Humans Are Often The Real Monsters
CONTENT WARNING: Child Neglect/Emotional Abuse, Nightmare Fuel
People seemed to believe this story I wrote was true, which is good because it is, so I think I can dredge up another story or two about my insane parents from those memories I try not to think about anymore.
I’ll start with a cautionary tale about what NOT to say to young children.
When I was three, I had that most common of afflictions for children: believing in monsters that hid in the dark — under the bed, in the wardrobe, peering in the window, or out in the hallway peeking in the door. At the time, I spent the days with a childminder who was a better mom to me than my mother ever was, as both my parents were working full-time, and her family treated me like their own.
Every so often, events conspired so that I’d stay the night with them, on weekends when my parents had to travel to go to some big meeting or wanted to go drinking. They had been working on getting me to sleep in the dark by providing me with a hot water bottle that was also a plush toy, sleeping in the same room as me with the lights off, or using a dim red bulb in the bedside lamp to acclimate me to it. That glorious woman did a lot more for me than that, and I credit her for my love of helping and comforting others, but this isn’t a story about good things happening.
My father was a military man. He had left the army not too long before this and had carried a number of bad lessons from it. Discipline is all well and good, but you can’t expect a child to sit quietly through a six-hour car journey with nothing but classical music to listen to. Stoic self-reliance is commendable, but you can’t tell a child they’re too big to cry when they wander through a patch of nettles. And you absolutely cannot ever do this.
I was crying in bed, begging him not to turn the lights off, begging him not to leave me alone in the dark, begging him to at least close the curtains, and begging for something to keep me safe so the monsters wouldn’t get me.
His response?
Father: “You’d better go to sleep quick; the monsters can’t get you while you’re sleeping.”
Then, he closed the door, turned off the hallway lights, and walked away, step, step, step against the wooden floorboards echoing up through the darkness, accompanied by his chuckling, celebrating a good practical joke.
I didn’t sleep that Friday night. Nor the night that followed. Or the night that followed that.
That Monday, I spent all day asleep on a couch, listening to my childminder pottering about her kitchen, finally feeling something close to safe. I concluded that the only way I could sleep was if I had something to fight the monsters.
And that is how I spent sixteen years sneaking kitchen knives into bed so I could sleep with a weapon under my pillow. I only recently shook off the rest of that trauma. I spent two and a half decades with my imagination running wild, seeing pale faces and long clawed fingers peering in or reaching around windows and doors, and having repeated pain-filled nightmares about being ripped to shreds by circling teeth as I fell through a pitch-black pit.
Next time, if there is one, I should probably go into how I ended up paralyzed for three days because my parents were convinced that my illness wasn’t that bad or how they hid eighteen years of loving gifts and letters that my biological mother sent in a locked filing cabinet. Maybe those are a bit too much, though.
Related:
When The Tree Provides The Apple With The Resources To GET AWAY
