Early childhood (before the divorce)

It has been a while since my initial post about the bad start I had in life. The addiction that I had to deal with as an infant, which in turn led to more (possibly permanent) physical problems. But if this rough start was not enough, there were many more events that all managed to take root in my mind and soul and damaged me in one way or another.

The next big event I am sharing today took place in my early childhood (before the divorce of my parents when I was aged three and a half years). The relationship between my parents had only cooled. This can of course be attributed to my father’s true sexual preference being not with women, but having a baby that cried a lot and a wife that constantly played victim was of course not helping their already fragile standing.

I do not know exactly what happened between my parents that led up to this particular fight, but because the fights got so bad, my father at one point picked me up (I was still very small) and headed out to the neighbors, both for him to calm down and to take me out of an unhealthy situation. My mother was in all states at that point and began to think of things that simply were not happening (like that my father had taken me away from her and she had no idea why). She took about every pill she could find in the medicine cabinet in her fit of panic and after receiving the medical care she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital (on her own initiative and on an open ward).

My father received help from a family careworker that came to our home from nine to five to take care of me while my father worked, so he arranged with his work that he would arrive at ten and leave at 4 (he worked a deskjob in the IT-sector for a big compuer company). But his colleagues began to complain that he essentially worked two hours less than them, so to avoide escalation, he had to find another sollution.

Then a social worker suggested that I would be taken up into a foster home during the workweek and that my father would pick me up Friday evenings and take me back Sunday evenings to spend the weekends with me. It was of course not ideal and the fact that the Social Worker knew the foster family that would take me in on a deep personal level is reason to raise your eyebrows (knowing what I know now).

But my father had no choice. He had a mortgage to pay and a family to support. So I ended up in foster care for fice days a week. That was, until a dispute rose between my father and the forster family about a holiday that granted my father with a long weekend off. He announced on time that he would pick me up Thursday evening and take me back Monday evening, since he had the Friday and the Monday off as well. But the foster family protested and gave my father a hard time. They refused to agree to this change of schedule and that was reason enough for my father to be very alarmed. That was the moment that my father essentially said, “screw that, she is not coming back at all!” called in sick from work and took care of me himself until my mother came back from the psychiatric hospital.

He recently told me that looking back at these strange circumstanced under which I had been mediated into that foster family and how they seemed very possessive of me in regards of my father, he thought that they were possibly trying to play it into a permanent, legal adoption. They were unable to have their own children and now they had an adorable little girl with an unstable mother that tried to unalive herself and a father that worked and could not take care of her during the workdays. Then the longer they took care of me, the more likely it would have been that I would have “rooted” with them and then they had their claws in me. As this was brought to my attention, it all felt very icky and off and I am thankful that my father stood his ground when they refused to cooperate with him on his extended holiday weekend.

I could have very well ended up growing up in a family that had essentially stolen me from me own family. Even if my family was not exactly a model family either…