Tears

Ah, the age old saying, big girls don't cry.  Boys don't cry.  The letting go of tears is often viewed as a weakness in either gender.  For me, tears are a vulnerable place that I work hard at never visiting.  I am not saying that this is a healthy approach, it's just where I am.

As a young child I was trained to withhold tears.  It was deliberate and purposeful.  *They* at least one woman, who was not my parent, set me on a tall stool.  I felt fear that I would fall and can remember gripping the seat tightly.  Then the taunting would start.  Adult voices telling me to cry.  "Come on baby, cry, you know you want to cry.  Is that a tear?  Is the baby going to cry?"  That sort of taunting over and over again until my eyes filled with tears and the first one began to fall.  Then, SLAP!  I was hit in the face and yelled at.  "Don't cry, don't you ever cry, only babies cry!" Once I gained control, they started again with the taunting, telling me to cry.  This was repeated in session after session until I did learn to hold back tears.  I have no idea what they were preparing me for.  I have wondered recently if they were preparing me to take the sexual abuse silently.  Their true intent is unknown to me.  What I do know is the results that came from these sessions.

In the most fearful of situations I learned to stay silent and calm.  Silence for sure has become a lifelong friend.  Even as a very young child in the first or second grade if a Teacher were to scold me for something, I could look at them, through them and beyond them.  No longer caring what their words were and just waiting for it to be over with.  The scoldings had no impact.   I would stand toe to toe with them, in my own silent place, sometimes counting, and just wait.  Yes, I was and still am a counter.  I find myself counting everything I can see.  When I was on that stool, I counted the tiles on the floor, the lines in the ceiling and sometimes even the features on one of their faces.  Oh, I could hear the words of my abusers and the teachers trying to correct me, what they didn't know was that I had learned how to control the situation by not reacting.  The older I got, the more I honed this skill.  The young girl me, became strong and powerful in her own way.  I decided early on that they could do anything they wanted to me, I mean it is not like I could physically stop them, but, they could not touch the core of me!  My silence was my weapon.  In a sense, I guess my counting was the ammunition.  No one understood that eye contact with me was not enough.  You might have my eyes, but unless you are also touching my face, you do not have me.  I have been terrified of others being too near my face and touching my face was a hard limit for a very long time.