Category: childhood

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Early Years

This is the opening I’ve written for my submission to the APPG inquiry into dyspraxia. I know it will need editing – and the post is longer than usual, because I’ve included a poem.

I was born in 1954, and at the time of writing I am 66. I was diagnosed with dyspraxia less than two years ago, in October 2018, and am still coming to terms with understanding it and how it may have affected my personality and experience of life.

I am the youngest of three children, with a sister (six years older) and a brother (four). I’m sure my parents loved me and did their best for me as they saw it, I don’t think I was ever abused, physically or sexually, but I struggle to find any happy recollections of my childhood. I felt as though my parents and siblings belonged to a closed world of ‘big people’, a perfect family unit of four, but that somehow I was the odd one out, a spare part, surplus to requirements.

I was a shy and timid child, and found it hard to make friends. I was always small for my age and late in reaching puberty. All this made me ripe for bullying – not so much the physical kinds, but the verbal, psychological kind, mostly from other girls, but also from my brother and his friends (unlike me, he was charming and popular, and still is), occasionally my father, and later my brother-in-law. If I complained, I was told: ‘you’ve got no sense of humour’, ‘it’s only a bit of fun’ or ‘don’t take any notice and they’ll give up’. Somehow, it wasn’t the teasing that was a problem – it was my response to it.

Maybe none of this is directly related to dyspraxia, but it is part of the emotional landscape of my childhood. More significantly I was untidy, forgetful, clumsy, ‘cack-handed’ and constantly in trouble at home for all those reasons. I learned to be ashamed at a very early age, and it was constantly being reinforced. Sometimes it felt very unfair, and I became resentful and sulky, for which I was criticised even more. Two years ago, my brother gave me a present – a tee shirt with the slogan: ‘The third child is always the difficult one’. Oh how we laughed.

I was academically bright, always in the top stream, and in 1965 I passed the 11-plus and followed my siblings to the local grammar school. However, although I enjoyed learning, I don’t think I ever really ‘shone’ at school – maybe because due to my shyness I didn’t engage in class. I don’t remember any teachers taking a particular interest in me or encouraging me, even though (perhaps because) I rarely did anything to cause trouble. I was terrible at practical subjects and sport, but I got on with my academic work quietly, if a little slowly, and slipped under the radar. I was always a ‘good’ girl – except at home, where I was evidently nothing but a trial to my parents.

Here’s a poem about that time which I wrote a couple of years ago:

The Awkward One

I never learned to smile.
I never learned to play the happy fool,
to put them at their ease,
to read their minds.

So I became
the awkward one,
the difficult one.
I learned to be alone.
I never learned to make a friend,
I never learned the way
to make them love me.

I hated mirrors, and cameras,
I hated the plain, sulky face
they showed me.
I knew that face,
with its curtain of straggly hair,
and that skinny body,
would never be loved.

I never learned to turn on the charm.
I had no charm.
I never learned to play the game.
I turned inside myself,
became invisible,
played my own game.

© Linda Rushby 25 March 2017
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Untangling Dyspraxia

I was trying to think what I would write about this morning, then saw this post on the Dyspraxia Adults Facebook group and it got me going in reply… also helped that what they were asking about was something that was already on my mind.

I didn’t get my Dyspraxia diagnosis until I was 42 years old when I was doing a masters at university… The university gave me a lap top to support me through the course but no human support.
I am 49 now and have never managed to unpick what issues I experience are down to my dyspraxia and what are just my personality … I would very much like to know what I should be seeking support for and what I should be accepting as part of my personality.

Here’s my reply:

I was diagnosed with dyspraxia at the age of 64. It’s taken me almost two years to start to really engage with it, and, like you, to try and sort out what is down to my dyspraxia and what my underlying personality.

It seems to me, looking back over my life, that so many things I’ve always considered part of who I am (social anxiety, interacting with people, untidiness, forgetfulness, always being late, inability to make decisions, not being able to finish things without giving up, self loathing etc etc etc) can be traced back either directly to dyspraxia or to the way it was dealt with (ie not at all) during my childhood and adolescence – in fact pretty much my whole sixty-plus years worth of life. In other words, my ‘personality’ has been completely shaped by it, and I don’t think it’s possible to separate the two – I’m sorry this probably isn’t very helpful!

Even since I’ve had the diagnosis, trying to tell other people – friends and family – about it doesn’t seem to help, because they don’t understand and either think this is just something I’ve read somewhere and/or that it’s just part of my being self-critical and ‘beating myself up’ and I’m not really ‘that bad’, or perhaps that I’m just making excuses for not listening or being chaotic.

But I have found being on this forum (which I only joined a few weeks ago) and reading about other people’s experiences and struggles is helping me to see that the problems I’ve lived with ARE real, not just excuses or down to “negative attiudes”.’

Well, I’ve just posted that, so don’t know what they will make of it.

What I was vaguely thinking about before that was that a few days ago I think I mentioned Taoism in passing at the end of a post, and was going to go back to that. The connection is me thinking about the ‘Path’ I’ve taken through life, and how it might have been different if I’d understood myself (or been understood) better when I was young. Because it seems I’ve been on this quest of self-discovery for a long time.

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Happy Families

Yesterday I wrote but didn’t post. Because… I’m not sure why, now. Except I was full of anger.

I still don’t really know how to write about this. But I don’t think that my previous approaches to dealing with the sadness and frustration of various times in my life by trying to forget them and/or blaming myself has been very helpful in the long run. I think I am slowly moving away from the shame/self-blame cycle, but that has unleashed a lot of anger and resentment, as I try to find and understand reasons for why that became my default way of dealing with difficult emotions.

By coincidence, on my Facebook ‘Memory’ feed this morning, up popped a photo of my family which I scanned and posted two years ago, but which was taken when I was twenty, at my niece’s christening: Mum and Dad, my brother and sister and their spouses, my nephew (still not quite two at that time) and the baby, and me. Of course, we are all happy and smiling, as everybody does for family photos (apart from my brother-in-law, who’s just that sort of bloke). I remember the dress I was wearing that day, pale green printed with a pattern of tiny cream roses, very pretty and totally unlike anything else I wore at the time (or do now). I remember buying it with Mum from C&A in Hull (pre-Humber Bridge days, so we must have gone round the long way, because I’m sure we didn’t take the ferry – those were the days, when a shopping trip to Hull was a day out because there were exciting shops like C&A which we didn’t have in Scunny.) Dad must have driven (because Mum never learned how), no doubt under sufferance and with a lot of bickering. But he would have done it because he loved us, even though I don’t ever remember that word being used until decades later, when life and time were drifting away from them both.

That dress later became my interview dress, when I was trying to find my way through to the next stage of my life. I don’t suppose there’s a decent photograph of it anywhere, which is a shame. There I am, just a face, hiding at the back between my brother and brother-in-law, and it seems significant that I was the odd one then, as I am now (though with two broken marriages in between) while both my siblings are still with the same partners, almost fifty years later. ‘Between’ boyfriends, as I usually was, smiling for the camera, but lonely, sad and scared of the future, about to embark on a summer full of heartbreak and a desperate search for love and stability which would precipitate me into my disastrous first marriage.

I weep now for that pretty girl, full of misery and shame rather than hope for the life to come, and quite unable to talk to any of those other people, her ‘nearest and dearest’.

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The Chain

Wrote this yesterday. Didn’t share it – chickened out. I’m sharing it now.

Rejoice, rejoice,
We have no choice
But to carry on.

Stephen Stills, 1970

Will I be doing my bit to support the economy by going shopping today? Probably not. I’ll stay at home and carry on doing what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months, thank you very much.

This morning I am lost for words, a strange experience for me. Poised on a knife edge between opening myself up and expressing my honest feelings and thinking of something else, less contentious to write about – at the same time as watching on YouTube – really watching for once, not just playing music as a background – Fleetwood Mack performing ‘The Chain’ live, witnessing the rage flashing and crackling around and between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, feeling it entering and reflecting my pre-existing mood of pent-up furious chaotic self-destructive energy.

Why? Why this morning, why today?

‘Where [am I] going now my love?
Where will [I] be tomorrow?
Will [it] bring me happiness?
Will [it] bring me sorrow?

Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams
What you do with what you see…

Stephen Stills

Woke up with my usual mixture of shame, self-hatred and despair, but instead of taking the path of trying to calm it down and hush it up, I decided to go the other way and face it all head on, and this is where it gets me. For once I can feel all that anger in my body, not just think it in my head.

This was happening in my therapy sessions towards the end of last year, when we were still meeting in person. Every week I would come into the room with whatever was in my mind, but before the end of the session I would be screaming and grinding my teeth and smacking my fists against the arms of the chair to stop myself from smacking them into the side of my head.

It would be easy to put this down to the repressed frustration and anger of a child whose voice was never heard; whose questions were met with impatience if not downright anger; whose feelings were never acknowledged without disapproval; who learnt that those feelings of sadness and loneliness and inability to mix with other children or interact with adults were her own fault, a wilful failure to play the ‘happy little girl’; who lived in a world of confusion, constantly trying to anticipate what was wanted of her, never knowing when she might unwittingly overstep some implicit boundary and suffer the consequences.

Maybe that is a true story, maybe not. I honestly don’t know. In last week’s therapy session, I said that I’m sure there must have been happy times in my childhood, but I can’t remember them, which to me feels very shameful, my failing that I should be so unfair on my parents, but the therapist’s reaction was that it was very sad.

After sixty years, after multiple attempts to resolve these questions, can I ever find a way out?  

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Light Bulb Moment

Back from Tesco and realised that I haven’t written yet and need to do that before breakfast.

In case you’re wondering why shopping day has moved from Tuesday to Friday, last week there were no four pint bottles of semi-skimmed, so I got a six instead, which didn’t run out till yesterday.

Although I wasn’t late waking up (around 5.30), the day seems to have slipped somehow – not helped by me sitting and staring at the screen.

Yesterday I was talking about my parents, and the apparent contradiction between love and tolerance for mankind in general but severe judgement and criticism of individuals, and inability or unwillingness to see things from someone else’s perspective – lack of empathy, I suppose you could call it. Here’s a really trivial example that popped into my head a while back when I was trying to remember my childhood. Like many of the generation who lived through the war, my parents were keen on saving electricity (for financial reasons, not environmental). So at certain times of year, while we were eating our breakfast in semi-gloom, comments would be made about our neighbours in the house behind, on the lines of: ‘They’ve got that light glaring out again! That house is lit up like a Christmas tree! They must be made of money!’ etc. Since I’ve been living in my present house, (where the kitchen is at the back and faces east, but is also quite long, so that the kitchen end can be quite dark, though the sun may be coming into the dining area) I’ve been reminded of those conversations. Yes, the back room of my childhood home faced south, so the neighbours in a comparable house in the next street ate their meals in a room that faced north – but for some reason it was okay for my parents to pass moral judgements on them for having the lights on.

Well, yes, I did say it was very trivial, but I also think it’s quite illuminating (sorry about that!) When it occurred to me, it was a bit of a light-bulb moment (really, I just can’t help myself!) For a start, what gave my Mum and Dad the right to make these moral judgements? And even if that was okay, there was a reason why the neighbours’ experience was different from ours, so weren’t they entitled to behave the way they did?

I often feel that much of the unhappiness in my life has come from this sense that there is a set of ‘rules’ that sometimes I break consciously (and live with a morbid fear of being ‘found out’ and ‘punished’ for), but often I don’t even know what they are, or where the boundaries are drawn, so at any moment I might overstep them without even realising it and bring all that judgement crashing down on myself. And if I am ‘caught out’, what might the punishment be?

Where could that sense of shame and fear possibly have come from?

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Tolerance and Judgement

What am I going to write about today? Every day it’s like this – well, maybe not every day, but most days, I don’t really have an idea and something gradually appears, but by that time I’ve almost used up my 500 words – sometimes I go back over the drivel and edit out chunks so I can squeeze in what I want to say, but I don’t go over the limit. And I don’t go back and read what I’ve written previously before I start again.

But I remember that yesterday I’d got as far as wondering about how we learn to relate to other people, what advice our parents give us – specifically, what advice mine gave me – and by implication, what we pass on to our children. Thinking back, it seems to me that most training of that kind came either through example and observation, or through being told off for breaches of some rule that I might or might not have been aware of. Come to think of it, those methods were often in conflict – following what the grown-ups did was not always appreciated, and neither did they always follow the rules they laid down for us. There’s another layer of complexity to unravel.

Something I will say for my parents, which wasn’t typical of the time, class and place in which I grew up, was they were very opposed to racism. Not that we encountered many non-white people living in Scunthorpe in the 60s, but in the abstract, all men deserved the same respect and opportunities and the Apartheid regime was an abomination – actually, it went beyond race, to class, to a very deep-seated chapel socialism and republicanism (Dad was raised a Methodist), a belief in fairness and equality that has also always underlain my own personal and political values – to this day, my party loyalties may have wandered over the years, but I have never voted Tory (god forbid any party further to the right) and never will.

But what I was going to say was that this universal respect for the brotherhood of man in the abstract (and I use that terminology deliberately, because I think the attitude towards women was more problematic) didn’t necessarily extend to individuals – I’m not talking about racism now, but a lack of tolerance when it came to other people’s behaviour and what we might now call ‘lifestyle choices’. Maybe that’s not so contradictory, I’m not sure now. What I mean is that although my parents were opposed to prejudice and intolerance of groups of people in the abstract, they could be extremely judgemental about the people we knew, whether family, neighbours or workmates, and they would quite happily exchange gossip and criticism for any minor infractions of ‘the rules’. Maybe that also came from Methodism, but there was certainly no truck with: ‘hate the sin but love the sinner’ in our house.

Well, I thought today I was going to write about my inability write fiction, but that will keep.

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Reading (Part 2)

On any normal Monday… I’d be getting out of the pool around now. Except that it wouldn’t be a normal Monday, it’s Bank Holiday – not that that makes much difference to me. Five years ago (261 weeks) it was Bank Holiday, and I had breakfast at Rocksby’s, sitting outside on the prom, watching the sea and the boats and the Isle of Wight across the water and marvelling that I was here and how exciting it all was, never mind all those boxes I had to unpack. Rocksby’s is gone now, or rather, the basic structure and a couple of the staff are still there, but even when it’s open, it’s not the same, and the bacon sandwiches are terrible. Everything changes.

I rang my brother yesterday, it’s a thing we’ve done on and off over the years since I’ve been on my own, ringing each other on the first Sunday morning of the month. It’s been a bit erratic over the last couple of years while I’ve been going to writers’ group on Sundays, but as he said last month, now he knows where to find me on Sundays (or any other day). I told him that I’m enjoying not having to go out and interact with people, and he said something like: ‘that must be a blessing’ which was such an unusual word for him to use that I had to ask him to repeat it. But it’s a good word, appropriate, because yes, I have been feeling blessed, living in my cosy, stress-free bubble.

I told him I’d thought of him because on Saturday I heard a play on the radio about the life of Arthur Ransome, who wrote the Swallows and Amazons books, which I know he loved, and his daughters loved, and my sister loved too, though to be honest I was never all that interested in them (though I didn’t say that to him). It was one of those things that my two elder siblings did that I felt I should do as well (like staying married to the same people for fifty years), but didn’t really appeal to my nature.

That got me thinking about the kind of books I did read in childhood, and at first I could only think of Narnia and The Wind in the Willows. Partly, I realised, that was because they predominantly came from the library, we didn’t have many books of our own and the ones we did were mainly Ladybird and Observer books, things like that, vaguely educational. It’s not that Mum and Dad didn’t read books, they did (though, as I realise now, it’s not always so easy for adults to find the time), but they also got them from the library – books weren’t a high priority for spending limited cash, when there was an abundant supply which could be borrowed, and were reserved for birthday and Christmas presents.

My preference in books was always magical, which I may come back to another time.