Childhood trauma

Many of us have childhood recollections of events that have somehow shaped, scarred, scared of taught us. I myself am fortunate to have many of these recollections, good and bad.

On Friday (06/07/2012) I turned a whole 28. I’m proud to say I still have my own teeth, bladder control and memory intact. I put on quite a spread of Friday and by the time I left work everyone was feeling rather full and in some cases nauseous.
The food was temporarily stored in my cubbyhole of an office until I carted it all outside on our picnic bench so my fellow workers could enjoy (which they did).

At no point has any food been dropped, or left in the office over the weekend.

I arrive at my desk this morning to a desk literally crawling with ants. The little blighters are everywhere, and now due to my innate sense of paranoia I can feel them walking on various body parts. I’ve swept them aside, I’ve brushed them to the floor with bits of paper, I took off my shoe in desperation and whacked a few hundred of them in the hope that they’ll all go away to no avail.

Finally I managed to procure a can of bug dope and liberally sprayed it everywhere, but they still keep on coming. Even through the lake of poisonous goo now coating everything.

Now I know Disney or Fox or Pixar or whoever the hell else tried to make ants all cuddly and person-like but they’re not.  One of my very traumatic childhood recollections involved ants, and to this day I cannot for the life of me stand them, especially if there are hundreds of them crawling over everything, including my cling-filmed lunch.

Many, many moons ago we lived in the old Transvaal as my father was busy with his traindriver training and it was closer to college, I could be wrong on certain facts. At the age of four we moved back to my current hometown as my mam was pregnant with my brother and my parents had decided that the city was no place to raise a family.

I remember the epic adventure it was to move house, how exciting and wonderful it was to run through an empty house and play with empty boxes, tape and bubble wrap. My first real road trip was the house moving experience and my dad and I did the long journey to the new place alone. My mam had gone on ahead to get the new house sorted and settled in.

So we arrive at the new house, and it’s not as big as our previous house. My grandparents weren’t as close as they used to be, but still. New house, new adventures. I turned five in that new house, we had an orange tree in the back garden and at one point our dog ran away. Strange what you can recollect from childhood, even as an adult.  Oh, I also locked the keys in the car once. After being told not to play in said car.



One Saturday afternoon while my father was pottering away in the garage I’d decided to do a spot of gardening. I’m not sure what I thought I knew about gardening but I knew that we had empty flower beds and that made me sad.

So, watering-can in hand I make a thorough muddy mess of the empty flower beds, yank out some of the neighbours flowers protruding from the fence and plonk them in our flower beds. Needless to say they weren’t going to grow and had already started to wilt by the time I’d done my gardening, but it made my five year old heart incredibly happy.

I’m sitting there, quietly, keeping myself entertained (which I’m still very apt at doing) when all of a sudden a massive stinging pain engulfs me. My legs and bum are on fire. I don’t know where it’s coming from or if it’s divine punishment for taking some of the neighbours flowers but it’s agony.

I do a mad dash around the house several times, screaming and crying as I go. My father in a state of panic (welding helmet still on his head) comes barreling out of the garage and runs behind me until he finally catches up to me.

What’s the matter he asks all out of breath.

Daddy, everything’s on fire!!!  Everything!!!!

Where he asks?

Just there in our front yard I yank up my dress and indicate where “everywhere” is. To his utter amazement and horror he finds himself faced with a dilemma, does he laugh as I’m covered in red ants, or does he help me put the fire out?

Decision made he starts my helping me brush off the offending ants, and through much babbling and tears I explain that I’d done nothing wrong and had just sat over there gardening.

I’m sure he tried to explain that I might’ve sat on an ant nest or that I was a threat in some way, but I’d had enough. As soon as the agony had subsided I filled up my watering-can (which I’d flung in the neighbours hedge) and sought out every single ant’s nest I could find, and then very merrily proceeded to flood it.

I’m not sure at age five you’re aware of the concept of revenge, but it must be ingrained in our DNA dating back to prehistoric times. 

To this day I still don’t garden, like ants or wear dresses for outside functions.