Automatic Writing

It’s the morning, my body shivering with shock at being forced out of sleep. Trembling in the cold white light, clinging to the dressing gown draped around my bones.
I’ve had to get up early, as if I had a job, to get the train into town and sit with K. while M. finishes her tattoo. I don’t know if M. is expecting me to be there, I don’t know what our relationship is now, our friendship a little ragged around the edges with time and distance. I’m back in town but no happier than ever, stapled down in suburbia with the weight of security and stability, forced to stare into my soul. So far I am avoiding eye contact.

I can feel tears building in my chest. I don’t want to be a weight around everyone’s necks, bringing up my unhappiness at every opportunity, beaming it out through my face. I would rather not go today, but all the advice says to push through, go through the motions. I’ve absorbed a lot of advice over time, questionnaires asking whether I enjoy doing things less than I used to. The past tense isn’t relevant here, not usually - there isn’t a bright, cheerful previous instance of myself for me to claw my way back to. The only way is forward, into the void. 

I’ve been dancing around the edges of something lately, my childhood I think, perhaps my present. Something squats on my brain, something big that I can’t think round. A memory, maybe, or a realization. I’ve put up walls around it. It’s blotting out the sky. As I try to approach it, investigating tentatively, my heart starts to race. My mind doesn’t want to go near it, it doesn’t want to be poked, it digs in deeper, claws sinking into its wrinkled throne. I have the feeling it’s masquerading as something banal, it’s something obvious that I just don’t want to see. It’s hiding behind a completely opaque black block, like it’s been censored for TV, and it’s big. 

DV Training

I’ve been taking a training course about domestic violence in order to volunteer for a charity. The realisations have been dawning over the last few years that I didn’t just blink into being as a teenager, that I didn’t manufacture my depressive personality by myself, out of nowhere. I suppose in a way I never really felt like a child. I didn’t remember much, just flashes here and there. It was more convenient to forget, when we moved to live with our father when I was nine or ten - that became our life, never mind the life from before. Sentience only seems to dawn around that time. 

The second week of our domestic violence training was about children. I had a hangover so was already feeling very fragile, an old friend and a couple of bottles of red wine made for feeling pretty awful in the morning.
The list spoke to me.

The wide range of effects children might experience in circumstances of domestic violence can include any of the following behavioural, physical and psychological effects, which may be short-term and/or long term:

There were a few that didn’t apply - physical injuries, broken bones. Then, with some others removed which didn’t apply:

Being protective of mother, being protective of siblings, advanced in maturity, advanced in sense of responsibility, introversion, withdrawn, feeling guilty, secretive, silent, self-blame, bitterness, fear, insecurity, tension, truanting, difficulties at school, disruptions in schooling, disruptions in living arrangements, emotional confusion in relation to parents, bed-wetting, nightmares, sleep disturbances, eating difficulties/disorders, self-harm, weight loss, sadness, depression, social isolation, difficulty in trusting others, low self-esteem, poor social skills, highly developed social skills, ability to negotiate difficult situations, drug use, alcohol use, petty theft and shop lifting, frightened...

I might have been reading a list of my own historical symptoms.

Children will almost certainly be affected if their mother has been subjected to domestic violence. Some will have witnessed or heard the abuse; all will sense their mother is unhappy.