To Touch…

There are times when I yearn to be able to curl up in a ball, like a cat, on someone’s lap and have my back or hair stroked. There are days when I just want a hug, to feel someone’s arms around me to know that they care. Someone to hold me tight and tell me that everything will work out and that if doesn’t then they will still be there.

To let someone touch me is difficult, it requires trust on my part and understanding on theirs that when I pull away it is not because I dislike them or do not want them to touch me but because I fear the intimacy that touch brings. For many people it is second nature to touch someone on the arm while talking to them, to embrace in greeting and on parting but touch has never been a part of my life. I have always kept my distance more out of habit these days than fear.

All through my childhood you told me I did not like to be touched, no one hugged me, picked me up or cuddled me when I was hurt or upset, or put a comforting hand on my shoulder. I began to believe the myth and shrank away from physical contact and so the myth became reality.

But this fear of being touched is not natural to me, I know that now but believed it for many years and let it rule my life. I now believe I understand the reasons for it too. You never bonded with me as a baby, you made that clear throughout my childhood and even into adulthood whenever babies entered the conversation you would always say that you couldn’t bond with me, the only one of your children you had this problem with.

Things were hard for you, you had two babies when you expected one, and you were only able to bring one home, with whom you bonded and enjoyed a loving mother baby relationship. The perfect baby, she slept and fed and gurgled and smiled and you loved her. Then I entered the equation, an angry screaming mess, having spent six weeks in an incubator attached to tubes fighting for my life.  I continued to fight, to scream when I arrived home, no longer fighting for my life but for attention and love. But you could not cope with my demands, the constant crying, I was an intrusion on your perfect relationship with my sister. So you refused to give in to my demands, telling yourself that picking me up only made matters worse, that I cried harder when you tried to comfort me. You would wheel me into a darkened room and leave me to cry. My father was the one who fed me, comforted me, when he was around he did as much as he could.

As I grew older, you grew more impatient with me, easily angered when I got things wrong, when I cried you would tell me off. And you wonder why I turned into a shrinking violet, a quiet, nervous child, who would not look at let alone speak to anyone outside the immediate family.A child who so afraid of doing something wrong that she shook with nerves and could not be trusted to carry or lift anything breakable.  A child who immersed herself in a world of fantasy, of books , of imagined adventures.

A child, whom you convinced, did not like to be touched, who believed what you said, who took in the anger, the bitterness, the sadness to her heart and soul and allowed it to fester there. Who allowed herself to believe she was as useless as you told her she was. All along it was your inability to show her love, your guilt at that, and your fear that she would some day take you to task. I know you could not love me as you loved my siblings, I know you do not understand why any more than I do. I just wish things could have been different, that somehow you could have found the strength to at least hide how you felt, to pretend that I was as good as them. And perhaps I would not have become someone who when others reached out in love or compassion felt she could not trust them to do right by her.

When touch became not a comfort but a reminder of the smouldering remains of who she could have become…