Living with fear

Fear was a huge part of my childhood. I don't have very many memories. I've always assumed it's because my brain was so focused on terror that it didn't lay many down. I was born by emergency C-Section (referred to by Mum as 'you almost killed me') and it sounds as if the trauma set me up for life. I'm told that at 3 days old I almost jumped out of the cot at the sound of a loud thunderclap. Having had my own babies, I guess that was probably one of Mum's highly exaggerated stories but there's no doubt that my early childhood was a daily struggle to cope with noises that other people often weren't even aware of. 

Back then, certain emergency vehicles had a siren which was like a high-pitched warble. I could feel this in my body before it was audible, and would stiffen like a pointer dog - eyes wide, hands over ears - long before my family heard anything. They knew what was coming though!

I don't think my super-acute hearing was ever seen as a possible sign of anything else. When I was about 3 or 4 I began complaining of not hearing. Mum took me to the doctor (he was called Dr Foster and for many years I thought he was THE Dr Foster - because, why wouldn't he be?) and he rather bad-temperedly syringed my ears with a forcible squirt of water. I can still feel how much it hurt, and remember his surprise when what Mum proudly described as 'a little finger-sized piece of wax' (how could it possibly have been that size, Mum?!) plopped into the drainage tray.

Mum's theory was that I had formed the wax to stop the noise, and I suppose she may have been right. My complaints that I couldn't see were put down to 'wanting glasses like the others' until at 6 I was finally tested and pronounced to have 'the worst eyes of the lot'. Or so Mum said. I took on her narrative of my life, so that I'm never sure if he few memories I do have are genuine subjective recall or an internalisation of Mum's version of events. 

I was frightened of so many things... the vacuum cleaner, the toilet, the bath (the body of water filled me with terror but the emptying of it, even more so). Loud noises. Random illnesses I'd heard people talking about. Imagined monsters. I was one of the children who had to be taken screaming out of the cinema when the witch appeared in Sleeping Beauty. And then there was Doctor Who, with the baddies morphing into my mind into my own special tormentor: the Yorkshire Dalek. This was the result of overhearing the conversations of my much older brothers and their friends, which ranged from Philosophy through Science and Maths and Music and presumably, language and dialect.

I also had a terrible dread of the moment someone had understood a point and said, "Ahhhh!" and if I realised a conversation was going that way I would tremble and cry. I couldn't explain this to anybody because I couldn't even think the word, let alone say it, so that must have been strange to witness.

It was horrible to live with constant fear and terror of the next sudden trigger, and there were many. Looking back I strongly suspect that much of it was the anxiety of Autism. I also think Mum was very much on the spectrum, probably also had long-term post-natal depression from earlier pregnancies before I 'nearly killed her' and it seems likely from things she said that she had perhaps been abused as a child. Add in losing two very close childhood friends in the War, and her inadequacy as a mother (mainly an inability to show us love in the ways we needed, and a personality which made relating to her very difficult), and she was never going to reach out with the type of parenting I needed. I wish I could talk to her now that I have so much more understanding of what was going on for both of us, but the truth is that she would never have had those conversations and so like many people, I go into later life with much unresolved and a need to put aside the need for closure - because I am never going to get it. 

However, I do stand in awe that she survived at all and I know as a teacher that most parents - even, perhaps especially the more inadequate ones - are doing the best they can with the cards they've been dealt. I'm sad that I didn't have these insights earlier, sad I never really had those conversations but... it is what it is, and sometimes that's where you have to draw the line, for the sake of sanity.

Mum used to fly into rages. I did myself. We clashed horribly and I have one very vivid memory from when I was still quite tiny, of her standing over me with murder in her eyes and thinking, "Mummy's going to kill me." I thought perhaps I had exaggerated the memory but it was confirmed by my sister, who did indeed intervene and try to pull her away, just as I remembered.

It helps to think that perhaps on both our parts, this Bad Temper was actually autistic overwhelm, a point of no return reached on a bad day. I felt this overwhelm a lot of the time, although I didn't know that was what it was. I have very vivid memories of being in the middle of the red mist and wishing someone would stop me, because I had no control at all. 

By then, I had developed Tickertape Synaesthesia (I only found out this was what it is a few years ago) and so I would literally see captions. I remember at around 4 lying on the sofa listening to my brother playing the piano, and seeing the word SHOWPAN (Chopin) floating in the air, beautiful and differently-coloured capital letters dancing gently to the music. 

I sometimes wonder if fear dominated my life to such an extent that it stunted my physical growth. Whether the wakeful nights damaged me in some way. How it would have been if someone had known that there might have been something else going on, and offered strategies or even just a simple explanation about how some brains hear and smell and see the world differently.

That would have been a huge ask in the 1960s though. 

Too huge an ask. So I lived with fear, and it seeped into every pore and took ownership of my every waking moment.