I Don’t Know If My Childhood Was Bad or If I’ve Just Been Gaslighting Myself for 40 Years….

I know I was lucky in some ways. I wasn’t homeless. I lived in a large house. I had doctors, dentists, school, grandparents, birthdays, Christmases, and moments of real care. That is why it took me so long to understand how bad it was emotionally. Because how do you explain feeling neglected when, on paper, you had more than enough?

I’m telling this because I don’t want it to go untold. Not because my pain was the worst kind of pain, but because it was real, and I spent most of my life trying to convince myself it wasn’t.

For most of my life, I thought we were poor, which is ridiculous when I say it out loud because we lived in a five-bedroom house with five bathrooms and a basement big enough to get lost in. There were seven of us living there, but there was still space everywhere: bedrooms, bathrooms, extra rooms, corners to hide in, places to avoid each other without technically leaving. From the outside, I imagine we looked fine. More than fine. A big family in a big house. Parents, grandparents nearby, birthday parties, Christmas presents, doctors, dentists, school, family dinners. Nobody looking at us from the road would have thought to ask whether anything was wrong. Maybe that was part of the problem. There was no obvious visual evidence that a child inside that house could be hungry, cold, confused, or lonely. The house itself argued against me.

I was one of quadruplets. My parents already had one child, my older brother, and then my mother wanted another baby. Instead, she got four. That became the family story before any of us were old enough to understand it. People loved hearing it. They still do. Their eyes widen. They ask if we’re identical, if we were natural, how my parents survived, what it was like growing up. I understand the reaction. Quadruplets sound like a miracle, or a television special, or a punchline about chaos. But nobody ever asks what happens after the miracle wears off. Nobody asks what it feels like to be one of four children the exact same age, moving through every developmental stage together, needing the same things at the same time, being compared before you even know you are separate people.

My earliest memories are not unhappy ones, which is part of what makes the story difficult to tell. One of the first school mornings I remember is my father waking me up gently because we had overslept. We went to a school about thirty minutes away then, and my clothes were already laid out on the bed: black corduroy overalls with a white collared shirt underneath, bright colours on the collar. I remember him speaking softly, telling me it was time to get up and we were running a little late. I remember that outfit because later the same day I almost peed my pants at school trying to undo the buttons. It is such an ordinary memory, almost sweet in how ordinary it is. A father waking his daughter. Clothes laid out. A little girl in overalls. Someone had thought about what I needed before I woke up.

That is why it took me so long to understand what happened later. Something changed, but not in a single dramatic moment. Nobody announced that childhood was over. Nobody said, “You’re on your own now.” Responsibility simply drifted downward until it landed on us, and because we were children, we adjusted. By Grade 2, we had moved to a closer school and started taking the bus. Around then, things became messier in my memory. Lunches became our responsibility. Laundry became our responsibility. Our rooms became our responsibility. Cleanliness became our responsibility. The fact that we did not know how to do these things properly became our failure.

My mother would say there was plenty of lunch food, and technically, maybe there was. There were apples and vegetables and bread and tuna and deli meat, unless someone had left the package open long enough for it to dry out or go bad. But there is a difference between food existing and a child knowing how to feed herself. A seven-year-old does not automatically know how to cut a cucumber, how to mix tuna and mayonnaise, how to tell whether deli meat has spoiled, or how to pack something that will still be edible by noon. A seven-year-old can stand in front of a fridge full of ingredients and still have no real access to lunch. By Grade 6, I often stopped bringing lunch. By Grade 7 and Grade 8, I usually did not eat lunch at all. I don’t remember making a decision about it. It simply became easier not to deal with it.

That is how the maggots happened. I was eleven years old when I pulled cookies out of my backpack at school and discovered they were full of maggots. The whole class saw. I don’t remember if anyone laughed or screamed or looked away. I don’t remember what the teacher said. What I remember is the heat of shame moving through my body so quickly it felt like I had been caught doing something wrong. I remember hiding in the bathroom afterward, unable to speak. For years, I told that story as if it proved something about me: that I was disgusting, careless, lazy, the kind of child who let food rot in her bag. It took me much longer to understand that the maggots were not a personality flaw. They were evidence. An eleven-year-old does not end up carrying rotting food around long enough for that to happen because she is fundamentally defective. She ends up there because she is eleven and nobody is checking.

The same thing happened with laundry. I was doing my own laundry by, I’m pretty sure 6 or 7. The washing machine was on the main floor of our house, and I was too short to reach the clothes at the bottom, so I would climb on top and lean my whole body into the drum, trying to hook socks and shirts with my fingertips. I don’t remember thinking it was unfair. I remember thinking I couldn’t reach. That distinction matters because children do not analyze their circumstances the way adults do. They solve the problem in front of them. If they cannot reach, they climb. If there is no lunch, they don’t eat. If they are cold, they layer pajama pants under their jeans. If they need help and no one offers it, they learn not to ask.

In Grade 8, I wore a very thin Sabian music jacket meant for spring through Canadian winter. It was not a winter coat. I grew out of mine and did not have any other to wear. My mom and dad saw but never said anything, at all.

To stay warm, I wore pajamas underneath my clothes. I remember sitting in class with the extra layer hidden under my jeans, both grateful for the warmth and embarrassed by the strategy. At the time, I thought I was being resourceful. Now I think about a child in a five-bedroom house making herself warm in secret and wonder why nobody asked a question.

My body became another place where I learned not to expect help. I was bigger than my sisters in height and shape, so I could not share clothes so this left me with one or two outfits on repeat. I often wore hand-me-downs from my older brother when I thought people started to notice, which did something to me that I did not understand at the time. Other girls got to become girls. They got clothes that fit, clothes that reflected who they were becoming. I often felt like I was borrowing someone else’s discarded identity.

My siblings called me fat. Later, my brother would tell me proudly that he defended me when his friends called me fat or compared me to Powder because I was so pale. He seemed to think this proved he had been a good brother. All I heard was that people had been making fun of me and I had not known. In high school, when I finally lost enough weight to fit into my sisters’ clothes, it felt like access to a version of girlhood I had been locked out of. But my body was still my body. My thighs wore through jeans. Once, I asked my father for a new pair because my ONLY pants had ripped. He made a joke about my weight. I do not remember getting the jeans.

The summer after Grade 6, I got my period at my friend Amy’s birthday sleepover. It was the night we found out Ginger Spice had left the Spice Girls. I was wearing a 101 Dalmatians onesie. I went to the bathroom, saw blood, and told no one. Not my friends. Not my mother. Nobody. I carried it alone because carrying things alone had already started to feel normal. My mother had explained sex and reproduction when we were very young, maybe five, and she had done it in a way that felt too open, too pushy, too embarrassing. People often assume that openness creates trust, but sometimes it creates the opposite. By the time my own body started changing, I did not want to talk to her about it. I did not know how. So I said nothing.

Months later, I was in Texas with a family my mother had met on the internet. That sentence still sounds strange to me, but at the time it felt completely normal. It was the mid-1990s, and my mother had discovered the internet and made friends with a family there. Somehow this turned into three preteen girls flying to another country to stay with people who had started as strangers online. The first trip I remember because all three of us were discovered to have lice, and I had it the worst. Another trip stayed with me because the Texas mother was doing laundry and found blood in my clothes. That was how she learned I had gotten my period, and that was how I learned how to use feminine hygiene products. Not from my mother. From a woman in Texas.

That same summer, my mother had started criticizing me in front of people for not wearing a bra. The Texas mother took me shopping for sports bras and helped me find ones that fit. I remember standing in the change room with her, taking my shirt off while she helped me try one on. I do not believe anything malicious happened. I want to be clear about that. What feels strange now is not that she helped me, but that she was standing in a place my mother should have been standing. She noticed what I needed. That was the thing that made the memory last.

Texas became darker with time. Years later, my sister disclosed that one of the teenage boys in that house had sexually abused her. I still do not know the full story. I do not know what my mother knew, when she knew it, what signs were visible, or what anyone chose not to see. I only know that when I look back now, the whole period feels like one of many unfinished conversations from childhood: adults making decisions around us, children absorbing the consequences, nobody explaining anything clearly enough for the story to settle.

My mother was a stay-at-home mother until we were around twelve, though she may have gone to school when we were around nine to eleven before getting a job in health care. When I remember her at home, I remember her sleeping or sitting at the computer. As an adult, I can imagine reasons. Depression, exhaustion, overwhelm, maybe all of it. But children do not experience adult explanations. They experience what is available to them. What was available to me was a mother who could be deeply present in some areas and completely unreachable in others. She loved music, and when I became interested in music, she connected with that part of me. She took me to concerts. She gave me something that became one of the central forces of my life. Some of my happiest memories are tied to music because of her. That is true. It is also true that she was not the person who taught me how to use feminine hygiene products. Both things are true, and the fact that both things are true is why the story took me so long to understand.

My father was not one thing either. I remember the gentle kindergarten morning. I remember the black corduroy overalls. I remember being cared for. I also remember being around ten years old, standing in the laundry room and telling one of my sisters what an asshole our older brother was. My father heard me. He came in, threw me to the ground, and put his hands around my neck. I still do not know if he actually choked me. I remember my mother running in and pulling him away. Then life continued. No real conversation that I remember. No repair. No adult sitting me down and saying that should never have happened. It became another thing that happened in the house.

I used to pass out when adults yelled. My Grade 2 teacher yelled at me once and I fainted. My father yelled at me once and I fainted. I also used to vomit in my sleep, and I still do not know why. Doctors were involved. Hospitals were involved. People investigated the symptoms. That was another contradiction. We did receive medical care. When I was six and had a bump on my face that older kids made fun of, my parents had it surgically removed. We went to the dentist. Teeth were removed. Physical issues were handled. The visible problems received attention. The invisible ones remained invisible.

I was sick so often in Grade 8 that I ended up in summer school. Once I got there, the teachers kept asking why I was even there because I was smart and did well. I remember that confusion. Their confusion and mine. If I was smart enough to succeed there, why had nobody asked why I was missing so much school in the first place? Why didn’t anyone ask what was going on? Why didn’t anyone stop at the obvious contradiction between a capable child and a child who could not seem to function?

By then, I had already built a story about myself. I was fat, ugly, not smart, a slob, unlovable. I did not need anyone to say all of it directly, although enough of it was said. I gathered evidence the way children do. The messy room. The body comments. The hand-me-downs. The lunches. The maggots. The winter jacket. The fact that one sister seemed to be my granny’s favourite, another seemed to be my mother’s favourite, my same-age brother seemed to be my grandpa’s favourite, and my older brother seemed to be everyone else’s favourite. My older brother stayed with my grandparents on weekends, where they did his laundry. He learned about money and stocks. He was paid for chores. He seemed to receive preparation for adulthood while the rest of us were simply expected to become adults by instinct. Somewhere in that system, I could not figure out where I fit.

My sisters and I were close and not close, cruel and loyal, friends and enemies depending on the year, the day, the mood. I shared a room with one sister, and the room was always a disaster. We were called slobs, and maybe we were messy, but we were also children. Nobody had really taught us how to maintain a room, how to build routines, how to organize a life. I was constantly told to do the dishes, not everyone else, just me, so often that even my siblings called it out. I wanted to play baseball and was allowed to go to one practice, then never again. I did piano briefly and was taken out. One sister did gymnastics. Another had piano. My wants seemed to appear and disappear without ever becoming something the family made room for - I was the only one pushed to back and forgotten about. I wish I was being dramatic. They all at different times have acknowledged this directly to me - though, my parents deny it still.

The thing I wanted most was not a specific activity or item of clothing or even fairness, though I wanted all of those things at different points. What I wanted most was for someone to notice me. Not us, not the quadruplets, not the family story, not the messy room, not the fat kid, not the quiet one, not the useful one. Me. I wanted someone to say, “Is SHE okay? Does she need to talk? Does she need a hug?” I wanted an adult to look past the big house and the large family and the apparent normalcy and see the child inside it who did not know where she belonged.

For a long time, I thought adulthood would answer the questions childhood couldn’t. I thought that once I left home, got a job, paid my own bills, and built a life that belonged entirely to me, I would finally understand my family. I thought distance would create clarity, but distance mostly revealed how much of my childhood I had normalized. When I moved to a major city, it felt less like leaving home and more like discovering that other ways of living existed. I was suddenly surrounded by people whose parents called them regularly to check in, whose families knew what they did for work, who asked for help without feeling guilty, who seemed to move through the world with an assumption I had never developed: that care was normal.

At first, I was too busy surviving to think about any of that. I was building a career, trying to prove myself, trying to become someone. Looking back, I spent most of my twenties running toward a version of myself that felt impossible when I was younger. The internet had become my escape long before it became my career. While other kids seemed to naturally absorb information from parents, teachers, coaches, and family members, I learned things online. I learned how to take care of myself. I learned how the world worked. I learned how to communicate. I learned how to build things. Eventually, I learned enough that I built a career helping some of the biggest brands and artists in the world tell their stories. The kid who couldn’t figure out lunch grew up to build marketing campaigns seen by millions of people. Reader, you’ve almost certainly seen some of them. That is one of the stranger ironies of my life. For someone who spent so much of childhood wondering whether anyone noticed her, I eventually built a career around capturing other people’s attention.

Success solved many things, but it did not solve the past. In fact, success complicated it, because the more successful I became, the harder it was to reconcile that evidence with the version of myself I had carried for years. The story I had built about myself was that I was the problem. I was lazy, messy, not as smart as everyone else, not disciplined, not capable. Then I started succeeding, and then I kept succeeding, and eventually the evidence no longer supported the story. That should have felt freeing, but instead it was confusing. If I wasn’t lazy, why was I always called a slob? If I wasn’t incapable, why had I spent so much of my childhood feeling incompetent? If I wasn’t unlovable, why had I felt so invisible?

Those questions followed me into relationships. The worst one nearly destroyed me. Like most abusive relationships, it did not begin as the thing it became. It shifted gradually, the way so many things in my life had shifted gradually, until I was living inside a reality I no longer trusted myself to interpret. He dragged me by my hair down hallways. He physically restrained me when I tried to leave. He put me into wrestling holds and locked positions so I could not move. Once, when I was screaming to get away, he put his hands in my mouth so aggressively that I thought he might break my jaw. He slammed a door on my hand. He locked me in rooms. He threatened to call my workplace and leak private photos. He got me so drunk I would throw up, and I lost weight. At one point, he pricked me with a pin when he made me sleep on the floor so I would not fall asleep.

I could not tell my family the full extent of it. My mother and one sister knew some, but not all. Eventually I got out, but getting out was not the same as being free. I stayed in the hospital for a week because I wanted to die. There is no elegant way to write that. For years inside that relationship, I wanted to unalive myself. Not because I did not want life, but because I could not imagine continuing to live that one. Surviving it did not make me enlightened. It made me exhausted. I did not emerge with a lesson. I emerged needing quiet, stability, and proof that I could trust my own mind again.

There were other echoes later, smaller in some ways and still devastating. My ex made me believe I had bed bugs. I stripped apart my life trying to solve the problem. I gave up belongings, dismantled routines, moved, and destroyed my sense of safety over an infestation that turned out to be him. Even now, it feels too obvious as a metaphor: someone else created the problem, and I destroyed my own life trying to clean it up.

That pattern was familiar because I had been doing versions of it since childhood. Something feels wrong. Assume it is your responsibility. Fix it. Carry it. Handle it. Do not make it anyone else’s problem.

The people who know me professionally often describe me as calm under pressure, strategic, capable, resourceful. They are not wrong. What they do not always understand is where those traits came from. Chaos feels familiar to me. I learned how to function inside it long before I learned how to function outside it. I became the person who solves problems because I spent most of my life solving problems that belonged to other people. That skill helped me build a life, but it also kept me trapped in roles I did not want, especially inside my family.

By adulthood, my siblings had built their own lives. They got married, had children, bought houses. Money entered the picture in ways that made old dynamics sharper. They received financial help for homes or down payments, while I never followed the same path. I never wanted children, partly because I did not know if I could give them the childhood I would want them to have. I got cats instead. I built a career, built stability, built a life that made sense to me, but because I had not received the same large financial help and was not tied into the same house-and-children structure, I became useful in a different way. I became the reliable helper.

That role became unbearable more recently when my same-age brother separated himself from the family and became convinced that my older brother was trying to destroy his life. He talked about psychics, empaths, narcissists, toxic family systems. Maybe some of what he saw was real. Maybe some of it was distorted by his own pain.

What I know for certain is that he kept coming to me for help: emotional support in three hour phone calls rehashing his childhood experiences and in the same breath ignoring mine when I tried to relate or remind him I know how he feels - I would help prove things, helped navigating conflicts that had nothing to do with me. Eventually I realized that he did not really ask how I was. He did not know much or have any desire to inquire about my life, my cats, my relationship, or what I have survived. He knew what I could do for him and that’s as far as our relationship went.

When I finally pushed back and said I could not be in the middle anymore, the consequences spilled everywhere. Access to my nieces and nephews became political as a result - since I did not want to implicate myself any further, I was no longer able to have a relationship with the children that I have helped raise.

The old wound opened again - my presence in life is conditional. I am only there to be useful. I am not seen as an equal sibling or human being.

I do not believe my family is incapable of love. I do not think they wake up trying to hurt each other. If anything, I think most of us are carrying wounds we do not fully understand. But understanding something does not erase its impact. The impact was that I reached adulthood carrying a profound uncertainty about where I belonged. Not because I had no accomplishments, not because I had no relationships, not because I failed, but because belonging and achievement are not the same thing. You can build an impressive life and still feel like the little girl standing in a kitchen, looking at food she does not know how to turn into lunch, wondering why everything seems easier for everyone else.

For years, I thought I was looking backward because I was stuck. I thought maybe I was obsessive, dramatic, unable to move on. I thought if I could find the right explanation, the past would finally release me. Now I think I was looking backward because I was searching for the adult who should have noticed. A teacher, a grandparent, a parent, a friend’s parent, anyone. Someone who should have seen the child with no lunch, the child who fainted when yelled at, the child in the thin winter jacket, the child hiding in the bathroom, the child learning about her body from a woman in Texas, the child who wondered at eleven why she had been born.

I may never find that person in the past. Maybe everyone was overwhelmed. Maybe everyone was tired. Maybe everyone was doing their best. Maybe they loved me in the ways they knew how and failed me in the ways they could not see. Maybe all of that is true. But the child still stood there, and no explanation changes what she needed. For a long time, I thought healing meant getting everyone to agree on what happened. I thought if I could prove it clearly enough, someone would finally say, “You’re right. That was not okay. We should have seen you.” Maybe that will never happen. Maybe the story does not end with a verdict. Maybe it ends with me understanding that I do not have to keep building the case.

I remember enough. I know enough. I remember the house, the lunches, the washing machine, the maggots, the 101 Dalmatians onesie, Texas, the lice, the winter jacket, the jeans, the dishes, the favourites, the abusive relationship, the hospital, the career, the brother who needed me but did not know me. I remember becoming an adult who could lead teams, build campaigns seen by millions, survive things I still struggle to say plainly, and still feel like an eleven-year-old girl waiting for someone to ask if she was okay. I am asking now. That may have to be enough, not because it makes the past fair, not because it excuses anyone, and not because I am done grieving, but because I cannot keep abandoning my present life to search for an adult who never came.