December 13, 2008
As a child, I was described as a sweet, sunny child… except… when I was not, I guess!
When I was locked in a room, as a punishment… I tore up a pillow.. I hear… Or was that me? I am not destructive.
And I hear that when I was very, very small, and angry with my parents for whatever, I just toddled/stalked out of the gate… meaning to run away before I could walk properly. My parents laugh to tell this tale of a little person, with a such a big temper.
One thing I do know, is that I am still both short tempered and strong tempered. And I have run away/walked out, a countless number of times in my life, not so much out of fear as out of anger. My leaving is a sentence that I pass on offenders, in my mind – it is always their loss.
I wrote the poem – Temper, when I was angry with a friend of mine, who is still my friend by the way. I have such decent friends, friends who can laugh away my temper and wait for me to laugh too. I was about 18 or 19 then, I think.
Most of the people who have stayed in my life (and this includes my parents, sister, friends and son) are people who know how to side step my temper.
I can be appeased easily by kind words, food and/or a hug!
I remember once, when I was telling an astonished new husband where to get off., my grandmother literally poured some horlicks down my angry throat and I turned sunny again. She told him, that I could never tell when I was hungry and often confused hunger for anger.
Later I learned that this had to do with a neuro-transmitter called serotonin. May be I was a also little glucose intolerant then but we did know. My husband and in-laws did not undertsand, how necessary it was to let me eat and sleep on time and they did not know how to side step my temper. So they are, naturally enough, not in my life anymore.
Instead of laughing, they took it rather seriously when I kept running away from home in a temper.
