Origins of Darkness (Tai)

Origins of Darkness

By: Tai

As a rule, I try to avoid talking too much about myself, about my past, about the origins of the themes I express in my writing. Personal has always felt a bit too self-involved, as if I’m either justifying or seeking pity, neither of which are things I wish to claim.

But lately, I’ve seen people use their personal experiences to encourage and enable others, to comfort and to support. We all have our demons and our baggage and from those experiences of darkness come the most powerful and resonating of words. I’ve often said, ‘I’d never change a thing,’ NOT because I enjoyed the experience, Hell, no to that, but because out of my twisted past comes the motivation to help others. I wouldn’t wish my past upon my worst enemy but the truth is, I’m (very unfortunately) NOT alone and if I can say, ‘I survived and so can you’ then it’s all been worthwhile. ALL of it, no matter how painful it was and still is.

There are few remaining memories of my childhood (thankfully, as it turns out) but my mind and body remember, outside of direct memory. I can thank my past for chronic PTSD and varying diagnoses of Bi-Polar and even Borderline Personality Disorder. Yay for me. I live with multiple voices in my head as a constant and it’s taken me the better part of my life to come to terms with them. Now, for the most part, I can make them work for me. But their origins most definitely lie in darkness.

My bio-parents (I won’t grace them with the honor of calling them ‘parents’) were both dysfunctional, warped, and damaged individuals. My father-person most likely as a product of his own troubled past, my bio-mother, I suspect, born warped, the product of nature, not nurture. My father-person was violent, both psychologically and physically. My bio-mother simply deranged. If there’s such a thing as psychological Munchausen’s-by-proxy, that would be her!

But let’s start at the beginning, as much as it’s possible to, to give some context to my tale.

My parents (as I’ll refer to them only for the sake of simplicity) are Dutch. I was born in Belgium and, up until only last year, I held dual Belgian/ Dutch citizenship with permanent residency in New Zealand after my parents immigrated when I was five. But I am NOT (by all accounts) my father’s child. Keep in mind, we’re going back a few years (more than I care to tell) and my father is of Orthodox Dutch-Catholic roots and from an extremely lower class family and my mother was (she’s passed and if I knew where to dance on her grave, I would) of an upper-middle-class family. My mother got pregnant, to one of (and I have this from the extended family) a possible three donors, none of whom are my father. She needed to find a scapegoat and father was it.

I think he figured it out when I was born because I certainly didn’t fit the stats of a prem baby!

Too late. He was married!

My sister came next, one of those band-aid babies who was the apple of my father’s eye, not that it did her a great deal of good because dysfunctional is dysfunctional. Period.

The family immigrated thinking a ‘fresh start’ in a new country (halfway around the world) might make things all right. Which, of course, it didn’t. I might point out that my first hospital admission occurred mere weeks before our departure. A head injury that they attributed to a fall off a swing. I have a scar (one of my many) and I was hospitalized for two weeks. Some fall!

There are no clear memories of my childhood, as I’ve already said. There are, instead, HUGE holes and blanks, flash-backs, nightmares, random excerpts of things which make little to no sense. The memories there are, aren’t really much better.

My mother lived for drama and if there wasn’t any, she created it. Her favorite was to goad my father, very subtly, into fits of anger directed at me, and then she would come to me and hold me and tell me how sorry she was and how she wished she didn’t always have to be (in her exact words) ‘the meat in the sandwich between us’ and couldn’t I just not upset him so much. He, for his part, would throw me, throttle me, beat me black and blue, and then come to me and cry and apologize and tell me he wished I wasn’t the spark to ignite his anger.

Are we seeing a pattern here? No matter which parent came to me, somehow, things were always my fault. I ‘brought it upon myself’ and in the process caused my parents grief.

When I was seven (and this I DO remember) I received a beating my mother couldn’t hide. I was already, at this age, taking care of my sister (three years younger than me) and doing much of the household labor. My mother worked days, my father worked nights. He would come home, and my mother would leave. He would go to bed and I would get my sister and I ready and then wake him so he could take us to school.

On this particular day, I was vacuuming and I missed his alarm going off. I was seven. Time meant nothing. He woke up at midday, discovered us still there and began with his hand, progressed to a sandal when his hand got sore and finally gave up and frog-marched me to school. I was blue from shoulders to calves.

My mother moved us out, though it wasn’t to last.

In the eighteen months in which we were absent from my father, my mother had ‘boarders’ in her house to help cover costs (or so she said later). I have no memory of this time… at all. What I DO have is an everlasting fear of men and flashbacks and the first signs of my alternate personalities. I was sick often. I feared the dark and slept (and still do) with my back to the wall. I developed a fear of sudden bright lights in darkness and footsteps in the night. You do the math.

And I believe to this day that my mother not only knew but either condoned or perhaps even encouraged whatever was happening to me at this time.

My father returned home. And life continued as it had before.

I’ve lost track of how many times we moved, how many schools, how many broken and lost friendships. I brought NOBODY home. Ever. And the moment it appeared somebody was beginning to suspect what was going on behind closed doors, the moment I had made a ‘friend’ who might have cared, who might have been able to save me, we were on the move again. A ‘new job’ my parents would say.

In all of this, my sister was there for me. She couldn’t do anything but hold me and cry with me… afterward, but she was there for me. She received the things I didn’t, the material things, but she was no more ‘loved’ than was I. I never understood what this must have meant for her until much later. I didn’t know about Survivor’s Guilt. How could I? I had no idea what I was going through, never mind what it meant for her.

My first attempt at taking my own life was at fourteen. I over-dosed. My mother found me and as she was driving me the near one hour to the hospital (no, she didn’t call an ambulance) she pulled up and told me to throw up and never mention it again. The end. She had me by, as they say, the short and curlies. I both loved and hated my mother. She was there to hold and comfort me every time I was broken and then set me up to be broken again. She couldn’t get enough of the drama and it simply continued in a never-ending cycle. Every time I tried to break free, she would pull me back in and, for reasons still unknown to me, back I would go. Over and over and over again.

When I was finally old enough, at seventeen, to tell my father I’d had enough (note, my father, NOT my mother) my mother and my sister left with me and I became responsible for both of them. Goodbye University. I joined the Army.

By this time, I’d become so immune to pain that I ended up having to leave due to injury. What began as probably a simple pulled muscle became transverse tears of my abdominal muscles, a collapsed lung, gastroenteritis, and pneumonia. I collapsed on a training run and woke up in hospital. I was offered voluntary discharge so I could return at a later date (with a request to please apply for OC, I’d joined as a Regular) rather than risk Medical Discharge. My mother ensured I never returned and it is the single greatest regret of my life.

Meanwhile, the family (mother, father, sister) had begun to play multiple push me, pull me games. I was welcome, I was disowned. I was welcome, I was disowned. And I permitted them to play. Even my sister saw me as a misfit and a shame on the family because of my rapidly deteriorating mental health. I was hospitalized with fugues and fits. I made multiple attempts on my life. I could no longer differentiate between real and imaginary.

And I was dismissed. Nobody believed me. Because my parents were so good at wearing the masks of public virtue, I was the crazy one. And I believed it. None of it ever happened. NONE of it was real. I had made the whole thing up and my entire life was a lie.

Until, finally, I met that one person who changed everything. The psychologist who saw through the mask and saw the demons beneath. She said, ‘Your body doesn’t lie. Your mind might, but your body doesn’t’. Every time we tried to talk about the past, I would get physically ill or suffer spontaneous reactions, pains in random places, most often parallel to my physical scars, scars I couldn’t recall receiving. The box was open.

I have no desire to face ALL of the demons in the box. Some darkness is best left where it lies. But I have a better understanding of my own origins now and I can assign blame to where it squarely belongs. Not to me, not to the broken, frightened, helpless child I was but with the people who were supposed to protect and nurture me and who broke me instead.

I no longer acknowledge them as family. They broke away from me for the last time more than ten years ago and I have refused to have any interaction with them since. I have changed my name and gained citizenship. I have new ‘whanau’, my family of the heart. I have a life and happiness and I am destroying the demons one by one.

My mother, as I said, is dead and no, I don’t grieve. My father and sister might as well be for all I care. Ironically, my sister tried to return to my life when my first novel was published. As if! I am stronger. Braver. Not whole but getting there, step by hard-earned step.

And if I can, so can you.

I apologize if this is longer than I’d intended but even this is no more than skimming the surface. I think it suffices for there is absolutely nothing to be gained in telling any more. I think it doesn’t take a genius to read the rest, imagine the rest, and I use it to inspire and build credibility in the worlds I write. My words come, quite literally, from my heart and from my past. Unlike my father, who always said ‘It wasn’t his fault, it was his past to blame’, I say take ownership and break the past. I will not perpetuate the tragedy of my own shadows.

The darkness will not gain life through me if I have anything to do with it!