When My Childhood Was Murdered
Something inside me had died
I watched the end of the third season of the series “Anne of an E”. I cried all the tears I was entitled to. It was sensitivity at its highest! And that’s not to mention that Marilla, Anne’s adoptive mother, is an actress identical to my grandmother Veronica! Physically Marilla was my grandmother that I lost so early.
Well, but it’s not the series I’m going to talk about. Looking at Anne I realize I was as effervescent as she! She spoke to trees, to animals, to the moon. She was also so dramatic and I smile as I type because I remember when my Mom used to say that I was a dramatic girl! I also used to speak alone with kittens, with God, and with the moon. With the trees, I talked a lot as a child, high up in the last branches.
I had a wonderful childhood! What could a child want to be happy in a charming little town in the 50s and 60s? We were free, we played in the streets with bare feet, and the city garden was in front of my house. And all this with the magnificent view of those mountains! In the backyard, I had all the wealth I needed. There were mango trees, orange trees, avocado trees, the canvas fence with the hounds. When I was an adult, I returned to that house, and I walked through all the rooms as if I was walking there when I was a child. The hostess took me to a wall and showed me my name engraved in the cement mass.
We lived there until I was twelve. Then my childhood was murdered. We had to move to another city, and I couldn’t accept it. My mother was hopeful because she always wanted to move where my grandmother lived. If someone asks me which was the saddest day of my life, I keep answering, without a doubt, it was that moving day.
That city was my enchanted kingdom. There I had my first love, an older boy, unrequited, of course, but it didn’t matter, “I loved him” in the exaltation of my twelve years old. I cried devasted for many months. I looked like a tear factory. I could not understand how a girl with such precious life could suffer like that. My childhood ran away from me. My brothers and my oldest sister were full of joy, and I was alone in my sadness in a state of total helplessness. I heard that children are like the fingers of a hand, all different.
I got sick several times that year. I had herpes in my mouth, a big wound that forced me to stay at home. My mother took me to the doctor because of something I felt walking inside my body. I said to the doctor: now it is walking here, here inside my leg. In short, my psychological state was affected. Sadness made me sick. Something inside me had died. I hated life.
I only felt healed many years later, and there’s not a single picture I’m smiling until I was twenty years old. I learned that losses are not limited to people or pets. We also suffer from the loss of places. Of course, the places have a history, memories, feelings.
Luckily, everything was fine. I was reborn fuller of life, bubbling with joy, in love with the sunset, in awe of the moon, but always with the tears that never ask for permission to flow.
Every time I had a chance to visit that town of my childhood, I had a feeling that it had all been a dream, something with a person who was not me. I wish it were not. But when I went back to my current life, I was happy! I took charge of my life. I understood that the transition from childhood to adolescence is a fragile period that can often affect our entire lives.
We can overcome. The scars are left to remind us that grief exists, it is real, this is life, sometimes happy, sometimes not. We must accept the things we can not change, and start again, like a child. Yes, we can do that!
