Flew Away on Page-Wings
How books became lifelines for a troubled kid
Welcome, and a warm first hello to the newcomers! Thank you all for joining today.
This week is a little different. We examine not a tarot card, but a question:
What do we gain by recalling the hard times?
This post is a deep dive into the Lizzy Co origin story; folks with a history of adverse childhood experiences may want to exercise caution.
Part One: Nice
Background music: “Chariot” by The Lizzy Co Show
The definition of
“Nice” has really changed for
Me over time, as I
Gain some self esteem,
Set some boundaries.
As a young girl, I relied on my mother to show me how life works; my father, while kind, was busy with two jobs and constant repairs to our aging house. He and I spent time together the way children and dads without custody do.
It was my mother who shaped my early days. She was a woman of extremes; at times, she craved me close by her side, while other moments showed her screaming for space. Over the course of our days together, the words she poured into my small ears became my worldview.
Don’t be difficult.
That’s not ladylike.
You made me do it.
Go to your room.
I was trained from early memory to live as a housewife. It was all my mother had ever been taught, and she was unwilling to allow other adults to influence me, so what she knew had to be enough.
She refused to send me to daycare, and agonized when I began preschool. She told my young self about this hesitance, “If anyone’s going to screw you up, it’s me.”
I was informed that I would get married to a man, that I would have children. My mother insisted that parenthood brought her joy, but she seemed irritated by the mess and noise that my childlike exuberance naturally caused.
Her façade of willing motherhood cracked wider over time. Once, in an outburst of rage, she screamed, “I can’t wait until you have a daughter!” She wished my own existence on me as a punishment. What a charmer.
Above all, my mother stressed that I must be a nice girl. (I suppose one of us had to be.) Being nice, I learned over time, meant letting someone else set the terms for how I would be treated. Nice girls do not make a fuss, even if their silence leads to bodily harm. Quiet, instant acceptance of poor treatment was a badge of maturity that I was pressured to earn, by a mother who could not regulate herself well enough to treat me kindly.
This situation tightened as I entered middle school. I gained enough perception to spot some key differences between myself and my classmates. An anger, born of confusion, took root in my heart; why were other kids allowed to be so much? Why were their needs real, but not mine? Why couldn’t they go numb instead of making a scene when they were upset? All I had ever been offered as an option was stoicism.
When my mother saw the cuts on my teenage arms, she sat next to me on my bed and stared me down. “I tried that once, you know, and it hurt too much. I never tried it again.” That was the end of the discussion. It was not the end of the cutting, but I assumed that I was on my own moving forward.
The following year, a classmate was discovered with cuts on her arms. Doctors were called. Concern was shown. Help was given. I watched it all happen, confused and furious.
I could not allow myself to understand the truth; my parents showed me grave neglect, and the care shown to my classmate was what I had deserved as well.
Part Two: Naughty
Background music: “Hourglass” by The Lizzy Co Show
Only in adulthood
Did I learn that parents
Are not supposed to match
The shouting of
An angry child.
My mother could not abide a tall poppy. Her readied action for shows of self-esteem was a spirited retelling of my latest mistake. This was too much for my teenage brain to process, and rightly so. She was being cruel, and I felt the need to defend myself.
Once she, a grown woman, had successfully provoked her child into an outburst, she would send me to my room for my lack of composure in the face of bullying. When I resisted, my mother warned me that I would be safer out of her reach.
Over time, I grew to see my bedroom as the center of my world. I knew I would end up there when I committed the mystery offense of the day, so I set myself a mission to find comfort where I could.
Books turned uncertain time alone in my room into something I could control. I never made it clear how much reading meant to me, because things that were precious became things taken away as punishment. But secretly, I sank into books like the arms of the chosen mother I would only meet later in life.
I came to understand the limits of my situation.
Through reading, I saw examples of kindness. I learned what empathy meant, even if I didn’t see it in practice until I was an adult. I gained theoretical knowledge around what it means to be a person in society.
One unusually calm afternoon, in the hazy early years of childhood chapter books, I was enjoying a novel in my bedroom, a small nook on the second floor of our falling-down house. I read a scene in which a family gathered for a meeting. They spoke honestly about how they were feeling, and made plans for the future.
My small, not-yet-callused hands clutched the book to my heart. The idea of coming together to communicate clearly about wants and needs sounded luxurious. To know ahead of time how to behave, and not to find out through shame at high volume! To have a chance to be heard as a human with needs!
Down the wooden staircase I bounced, oblivious. Homespun layers of housepaint squeaked shiny beneath my bare feet on the steps. I entered the kitchen at the base of the creaky stairs and approached my mother, a looming giant to my young eyes.
She was stirring something on the stove that surely contained too much acid and not enough fat. I screwed up my courage and smiled.
“I think we should have a family meeting!”
Dissociation is really good at its job.
As I consider that afternoon in the kitchen, from the comfort of my safe adulthood home, my skull fills with cotton-ball haze. It compacts tighter and tighter until the memory-shards cannot pierce anything around them.
When a parent is unable to receive feedback from their child without losing control, a child learns to justify things that should be resisted. While I do not remember clearly how that encounter ended, what I do know is that I left it with the learned belief that questioning the way of things is physically dangerous.
I still believe that today.
My wise adult mind knows I don’t deserve violence, but my instincts remember the damage a person can do. When my young brain was wiring itself, that belief kept me alive. It’s a hard one to release; the only thing I’ve found that helps is consistent evidence over time that I’m safe.
Part Three: How It’s Going
Background music: “The Joy of Being Alive” by The Lizzy Co Show
Books have been healing
companions to me
as an adult,
just as they were
when I was small.
I really worked, for decades, to justify the way I was treated by my parents as a child. I felt a deep shame climb lovingly, like vines, around my bones. That shame whispered, insidious, “You would have been treated better if you had been better.”
That whisper eventually got so strong that it sent me to the hospital. More than once.
I couldn’t continue living that way, in every sense of the words.
I turned to parenting books, to my own surprise as well as the surprise of my therapist. I never wanted to be a mother, so the lizard-brain instinct I felt to read them made no sense to me. But my gut has always kept me alive, so I listened. I read volumes about how to treat young humans, and I came to a wider understanding of how abusive my own childhood experience had been.
One book that particularly rocked my world was Dr. Becky Kennedy’s Good Inside. She gently broke apart my brittle, hurtful views about what I deserved as a human, and I breathed easier for it. It’s worth reading if you’ve ever felt like your body is a bad neighborhood.
I saturated my brain with blogs written by parents who intervened on their addicted children, yearning couples struggling with infertility, and folks traveling around the world to scoop up their adopted babies. I hammered my mind with those new ideas daily.
It took a long time for it to sink in, because surviving childhood meant believing I was a shitty kid who deserved what I got. The alternative was too frightening: living in a world where the bigger, stronger bad guy has control.
I worked hard. I put serious miles on my library card. I spent hours in hard wooden study rooms, reading about cultures that revere their children. I wired my brain to believe that parents should want their kids. I tried to believe that I should have been welcomed as desperately as those children in the accounts I read.
My brain resisted, hard.
It told me that the way my parents treated me was normal, that those people in the books were being far too indulgent. I kept reading. I kept telling myself that the things I was taught by my mother are poison to me, the same as the alcohol I haven’t had for years.
Framing the boundary of no-contact as sobriety-from-abuse made it feel possible; I already had a structure for that type of lifestyle change. My brain didn’t have to build the plane as it flew. All it had to do was soar.
I cut off my harmful family. I slowly felt safer, more worthy, more open to the world. I pushed myself, inch by painful inch, out of my lonely comfort zone and toward the connections of friendship and love.
I met a wonderful partner. His family is kind, and they accept me as their own. I found friends who bring light to my eyes. I found a job that values me and doesn’t force me into crushing emotional labor. I no longer feel like I have to be solitary to be safe. These days, I’m cruising at altitude, smooth and steady, fuel tanks full. Books are still close companions, but now I have human love, too.
Epilogue: Why?
Background music: “Burlap Ballgown” by The Lizzy Co Show
The question remains:
why do we talk
about how it was,
how it is today?
The beliefs I learned as a child have deep roots, and gaining fluency in a new way of thinking took some work.
Reading the lived experiences of others helps me see that it’s possible to move beyond a rough start to find a wonderful life.
The longer I fight to give the frozen, terrified parts of me what they need to feel safe, the more clearly the world looks like a place where I belong.
I’m doing it, and while I hope you never have to, I know you can too.
Thank you so much for reading this special edition of The Lizzy Co Show. If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe and tell a friend!
All my best,
Thanks for sharing this, Lizzy! <3
I'd never considered the power in reading parenting guidance books when dealing with this type of trauma. I might take a page from your book! :)
I'm here for you, just as you are for me.