, sucking his thumb even though he was five, whining in a high-pitched voice about how hungry he was.

We were all hungry.

My mom was allotted $600 in Food Stamps, roughly, and sold part of that allotment for drugs. What was left had to sustain us for a whole month, and with eight people in the household that wasn't much when my mom loved to buy a 24 pack of Mountain Dew each week.

All of these things were a lot for any normal human being. I was going into eighth grade. It did not help matters that I was the weird kid out of my collection of peers. Since I had started middle school, I had worn ridiculously professional attire (heels and all), crayon-equivalent outfits, and bright make-up. The rest of the girls my age wore Abercrombie, American Eagle, Aeropostale, and Hollister. I wore Goodwill. The other girls wore drugstore makeup their parents bought for them, with stipulation. I wore Dollar Tree eye shadow and my mother's hand-me-downs, with no discretion.

I was young, and I was forced to address very old concepts of adulthood.

When reality had addressed me with it's clinging stench of uncertainty, I was overcome with a feeling unknown until this point in my life. I lost all ability to see, my chest was tighter than the knots that held my false sense of hope in place, and my face began to dampen with the tears resulting from the crashing reality that showered above me.

My first anxiety attack led to my first real loss of memory.

Somehow, I transported to my very-empty bedroom from the overstuffed living room that now housed all of my fears. Then, suddenly, my mother was in the room.

This is the part where my mom was supposed to hold me and tell me, "everything is okay". I would curl up in her arms and sob until the rivers of uncertainty drained and all that remained was the feeling of numb acceptance. Somehow, my mom would soothe me and remind me that there are people who are suffering more than me and my precious siblings were.

This did not happen.

Instead, my mom approached me with a handful of pharmaceuticals that apparently held the solution to all of my worries. I didn't want a band-aid to cover up the hole this pain and fear had created in my always-empty tummy. She wanted me to stop crying. This resulted in an ultimatum: take the pills, or she would force them down my throat.

What choice does this leave me? My mother had never meant to harm me, she always did things for my safety and overall happiness, right?

Wrong.

I took the pills, because I knew regardless I would wind up swallowing a pharmaceutical concoction of unknown toxicities that would result in who-knows-what.

Following this, I curled up in a ball on my twin-sized mattress that had yet to be placed on my canopy bed and stared at the wall with nothing but fear in my mind. Fear of the unknown, fear of my future, fear for my brothers whom had no clue what our new situation contained, and fear for my mother whom had no idea what she had done.

Or maybe she did.

I do not recall the preceding three days. All I know, is I groggily removed myself from my now assembled bed to use the restroom. This resulted in a trip to the kitchen, where I once again blacked out and resumed reality seventy-two hours following the initial loss of memory. I cannot account for what I did, nor anyone else in the household, for a total of seventy-two hours.

How do you remember the days you forgot?

Do you survey the environment in which you know you were in and hope to recall something from the lost time, or do you accept the loss and move on? I moved on.

That is all I ever did, I accepted and moved on from every instance that I questioned as a young woman. I never turned on my mother, but I always internally suffered from the negligence.

Now, I look back and fear for the young girl who was forced to drug herself because she felt fear for once, the fear her mother forced her to once again suppress. She does not know what she did, or what others did to her. She very well could have remained in her bed until she recovered from the overdose. She never spoke of it, until much later in her life when it didn't matter. Had she told someone, her entire life would have crumbled and she would have lost the one thing that mattered most to her: her brothers. She was scared.

I am not that scared little girl any more.