I’ve been writing about vulnerability, but it became evident during my most recent therapy session the amount of vigilance I have been living with for as many years as I have been a mother and beyond.
Emily joined our family as a one year old, having lived in a social welfare institute (or orphanage as they are commonly called) in China for the first year of her life. The little that we know of this time is that it was very regimented and she was very sick. Nourishment was provided at certain times and if it was not eaten or drank during the allotted time, it was taken away. We believe Emily probably spent that first year fighting for her life.
When she came to us, she was in the fifth percentile for weight, and the first night in the Gloria Plaza Hotel in Nanchang, China, she ate an entire loaf of Chinese brown, sweet bread, and didn’t stop eating for months. We had to remove the ever-present fruit bowl from the dining room table because when she woke up from her naps she would scream “Xiang jiao, xiang jiao,” and eat as many bananas as we would give her. Banana was her first word , before mama or baba, it was xiang jiao. Before she found her voice, however, it took her several weeks before she even cried. She was mostly silent, mewing like a kitten when she wanted something, which was mostly food.
After Emily ate with abandon for several months (We were sure she would become a chubby child), she normalised to a healthy weight and lost her food obsession. After she got stronger, she never ate quickly and we never forced her too. She stopped demanding food, and ate what was given with gratitude. When we asked her what she wanted for dinner, her typical response was, “I don’t mind.” The one thing she did love was her Daddy making her gigantic weekend breakfasts. On weekends, if she woke up before we were out of bed, she’d sidle into the room and look at Don with that kind of embarrassed, don’t-want-to-ask-for-too-much gaze, and say, “Brekkie?” With Emily, it was very hard for her to ask for what she wanted, and Don was only-too-pleased to oblige.
In the first year of children’s lives, their identities are largely formed. We suspect Emily’s first year was one of both neglect and stubborn survival. On our trip to Mexico last week, Don and I talked about Emily’s older sister, Charlotte, who also spent her first year in a social welfare institute. She deals with issues of abandonment. For the first years, she never let us out of her sight, needing to know we were ever-present. She clings to us still: when I get up from a sofa we are sitting on together, she’ll grab my hand and hold on, trying to keep me in place, bodies touching. She tells us how much she loves us multiple times a day, texts constantly when we are not together, to let us know how much she loves us and also to receive reassurance. She is full of sweetness and light and effervescence, though some of it is borne out of that fear. For Emily, her defining characteristic or lack of one may have been with bonding. Our working theory is that she was never truly able to bond and trust and say what she needed or believe she deserved what she was given. With us, she was almost always satisfied, always grateful, seldom effusive, never clingy. She never felt entitled. Both of our daughters’ identities spring from the same root cause, but manifested differently.
When I reflected with my therapist on the many times that Emily needed emotional help and support and didn’t seek it because she probably did not even know it wasn’t normal to feel the way she did, and so disassociated or went into herself or perhaps even into another self, it brought up such deep sadness: all these times we could not help her because she couldn’t let herself be helped. Somehow she didn’t know how to ask or even know what she needed or that she needed anything at all. It’s heartbreaking. It’s soul crushing. It’s enough to destroy me.
So all these years of vigilance – of trying to help, trying to control and normalise situations, trying to get to understand how to give Emily what she needed, yet never quite succeeding. All the cortisol. All the adrenaline. All the nights of sleeping on the floor beside her bed. All the thousands of nights where I slept so lightly so I could know every movement in the house and that everyone was safe. Dear Lord. I deserve a medal. Yet I thought it was normal. Isn’t this what parents do? Perhaps it is.
Now I just want to breathe. I can barely take care of myself. How have I managed a household and children and taught for 35 years and written blogs and books and just generally maintained? How have I actually done this?
And is this just life? Is this what everybody goes through? Is this the price we pay for choosing to come to earth? I’d like to just watch sitcoms and cuddle with a cat and gaze out the window for the rest of my life. I’d like cocktails on the beach and drug cocktails to put me to sleep at night and I’d like some damn peace on earth. The price of living here is just so high. Emily obviously knew this. It’s just so, so much.
Reliving memories with my therapist, and not the fond ones, was so horrendously hard. I cried and cried. I’ve just come from the bathroom and the wrinkles and sagging around my eyes are so pronounced: I look so very old and weather-worn. If people who haven’t seen me in a few months could see me now, they’d be shocked. I’m not the same person mentally or physically. I am going through the motions and, yes, I am healing, but I am also feeling the weight of a universe of grief.
How can we choose this life? And who are we to judge for the people who choose to end it?
I don’t want to be vigilant anymore. I want to move to my house on Vancouver Island and go for long walks on the beach and grow basil and make granola and write delightful books that charm people. I want to go to water aerobics and bake pies and visit with people I love. I want Charlotte to come over often and I want us to laugh and play and make pizza together. I want to hug Don tightly each night and snuggle under our down covers, and I want us to hold hands and walk along the wind-swept beach, and live our easy dreams that entail music and laughter and good food and exploring old growth forests and bobbing around the island in our camper van, having little bonfires where Don plays his guitar for me. I want to bathe and read and sleep through the night, waking up having remembered no dreams, ideally having had none at all.
I want Emily to be a muted and beautiful presence that requires no more vigilance, just gentle joy.
That’s all I want.