Tulips
I'm forcing myself to write, to think, right now. What I want, and need, desperately,is to go away inside my head. It feels like, I'm stuck in molasses, I can barely move.
I have to write my way out of this somehow.
it has to do with tulips.
we used to grow them, when i was in kindergarten, out in the front yard. every morning as I walked out to the school bus in the spring, i stopped to smell the tulips, look at the dew gathered on them. They were so beautiful. Sometimes I took some to my teachers as the years went by.
My therapist has tulips in her office today. They are really beautiful but they have brought up so much, more feelings than I can handle, more sadness than I can deal with.
By the time I was in 1st grade, i was mixed up a lot. I was losing track of time, and I remember trying to keep track of time by watching the tulips. I learned about how long it took them to grow, how long til the flowers bloomed, how long they stayed open. I used those to measure the passing of days. I knew I'd lost track of time when the tulips would just be opening and then all of a sudden they were all gone. I knew when to expect the tulips in the spring. I desperately relied on their predictability.
When I was 8 years old, I cut for the 1st time. Outside, by the tulips. I remember standing there, looking down at the tulips, in the front yard, and looking at the blood on my finger, thinking "THIS is how I can measure the days; THIS is the way to do it. THIS is how I'll remember right now, and not forget it (I was always forgetting things, always being told I did something that I didn't do, never remembering what I was supposed to-- I faked it a lot). I told myself "this is how I can always remember that its this Wednesday in 19___ and I'm standing here looking at the tulips and watching the blood and I know I'm real right now and I wont forget this." And I was so careful to not let the blood get on the tulips.
Why was I so screwed up when I was not even 8 years old? What was WRONG with me? What in the world was going on in my head that in 1st and 2nd grade I was trying to keep track of time with tulips and marking time by cutting? What was wrong with a clock? Why couldn't I just be a normal kid?
Posted by pilgrim | Filed under:
Oh Sweet Pilgrim,
I'm glad you remembered and wrote about the tulips.
It's terrible to think of you at 8 cutting your finger, even though you just did it to try to track time (maybe like a string around the finger but less likely to have to be explained).
I've been thinking too, & I'd thought our 5 year old had 'become' at 5 and the abuse she speaks of happened thereafter; it's only after her writing of going into the wall that I see it was then she 'left', she had 'been' from some young age until then which makes her memories of abuse even more disturbing....a little girl under 5 was so hurt.
Seems that when she went away others came and 'shared' your life with you...
It's beautiful and sad that the tulips were so special, yet they 'showed' you the lost time.
Sweet Pilgrim, I wish for you only tulips that bring joy for your future.
Love, Judy