How I Lost My Voice

My thoughts, feelings, & preferences vanished...leaving me with scars

From what I know, I didn’t start out like this.

I knew who I had liked. One day in kindergarten, the teacher walked out, and I kissed my crush on the cheek. I let everyone know I knew how babies were made at the ripe age of five. I did this on a bus while spouting all the facts my mom had recited. Noted, I didn’t understand what she’d said at the time.

But, oh boy, was I proud to know!

However, things changed as I grew older. I first remember a sense of shame when my mom found my friends and me with pillows up our shirts. We, at roughly four years old, were pretending to be pregnant. The other girls giggled. I didn’t. Instead, I quickly pulled the pillow out and grabbed the end of my shirt.

The moments of shame stayed fleeting until our move from one end of the state to the other. My mom wasn’t happy about the move. She let Dad know and, by extension, me. There was a fire lit in my mom that never quite extinguished.

Shortly after she began homeschooling me, her father, my grandfather, fell ill. We went down to care for him. I don’t remember doing much schoolwork. I do remember recording the stories in my head on a tape recorder.

The nights sparked the most ideas.

Long shadows from lamp posts cast onto the one-story, low-income complex in mysterious ways. Dust particles swayed under lamplight. A faint, old smell lingered. Silence wrapped around me like a blanket. Stars poked holes in between the man made light.

For a while, I was happy.

My mom, on the other hand, wasn’t. My grandfather continued declining in health. I could fully grasp death at that age. I didn’t know him well beyond his scolding me for doing things.

This brought tension in her teaching. It stretched further and further into our days at my grandfather’s place. I didn’t know how to talk out my feelings. Instead, I wrote them in a notebook I’d begun using as a diary. It was clearly marked, even if in silly fifth-grade scribbles.

My mom had been attending to her father when I wrote out on a particularly sad vent. A few tears fell on the pages. While it didn’t fix the problem, relief washed over me afterward. I’d considered the triggering event over.

A bit later, I walked into see my mom reading the entry. A melancholy look washed over her. She quickly snatched me up. Crying, she apologized. I stood there, unsure what to do. I was happy she understood. Yet something felt off.

I froze, a more visceral feeling creeping over me — discomfort.

A few years passed. My mother had a surgery explained to me multiple times. Despite this, I didn’t understand. The mom I knew transformed into someone else. I couldn’t vocalize my pain without it being compared to hers. The house became a prison which I shared with a mom who knew nothing but anger.

I don’t remember those years well.

They’re blurred. I don’t know when the surgery happened. My best guess was when I was around the age of ten. I don’t know when the years of this ended. I remember anger at unpredictable things, torrential fights with my father, and an ever-growing pit of sadness and anxiety.

I’d moved into a place with people I barely knew, sent to a private school with stuck-up kids, then pulled out to homeschool. As I blossomed with my new friends, my mom’s surgery happened. I became a woman at twelve, landing somewhere in that mess. My father retreated to the basement and interacted with me less.

The one consistent person I had became, for a time, the voice that told me my feelings didn’t matter in the years I needed to hear it the most.

Home wasn’t safe. Everywhere I went, I was known as my mother’s daughter. I felt I couldn’t escape her grasp no matter where I went. I tried to find solace in other places.

For a while, I wrote in an American Girl diary which I once kept unlocked. My mother learned I wrote about her in it. The entries about her weren’t flattering. They were the unrelenting and opinionated rants of a preteen. When I wrote in it, she’d snidely ask if I was writing mean things about her.

So I stopped.

Later, I found a friend who understood. I’d share with her my qualms with my mother. Sometimes, this was done over my prepaid brick phone. Other times we talked in the wee hours of the night at my place. Therefore, there were times my mother overheard. She commented on how I shouldn’t say such mean things to others.

I ranted this to my friend, now over MSN messenger or at her place. But I stopped vocalizing my qualms when I talked on the phone or at my place. Later, I lost that friend. I didn’t find another I felt safe talking to about my issues.

Once, a high school counselor told me I could confide in her. I found this strange as I only took band, Spanish, and graphic design courses at the high school. As I watched her run to and fro, I concluded she wouldn’t know what to do if I told her.

Playing in the band became my solace.

I had friends there I could talk about forbidden topics. I made friends with my polar opposite — an atheist oboe player who wore long, mismatching socks and dyed her hair. We once had a long conversation about our beliefs, why we believed them and respected each other’s decisions. Best of all, none of them knew my mother.

Yet the band teacher struggled with me not practicing, something my mom pawned off as a mystery as she “knew nothing about music.” I squirmed in my seat. She knew enough to critique each practice session. But I couldn’t say that. The band teacher laughed, commiserated with my mother, and moved on.

He also signed me up for a solo contest without my permission and payed the entry fee. If our school had one more no-show, our band wouldn’t be allowed in this contest again. I couldn’t back out.

I shut my mouth and ended my senior year playing a solo I barely knew.

In my first relationship, I had a hard time opening up. The guy was nice, charismatic, and had a beautiful voice. He stood nearly a foot taller than me, wished to become a rollercoaster engineer, and insisted I watch a horror movie. I didn’t. I hesitated to kiss him. It ended mutually.

My second relationship, however, took a worse turn.

I felt more passion this time. My second boyfriend was often distracted by friends but was proud to announce I was his girlfriend. One day, that ended. He became annoyed at my presence. He asked me what he’d done wrong. He’d do anything to fix it.

Not knowing how to articulate my feelings, I took advice from my now much calmer mother. She told me to tell him that actions speak louder than words. That’s all I told him as he insisted I tell him more. I thought that tell him everything he needed. It didn’t. 

Miscommunication abounded both before and after that. My boyfriend began to ignore my presence. I broke it off. I managed to try again a few years later after I ended my junior year of college.

It felt different than the last one. This guy drove to all of my concerts with flowers in hand. We’d make out in his blue truck in the shadowed places of the college parking lot. We talked about our plans, our beliefs, and our pasts.

He’d linger longer while talking, even when we were in my dorm room. I was told to keep it for a smaller amount of time. My roommates didn’t want to walk around in towels after a shower with a guy around. I obliged. But I did find it hard to leave. His stare always seemed to draw me back in.

Then I graduated and got a job in the nearby area. My boyfriend still lived with his parents four hours away. When he came to visit my parents, my mom wasn’t happy. She told me he was wrong for me. That he didn’t have a strong walk with God. Yatta, yatta, yatta.

The tension never left.

He didn’t always drive over when it rained. He didn’t engage with my parents much when I wasn’t around. But he understood me. I could finally talk about my feelings, wants, and desires. So I ignored my mother’s comments.

It took four years until the façade broke.

He hadn’t driven to see me in a year. Yet I drove to see him. I’d tried to get a job in his area. When I drove down, his help went from double-checking if I was ready to scroll on Discord to telling me he couldn’t drive me five minutes away as it was too hot to wait in the car.

I didn’t have the time to argue. I was going to be late for the interview.

I did try to wait to see if my boyfriend would ever come to see me. I broke a week before he finally decided to — his reasoning being he really wanted to see the tractor pull in my town that year. When asked to elaborate, he never said he wanted to see me.

When I broke it off, I felt both relief and fear.

His interests had merged with mine. His weaknesses had been painted onto my skin with indirect wording. The world felt vast and empty. I uninstalled the video games we played together — only ones he’d suggested. I donated my Yu-gi-oh cards. I had I realized I only played the game with him. The stuffed tiger he’d given me gave no comfort when I cuddled it.

My mom had mentioned I’d become someone else.

I hadn’t realized it until then. I stared at my living room wall. The silence swallowed the previous nightly Skype calls. Time flooded in as though a dam had been broken. My hand took to poetry.

I threw up your false love
and half-truths. I forced myself to
tears and burned out the toxins
left by your touch.

Your face no longer held the
shine of my Northern light. Your
voice no longer sung the song
of our triumphs, instead heaving with
your over-sensitive, over-fed
sense of self, a reverse Narcissus
indulging in negative exaggeration
of the difficulties of your life, vying
for pity without attempting your
goal. I knew, then, you were
never a giver of love,
just a taker.

The stars above had written
our story, that may be true, but
it was never a curse. The strings that
held us together had been cut;
we’d met our end.

Now I’m a lone light, shining
brighter than I ever could
in the constellation of us.

My parents wondered how I had fallen for it. I, for a while, did too. Looking back gave me my answers. While my mother did become better and more like her previous self, the scars stayed. Other adults chimed in, keeping the wounds festering.

I’d learned, very unintentionally, that my voice and feelings didn’t matter. So when a man walked into my life who I thought I could help and slowly took my voice, I thought nothing of it. It was natural, I thought, to sacrifice for the ones you loved, to bleed yourself dry until only their voice remained.

It was righteous to sacrifice, I thought. It was good.

But even my body told me otherwise. My unexplained anxiety unwound. My Crohn’s calmed.. And I dug into what brought me joy. Even when those joys didn’t stay, I learned something new.

There was still hope. Still, time to find me. Still, time to start…

Preening for Purpose

I awake with the morning
dew on my lashed
lids, laden with
sorrows foreign
to the black-
capped chickadee.

It visits me in the
early light, perched
upon the white-capped
rail, calling a quarter
high then a staccato
low, darting a black
beak-needle through
its feather-fur.

I shower off the
thoughts of yester-
year in the hard-
bound blue tree, cover
slipping from my
hand, as the
’dee darts to
the ground.

Called to
eat at its earthen
home, but I
hover in the blue
abyss, a bird without
legs.

Much love,
Ada

---

If you want your works featured (in my bi-weekly or monthly round-up), email me at chronic.creativity@proton.me or join my chat. Also, if you’re looking for a more laid-back let’s-talk-in-a-café-with-the-smell-of-coffee-surrounding-us, head on over. ☕