I would like to say that the abuse didn’t start until I was older. In saying that it did, would make me a liar.
The first time was when I was no more than six.
My family had gone on a hike a couple of hours away from our hometown. It was in the middle of the desert with no living thing close by.
We finished the hike and were back at the trailhead, packing the truck back up so we could go home. I needed to use the restroom so my mother told my father she was taking me over to use the port a potty on the other end of the parking lot. She and I walked over to the edge of the parking lot, never leaving that far area of the parking lot.
We were still in sight of my father. But once we had finished up in the bathroom and turned back to walk a couple of yards back to the truck, it was gone.
My father took my sisters and left my mother and me in the middle of the desert with no phone, no water, and no food.
Once my mother had assessed the situation that she found us in, she decided that we would find the nearest road. We would walk along that road until we found my missing father and siblings.
I remember being hot, hungry, and thirsty. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, my mother had just told me that we were “going for a walk before we had to sit in the car for a couple of hours again”.
I remember walking for quite some time. The longer that we walked along the road, the more hopeless I started to feel. We had been walking for what seemed hours when we reached a cattle guard.
At this point I was scared.
- I was scared that my father was going to drive away because of how long we had been gone.
- I was scared of being left in the middle of nowhere with nothing nearby.
- I was scared that my mother and I were going to have to find our own way home.
In reality, I’m not sure that we would’ve because of how far off the beaten trail that we were.
After a million hours in little kid time, which was really an hour in adult time, we saw the shiny red truck coming to get us. I felt relieved that he had found where we were.
Simultaneously I was scared that he had left us. If he hadn’t driven on that road to find us, he could’ve just left without us. Now, as an adult, I know that he knew where we were all along. He just wanted to punish us for whatever reason he had that day.
As soon as my mother and I climbed back into the truck, my father started screaming at us. He had my mother and I believing that it was our fault that he left without us. Then within seconds of me crying, he started screaming at me that it wasn’t my fault but my mother’s.
Turning something he had done into my mother’s fault was a common abuse tactic for him.
The entire drive home, I just sat quietly thinking, tuning out the screaming that continued most of the way home. My thoughts wandered to what would have happened if he hadn’t come to pick us up. I thought about how I never wanted to be in that situation again. I decided that I hated hiking because what had just happened could happen again and maybe next time, it would be just me.
This is where my fear of abandonment had started.
The years had passed since this incident and I had completely forgotten that it was real. I thought that it was just one of the many nightmares that plagued me at night. It wasn’t real, I had a lot of nightmares about being left in the middle of the desert and this was just one of them.
I just thought my fear of being left somewhere unfamiliar with nowhere to go was just an irrational thought that I had made up. I didn’t realize that the fear of not having my phone next to me at all times and my always needing to have it fully charged ‘just in case’ stemmed from an actual event.
Then one night, it hit me head on…
I was having a sleepover with a friend who I was pretty close to. At this point in time, I already knew who my father really was. We had been talking about the things that he had done and the things that he was currently doing when the lightbulb went off in my head.
I dared to speak the words out loud to my friend.
My friend went quiet.
She didn’t know what to say about it (which is how most people react). We brushed past it like nothing had happened.
The next morning I confronted my mother about it; asking if it had actually happened.
After a long talk with her, the fuzzy details came into a clear picture. I had remembered part of it wrong. She was able to solve the confusion.
That was the day that I knew my abandonment fear was not irrational.
It came from an actual experience that I had lived through.
