Silent Treatment

I've been thinking a lot about that 8-year-old me...Wondering why I'd been silent all these years towards her.  It took some real deep digging to find out exactly what was going on between myself and her.

Years ago, in a similar season of excavation and discovery, I had a dream of an adult Terri rescuing a child who had been hidden away in a dark cupboard.  I scolded the older girl child who was responsible for treating her so and told her she was never to treat the younger child in such a way again.  I was quite angry and quite forceful in my language to the older girl.   When I awoke from that dream, it didn't take a lot of psychoanalysis on my part to figure out that both the girls were a part of myself and that the older had behaved pretty badly towards the younger.

This letter I'd written in error had been a mistake but a providential mistake.  I'd never before acknowledged this girl child self, aside from rescuing her...WHY had I given her the silent treatment all these years after I'd been so angry about her being locked away?

That answer is not an easy one to acknowledge.  

My adult attitude toward her had been exactly what the adults' attitudes had been in my life at the time I was 8.   I wasn't special because I was the oldest nor treated as a beloved only daughter. I was treated as a convenience, a helper, one who could take on responsibilities, but whose feelings were unimportant.  I was often criticized but was seldom praised.  I was often ignored and what attention I received was incidental to what task I was needed to do next.

I remember the year I was 8 that I received a Christmas gift from my parents: a white cardigan sweater, a horse pin and a matching corduroy skirt and jacket set.  Why do I recall that gift so clearly?  Because my mother bought the exact same things to give to her brother's three stepdaughters.  The suits were different colors, mine a lovely deep purple, but all were printed with the same pattern of flowers and made by the same pattern.  All the suits were handmade by my mother, an excellent and skilled seamstress.  The horses were different colors (mine was a deep grey).  And a white cardigan sweater for Sunday was a wardrobe staple for any girl in that era.  

I remember those gifts so well because I remember I felt a little hurt that I, the daughter, received the same gift as the stepdaughters for whom my mother had no real affection.  Somehow, much as I loved those girls, and as much as I considered them 'real' family, I felt that I'd been slighted as the only daughter of my own family.  

This is the very first time I've ever admitted that particular hurt to anyone else.  I've reasoned it away: that Mama just wanted us all to look as though we belonged together, that she liked us girls looking like a matched set. But in my heart, I knew that she had not given me the same gift for either of those reasons.  She'd chosen a gift for the girls that matched and then decided to give me the same thing.  One less decision to make.  One less thing to worry over.  Dusted and done.

I am not here to vilify my mother.  I deviate there only because there is an 8-year-old girl in my past whose mother just happened to be mine.  This is just one of the times that little girl had experienced a hurt but hid it deep down and never let anyone else know.

I've refused to look back at that child and acknowledge her increasing knowledge of things.  I've refused to soothe her or comfort her.  My excuse is a poor one.  I did it because everyone else in her life pretended that these things were not worthy of notice, of acknowledgment.  It was a behavior I learned right there in the ranks.

As I grew older, I pretended things were perfectly normal and the same for everyone the world over.  I pretended that 8-year-old me didn't know, wasn't smart enough to know, that she hadn't yet discovered that she was not enough, was not considered pretty, was not wanted.  She knew the world wasn't as nice as it might appear to everyone.  She already knew that family could humiliate and degrade you.  

She knew things that no 8-year-old child should have known.  She had been exposed to things that she knew were wrong and cruel.  My very denial of those things, my refusal to acknowledge those things to her was a falsehood of the worst sort.  When I wrote that letter to her, I was being dishonest.  I was still pretending, pretending that I didn't know her hurt and her pain and her confusion and her lack of understanding.  I was still pretending that she was too innocent to know what she knew.  She knew. She knew.

I wasn't protecting her innocence.  No, I was trying to protect myself, grown woman of 66, who didn't want to feel the hurt again, who didn't want to say, "I wasn't loved."  The woman who still excuses away the parental behavior.  The one who still blames herself for the way she was treated.  The one who still wanted to believe in the lie that if you don't acknowledge it, it can't be truth.

I owe that 8-year-old something.  I need to start showing her the love she deserves.  I need to stop giving her the silent treatment.  I need to talk to her.  I need to tell her the truth.  I need to say I'm sorry.  I see.  I know.