In many ways the frequent moves were wonderful experiences that most children do not get. In other ways each and every move and adapting to new people, new locations, and new situations was filled with so much stress and uncertainty that I felt miserable. I do believe my mother and father did the best they knew how in trying to keep each move from causing as little instability as possible. Most of the time we moved when school was out for the summer. However, the draw back to that is most of the time my father had to head to the new place we were living weeks or months before we could join him. Sometimes we did not have a house to live in when we got there. There were times when we spent weeks and weeks in a hotel while we waited for my parents to find us a place to live. I can remember always feeling a bit of anxiousness because things often seemed so uncertain when we moved.
I cannot be sure, but I would think that uncertainty probably caused my mother a great deal of stress as well. It seemed that the more stress she was experiencing, the more difficult she was to be around. She would anger more easily, say cruel things more often, and if her stress was very bad, there would be some physical abuse as well.
Since I knew that we would be moving soon, I never really made friends. There were kids I did things with, and played with but even from a young age, I never made a friend that I would miss when we moved again. I learned the art of self isolation at a very young age. Any time I had to walk into a class room as the new kid, it was so hard. I never knew if the kids in the class were going to like me, or what the teacher would be like, if I was going to know as much as the other kids did, and would I be able to find a way to fit in. I felt this constant internal pressure. Pressure to fit in (once again) in a new place, pressure to do well in school, a huge pressure from my parents (mostly from my mother) to adapt well to my new surroundings, and a constant pressure to not upset my mother.
Despite the fact that I spent the majority of my early childhood in “fight or flight” mode, I did manage to adapt (most of the time) each time we moved. This is how I learned the very valuable tool of hiding what you were really feeling, and make it look like everything was OK, even when on the inside you knew it was not. From the time I turned nine and on it became harder and harder as each year passed to adapt to my surroundings and to fake that everything was OK.
I cannot point to one thing that led to my spiraling down emotionally. Instead I think it was a combination of some pretty drastic and stressful events that, as a child, I did not have the skills to express. Instead what I did is intensify my self isolating behavior, no longer bothered to try and get along with my peers, and stopped trying to adapt to my surroundings and situation. I spent more and more of my time and energy in a “fight or flight” mode.
Around about the time I turned nine, we moved to Spain. This was a difficult move for me even before the actual move took place. When we found out that we were moving to Spain, we were living in Vicksburg, Mississippi. I remember when we first got to Mississippi, I had asked my father if we were going to stay there “forever”, and he had told me that we would. So when the news came that we were moving and where we were moving to, in many ways I was devastated. My brother and I were sent to stay with my grandparents for at least a month, while my parents went through all of our belongings and decided what would go into storage here in the States and what they would have shipped (by boat) to Spain. If I remember correctly, the company my father was working for would pay the shipping costs up to a certain weight, and so the whole family was limited on what could be sent to Spain.
By this point in my childhood, I was nervous all the time. I was constantly worried, stressed and anxious about what would upset my mother and those feelings were carried over to almost any situation I encountered. The uncertainties in my life also caused me to be very anxious most of the time. Sometimes those feelings would make themselves known to other people in the most unexpected ways.
Once my parents got things sorted out with our belongings it was time for me and my brother to get some vaccinations or have some blood drawn. Either way it was something that involved needles. I do not recall being all that upset in the past about needles, but I think because of the stress of all that was going on, I become over anxious, extra worried, and even more stressed out than usual. About the time the nurse was going to stick me with the needle, I screamed. My brother must have been experiencing some of the same feelings I had been and my scream was a little more than his poor, little kid nerves could take. The next thing we all knew, he was running down the hall, to get away from my mother and the nurses. They were chasing him as fast as they could go. However, even at a young age my brother was a very fast runner. He probably would have made a clean get away but the elevator door was not open on our floor.
That is a funny tale about my brother, but when I look at it from my perspective now, I can see that he too, might have been experiencing a great deal of stress at an early age. In fact if the researchers and their studies are correct, that means starting at an early time in our childhoods, our brain chemistry was being permanently altered.
Once we arrived in Spain we spent several months in a hotel, because it took a while for our furniture to get there. My brother and I had the run of the hotel. The staff let us get away with entirely too much, but some of my best childhood memories are from when we stayed in that hotel.
We lived in the Basque area of Spain. There was terrorism there, there were civil police standing on street corners with machine guns. It was very different from life in the States, but up until something happened to me, I enjoyed living there a great deal.
To be continued….
Beginnings – Part III will come out tomorrow.
