The Truth You Can Hold and Handle

For those who spent childhood trying to quietly imagine themselves somewhere they finally belonged.

Sometimes when I sit and watch you playing on the floor beside me, I feel as though I am being pulled backwards through clouds of times gone by, towards memories of my own young childhood that I had long forgotten about or maybe quietly tried to forget. It feels like a gentle haunting.

When I think of younger me, I think of the little girl who would hop into the wardrobe and quietly close the door behind her. I was very lucky growing up in a lot of ways. Your grandad was a builder, so I lived in a large house with bedrooms that had expansive fitted wooden wardrobes. It probably sounds like a strange thing to associate with luck, having a large wardrobe in your bedroom. But for me, it was less The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and more trying to run away from a noisy, too bright, lonely world where I was the “nobody nowhere,” as Donna Williams once wrote.

I never seemed to fully fit anywhere at all and mostly felt as though I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I remember being small and imagining I was white noise moving around my little world. Like the static screen of old televisions after the channels switched off for the night, that endless soft white haze humming quietly in the background while everybody else moved past it without noticing. I felt like the kind of white noise people eventually stop hearing. Something easy to overlook. Easy to pass by. Easy to forget entirely.

When I would sit inside the four wooden walls, the darkness kept me safe, wrapping itself around me, and for a time the world’s judgemental eyes did not bother me anymore. I could sit in the darkness, living a full bright life inside my head.

When I lived in my head, I never said or did the wrong thing. I always knew what was going on there. Often when I was out in the big world, away from home, away from the quiet safety of the darkness, I would find myself staring down the barrel of squished-up faces, raised eyebrows, and loud booming voices.

I would apologise for whatever I had done or said that was wrong this time, while still feeling entirely confused about what had been so wrong in the first place. I had only answered the question they had asked or done the thing they told me to do exactly as they had asked me to do it. Later, I would learn about understanding language literally, or that sometimes people did not really want the truth when they asked you a question, they wanted a version of the truth they could hold and handle.

As I sat in the dark, I imagined I would be the one asked to go over to houses for play dates instead of hearing they had happened without me. When I was there, I would be the person everyone wanted to be around, to tell their stories to and share their time with, instead of, in the big world, gripping my little fingers and standing on the outside looking in, wondering how I was supposed to know what to do to get friends and, even more difficult, how to keep them.

When I lived in my head, life made sense, it didn’t hurt my brain to think, the noise wasn’t so bad, and that scared feeling that was always stinging my tummy wasn’t there. When I lived in my head, I didn’t have to keep watching for trouble or danger that I might cause by accident. I could just read my book and imagine a land where it was okay to be me. A land where I knew how to belong and finally would have all the friends I would have liked to have had.

Sitting in the darkness of the wardrobe, I would hum quietly to myself. The line in the song I remember most was, “Oh show me the way to go home, I am tired and I want to go to bed.” I felt like that all of the time back then, never fully able to just feel okay or rested. I was only small, but carried the weight of the judgemental world inside me.

If I could bring the little girl who hid inside the wardrobe all those years ago back to the future, I would have her come over to play in our house with you, my lovely Max.

You would tell her it was okay to be herself, that in our world everybody can be exactly who they are without fear of getting it wrong.

And maybe for the very first time in her whole life, she would step out from the darkness of the wardrobe and realise she had never been white noise at all, only a little girl trying to find somewhere she felt safe enough to belong.

I love you now and forever more.

Mom.