Day 164 – Breaking Down My Worry Pattern / Personality, Part III

The reason why I cannot say for sure whether or not my biological father ‘disappearing’ at the age of 5 had any adverse consequences to my psyche is for 2 reasons: 1: I never had any back-chat / internal dialog that I can say is a direct result of this, such as ‘I must be a bad person because my father left me’, etc., and 2: I had a new dad almost instantaneously take his place.  However, I can say that as far back as I remember, like 1^st and 2^nd grade, I was very shy and ‘afraid’ / ‘intimidated’ to communicate with my peers.  It also makes ‘sense’ that his ‘disappearance’ should have had some adverse affect on me, especially considering my own boys and how I know for a fact that if I would just disappear one day, that they would feel rejected and abandoned.  I know this because of their emotional dependence on me that I can observe and see.  However, what I don’t know is how fast they can re-cover and adjust, especially if a new ‘father’ would take my place quickly, and especially the younger they are when this happens.  So, what I don’t want to do is make something out of nothing because there is a possibility that I just went on with my new life with my new dad with no real problem with the whole situation.  However, one affect this had that I can see is that when I became an older kid, I started to hold anger towards my mom and my adopted dad because I started to see and hold a backchat / internal conversation about ‘how fucked-up it is that my real dad just disappeared for no-good reason and my parents had no good explanation’.

So, the rest of my childhood, while growing up, was spent with my mother and my new father, and that was a cool child-hood.  I loved and considered my new father as if he were my real father.  He was a good father who has very good to me and my brother, however, he was a work-aholic and therefore we hardly ever saw him.  My mom was a good mother too, but very over-protective.  I was always the one, of my friends, that would not be able to ride my bike as far as everyone else could and other things like that.  I had a paper-route when I was about 10 years old, and my mother wrapped my bike almost completely in reflective tape so that cars would see me in the early morning hours.  I hated this, as this was going way to far.  I remember telling my mother that I was going to ‘blind’ the drivers with the brightness of my bike.  And this is just how it was with everything; she was very over-protective.  So, was her over-protectiveness a confidence killer for me?  Did she train me to be scared of everyone and everything?  You see, I just don’t know.  I don’t have an internal dialog regarding this.  I just did what I had to do based on my circumstances and did not think much about it back then. 

Tomorrow I will go into my later childhood / teenage years, and seeing if in those years I started seeing this pattern of worry in my mother.  Those years are where the internal dialog / backchat started to kick-in.