My earliest memory as a child that I remember was as a baby. I was being cradled by my mother in my parents room. I remember her feeding me her breast. Her skin was brown and wrinkled. I remember this black lamp which was a statue of a person’s body, a smooth shiny black statue holding the light up with their arm stretched out.
I remember the walls, blue like the sky. It seemed so big that room, because we were laying on the floor on a soft mattress in the corner of the room.
Growing up in my view, wasn’t always easy, but it was all I had known. Life wasn’t noticeably hard or unfair until I got to mingle with other children at school. It was there I was able to engage with people from other homes, and compare differences as well as similarities.
I had older parents than everyone else. That was a little embarrassing, not because they were older, but because everyone knew my island mum was a grump. Everyone was scared of her.
I was barely five when I learned I had younger parents. The parents I had always known were in fact my grandparents. I remember that day like it was yesterday. My birth mother turned up and made a fuss about us kids wearing nice dresses. I had a blue dress on with a white laced collar, and my favourite pink puffy jacket. My hair was naturally curly and black, but this day I remember it being tied with a ribbon and it shone like a river when the light catches it because my mother had drowned my in baby oil. I think people could probably see their reflection of themselves in my forehead.
She carted us into the car and drove us to a motel not too far away. It was the first time I met my father since I was taken as an infant. He looked different to everyone I was around. He wasn’t dark skinned like us, nor did he have the kaka brown eyes like everyone else. He was tall, and white with eyes that were blue like the sea. I remember eating cookies and having milk tea playing on the floor in his motel room while he spoke with my mother and siblings. Shortly after we rode with him to the airport. He was leaving.
I had spent the last couple of hours warming up to this man, only to learn he was leaving again. He had spent the entire time telling me to call him dad, and the last thing I remember was hugging him around his legs, crying for him not to leave. If that wasn’t enough of a kick in the gut, the biggest blow was yet to come.
“I have to go now, I have another princess waiting for me at home.” I immediately stopped crying. For some reason, my little five year old mind was able to make sense of that in an instant. My tears continued to fall, but this time it was because I was mad. I was mad at him, and jealous. I think this was the first time I had ever felt jealousy and remembered it, because I wanted him to choose to stay with me. I wanted to be his princess. I wasn’t.
The drive home was typical. Everyone was trying to stop me from crying, and my new mother tells everyone to make sure nana doesn’t find out I was crying for him. We were not to tell her or anyone where we went that day. That was the last time I had seen my birth father for another twenty five years at least.
As months went by, that experience helped me to realize a few things. That my old parents weren’t really my parents, but were in fact my grandparents. Why was I having flash backs of being breastfed by my grandmother then?
It wasn’t until my adult years that she came out and told me that she had got me at barely three months old, and I wouldn’t stop crying. I was breastfed by my mother in Australia, when grandad came to get me. My grandmother didn’t know what to do, so her breast was the only comfort she had that worked. In those days I am not too sure if pacifiers were a common thing, and if they were, my island parents wouldn’t have known about it.
Although it wasn’t a blatant deceptive act on my grandmothers part. Looking back, I was deceived since the day I left my birth parents. To think my mother was my aunt for so long, but when my brothers who still lived with her came to visit, I was told they were my brothers, which they were. They didn’t live with us though, but my little socially undeveloped brain didn’t make the connection back then.
My earliest memories of infancy, always stayed in my mind. Being nursed by my old mum with the wrinkly brown skin. I didn’t feel betrayed by her, but more so from my birth parents. They didn’t have the courage to stay in my life, although my mother lived down the other end of the same street! She didn’t really have the time to be part of my life. It is that deception, of not being acknowledged at the least, that defines the deception and betrayal I experienced as a child. One of many traumas to come that indirectly, and unknowingly became the beginning of a life of struggle and fighting to be seen.
Being awake to the knowledge that I had a white father, and my mother only cared for my brothers down the street, my childhood became a series of unanswered questions that nobody could answer, because I dare not ask them aloud. Why did my dad abandon me? Why did my mother do the same? Why does my grandmother moan about caring for me and curses my parents for not helping, when her daughter lived down the street?
Why was is that when I got my period for the first time, my grandmother thought I was the devil and didn’t want anything to do with it? Why did my birth mother not come to help me when I rang her from the toilet, horrified that I was bleeding out my butt?
All these questions continued to build up as time went by. My childhood was a series of what I would later realize as a recipe for the perfect childhood trauma. Well the start of it anyway.
The hard truth 