I have had a rough week. Between deadlines and the gym, friendships and not having traveled for six months, my dad was in town.
Here is something I have realised about my father. He demanded everything and nothing from me. When he expected nothing, you felt all the freedom in the world, but he also expected everything, which meant that he would walk away from me as a child, on the sidewalk in London next to our underground basement flat-cum-caretakers-quarters (side-note: My aunt, when I had first started school, told me to tell everyone that my dad’s job was a ‘maintenance manager’ not a dormitory caretaker, which is what he was; she asked me to lie, maybe that was the first time, before I had hit puberty), if I didn’t obey him. I remember being on a small bicycle, we were perhaps riding to the park. He wanted to leave me there, because I had made one extra request– it was oh, maybe, that I didn’t want to bike 15 minutes, or something even more minor. That fear was incredible, and has lasted to today. I am always so scared of being abandoned, because of this extremely early period of abandonment, this experience of abandonment. Why would he do this to a child? It almost didn’t make sense, to leave a child on the side of the road.
His threat was abandonment.
I was listening to the RobCast yesterday (highly recommended!) and he had a line in there about being “Divine sons and daughters.” The idea, an idea that I had also read on the Bodysex website this morning, was that we are completely whole as we are. I hadn’t encountered this idea until a fingerful of years ago, and certainly I had no idea of this idea in childhood. I was always on the bicycle, with a father walking away from her because she had made a request. Always.