The First Four Years-Gaps In Time

 As a very young child, as my mother tells it, I was afraid of old men. The men who were around the same age as her father. I was very picky about who could touch me as a young child. Only my mother and father could pick me up or handle me in any way without me screaming bloody murder. However, my fear of older men went beyond this, apparently. My mother said that whenever her father (my grandfather) would hold me I would scream and get completely hysterical with hyperventilating and sometimes passing out. She said that they all thought it was just a phase I was going through or that I was incredibly shy. Now that I am an adult, I realize that this is not normal behavior for a baby. I am a parent now and if my daughter had acted that way when someone held her, you can bet that I would have investigated why very thoroughly.

I have huge gaps in my memory of my childhood. There are pictures in my mind or flashes of things that happened, but no continuous memory. The very first memory I have is of being a toddler and climbing out of my crib, walking down the hallway of our house to the living room and crawling up on the sofa to snuggle with my dad who was eating ice cream while watching Johnny Carson. When I told my dad of that memory, he didn’t believe me at first, saying that he didn’t believe children that young could have detailed memories. However, when I began to describe the layout of our house to him in detail, his eyes got wider and wider. He was shocked that I could remember all of that when I was still in diapers. The memories I do have are very detailed and accurate. I notice little things around me like if there are chachkis and where they are placed in a house or what the weather was like on a particular day. I can remember dreams I had when I was a child in great detail. I think I had a photographic memory. When I started elementary school, all of the things I learned I snapped pictures of in my mind. I have this memory of being around ten years old, sitting at my mother’s dining table studying for a test the next day. I had a page of notes, front and back, in my own handwriting that I was reading and re-reading. The next day, during the test, I was able to recall the notes I took in the form of pictures in my mind which were organized into paragraphs or sections of the paper. My mind still works this way to some extent.

My parents divorced when I was four years old. I was completely devastated. My mother said I cried every night for six months. I was very attached to my father. Not long after I was born, my mother had to undergo heart surgery for the second time. She was born with a congenital heart defect and had had surgery to correct it when she was a child, but evidently, that surgery was not done correctly. So, after I was born, she was recovering from that surgery for a long time. During this time, she could not hold me, and she definitely did not breast feed me. (When I mentioned to her years later that I had decided to breast feed my own daughter, she screwed up her face in disgust and made an “ewww” sort of sound.) My father had to take up all of the duties caring for me. He was the only one who held me, fed me, changed me, played with me, took me to daycare, etc… My mother did not have anything to do with me for practically the first year of my life. So, it’s no wonder that I was so attached to my father. My father told me that when they talked about who would get custody of me during the divorce proceedings, it was agreed that I would be better off with him. However, my mother told him that she was going to fight for custody of me because she “needed the money” that she would get from his child support payments. My father’s exact response to me regarding this was,

 “It’s terrible to use a child like that. For money.” 

I think this statement sums up perfectly the major differences in who they were as people and their parenting styles.

My mother remarried almost immediately after her divorce was final. She had been having an affair with a child psychologist at the hospital where she worked. When he moved into our apartment after they married, I was still crying every night over the loss of my father. His continuous presence just made things that much more difficult. Every night, I would lay in bed crying and heartbroken and every night, one or the other of them would come into my bedroom, drag me out of bed and beat me until I stopped crying. This happened nightly for around six months. I had bunk beds at the time, and I can remember moving to sleep on the top bunk thinking, in my childish way, that if I were on the top bunk that they couldn’t reach me to pull me out of bed for the nightly abuse. As children often do though, I misjudged. After I moved to the top bunk, they would just yank me off of it and I would crash to the floor. A startling and rude awakening. 

When the time came that I finally stopped crying every night for my father, I began to hear at night strange noises coming from my mother’s bedroom. Since my bedroom was adjacent to hers, I discovered that if I put my ear to the door that connected her room to mine, I could hear everything that was going on. This is just what I did. For the first few times I listened, I couldn’t understand what was going on. During the day, though, my mother began to appear with various bruises on her face or body and she seemed always to have a purplish red ring around her neck which she tried to cover up with makeup.