Silent No More

I could tell by her stalk that she was planning to stonewall me. To test it out, I went into her room ten minutes later and asked her something. She avoided looking at me and barely responded. Oh, no, I thought, Will I allow Goldie to use the silent treatment as a weapon?

I grew up with the silent treatment, so I know the havoc it wreaks on a child’s life. When I detect someone using it on me today, there are 100 sirens going off in my head — they’re so loud I can’t hear myself think. I freeze and go into a shell.

When I was 13 years old, my mom stopped talking to me. I still don’t know what I did wrong, but she stonewalled me for four years. At first, I didn’t even realize that she wasn’t talking to me. Then for a long time, I doubted myself; is Mom talking to me, or isn’t she? Because there were times she would talk to me. So maybe I was making up the times I thought she wasn’t?

It turns out that on that long-ago day that I did something to anger to her, she made the internal decision that she would respond to any conversation I started, but she would never initiate. (I only found this out years later when I had the guts to ask my father.) So, I was subject to her crazymaking as well, and I spent my teen years feeling tainted and invisible, often wondering: Am I here or not? Do I exist or not?