I am convinced that old age won’t get me. My body still radiates youth but my neck and face are beginning to show the signs.
I wish I could shed my skin and let a new one grow. I wish the youth I felt inside was eternal. As I come into relationship with my inner 1 year old and inner 4 year old, I feel like I am a family of Carly’s, ages from 46 to 31 to 25 to 20 to 16 to 13 to 7 to 1. All the formative years that kicked me in the butt, made me grow or left me alone.
Me and them, we coexist in this space inside of my body. Today my inner 1 year old is with me. She went through it last night.
It started with nothing big like usual.
He was absent all day, said he was doing bookkeeping, I thought it would take an hour or so. Hours later he showed up, to be absent. He did his yoga on the lawn. I recall a hug and then he was distant. 3 of us watched the sunset on the lava rocks overlooking the familiar and always awing majestical sea.
I got up to leave with my Roomate in her car. He decided to stay on the beach in the dark. Do you want me to make dinner for you? I asked. No. Will you be long? I don’t know.
He came home a few hours later. I stoically feigned being fully immersed in my own activities, doing my life, alone, as I would if there wasn’t someone else’s presence in the back stage, potentially coming, potentially not.
He arrived, nonchalant, strolling in, I was reading, eating, soothing myself with the I’m fine narrative.
Want a chamomile? He asks as he disappears into the bathroom. You could say Hi, I remark.
Hi, didn’t I say HI?
No, I don’t want that kind of hi, I imagine a hi, where he comes over to me, with a smile and a full armed hug, looks me in the eye and says “hello there, miss.” As he calls me.
He comes over, what I imagine as unwillingly, he crouches down to my floor level. Not available, but semi-available. “My clothes are dirty.” There is no hug, just me touching the bones of his knees as he squats. Hard, non responsive.
It’s fine, “guess you want to shower” I say.
He leaves, showers, makes food, I pretend to be busy, I get my guitar. I go to my room, fine, you don’t want me, then I don’t need you, I’ll be over here.
The tightness in my chest is rising, the contraction in the solar plexus. I push down the filter of blame and pull out my NVC sheets, physical sensations: chest: contraction, heavy, tight
Emotions: Insecurity, mistrustful, lonely. Needs: affection, understanding, love, warmth
He finally comes back in after an excruciating time that feels like eternity. I ask him if I can share something. I read from the NVC lists, I’m noticing this physical and emotional sensations and my needs are…
I add on that I’m feeling withdrawn and distant and protective of myself.
I share that I’m feeling this way when I don’t understand where he is at in his mental, emotional state, or even time wise.
It’s a lot. I imagine by his demeanor that I just hit him with one. I’m imagining the pain in the ass highly sensitive girlfriend who always has some emotional battle going on.
He does his best, sounds like you’re feeling distant and withdrawn, guess that’s why you came over to the bed, did I get that right?
No, he didn’t get that right. He didn’t get 80% of what the real story is.
He gets defensive as he asks if he always has to justify when he needs time alone.
I explode. “You’re not acknowledging where I’m at, I don’t give a fuck if you spend time alone, I just want you to communicate that to me”
You need me to acknowledge you? Isn’t that what I’m doing?
I throw him out of my room. Get out of my life. I literally just fell madly in love with this man again for the last weeks, making love every day, in heaven’s bliss and here I am.
Get away from me.
Something in him shifts, he bends down by the bed. He lets down his defenses. He tries his best.
He finally comes near me to touch me. Can I touch you. Yes, I respond. But my body is frozen.
My arms are crossed in front of my chest, my legs are rigid. He drapes himself over my chest. I cannot feel his skin, my body stays numb.
I need him to force himself through my cage.
“I feel you’re guarded, I cannot bring myself to force myself on you" he says.
I am alone. This story happens again and again.
Flashback to age 1. Screaming. Crib. Ceiling above me. Dark. Writhing. The sensation is in the body, writhing, discomfort, exposed. No-one is there. No-one is there. They are there, but they are not here. They are in the other room. They are just beyond my reach. They are there but they don’t hear me, I’m screaming at the top of my lungs. They ignore me.
They never come.
I wait my whole life for someone to pick me up and hold me.
I seduce, tantalize, flirt, flaunt my beauty, fall in love just waiting for someone to pick me up and hold me.
The realization hits me as I’m laying there, rigid with this unsafe man on top of me.
This man can hurt me. This man hurt me. This man cannot be trusted. I cannot open myself again to let this man hurt me.
He was fully there and then he was gone. Gone. In the other room, in his mind. The other room I cannot access.
If I am alone, no-one can hurt me. If I am alone, no-one can hurt me. If I’m alone, no-one will hurt me.
The realization stings. It hits me deep in the heart. The sobbing is inaudible, it is simply pouring down leaking out the corners of my frozen body. There is a wail, a grief that clenches my heart like a clamp. The water falls, a steady stream.
My eyes are closed tight, my arms around my chest. I go to her, I go to her crib. I reach out my arms, I feel the weight of her little body in my arms, her onesie hugging her skin tightly.
I lift her up and hold her to my chest. It’s too much my heart is exploding. I barely audibly voice, “is it ok if I cry?”
I begin to sob. Tears of relief, tears of loss, tears of 46 years looking for someone to hold me, to pick me up, to tell me I don’t have to be all alone.
I can barely get the words out, “can you pick me up and hold me please?”
He sits up on the bed and pulls my 135 lb, 46 yr old body to his, wraps his strong arms under my knees and behind my back and lets me curl up to his chest.
My head rests against his chest, the chest I’ve wanted to rest my cheek on my whole life. I let it rip, the downpour opens up the dams, I sob and sob as he just holds me.
I am spent. He doesn’t leave, he doesn’t let go, he doesn’t ask me to explain, My one year old can’t explain. There are no words to explain the feeling that comes through the body of desperately needing touch and it being denied.
I don’t need space to figure out my shit. I don’t need to self-soothe and find my resources. I know how to do that, I’ve done that my whole damn life.
I know how to take care of me.
But the thing about always having to care of me is I can never stop being the adult.
We walk around in these adult bodies as if our childhood is long past. We look at the young ones and reminisce as if we are no longer our tender selves hidden behind the appearance of respectable, got it all together human beings.
Sometimes I see glimpses of his younger self. When he runs up to me on the beach after a good surf, with that smile of a child. When he’s feeling rejected, I see that young one peeking its face, often immediately covered up by the adult or distance.
I don’t believe we’re here to do it alone. We’re not. We don’t have to be healed to be in relationship. Relationship is what heals, if there is safety enough to be held in the fragility of our inner children.
Trauma doesn’t know that time has passed. It still thinks you’re 4. It still reacts as if you’re 4, only the adult finds strategies to hide the shameful parts of our fragility.
We are fragile, we are hurt, we live with unhealed parts of ourselves. As adults it takes a hell of a lot of balls to step up and then set down all the equipment, armor and toolset to just say… will you hold me, I’m afraid. Will you hold me, I need to know I’m loved. Will you hold me, I’m afraid I’m a bad person. Will you hold me, I don’t want to be alone.