The Halcyon Days of Childhood

I've spent a bit of time now talking to you about the physical part of my low libido.  Some of the psychological portions are already dealt with in these pages incidentally.  I'd like to address those more completely.  Specifically, I'd like to talk to you about what someone with emotional issues with sex can do to help themselves.  Now, keep in mind, I'm no expert.  I'm just a woman searching for her own answers.  I've recognized that while my problems is partially physical, there are psychological components as well.  I'm working on those also.  Before I launch into my thoughts about emotional self-care and libido, I need to give you some background.

I've touched a bit on my childhood in these pages.  I'm sure you can guess that my childhood was one of abuse and neglect.  To any outside observer, we might have looked okay, but inside the circle things were very different.  My father took off when I was about 2.  He'd had an affair and my mom threw him out.  He married the woman he was fucking around with (she became my step mom and I love her dearly).  After a few years, my mother could no longer support herself and we had to move in with her parents.

I love my grandparents.  I grew especially close to my Nannie.  She took over the mothering role because my mother was working in the city.  I loved my Pa too, but he was more of a grandparent for me.  Most of my memories of him were of fishing, and long walks, and playing cards.  I don't remember him being involved in any of the real parenting.

I mentioned that I thought that both my Mom and my Nannie have personality disorders.  More precisely, I believe my mother to have borderline personality disorder and my Nannie to have narcissistic personality disorder (with maybe a little bpd thrown in).  My mother's relationship with her mother is one of nightmares.  She often received the belt (or a chair, or anything that was within my Nannies'  reach).  My nannie put her down all the time.  There was even an incident when my Mom woke up to find my Nannie standing over her bed with a knife.  This is really my mother's story, so I won't delve into it much more.  Let's just leave it at this;  any deviation from my Nannie's rigid plans/dreams meant that my Mom was a horror in my Nannie's eyes.  My Nannie was always more concerned about how her family appeared to others than about how the people in it were doing.

By the time I came along, my Nannie had mellowed a bit.  She also saw me as an opportunity to get things right, and to get back at my Mom.  My rearing became a power struggle between the two of them.  So, my Nannie was much nicer to me than she ever was to my Mom.  Of course, this was much better for me…in theory.  In reality, it completely ruined the small chance of a healthy relationship with my own mother.

My mother never really saw me as her daughter.  She was jealous that I got along so well with her mother.  She was angry that I was being used as a tool against her.  In short, I'm pretty sure she began to hate me.  I think, subconsciously, she wanted to put me in my place.  She saw me in the most negative light possible.  If I was tired, I was lazy.  If I was sick, I was a hypochondriac.  If I was sad, I was a cry baby. 

This led to a lot of neglect, especially where my health was concerned.  I told you in my last entry about my health history.  There is not a single illness that I was diagnosed with that was not neglected for a period of time before diagnosis.  If I wasn't running a fever, I wasn't sick.  And she made sure to tell every doctor she ever took me to that I was a hypochondriac, "What kid has stomachaches everyday?".  A child with Celiac Disease, you nasty bitch.  (Pardon me, it slips out sometimes.)

I think you can guess what my childhood might have been like.  So, I'm going to leave the description there for the day.  In my next post, I'm going to talk about the psychological issues that I developed in this environment.