Love Me, Feed Me, Never Leave Me

Isn’t it funny how we see other people’s problems so clearly? I kept on looking at people and thinking that they had abandonment issues. In my head, the issues were very obvious whenever it was a matter of somebody coming from a family where the parents divorced, and the parents had remarried, had other children, and spent more time with their new family and did not show up for their children from their previous marriage. Also, in families where one of the parents had left them or had died. I could see them so clearly, and I tended to gravitate towards these people. Looking at my dating life, most of the people I dated came from these types of families. It activated my need to save them and give them stability. Well, imagine being in the middle of a therapy session and the therapist saying: “The woman that you have become needs to comfort the abandoned girl you used to be.” I was taken aback, and I didn’t really know why she would be saying that.

After the session, I kept on thinking about it, and I couldn’t really understand what she meant. Surely, others had this problem but me? Both my parents have been together and married for over 46 years now. How could I have abandonment issues when my parents were physically with me? As one does, I went to Google for answers. I kept reading, and the more I read, the more I could see how that would be me. I understood how those emotions came to be and how they affect my life.

The first episode that came to mind was my maternal grandfather’s death. He had been such a great influence in my life. My grandmother would pick me up from school, and she would take me to her house. There, my grandfather would just happen to have an already prepared grapefruit with sugar. He always said that he had prepared it for himself, but he would always give it up for me. He had been in the army, and he had been singing as backup at a variety theatre; he knew loads of stories and songs that he would perform for me whenever I had to take my afternoon nap. He was in his seventies, and I was 7 or 8; sometimes he would fall asleep before me. I would sneak out of bed and proudly tell Grandma that I put Grandad to sleep. I can remember he was so calm, and nothing really seemed to get him upset. He felt safe, and he always had time for me. He saw me, and he made space for me. He never told me how I should be. I never felt judged or constricted, and I felt that when he was with me, he was truly with me, and I was the centre of attention. I would love to do errands with him and go buy bread. We would always get an extra one that we would eat on the way home. To this day, my favourite smell in the world is that of freshly baked bread. Unfortunately, my grandad died when I was nine, and it left an impact on all of us. My grandma felt alone and was crying about how he had left her, my mom felt like she lost her best friend, my dad felt he lost a mentor and a father; he had left a huge gap behind that we didn’t quite know how to fill. The events around the death were retold, but the emotions around it were never discussed, not unless it was my mom and dad talking about how they felt when they found out certain things.

A big change came at the funeral. I was crying on the day, and I can remember my mother saying,” Stop crying. Just stop crying!” My dad tried to comfort me and get me out of the way, and then we were left in the house, as it was considered that seeing the burial might be too much. No daily grapefruit after that. No stories or songs for nap time, more than that, my dad took over on that side, and he would become extremely triggered by me not going to bed. I got spanked for it. I would essentially cry myself to sleep. It didn’t feel safe anymore. I didn’t quite feel seen or understood. Everything screamed that I am not important.

Another thing that stood out was being around while my parents were fighting. My dad always felt that he was in competition with his daughters, and when something happened, he felt that my mom was always taking our side or trying to hide things from him in some sort of conspiracy against him. After some fighting, he would state that he would pack up and leave her with her daughters, after which he would storm out of whatever room we were in, and he would go into his room to sulk. Because this happened so often, it brought up feelings of shame that it was because of us that our parents were fighting, and one day, my dad might actually leave.

My sister and I were sent to the countryside to stay with my dad’s parents during the summer. We didn’t really like to go. If my mom’s parents were calm but stern, my dad’s parents were troubled, and there was always tension. There were not a lot of children to play with. There were minimal comforts like the ones we had in Bucharest. The store was miles away. They had a black and white TV and only two channels because this was a Romanian village in the nineties. We were not able to talk to our parents because there were no mobile phones, and our grandparents didn’t have a landline in the house; we would not see them for long stretches of time. I kept on saying that I didn’t want to go, and my dad said that I need to go because I was anaemic, and this is where I eat super healthy, and everything is fresh, and I can gain weight. Now, fair enough, I have good memories about going into the garden and just eating fresh vegetables straight from the source. I would climb trees and pick fruit. My gran had dogs, pigs, chickens, and ducks, and I could play with all of them. I remember going to my dad’s cousin and getting fresh honey because he had beehives. I would go camping with my grandad as he was protecting his corn crops from wild boars. We would have campfires, and he would tell us stories. But the fact remained that my parents weren’t there, and I had no way of going back, and they said it was for my own good. Recently, I mentioned to my mom about my being anaemic. She seemed puzzled as to what I meant, as this was such a big thing in my childhood, and my dad kept on mentioning it, so I told her about the bloodwork that I remembered, the stories and being sent away. She just shrugged it off that those were just my yearly bloodwork, and I was not anaemic. It just truly feels like history is getting rewritten, and I just can’t understand if I am misremembering or if I made it up to be more than it was in my head. I can’t tell if I were lied to just to comply and go, not that I would have had a choice anyway, or if this is just my mom thinking that I am trying to get attention by appearing feeble.

My sister and I were talking, and the question arose: “What is worse? For the parent to leave and never come back, or for the parent to be in the house and reject you at every turn?” We have seen how it is by example when a parent leaves, so, from what we know, while one has the same experiences of abandonment and feeling unworthy, they can go through the five stages of grief and accept that the person is not coming back. In our case, we have been stuck in the loop because we had been given some hope that if we behaved a certain way, we might be accepted, and then it was pulled away from us, and we would start the process all over again. We got in this loop of feeling that we need to hide parts of us, people, please, try to avoid conflict. We looked at who our parents were as well. My grandad was always leaving my dad and my gran and being absent for days, either having affairs with other women or drinking. My mom felt abandoned as well because her mom was quite cold. Their parents' issues became our parents’ issues, and they passed them on to us.

Having this start from my family started to create a sense of distrust in others and their intentions. I started to think that once people saw who I really was, they would leave me. That people don’t really like me, and they are only saying that so they can manipulate me. It didn’t help that I had friends whom I thought I could trust, and they chose to disclose my secrets to others or stab me in the back when they could. I started to monitor for signs of them preparing to leave me, and I took every sign of them distancing themselves as a sign of not liking me anymore. It didn’t help that my dad kept on repeating that one can’t trust people and that it is only family you can trust, and people will take advantage of you at any chance they get. It just felt like, regardless of how much I tried, I just couldn’t create connections that were deep and meaningful. Look at my friend group, and none of them is childhood friends or friends from university. My oldest friends tend to be people that I have met after I started work, after I moved away from home, and I could have the relationships that I wanted to have without my parents’ feedback attached or their influence.

Last but not least on the list is romantic relationships. These are an absolute minefield for my abandonment issues. I hate being single because I am afraid to be alone, and then one starts dating, but I don’t trust anybody because my track record and my experience have shown that everybody leaves, and that men will say how special I am, how they don’t want to hurt me, and then they do. I look for people to save, and once I start to help them heal their issues and they become better versions of themselves, the relationship starts to go South, and they leave me believing that I was good enough when they were broken, but now that they are better, I am not good enough, and they are going to go find better. It is very much a Good Luck Chuck situation. What I found out because of therapy is that I am what they call a self-fulfilling prophecy. Is she a fortune teller? Is she a witch with a hump and a raven? Alas, no. I recognise and ignore red flags like a champ, and not wanting to be alone, I instantly look away, and I get attached to the person. I then start gaslighting myself, and I think that despite everything this person shows me, if I put enough time and effort, they will change and they will love me and be the person that they should be, and I start putting them on a pedestal. While this is happening, in the back of my head, I still keep the idea that this is not going to work out, and they are going to leave me. I also keep that person at arm’s length and prepare for a breakup at any time, thus not really allowing for a true connection. And after a while, the inevitable happens, the relationship breaks down, and they leave; the prophecy is fulfilled. I then take this as confirmation that I am not worth it. This is something that has taken me a lot of time and energy to understand and see how it all flows. This is the part that I struggle most with, and I am most vulnerable still.

As far as I can tell, the abandonment issue is the root of all evil, and everything else comes from this. There are so many things that came together to create this, enforce it, and maintain it. There are so many things that I refused to accept, and there are so many things that I didn’t see clearly and misrepresented to myself. I wish I could just say that I just read a book, then I hugged myself, and it is all better, but that is just not true. There are so many aspects that interconnect and work together to make up my core beliefs and the makeup of who I am and what I have become. There are decades of me believing these things, thoughts becoming beliefs and those beliefs becoming patterns of behaviour, that it will take some time to rebuild everything that I am. The start is to understand my story and how it affects my present. Accepting everything that was and see what caused it, grieve for it, accept it, and let it go. Learning to disconnect from my emotions and manage them correctly, analyse them and see where they come from, I can change behaviours. The road is long, but I will get there one step at a time. This is the only way that I can live the life that I want, have the fulfilment that I have always longed for and truly belong. It is scary, but one deep breath and away we go…