Wanting

When I was a little girl, my father, in an attempt to curtail the childish habit of throwing tantrums in stores, started to use crude ways to stop my behavior. At every door to every store, I would hear the same threat…

“If you even dare ask for anything or if you make a scene there will be hell to pay when we get home”

Perhaps it wasn’t every store and perhaps it wasn’t those exact words, but I remember it being part of my story, as my family reminded me constantly about how meek I would be in the stores and how terrified I was of the threat. I remember being 8 and wanting a cheap dollar bank box with a key. Pink, and tiny, and mass-produced, and made of plastic. I remember getting home and crying because I couldn’t ask for the little pink box. I thought Dad would hit me if I asked so I didn't bother.

Parents do what they need to do to raise their children. Parenting is hard work. But I will say that I grew up in an era where corporal punishment was common and considered acceptable. That hell to pay meant getting the belt. Common for that era, though I am beyond happy that it is now considered unacceptable. Because fear is a powerful tool to control behavior and does more harm than good. It does no good except to serve as a shortcut for parents to get the desired outcome without any regard to the child's psyche. I didn’t have ABA therapy, but in retrospect, my father did powerful behavioral programming on me by teaching me to not act like a kid.

He molded my behavior to be meek, unquestioning, and obedient. So as an autistic woman, whose behaviors are a tangle of learned and programmed scripts, it did a lot of damage. I touched on this when I mentioned my propensity to cry when in a conflict. How I am prone to backtrack anything that I feel is against my mask of perfectly poised calm and kindness. I feel uncomfortable asking for things, even now as an adult. I cannot feel at ease stating my needs. There’s a mix of hopelessness and fear of punishment. I always feel so dumb for being like this. I berate myself for knowing the problem in my brain, but not fixing it in my heart.

The sad thing is that his programming worked too well. I remember meeting a younger cousin when I was a child and allowing her to hit me because I was afraid to defend myself. For which my father hit me after for being spineless. He was right… I was spineless and still am. I am spineless because he made me that way. I am spineless and don’t know how to state my wants, needs, and dreams. As if the part of me that needs things goes back to when I was 8 years old, thinking I was crying for pink plastic boxes when in reality, I was crying because my voice was gone.