The Lessons I Learned Before I Was Even Five
Ages 0–5: The Original Wiring That Still Runs My Fucking Life
Trigger Warning: Raw descriptions of infant and toddler abandonment, physical beatings, sexual abuse, neglect, and the exact moment a tiny kid learns her body is not hers.
Before I was even five I learned people can disappear, my body wasn’t mine, and the only way to survive was to detach and take the pain of others. Those lessons still run my life. If your earliest years wired you for hyper-vigilance and self-protection, this is where it started for me.
Before I can talk about what real healing looks like for me now, I’ve gotta take you back to the very beginning. The first three posts were about realizing I was only half-healed. Functional survival that looked good on the outside but left me locked inside my own fucking walls. This post is the reason why. These are the lessons I learned before I was even five years old. The original wiring that everything else in my life’s been built on top of.
I was dumped into foster care when I was only six months old, back in January of 1974. For a while after that, my birth mother still came for those scheduled, supervised visits. I only have two vague memories of her, and in both of them I can’t even see her face clearly. Just blurry shapes and emptiness.
One of the few memories that still sticks with me from those early years is the boat ride when I was about three. I can still feel the wind whipping through my hair as the boat sped across the water. At one point her hat flew off and disappeared behind us. She got upset while the other adults just laughed. My little stomach twisted with desperate, pathetic hope that maybe, just maybe, she was finally going to take me home this time.
She didn’t.
The final visit from my birth mother is still one of the most painful fucking things I carry. When it was over, she took my sister with her and left me behind. I stood frozen in the doorway, watching them walk away down the sidewalk. There was no wave, no goodbye, nothing. Just their backs getting smaller until they were gone. That crushing emptiness hit me so hard I couldn’t breathe. Even then, I still clung to hope and waited for another visit that never came.
That was the moment I first learned the brutal fucking truth: the people you love can just disappear without a second glance, leaving you behind with nothing but a hole inside you.
After that, the foster homes started to blur together into one long nightmare. Every new placement meant walking into another strange house with unfamiliar smells, different rules, and new forms of cruelty. I became an expert at reading the adults the second I arrived, studying their faces, their voices, every little movement. No matter how carefully I sized them up, the result was always the same. I was fair game. I was on my own.
There was one house where they kept all the foster kids locked in a single bedroom for most of the day. It was crowded with bunk beds and had a bathroom just for us. Jeffrey, a boy about my age, struggled with bedwetting every single night. Each morning the foster mother would yank him out of bed by his arm, drag him out, and lock the rest of us inside. We could hear his screams and cries echoing through the house. She would eventually bring him back, lock us in again, and leave.
Even as a tiny kid, I tried desperately to fix it. I was convinced the bedwetting came from pure terror, so I invited Jeffrey to sleep in my bed with me one night, believing that if he felt safe next to me the nightmares would stop and he would finally stay dry. It didn’t work. He still soaked the sheets.
The very next morning I told him to hurry and get back into his own bed before she came in. I was trying to protect him. He did. But when she walked in and saw my wet bed, I took Jeffrey’s place. I let her believe it was me. She yanked me out by the arm and punished me while laughing at my screams and tears. Something deep inside me shattered. When they put me back together, I was different. I learned how to flip a mental switch, detach from the pain, and let it roll off me instead of letting it destroy me completely.
My little heart was already broken into pieces, but I still tried to protect the other kids, especially Jeffrey. I started throwing myself between him and her, taking the beatings so they wouldn’t have to. That was the first time I ever stood up like that for someone else.
Every night I still pulled Jeffrey into my bed. He stopped fighting it, and he became the only person I trusted in that entire fucked-up world.
Eventually we were moved to a new foster home, and this one felt completely different. The parents welcomed us with real hugs and warm meals. For the first time, it actually seemed like we belonged somewhere. That feeling of safety was so unfamiliar that I slowly began to lower my guard and let myself believe that maybe things could finally be okay.
But that hope didn’t last long. One day a couple came and chose only Jeffrey. I begged them to take me too, but they refused. I stood at the window watching their car pull away until it disappeared. Another devastating loss. Another person I loved ripped away from me without any explanation. Afterward I spent hours every day sitting at that window, waiting for someone, my mom, my sister, Jeffrey, anyone, to come back for me.
Nobody ever did.
Not long after, the foster parents brought in an older boy, around thirteen or fourteen. They put him in charge of taking us younger kids upstairs to wash our hands before meals. He always saved me for last. Once the other children went downstairs, he would lock the bathroom door and lean in close, whispering his cold threat: if I ever told anyone what he was doing, nobody would ever love me or want me.
I wanted a real home so badly that it consumed me. That threat cut deeper than any physical beating ever had. Because of it, I stayed silent. Day after day he sexually abused me in that bathroom. That’s how a tiny little girl learned that her body wasn’t really hers. That “no” didn’t mean anything because people would take whatever the fuck they wanted anyway.
One afternoon he took it further while the foster parents were out. He forced me into the bedroom and crossed a line he hadn’t before. When the foster parents returned, they found me unconscious. The truth finally came out.
After that, they removed him and the other children, but they kept me. That night the night terrors began. I would wake up screaming, but there were no tears because I had already learned to turn my emotions off long ago. My foster mother would hold me gently and sing to me until I could fall back asleep. Slowly and carefully, I began to trust them again. For the first time in a long while, I started to feel flickers of happiness trying to come back.
Then one afternoon they called me into the living room and sat me down. With soft voices they told me they loved me and wanted to adopt me. In that moment, real hope surged through me. I believed with everything I had that I had finally found safety and love.
It didn’t last.
Another couple entered the picture. They already had a son they’d adopted from the same foster home, and now they were looking for a girl to complete their family. Supervised visits began, and outwardly everyone was pleasant and smiling. But deep down, a heavy sense of unease grew inside me. My instincts were screaming that something was wrong, but I had learned too well how to bury those feelings and stay quiet.
The day finally came when my foster parents dressed me up, drove me to a big building full of strangers, and handed me over to the new couple like I was nothing more than an object. There was a barbecue afterward, and everyone around me was smiling, laughing, and celebrating what was supposed to be the happiest day of my life. For me, it felt like the final door to anything good had just slammed shut forever.
All of those early years, every scar, every brutal lesson, every piece of me that got broken, followed me straight into my adoptive home when I was just five years old.
And they have never left my side since.
See you in Post #5.
—Syn
If this hit you in the gut, if you survived hell as a kid and built a life that looks okay on the outside but still feels like you’re carrying the same shit, you’re in the right fucking place.
What’s one brutal lesson you learned as a tiny kid that you still catch yourself living today?
(Mine were “people that love you, leave you,” “your body isn’t yours",”
and “detach to survive.”)
Share your’s. Lets name this shit together.
You’ll get every post in your inbox.