Parents: Are you helping or hurting your child?

I was born by caesarean at least a month early, a good kilogram underweight, something doctors scheduled to happen despite my mum's protests and then my dad signed off on. Because you know, men had authority.

Not surprisingly my mum became angry and depressed. I am the youngest in my family, my sister is 5 years older, my brother 4. While not exactly Irish twins, the two were close enough in age they might as well have been. My dad worked as an engineer while my mum stayed at home looking after us.

I was 6 months old when my dad's father, one of my grandfathers, died in a nasty accident. We now believe his hearing may have been a cause. The inheritance went to my dad and his two brothers. My grandma didn't get anything as far as I know but could live in her house for as long as she liked and had a widow pension. Like many women of her generation, she simply accepted her lot.

My parents were renting at the time so my dad bought an empty lot of land and began to set about building the family home. He did it the most expensive way possible. Had a massive 5 bedroom modern monster architecturally designed to fit with his engineering ego.  Lots of open space, high ceilings and windows. Not surprisingly it ran over budget and over time.

I have vague memories of the family dog who apparently followed me everywhere.  My mum tells a story where she couldn't find me so she called for the dog, then followed him as he made his way back to me.  He took her outside, to the front of the house where she found me crawling along the verge, beside the road, cars honking as they drove past.  That's probably everything you need to know about my mother right there.

It was the day after my 4th birthday that we moved in. The red brick walls and gray cement binding them were unpainted. The bathrooms and laundry were tiled but the rest of the floor was a concrete slab. The first night there was no power. My birthday is in June which in Australia is the first month of winter. In order to save a few extra dollars, my parents chose a small fireplace to heat the massive house. It's like expecting a candle to boil a soup pot full of water.  Camp gas burners were used to cook.

For the day after my 4th birthday I got to sleep in a strange bed in a strange bedroom all by myself, my parents half a house away in what was at the time a scary, big maze with no light, surrounded by raw brick walls and a concrete slab floor.

I had nightmares about falling out of bed and cracking my head on the floor because no one even bothered to put a rug or even a piece of second hand carpet under my bed. It was winter, I think I had sheets, one blanket and a flimsy bed spread. There was no garden, only some play equipment in the giant sandpit that the house sat on. Furniture and furnishings were very basic and cheap. 

I know my sister at least has memories of mum playing with her before the house, I have never had a particularly close relationship with my brother so I'm not sure if he does. Being so much younger than either, I have lost count of the times I got told to go away, that I was too young by both of them.

I have been told that when I was born my sister was allowed to treat me as basically a living doll, helping me to do everything. Unfortunately this habit of babying me and presuming that I need her help and that as the older sister she knows what I need better than I do continues to persist.

I do not know my brother well enough to ask him if he resented or was jealous of this baby sister or if he'd suffered his own moment of abandonment and rejection as all the attention went to me. I am unsure if he deliberately or instinctively checked out of this situation years ago.

I don't have memories of a mother who played with me. With my dad at work and my siblings old enough for school, I have memories of a mother with a paintbrush in hand, slowly turning brick walls off-white. I go from being in a prison box to the white room they use to use for mental prisoners (If you've ever toured the Fremantle Prison you probably have been into that area.)

I have vague memories of trying to 'help', because this is what little kids do right? I don’t have memories of what likely happened, mum shooing me away because like any 4 year old, my attempts to help probably just made things harder for her. I don't know for sure but I suspect this is where my issues of abandonment, neglect, isolation and rejection started. Mum didn't have any time for me beyond the basics.

The dog by the way? I think I was about 6 when he caught a perfectly preventable virus called distemper. He hadn't had his yearly jab because mum couldn't afford it. That might be true but my mum's negligence towards animals is even more pronounced then the level she gives her kids. He had to be put down.  He won't be the last animal my mum neglects.

I am not sure when the arguments started, my older sister is quite smart and very head strong. My Dad has told me on a number of occasions that he felt like my older sister needed to be challenged. In hindsight that is a remarkably horrible thing to do to your own child. Asking a child at such a young age to 'debate' their ideas, to have them questioned and have to defend and explain them? What the actual fuck?

My mum got drawn into the role of peacekeeper and piggy in the middle and her attempts to defend her own child never amounted to much. I am pretty sure it was at that stage I decided to avoid attention and fade into the background as much as possible. Become very unremarkable.

My Dad was about in his mid 20's when he got hearing aids. I'm not good at maths but he has had them for as long as I can remember. Hearing aids were a lot more expensive back then. I have been told that my dads mum, my grandmother gave my mum heaps about expecting an impaired father to work.

My grandmother has told my mum a lot of things over the years, raised old school, a child in a family of ten, leaving school at 14 to get married and have kids, in the 40 years of been a widow in which she could have done anything she wanted, she has chosen to remain an uneducated gossip who knows the answer the everything. I am beginning to see a family pattern here.

My mum would have preferred to stay at home to look after her kids but eventually shoving me into my sisters cast-offs and unable to afford to buy us much of anything while there was still a massive mortgage to pay off and the threat of my Dad possible been fired because of his hearing convinced her to go back to work. At a time where working mothers were still frowned upon.

Luckily she had a nursing degree and eventually got a job in Aged care while I started the 2nd grade. Mornings become rushed chaos getting 3 kids ready to school so then she could go to work. My siblings walked with me to school, keep an eye on your little sis. My sister, at about 11, was in her last year of Primary school. Both my siblings got grade As and Bs and did well at school. I was an average grade C or even sometimes D. I now think of this as a sign someone should have picked up on.

My Dad is a bit of a snob, I am told the parents of his father were snobs by my grandmother. The family had money at some point. The local highschool had a 'bad' reputation, my sister was smart enough to get recommended into a 'better' highschool. A good hour away, more by bus. 5am starts and home by about 5pm. At about the age of 8 I basically lost the only other family member in my life I had any sort of relationship with.

Did I tell you my parents moved from S.A. to W.A sometime after my sister was born?  No aunties and uncles and grandparents and cousins for us, oh no.  I now see this as a red flag, isolating my mum from her family, friends and support network.  Us kids never really got to have one.

Speaking of snobs, my Dad's hobby was sailing which anyone can tell you can be a bit of a money pit. I have no idea how old I was when he bought a yacht, the first of many. Oh yes, despite wasting money on his massive monster house and having to fork out however much on hearing aids, he still purchased a yacht, initially he could moor it for free I think.

Weekends more often than not meant being shoved into life jackets to get seasick while trusting a Dad who if he fell overboard would lose his hearing aids. Oh joy. I'm pretty sure this only happened because it gave Dad free rein to shout orders, expect them to be obeyed and treat everyone else like crap. His own inability to handle other people telling him what to do is probably why he rarely just volunteered as crew on someone else's boat. The ability to boast about his boat and sailing and make himself seem important is probably why he didn't just hire a dinghy or something.

The amount of money my Dad has wasted over the years all the while preaching us kids about responsibility, being sensible and practical and so forth is probably why I've mentally labelled my Dad as the biggest liar and hypocrite I know.

My brother sort of stepped up the next year as substitute caretaker but he was smart enough to get into the 'better' highschool as well. So I was left completely alone to both my parents mercy since about the age of 9. Both my siblings admit this school was probably equally as bad as the one they would have gotten sent to otherwise. Distance though meant that my Dad never heard anything 'bad' about it.

I was the C grade average student but by the time I made it to high school other options were being built. I was only given 2 options, follow my siblings to a school that was over an hour away or a closer, private Anglican school. The 'bad' school was never really an option, none of the other schools that either had been built or were going to be built ever got mentioned.  My parents aren't religious by the way, the only time I ever remember them stepping in a church was for a wedding or for choir practice or something. At least they got one thing right.

Neither one ever thought about the fact that if I had received any level of attention and support during my primary school years then maybe I could have done better then C grade or that if they put some time into me, that I could be as good as my siblings were. No, it's simpler and easier to pay a private school lots of money to deal with the child for you. So you don't have to make any sort of effort whatsoever.

Plus you get to look like a pretentious snob to your 'friends'. Plus you get to hold it over your child's head about the amount of money spent and give talks about family obligations and that you somehow owe your parents for being largely absent in your life because their job, career, hobby, house and money is more important than you are.

Oh I am not leaving my mother out of this, for allowing this series of events to occur. Oh no, not the woman who values appearances over the well-being of her own children. Not the woman who spent more time keeping the house clean and tidy for appearances and shooing her nuisance child away then interacting with them.

Not the woman who pulled my hair while shoving a brush through it because, oh the terror of been seen in public with a messy child. Because of being too impatient and too busy and too hurried to take her child into any sort of consideration. Never mind planning ahead, allowing for time, or just being slightly late, my mum is very much a 'right now' sort of person.

The mother who shoved me into showers and scrubbed me clean herself, who hauled me around, yanked clothes off me so she could put better, cleaner clothes on. Who forced me to stand still while she scrubbed at my face, or humiliated me using a wet cloth to get stains out of a top, in front of strangers, friends, my own family, leaving me walking around in public with wet patches. Creased tops were pulled off me so they could be ironed, every pimple remarked upon, the only time I could get any level of praise out of her was when I caved in and did what she wanted.

I once put on the sluttist outfit I could and went to a bar. I never hated praise more than in that moment. I still have a very bad relationship when it comes to the subject of praise. I am still frankly surprised I didn't become anorexic or something, I got close. I spent a summer holiday once weighing myself every day. Luckily I got bored of it.

When people talk about being assaulted by their parents they normally talk about sexual assault or the kind of physical assault that involves been hit, slapped, punished.  Normally it's the father but sometimes the mother.  I actually think that if you include the sort of abuse my mother subjected me too, the rate of child abuse perpetrated by mothers would increase substantially.  Because it's easily disguised and excused by society telling each other that the mother is simply tired, overwhelmed, stressed. 

 When we think about children being assaulted by their parents, we tend to think of sexual assault or when we think about physical assault we think in terms of being slapped, smacked, hit, punished.   We don't tend to think that a 'helpful' mother is also causing physical abuse, mental abuse and emotional abuse. 

I think we need to take a better look at this issue because even though mothers are stressed, tired, overwhelmed because of the ridiculous amount of social pressure put on them, it still isn't an excuse and it's still abuse.  Sure you do sometimes need a child to do things they don't want to do but where exactly do we draw that line?

My story doesn't end here though, this is just a dose of my childhood. Stay tuned for the next article where I go into my highschool years and early adulthood.