I'm on the cusp of a milestone birthday... I'll be 40 next week! Apologies but due to a certain virus there will be no party.
However, there is this blog post, so grab a cuppa and sit down with me for a bit of... reminiscing, maybe a bit of wisdom on the side, perhaps we can call this a review. Like a film. It's had its ups and downs, but mostly it's been an exercise in interesting plot twists!
What's funny is that my major life turns happened quite neatly by decade, four very different decades so far.
Decade one: nothing really
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| The only way I know anything about my childhood is through (few) photos. No memories. |
I have no memories of anything before about age 12. None. I can't remember my sister coming along when I was 6, I can't remember anything about primary school... it's just blank. It wasn't an unhappy first 10 years, I don't think, just an oblivious one.
Decade two: suffering
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| My mother in her wheelchair, the winter before she died in February. A slow, protracted, horrible death. |
This is when I feel like I woke up from the mists of sleepwalking through childhood, into to a waking nightmare. I learned what a rotten, hateful marriage my parents were trapped in. I learned to see my father's drunkenness - he had been drunk throughout my childhood but I could never tell because it was just his normal; my mother taught me to see. I kicked him out when I was 12, not long after standing over him with a knife as he snored one night, contemplating what the consequences for a child might be if I got rid of him that way. (I decided it wasn't worth it). Two years later my mother was diagnosed with ALS and died when I was 15; I was her main caregiver, sleeping through much of school that year as I cared for her at night. Although I saw her decline, I never actually expected her to die... and on the evening that she died, I was with her. Following this were three years of what I now have the vocabulary to name as coercive control at my aunt's - the slow but sure tightening of control, mental coercion, and erosion of who I was... until she died when I was 18.
This didn't break me - a prophetess once told me I had a "core of steel" - but at the end of this decade I was a walled island. The person I loved most in the world had died, and three years of emotional abuse followed... at the end of that I was just done with caring about others. No one mattered to me.
Decade three: freedom
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| Baptised at 21 (again - as I had been baptised a Catholic as a baby, but I never believed) |
At 18, I was free at last. Since moving into my aunt's house, my one hope - the one thing that had kept me going, the one thing I was clinging to every time my suicide plans were scuppered - had been to move to America. (As far away as possible, without leaving civilisation, in my mind!) I had worked for that. My schooling choices were about that. I decided to go to a college that would lead to a Bachelor's Degree - Austrian degrees follow a different system so an Austrian degree wouldn't have readily translated to Anglosaxon standards - so that I could move to America and be free. I was already free after my aunt's death, but by that time, this dream of salvation through distance had become such a fixed idea in my mind, I couldn't not do it. It would have felt like failing at life. So I followed through with college, and in the very last year of college I met a Christian woman who talked to me about her faith. She was my boss, I respected her mind very highly, and the fact that such a sharp and intelligent woman believed in Christ really challenged my worldview.
I've written my story of how I came to Christianity here, I was 21 then. The rest of that decade was a case of slowly learning what freedom actually is, and how to walk in it. I did move to America, where life and work was tough but I made some of the best friendships as I learned what it means to follow Jesus. Eventually I had to leave the States because my visa ran out, and I went to the UK, again being immersed in deep relationships through Christ, very quickly. I found my feet with work I was passionate about. And at the end of that decade, just after turning 30, I found love.
Decade four: love
I met Mr. just after turning 31. By then I'd had a decade to learn about God's love, and was able to give and receive it at last. A year later we married, and a year after that I found myself pregnant - something I had never really wanted until then, and I had to work through those feelings over the months before giving birth to N(6) (see here and here and here and basically all posts of 2014)... but God knew what he was doing. I experienced a pure, transformational love I could never have fathomed before.
And that's been what my fourth decade has been about... love. I've been so blessed.
Here's to the next decade!
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