When Did My Childhood End?

One question took me down a rabbit hole of memories…

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Looking back on your life, can you see a clear moment when your childhood ended? Was it when you turned eighteen, when you were twenty-one, left school, graduated from university or maybe when you got married?

After seeing a prompt — Write about remembering your childhood by the date it ended — on Medium KTHT, I repeatedly asked myself the same question:

That question — and more — stayed with me for days…

Was I robbed of my innocence at the tender age of nine? Was it when I fell pregnant? Or did it only happen when I became a mom? Then again, maybe I was just a child with a child at the time, until I reached the age of eighteen and became an adult according to the law?

To be honest, I don’t have an answer to any of those questions.

It was just before my sixteenth birthday that I fell pregnant, and three months before my seventeenth birthday, my daughter was born. I took on the responsibility of adulthood during that time, which included telling my parents about keeping the baby.

But I was also still a child, listening to my parents when they said I had to finish school, despite my pregnancy. My daughter was three months old when I went to university, a year earlier than my peers.

By the time I was eighteen — my second year in uni — I had already met my first husband. Looking back on that time, I did what so many do: I married a man just like my father. He was domineering, controlling, and abusive, although the latter differently than my father. By the time we married when I was twenty, I definitely felt like an adult, but was still not the one deciding about my life.

When I was sixteen, I wasn’t dealing only with the pregnancy, but also with the fact that the father of my daughter had abandoned me — thirty-eight years later, I learned he never did.

I don’t think that even once the thought had crossed my mind that my childhood had ended. Every day was about survival, and that feeling stayed with me for many years to come. My life had never really been an easy one.

I was nine years old when a friend of my parents sexually abused me. Where I never felt traumatized by it, I can see now that it definitely had an influence on what followed in my life after that — the way I perceived and approached intimacy.

So, when did my childhood end?

Any of those significant moments in my life could’ve been the moment it ended. I certainly cannot pinpoint the date or the experience, but when I look back on my life, I see something else: for too long, I’d allowed others to determine the course of my life.

From a young age, I learned to prioritize pleasing those in leadership roles. First there was my father. Growing up in South Africa, in a traditional boer family, he was the head of the household, and everyone had to follow his wishes. And we did. His anger made sure we did, and if we didn’t, corporal punishment and consequent preaching followed — preaching in which he made sure I knew his punishing me was my fault.

I carried a constant burden of guilt throughout my childhood — and into adulthood — always blaming myself for mishaps, regardless of whether or not I was involved.

Pleasing others became a theme of my life, and it’s only in the past years that I learned to put myself first, before anyone else. I still falter, but thankfully, my husband has always viewed and treated me as an equal. There were times I was people-pleasing towards him, and he never understood (or expected) why I did it.

For so many years, I put others on a pedestal and asked for permission before I did something. On the occasions I did something without asking for approval, guilt would consume me, and I would fear the reaction from the person I had put into the ‘leader’ role.

I truly believe this all goes way back to my childhood, and that I’m still working on feeling like the adult I am, instead of being the child I had to be for too long. I know I will get to where I fully stand for who I am — the me I have become because of all my experiences.

The me I really like!

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Also read this wonderful essay by

Vision2Verse