There are many reasons why I have trust issues, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that I don’t feel safe around my own people, in my own community, and that’s because of Family. I don’t think that’s talked about enough.
Sure, we all know about judgmental aunties... but let me tell you about mine.
Before I get into it, I need to provide some context. You may already know that I was born in Suriname, and I arrived in the Netherlands as a small child. My mom and I left my adja and adji’s house (my father’s parents), and my father would follow a year later. Once he arrived, he had to find steady employment before we could get our own home. The time between all that was spent with Family. My mother and I lived with my father’s oldest sister for a few months, then we were taken to another sister of his for more months, and eventually we moved in with my mother’s sister, where we stayed the longest. I went to three different preschools. We traveled most weekends too, so my mother could see her (other) sisters.
Basically, I’ve moved around a lot.
That, in itself, can be rough on a child, but my Family decided to be extra. I often joke I could write plots to dramatic Indian tv-shows or Telenovela’s with the shit I’ve seen happen. But for now I’ll just limit it to a few incidents to highlight how I became distrustful of Family.
Let’s go back to the destabilizing period when I was staying at an aunt’s with my mother. We lived in her house together with her husband, and their two sons. My older cousins. Their grandmother (on their dad’s side) visited them often, and one time she brought gifts with her. Three gifts for three children living in that house. When she handed a gift to me, I didn’t expect it. She wasn’t my Family. I wasn’t one of her grandchildren. But she was kind to me, nonetheless. A small gesture for a small child, but with immense value. The gift was simple. She’d given all of us drinking glasses with dinosaurs painted on it. Mine had sauropods. Long-necked dino’s—my favorite kind (the coincidence!) because they ate plants, not meat… so that meant they wouldn’t eat me, and we could be friends!!
I guess I was in need of a friend.
My feelings about sauropods are based on the children’s movie The Land Before Time (Platvoet en zijn vriendjes). Set in the age of the dinosaurs, during a great famine, Littlefoot, together with his mother and grandparents, the only ones left of their herd, are forced to travel to the Great Valley. When he’s still a child his mother gives her life to protect him from danger. He’s alive, but he’s separated from his family. He’s not alone. He has a friend. Together they try to find the Great Valley, guided by his mother’s voice to hopefully return to their families. Along the way, they make more friends, and the group has to survive together. Looking back at it now, I was projecting hard. I do love the found family trope, and Littlefoot’s reunion with his grandparents. So, you see, that drinking glass with the sauropods, a small kindness by someone else, was a reminder that there would be a happy ending. It was an example of friendship and love. And it was mine.
Until it wasn’t.
I was attached to that glass, which my aunt could see. I was a child, I wasn’t subtle. So, strange rules were imposed on when I could use it. A glass!! She was very strict about it. I wasn’t allowed to drink anything when I was eating, not even if I was thirsty, only when she allowed it. And when I left that place, relocated with my mother to stay at another aunt’s place, my aunt claimed that she had lost the glass.
How does one lose a piece of glass? You might break it. You might conceal it. But lose it? In your own house? The one that happened to be given to me after policing how often I use it? Come on. I’m not buying it.
I guess the glass wasn’t mine to keep. And I could do nothing about that. When I cried to my mother, she tried to console me. But beyond that she was powerless too. She couldn’t accuse anyone when we were dependent on the charity of Family. They were taking us into their homes after we arrived in the Netherlands. And this was just one of the sacrifices we made.
Also, it was only a drinking glass. So I get my mom’s actions. We were in survival mode.
Still, I can’t believe so much pain is wrapped around this memory. But I wasn’t just denied the glass (or bodily autonomy for that matter), I was given lessons on how little I mattered. How little my mother mattered. That the things we cared about weren’t ours to keep. We had nothing except for what Family would let us have. This wasn’t love. I knew that much as a child. And it also didn’t create love in my heart for my aunt. It brought up walls, and created distance.
Other things happened in that household too. A teddy bear I was given was ruined by my cousins for their entertainment. When we’d walk back to their house from school, they’d start running so I couldn’t keep up with them. All by myself, afraid, in a foreign town, in a foreign land. They found my tears amusing. I imagine I was a nuisance to them, a disruption in their upbringing. They were one in mine too.
There weren’t any consequences for their behavior.
Survival mode. More walls, more distance.
Let’s zoom out again. I’m Surinamese-Hindustani, Indo-Caribbean if you will, and the way I’ve experienced my culture is that it revolves around being perfect and superior. It’s highly critical and righteous. People love to point fingers while they’ve got skeletons in their own closet. As long as you don’t see them, they will point. There’s so much trash-talking, and image matters: How successful you are at life, how much you have, how good you are. All these forms of control and policing, and they’re enforced even more for women.
When you do well, people build you up. But they lie in wait, biding their time, finding the right moment to tear you down. Female cousins pretended to be nice to my face only to talk about me behind my back. That was another important lesson for me.
The biggest snakes are in your own nest.
More walls, more distance. I couldn’t even confide in my peers, save for two, and even that was only to a certain degree. An added layer to this is that I’m not straight. I’m bisexual. I’ve known this since I was eight years old. And I wasn’t able to tell a Family member about it. There was always that wall, firmly rooted. I never felt safe enough to do so. Not when the majority had homophobic views that they freely expressed (and, yup, those definitely were accompanied by sexist and racist views). I couldn’t take that on. I couldn’t bear it.
So I hid myself, and I fortified my walls.
Now let’s fast-forward a few years. I’ve many older cousins, and when they were in their teens, I got front row seats to the manipulation and shaming they went through at the hands of certain aunties. Under the guise of being cool, she would offer them cigarettes and alcohol. They’d accept, because that was pretty cool and experimental. Later on that aunt would offer it to me too—forcibly—but I would say “no” repeatedly. Had to, for her to hear it. Plus, I had “the excuse of asthma” that usually stopped her from shoving a cigarette in my mouth. My aunt (and her husband, she wasn’t alone in this) would sneakily offer us stuff during Family parties, or she’d invite us over to her place where the teens could just be chill and cool, and have a good time. By the time the smoking and drinking had become a regular thing for my teenage cousins, a habit they did on their own too, that same aunt would go to their parents and inform them of their child’s bad behavior as the concerned aunt that she was.
What kind of fuckery is that.
I could write so much more on this, but I’ll limit myself to these two incidents for now. The first one I experienced as an insider, the second I got to observe as an outsider (and had therefore learned to not walk into those traps). Although both incidents are very different (the circumstances and the degree of fuckery), both illustrate the power dynamics, deceit and manipulation, and how those aunties just got away with their shit.
And so I survived the best way I knew how. I built walls and hid inside. I kept Family, and people somehow related to them, at a distance.