Understanding Me
In the beginning
For the last six years, I have been a stay at home mum, a very, very bad, bad housekeeper, a wonderful mother to my son, who is on the autism spectrum, and a somewhat mercurial, but loving, partner to Brad. Prior to motherhood, I worked at a bank for fourteen years, ten of those in IT. I had finished my Master’s of Social Work with an international Canadian placement in my last year, and that is where I fell in love with a Canadian. I lived there, back and forth, for a couple of years, but for all of that life experience, it was being a mum that really kicked me in the arse.
On reflection, it is the first time that it really made a difference if I had my shit together or not. Before that, my behaviour didn’t really impact anybody besides myself. If I didn’t have my shit together, then the only person that was truly impacted, was me. I didn’t have a responsibility to anyone else. Until, that is, of course, being a mum.
“Oh, my gosh, that kicked me square in the arse. Who would have thought that such a beautiful bundle of joy could so easily, and so quickly, shatter the glass foundation that I had so carefully constructed?”
I have had an entire life of feeling awkward, of differences, of not blending in successfully. There was a moment in Year 12 that teachers saw something in me that didn’t match how I would present information. My writing and communication didn’t truly reflect how my comprehension. They investigated and I was diagnosed with dyslexia. I can still feel that visceral relief it gave me, to know that the wall I had been hitting my head against wasn’t stupidity. It was just another difference, and difference I’m kind of happy with. Difference I can work around, difference gives me something to point at and say, hey, here is my trouble.
There was, every now and then, something else that would pop up that would point out my differences.
There are a couple of meltdowns, that I don’t even think my parents know about that scared off a couple of people during primary school. But without a name, it was really hard to control. There were a lot of times in my life where the wheels had fallen off of my glass foundation, and I would scream out my frustration, and I would collapse into tears, and retreat into myself and not come out until I was ready to face the people who needed explanations.There were a couple of very early phone calls to my dad to come and help me, and lots of cuddles from my mum to comfort me. Not when I was a child, this was in between 17 to 30. I have relied on my parents’ understanding me for longer than I could ever remember. And, although they don’t always understand me, they are always there for me, and they always have loved me, and love me still.
Those moments in time are just a complete release of stress. My body is a temple of stress, and it has been for a long time. There was an untraceable back pain that I had in my teens that a doctor prescribed a natural medicine for me, which was mostly alcohol. It was very relaxing and a very happy week for me. My mum wasn’t so impressed, understandably. From there, I moved on to a physiotherapist and, after a couple of weeks of massaging and manipulation, they put me interaction and then they measured my muscles’ reaction. It was just by chance that she discovered that when she actually laid a hand on me, my muscles were actually relaxing.
“I do need touch. I don’t always want to be touched, but it’s like a need a vessel to transfer my tension to and that offloads it from me.”
I don’t know if I give it to somebody else, but it definitely offloads from me. My dad always gives me great big hugs, my grandpa always gives me great big hugs, and my nanna. From there, I went to a hypnotist. Hypnotherapy, which was an absolute disaster. That’s when I first had my anxiety attacks. So, in a room where I was meant to be relaxing and relieving tension, I just got more and more anxious and I had to keep on getting up and leaving. The hypnotherapist wasn’t impressed with me at all.
After a couple of sessions, I said that I think this is my body’s way of saying that, ‘no, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to’, and I left. It did align around the same time as that I was diagnosed with dyslexia, so, it wasn’t long after that I had my assessment and either I ignored the pain or the pain went away. I think the discovery of the dyslexia did create such a visceral relief in my body that I no longer had that back pain.
That’s a little bit about my past, and I could list and record the many different ways that I have succumbed to releasing the tension, and I could recall the stories of how I didn’t fit in, and the painful comments. The friends that have left me behind, the friends that I have left behind, the co-dependent relationships that have defined me up until now, and the memory flashbacks. But nothing really stands out more than when I became pregnant.
