A bleeding soldier

My parents in 1984 surveying the house they were having built.

I have this memory, but not because I actually remember it. I was too young to remember it, but the story was retold often enough by my mother that it seems like I actually have the memory. 

I was very young. It was the mid-1980s. My parents had a house built (which went wildly over budget) in 1984 on Happy Hollow Street in a little town in the Southern Black Hills in South Dakota. Parents raised their kids a little differently then than they do now. There was also the matter of finances, which meant that a babysitter wasn't always possible. My parents had a colleague leave their company and start up a competing business across the street. In order to compete, they were putting in 100 hour weeks, both of them. This continued for years. 

My mom didn't want to work, but my dad was the boss and women were working a lot in those days, so he said she should too. She started out as the bookkeeper, setting type, then page layout, mailing, etc. There were always things to do. I started working at a young age (I figure around the age of 3), as well. I got paid 60 cents an hour. 

That's the backstory of this memory. 

My mom had laid me down for a nap at home and went down to the office to get some work done, thinking that I'd be asleep a while. When she was on her way home, there I was, barefoot, in the middle of the road with my blanket, walking to where I knew she would be. This story always makes her tear up.

It's a difficult story because there's really no one to blame. It's just unfortunate. The times were different, the reasons it happened are difficult to comprehend now. It simply happened. 

It must have hurt my mother's heart even though she is the one to tell it, as she was the one who faced my lost little face that day. If my father didn't insist she work so much, would it have happened? If my parents weren't faced with crushing competition, would they have overlooked my needs? Is this the reason why I started spending so much time with them at work, why I ended up working at such a young age? In the end, I blame myself because I couldn't have just stayed asleep (or stayed in my bed, at least). No one wants to see their mom affected by a story like this.

Me with my blanket. I didn't break the pot, I swear.

There are many other stories like this, but this one captures what it was like being the last-born of three boys at that time and place. In times of upheaval and stress, I always go back to who I can count on, and it's never those around me. It's always just me. It's true that we all come into this world alone and leave the same way, but what about everything in between? Am I forever doomed to hold myself up, even though I feel like collapsing into nothingness? Am I to always be the rock that others depend on? What happens when I'm not there for them for that five minutes when their world goes up in flames? Am I to blame because I wasn't there? 

I was raised to be hard. I was raised to not be difficult. I was raised to be silent, almost nonexistent. I was raised to murder my feelings. In short, I was raised to be a man (and a toxic version, at that) long before I was capable of being one. 

After spending about a month and a half by myself, I've only recently realized that I've been in a state of dissociation which has gradually gotten worse over the last month. I attribute this to traumatic childhood memories coming to the surface. When I was surrounded by my people and all the things I had to do, these memories remained hidden (although they caused an occasional stir on the surface from time to time, like a whale coming up for air). Now there's nothing to distract me from these memories coming to the surface. There's no use putting them off, trying to push them below the surface like balloons. They'll just come back up tomorrow, and possibly at the wrong moment. 

Dissociation is a curse because you don't feel like yourself at all; you don't even recognize yourself in the mirror sometimes. But, the process of dissociation is meant to protect you during a vulnerable or traumatic time. If it stays, then you have larger problems, but it normally abates along with the triggered memories (in this case) or whatever trauma brought it about. 

This most recent episode is further proof that I need this time alone to work through childhood trauma that I couldn't or wouldn't work through before. Although it's painful, I feel like this is my last chance to deal with these things before I take another step. A bleeding soldier can only march so far, no matter how well he was conditioned to "be a man."