Ghosts in The Attic

I’ve always envied people who had big families. Growing up I spent so much time alone wishing I had a sibling or cousins or anyone. Instead, my mom tried to be my friend and I had our dog. I often feel that the reason I am unfamiliar with the meaning of boredom is because I learned how to cope and to entertain myself, before the internet took all of our attention away.

Now as a parent to an only child myself, I find myself feeling the same sentiment, both for me and her. She’s a teenager now, and we argue all the time. It’s always a disconnect of understanding. I feel she blows me off, she feels I blow up. It is a constant back and forth over reminders of why we are still hurt by past actions never made up for. I am a person quick to anger. I am a person who is using anger in place of fear. Fear from the keen understanding of the consequences of actions already attempted by myself 20+ years ago. Fear of the reckoning from bad choices that lead to a lifetime of contempt and hatred for myself.

Today she said that I treat her like shit all the time and I make everything about myself. I often use myself as a teaching example which is true. I am so afraid she will follow the same path of spineless fear of sticking up for herself that ends up putting her in terrible situations that she can’t quite erase from her mind. In some ways she is barreling down the path of desperation to be liked. The desire we all have to fit in and to keep friends, even if they are the worst ones we could find. The need of approval and love which calls any warm body that says nice things to us, “good enough”. In some ways she is not at all. She has ambition… The verbal kind anyway. The kind that has grandiose dreams and aspirations but no actual follow through and no path to get there. I suppose I did too at that age, though I don’t think I was begging to get a job at 14.

It cuts deeper than any wound caused by another, when your child resents you, or at least says they do. I have tried talking, reasoning, writing, yelling, swearing to secrecy, ignoring, appealing to emotion and logic, crying, and pleading. It elicits a reaction but it never fixes anything. And this is where it feels the loneliest. She doesn’t have any aunties, uncles, cousins, kin, that can talk to her or give her another perspective. There is no village to help in raising, and I, have no village for support. I often keep the things she does to myself, lest it upset my parents or her father figures. I keep these burdens shouldered, the weight of which feels like a ton of bricks in this satchel I choose to drag around. I write on the internet, but really I am yelling into a void. I have no friends in real life, I have no one to talk parenting with, no one to be a sounding board to my exasperation. I am the same lonely child sitting under a table, holding my dog and watching the world go by. Except now, the world has sped up, it feels more unforgiving and cynical. There is no reprieve from the chaos and I don’t have my mommy to run to anymore.

As I get older, the weight of living life mostly alone grows heavier. Sometimes it’s freeing, as when I went to Europe alone as a stranger. I know there are many others who feel the burden of loneliness, but it doesn’t make it any easier knowing that I am in like company. If anything, going to Europe maybe exacerbated the problem as I realized that many people have access to community in a way that I had not experienced and did not know was available as a life DLC. Every day I think about how I can get back there, or find some place here that fosters community and friendship over the proverbial “lone wolf” archetype that has inundated this country. I want so much more for both me and her. I want to feel like I can talk to other people and that I can build healthy relationships outside of the four walls of my home. Ones that won’t break me and maybe, just maybe offer a word of encouragement.

So if you are out there reading this, and it seems to hit a little too close to home, my word of encouragement is not to give up. Though I may be sad and feeling lonely, I have hope that somehow the future will hold new opportunities for growth and community that I can’t fathom right now. Maybe the same is true for you.