Too Young to Carry

I remember the burden that wasn’t mine to bear. A form of guilt shackled onto me, a fear unknowingly branded, and anger that simmered from a place I didn’t even understand. Nonetheless… I remember.

Sitting in the back seat of my mother’s Kia Sorento, I shake my legs nervously as my mother presses her phone against her ear, as though that would make the receiver of her call any more compliant. I try to catch her expression through the rear-view mirror, wondering what she looks like in this very moment of unbearable silence. I want to understand why she is quiet, but she continues to obsessively redial a sequence of numbers every time the automated voice message sounds.

“Damn it.” She curses. “He turned it off.”

She says nothing else after that. The drive home continues to be this uncomfortable silence with only the noise of my mother’s grip tightening on the steering wheel. That’s when I started to feel the weight of something I couldn’t even begin to comprehend, latching itself around my ankle.

My mother moped around in a shroud of darkness. Eyes bloodshot, yet still rimming with purple on her lower lids. Her face pale, and her stature folding into itself like some type of defense. My mother was becoming someone I couldn’t even recognize, and for what? I wouldn’t know…not then, because I was too young—or so I was told.

My memories of hushed yet harsh voices hiss from under the upstairs door. Moments of unspoken tension that would smother me to the point of fainting. Now there are days of continuous sobs that are choked out in rejection of the desperate suppression of the mourner. But what is she grieving over?

“You don’t have to worry about that. You’re too young.”

A phrase told to me over and over, as though it were a law. I’ve always hated it, despite never understanding what it meant. Why is age a requirement? Will it finally bring some form of explanation for these confusing yet curious events? What about this continuous weight around my feet that no one else seems to notice? Oh well. I guess I’m just too young.

There is another time I remember. It was something that happened not long after my first shackle clamped onto me.

“Why did you do it?” I whispered.

“Do what?”

“Did what you did to mom…to us. Why did you do it?”

He refused to answer at first. His eyes fixed to the red streetlight, as if he were cursing it for not being green. “You don’t know anything.”

“I know what I need to. And I know that you abandoned us.”

“What do you mean? You don’t know anything. You’re just a kid—stop talking like you understand.”

“You don’t believe that I know anything, but I know that you left. I know that you left mom…and that you left us. And that you left me to tell her without even a single care. You just care about yourself.”

His head whipped in my direction. His usual eyes of comforting chestnut turned black and empty—like someone who is tranced in madness. “And what? If it bothers you so much, I don’t have to be your dad anymore.”

He didn’t know it then, but those words created another metal bound around my limb. And just as ignorant as he was, I answered back spitefully. “Then don’t be.”

I dragged these weights for months, not understanding how I could never be rid of them but will always suffer their anchoring resistance. It’s maddening—not knowing why they came or why they will never leave— “You’re too young to worry about that.”

I know.

But why does it worry me still? It worried me when my mother heaved under her covers with panicking breaths that tried to cease her whimpering. Warily entering the room, I climbed into her bed and held her.

“He set up a beautiful dinner. We laughed and talked like nothing ever happened.” She quieted for a moment, probably mustering up the strength to retell the rest. “All a wonderful gesture…to tell me that he doesn’t love me anymore.”

I know.

There was another instance like this. I sat nervously at the top of the stairs. My head rested between the posts of the railing, as if the coming confession from my relative was going to bore me.

“When you were gone…he had her staying here. In one of the kid’s rooms.”

“He…he what?” My mother asks with a prominent quiver in her throat.

“When you left to visit family…he brought her here to stay.”

Now there were four shackles embedded into my skin. The first two held down my legs—keeping me from running away. The next two grabbed at my thin wrists like two hands that kept me from fighting back. Cold metal is weighing me down, yet here I am…still just a kid, but why should that even matter?

“You’re too young—”

I KNOW.

With my arms and legs bound, I still had to walk forward, pretending that I was weightless, that nothing held me back. And for a short time, I convinced myself that it was true. But even when painting over a mark on the wall, underneath one, two or even three coats of paint, the mark still remains.

My teenage years were no better, but I learned how to continue forward without falter. To feign strength when I kept struggling beneath my skin. These shackles clattered their unfriendly thoughts into my eardrums and blurred my vision with the creeping fatigue that I constantly fend off. They tarnished me with an illness to seek attention in the wrong places…and in the wrong people. So badly I wanted to feel a fraction of lightness in my bones that I would offer the weight to anyone who would wander. Little did I know, I contracted myself to carry their weights too.

I fell in love with people who loved me too much that it would hurt me—but my mother loved someone who kept hurting her too, so it mustn’t actually hurt, right?

I know.

No. No you don’t. And they don’t either. If children truly didn’t understand or worry, then why do they carry all the weight of trauma and stress that you place on them? I grew up. I faced my own hardships, and I also saw through so many lies and discovered so many secrets. But the most worrying thing was that I was never surprised because I was already pulling the weights of their shackles for years. And in my adulthood, I found some clarity—but I still never found freedom.

Children know. I know—I knew. My little body hauled those weights up to adulthood. And the only adult who fought to free me, was myself. I was too frail to be charged with holding the burdens of my parents. I was too impressionable to bear the guilt, fear, and anger of what my father had done. No one ever comforted me, because I was too young—yes, I was too young…but that doesn’t mean I was too young to be affected too.

Trauma stems from childhood—and if you do not believe that then look at those who have raised you. The ones who clamped these metal bracelets around our hands and feet are adults…but they were children too. I guess that’s one of the best things about growing up; all of the weights you’ve dragged around can finally be passed on to someone else, but at what cost? Our children do not deserve the inheritance of our pain, and neither did we. It takes us to finally muster the strength to melt down the metal even when scorching our own skin, to find eternal release. I was too young to carry, and so were you.