Loyalty
I do have many memories from my childhood, they are not haunting me as such. I am though a kind of person that always tries to make coherent sense of things and when my world view is challenged I need to settle things again and go through some thoughts and memories.
One memory that stands out tells about the loyalty children have towards their parents. When my parents divorced I was soon to be twelve. My mother brought me with her to the first meeting with my father and booth layers, probably in hope my presence would make my father constrain himself or maybe just not to being there alone. It went of course out of hand and I am not repeating what was said – most would probably be censured here, they did their best to hurt each other as mean as possible bringing up sexual performance, overweight and other weaknesses– angry people are creative when mean. That did in reality not impress me much it was the face of the layers a mixture of surprise, contempt, perplexity and amusement.
That got me – even to an extend I cried, that was not something I did and certainly not with witnesses. I ran out of the office used a couple of minutes to calm me down and pull my self together and went back in calm and controlled. I did notice some worry in my fathers eyes when I went back – only blame in my mothers.
I felt that as a break of trust. I had struggled to keep this chaos hidden. My school had noticed something was wrong. Mostly as I did perform reasonable in writing but never spoke at least only few words. I did stammer terrible at many sounds – and I only spoke if I could create sentences without these sounds, that was very limited. But during interviews with psychologist and counselors I did my best to protect the madness of my home and no say anything that could compromise my home. I do not stammer today so my stammer was of course neurotic due to emotional pressure.
It was not the chaos that made me loose trust in them, that I understood. It was when I saw that they were not to be trusted in keeping it a secret.
This is of course insanity – but this is not uncommon for children in this situation.
I even see shades of such thinking with me today so many years after.