My mind and body are miles apart talk of life times apart! I had grown into a woman and guess what, I had missed it. My mind was stuck in survival, fighting to keep its sanity. It had repressed a lot to be able to function. It was fighting hard. The body had grown in a haphazard way. Puberty seemed to hit differently. Maybe the mind’s confusion had the body confused too.
“Oh my god, there is this peeling.” When I looked at myself, it was right there at the fold between the groin and thigh. It had been there for a few weeks now. “What more could possibly go wrong?” I had given it sometime to clear off (ignoring it). “Aren’t I walking on eggshells already?” The shells being in my head. One false move and they would all crack and the world would fall apart. It would all be real. I was abandoned. She did me wrong. Then there was this other part of me, which reasoned that I still needed finances. She was the only one I had. My father had not been in the picture as an active parent. I did not even know how to talk to him. I am not even sure that I wanted him in on my business anyway. My business being my normal up-keep and activities. I am not sure why, but I was terrified of him.
“What could this thing be? Other girls at school don’t know about such a body change”. And yeah they kind of talk about a lot of things from panties to boob tops to bras to periods to letters from boys to clubbing. Never had I heard them talk about this rash like thing. Later on I came to learn that it is called jock itch and it is mostly a physical change seen in teenage boys and it is cured by an over the counter ointment and their using boxers. I asked the one person I could ask and yet she was the one who had abandoned me. She said to leave it alone and apply Vaseline on it.
Its clearing marked the end of my looking at my personals. My periods not being regular ensured that I did not go down there. However, missing them wasn’t that bad because the girls talked about that and some claimed they missed theirs too. The only physical problem I had left was athletes foot. That I easily handled through powdering my feet, airing them as often as I could (being in a boarding school we were in shoes 16 hours straight) and drying in between them.
I also grew hair on my tummy the kind which is seen in teenage boys. The change grew on me and after sometime I thought they looked kind of cute and stopped looking at them as another anomaly. I figured I just needed to keep them from tangling by clipping them. However, it was yet another occurrence that was not in line with female bodily changes but more of a male bodily change.
I really could not handle any of these because things at home were bad. I had just been physically abused repeatedly. The one person I thought would always be in my corner, my mother, also abandoned me during the ordeal. She chose to abandon me in a time of great need. I just could not believe that she could let that happen on her watch and do nothing.
I further could not believe that she proceeded to alienate me just so that I could know that she was all-powerful. She was my lifeline and she used that fact as a bargaining chip. She used it to create an emotional leash that she tagged at whenever it suited her.
All these occurrences and thoughts ambushed and tortured me at school. I was almost at the peak of teenage; 16. Mine, well wasn’t sweet. Instead of being a teenager, I was busy worried about how I would make ends meet now that I was alone. I knew I had to detach and show her that well; I didn’t need her that much. I would be fine on my own as she intended. I would ace my tests and be a doctor. Medicine was a program that kept students away from their homes the longest.
Although I had resolved on emancipating myself there were these thoughts gnawing at me. “Why did she get very good at appearing to be in my corner and then let me hit the floor hard when push came to shove? How could she turn her back and look the other way?” If abandoning me wasn’t enough, she could not even acknowledge that she did something wrong. She had the audacity to claim that she did not know what I was talking about. She went with the line that she saw nothing and as such she did not know what I was talking about. She further went ahead in keeping me from leaving or visibly doing something about it by tagging at her emotional leash. She went on and on about how she would be disappointed for people to know that her boys were out of control. How she was in fact the victim!
Trying to process all that sent me over the edge. I became split into three. A part of me that knew the truth, a part of me that was terrified and emotional. Lastly, the third part that still believed there was good out there. The third part was the one without which I would not be able to get out of the house or ever associate with other people.
I also learnt to dissociate to protect the part of me, which is terrified and emotional. I believed to move on, I had to forget. But did I really? I might have just misconstrued repression to be forgetfulness. All this confusion lingered in my subconscious, and manifested occasionally as anxiety or depression.
Although I was already split and I could dissociate, I also became an avoidant and I was still in denial. My mother could not have possibly done that to me. But I still avoided her whenever I could. I just could not let her hurt me again. I barely made it the last time round. My emancipation although informal, was due to my not knowing if I could survive a betrayal of that magnitude again. Facing the reality that the world was unsafe, people were mostly self-centered was also hard for me to swallow. The cherry on top being that I was not able to depend on anyone because I knew and I was also in total denial that trust was just used as a bargaining chip. Trust became a luxury I could not afford.
As all this went on, I became so parentified while in the same breath held onto the child in me. I however, missed being a teenager. My teenage years whizzed by me. It was a blurr! And with it my chances of experiencing sexuality like other people my age. I also hardly looked at myself.
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