I sit on the couch today trying to stitch together pieces of a childhood that feels less like a solid foundation and more like a series of scattered blurry photographs. Sometimes I look at these fragments and wonder if they are even real or if my mind just created them to cope with the sheer unpredictability of it all. That is what growing up in constant upheaval does to you because it makes you question your own reality.
My very first memory of my mother starts in the dark when I was only five years old. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of fighting, not screaming but those sharp hushed tones that carry a weight far heavier than shouting. I crept toward the sound and watched from the doorway. My dad was packing a suitcase. But he was not just packing his things, he was packing ours too. Me and my two sisters. I remember the visceral panic of that moment whimpering aloud because a five year old cannot comprehend the sudden fracturing of her world. When they noticed me I bolted for the bathroom. My mother caught up to me pulling me into a crying desperate hug while my dad wiped the hair from my face. They tried to comfort me telling me nothing was wrong before tucking me back into bed.
But everything was wrong.
The next morning was absolute chaos. The older kids were already gone, maybe to school or maybe just removed from the immediate fallout. The rest of us had slept in completely unprepared but my parents hurriedly dressed us three girls, told us we were going on a trip with Dad, grabbed our already packed bags and drove away. We left Pennsylvania and drove all the way to Wisconsin. After we left, my mother stayed with the man she had cheated on my dad with.
Later I would hear the rumors. Rumors that my dad had met a woman online. Rumors that the woman living in the apartment below us who babysat us while my dad worked the third shift was her. It makes a twisted kind of sense when I look back because my dad was always desperately seeking a family. Around this time we started occasionally dipping our toes into the Apostolic Pentecostal church though dad’s work schedule kept it irregular.
That apartment in Wisconsin is mostly a blank space in my mind. But I distinctly remember the winter night after I turned six. My dad packed us up yet again and drove us right back to Pennsylvania. The narrative shifted depending on who was telling it. My mother claimed she missed her kids while my dad claimed it was pure manipulation and that she had hinted at making things work. But the truth was she never actually told my dad she wanted to make things work. She had simply split up with the guy she cheated with. My dad just heard about the breakup and took it upon himself to pack us up and head back, holding onto his own hope that they could patch things up. Whatever that hope was it did not last. My mother says that shortly after we came back, she returned home from work one day to find my dad had packed us up and left again. Soon enough we were packed up for Wisconsin a final time.
That return to Wisconsin changed everything. We started going to church regularly and my dad relentlessly pursued the woman who would eventually become my stepmother. She likes to brag now about how she was not even attracted to the skinny twig chasing her but he would not let up. Boy do I wish he had. If I could build a time machine I would go back and stop him from ever choosing her. She ruined my life.
When I look back at Pennsylvania the memories I do have are small ordinary childhood snippets completely disconnected from the storm surrounding them. I remember falling off a trampoline. I remember playing barefoot in a toy playhouse in the yard and stepping on a bee. I remember the absurd irritating things older siblings do like my older half brother farting on us and our stuffed animals. I remember my older half sister playing Mancala with me in some vague building, maybe a daycare where she dropped us off, and the rare moments we all got to play games on the older kids’ PlayStation.
The therapist looked at me and asked “How does it feel to look at those fragments?”
I told her “It feels exhausting. When your early life is a revolving door of packing suitcases, shifting states, changing stepmothers and conflicting parental stories your brain protects itself by blurring the edges.”
These fragmented memories do more than just blur my past because they distort my present. They make it incredibly hard for me to believe in love. How do you learn a language if the people teaching you only speak in contradictions?
My mother tells me she loves me. She says she always did. But how am I supposed to reconcile that word love with a reality where she let us go and did not speak to us for ten whole years? Ten years of pivotal moments, of growing up, of needing a mother met with absolute silence.
Then there is my father. He says he loved me too. Yet he is the one who engineered and contributed to a terrible childhood, dragging us back and forth between states, chasing a life that ultimately ruined mine. If love is letting your children go for a decade and if love is subjecting your children to chaos and a toxic upbringing then what actually is it?
Sitting on this couch I find myself questioning whether or not I even know how to love. It feels like a test I am expected to pass without ever being given the study guide. I have zero first hand experience with healthy unconditional safe love from the people who were supposed to provide it first. Instead I was given conditional presence, long silences and a revolving door of upheaval.
It is terrifying to realize that the people who raised you did not just give you a painful childhood. They left you wondering if you are fundamentally broken in your capacity to connect. That deep doubt bled into a different kind of isolation outside the home. It became the isolation of being the girl who did not know how to make friends. When your home life is a storm of conflicting stories, finding solid ground on the school playground feels nearly impossible.
Even my school history is fractured by the people who tell it. My mother says I went to daycare in Pennsylvania but never started school there, though she admits her own memories are fuzzy. My stepmother claims I had to start kindergarten twice, once in Pennsylvania and once in Wisconsin, blaming it entirely on what she called my selfish birth mother. Then after first grade I was uprooted yet again. My stepmother had an autistic son my age who was not getting the right support at my school, so I was transferred to his school. Just like that, my education and my surroundings were completely secondary to the needs of everyone else.
With all that moving around, I never learned how to connect with other kids. I remember spending my second grade lunch periods sitting with my teacher, bonding with an adult because the kids my own age felt like a foreign country. I did have one friend, but her presence was fleeting. She was homeschooled off and on throughout the years, so she came and went as she pleased. We bonded deeply when she was actually there, but the consistency just was not there.
There were a few other people I talked to at school, but those interactions never blossomed into real friendships. I was always trapped inside my own head, questioning my worth as a friend and doubting my ability to even be a good one. When you are taught at home that you are a burden, you assume you will be a burden to your peers too.
Even if I had overcome that inner doubt, my stepmother made sure any outside connection was cut off. She strictly forbade me from hanging out after school. I was trapped. I could not form lasting relationships within the classroom setting alone, and the moment the final bell rang, I was forced back into a home that offered zero comfort. I was left stranded between a school where I felt like an outsider and a house that felt like a prison.
When I finished speaking the room felt entirely still. The therapist looked at me and spoke.
“The exhaustion you feel is entirely valid because your brain has had to work overtime your entire life just to protect you from the instability. When a child is moved around like a chess piece to fit the changing lives of the adults, it makes complete sense that school and friendships felt like a foreign land. You were never given a safe anchor, so you logically assumed you had to protect yourself by keeping everyone at a distance.”
She paused, her voice gentle when she addressed the doubt I have about love.
“You are looking at love through a broken lens that was handed to you by people who failed their responsibilities. Questioning your capacity to love does not mean you are broken or unable to form connections. It actually means the opposite. It means a deep part of you recognizes that ten years of silence and an upbringing full of chaos is not what love is supposed to look like. We are going to work on rewriting that dictionary definition together, step by step, because the little girl who survived that prison house deserves to find out what real safety feels like.”
samantha's Blog 
Leave a comment