It Gets Better
My friends and colleagues would always ask me why I don’t cook, and I conceived two excuses I would deploy often: I don’t have time, and my cat sheds all over the kitchen. It’s better than telling them the truth and making it awkward. One time, I told someone off for nagging me about not cooking, and boy, was it uncomfortable and awkward for them.
I don’t like spending time in the kitchen or won’t buy dining room furniture because they trigger my PTSD. Before I start, I worked out most of these memories in therapy, but I still relive them from time to time. Last time was yesterday, in April of this year and before that, in 2017. When I was a little kid, I used to make forts and play under tables a lot and pretend I was in a cave.
I was seven years old and my mom had her friend over. She was fixing food in the kitchen, which is adjacent to the dining table where my dad was talking to my mom’s friend. I was playing underneath the table. It was one of those clear glass tables. Anyway…My dad was always busy and never really spent quality time with me, ever.
My mom was, for a lack of a better word, psychotic. She was the opposite of nurturing. She treated me like trash. So, naturally, I wanted attention. I don’t remember what I was trying to get my dad’s attention for, but remember everything that happened after that. I was annoying him so much that he flew off the handle. I wasn’t expecting this, but he punched me in the face.
It was so hard that my face was numb and all I felt was a heavy stream of something warm coming out of my nose. I looked down and it was blood. My mom’s friend shrieked and instead of tending to me, my mom was trying to calm her down. My dad was yelling at me not to bother him as blood splattered all over the floor. I remember we had beige and brown tiles.
My blood splatter nearly covered a whole square. I ran quickly upstairs as if my life depended on it and locked myself in my room and hid behind the curtains. I remember being in that room for two days because it was a Saturday and I could retreat there until I had to go to school. I was there without eating or going to the bathroom.
That is a useful and neat survival skill I learned as I grew up. During the first day, they both scolded me from outside the door, saying it was my fault that I scared my mom’s friend away. Then, the next day they felt bad and tried to get me to eat and leave the room by giving me promises of new toys, but I refused. I spent those two days hating life and wondering why they keep doing stuff like that to us.
I don’t remember much after that except that my mom never cleaned up the dried-up blood stains underneath the table for weeks, and I could see the blood splatter every day from the glass table. To this day, I wonder what ticked my dad off so much that day that he would punch his seven-year-old, who was smaller than all the other seven-year-olds and was literally the size of a five-year-old. But there’s also more.
My mom was a clinically depressed housewife and spent most of her time in the kitchen cooking. As I grew up, my mom would randomly belittle me in the kitchen when I needed to grab something to eat, and told me things like how I was ugly and that she wished I was never born. My dad has had a history of unprovoked violent outbursts and anger issues all my life, but after that punching incident, I don’t remember any other similar events until I was in my teens when he got remarried.
On a few occasions, when I tried to cook something and he smelled smoke, he said I would burn the house down or something, so he would throw the food I was cooking at me. Or if he had a bad day and it had nothing to do with me, food would be flying my way anyway. This went on until I was able to work and buy food and avoid the kitchen or eating dinner with them.
I’d buy non-perishable food and hide it in my room so I wouldn’t have to go to the kitchen. Or, I’d eat only one meal a day. I started intermittent fasting without knowing it at school because I was working three jobs after school to save up to get emancipated. Working three jobs didn’t allow for a lot of breaks. From that time until now, I never cooked.
I developed a complex where I didn’t want to. I even have a pet peeve of seeing pieces of food strewn out on the table or on the floor, because it triggers memories of food thrown at me. Now, the only thing that bears semblance to cooking is me using the toaster oven. I’m very grateful to have been able to get out of that situation. I changed a sad story into a better one.
Since then, I’ve eaten at exclusive restaurants and been fed at movie premieres that people are desperate to get into. And the irony is that I have been supporting my dad and paying for his food for almost a decade now. I share this story because I’m sure there were a lot of people out there that suffer from PTSD stemming from stuff like this. I can say from experience that things can and will get better.