The Saints Of Mibba

One think you can’t say about my life is that I’ve never travelled. You can say that I’ve never experienced the joy of meeting an idol. You can say I’ve never experienced the interesting trials of having a sibling. You can even say I’ve never felt the pain of seeing someone close to me die.

But, there is no way you can say I’ve never travelled.

Of course, I’m pretty stationary now. My travel bags are now only ever used for sleepovers and the odd trip to my local city. I don’t have any new snapshots of me sampling the delights of another culture. There’s no more exciting tales that I haven’t already told my friends, purely for the fact I’ve hung up my travelling coat so that I don’t screw up my education any further. And you want to know the truth?

I’m perfectly happy with being stationary.

I guess you could say I’ve been on the move ever since I was born. Well, no, actually you could say I was on the move before I was born. Being pregnant didn’t stop my mother from travelling around to different locations. While I was chilling out in the womb, my Mum swan with dolphins, visited the “Wailing Wall”, floated in the Dead Sea, toured the holy lands (hey, this was back before the war was so serious) and rode a donkey. Forget about pregnant women being weak, thought my Mum. Not many people get to travel so much anyway, pregnant or not. Thanks to her, I can say smugly that I’ve been to Jerusalem and touched a dolphin (hey, they nudged my Mum’s stomach while she was swimming with them! It counts!). But enough about what happened while I was still a part of my Mum. Let’s fast forward to when I was actually born.

A piece of advice for all pregnant women out there: When you start having contractions and your husband/cab driver/friend/whatever is speeding you to hospital, avoid all speed bumps! I was nearly born in the back of a London cab due to speed bumps- and that would have been pretty bad for both my Mum and me. You see, when I was born, the doctors realised that I had the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck a total of 3+ times. If I was born in the taxi, I never would have survived. Luckily, I was smart enough not to make a dash for freedom before the doctors were around.

So, there I was, a squiggling bundle covered in blood. Just beautiful, right? Makes you really appreciate the miracle of birth, thinking about little me butt-naked and covered in blood. I’ll shut up about birth now, because I know a lot of horrible details that would probably get the population of the world under control like THAT! And shucks, I’m hoping that if the world survives, there will be some children to enjoy it…

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes. What happened after I was born? Well, just like anyone other baby, I screamed, I slept, I ate, I pooped. Nothing special there. Oh, but you know those screaming babies they put in those little crib things on the front walls of planes? Yep. I was one of them. I disturbed the peace of the passengers like no one else! I’ve always been pretty good at raising a fuss. Having a baby, just like being pregnant, didn’t stop my parents from travelling. I can’t remember any of the places I visited, seeing as babies don’t really notice much other then where the next feed is coming from. But, according to my parents, while I was under the age of three we went to the most beautiful and culturally famous places. Pity they couldn’t have saved going there until I could actually appreciate my surroundings. We went to Portugal, Dublin, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Gran Canaria, Scotland, Wales- all kinds of places I crave to visit now but can’t because I have my education to worry about.

Funnily enough, my parents never used to worry about my education being interrupted by travelling- my own or theirs. I started school at the age of three, mainly because my parents had to work to keep up with their expensive lifestyle. My Dad’s work depended a lot on him being able to catch planes to other places, and a lot of the time he would take my Mum with me. When they got married (yes, after I was born), they left me in the hands of child minders for two weeks while they honeymooned in Prague. Don’t worry, they left me with very capable people, plus I’ve always been pretty independent anyway. I did miss them a lot, though. I remember running out from school day after day, looking for my Daddy, and being brutally disappointed when I realised it was the child minder again. Their work had to come first a lot of the time- I understand that now, even if a tiny bit of me still feels some resentfulness at being left with child minders so often.

But of course, like with every story, there was a complication. My Mum had some trouble with her colleagues at work, plus a couple of miscarriages, that resulting in her having a nervous breakdown. It was pretty serious- she still admits that she’s never been the same since. She got fired, and Dad decided to take us out of London. They sold our flat, and moved to a small country town we used to visit from London, and that the whole family loved very much. We bought a place there, and settled down. I went to the new school. It seemed like the excitement was now over….

Or so I thought.

I’ve never been too good with schools. To be brutally honest, I find that I can educate myself better then any teacher, and that the mingling of students is really just an excuse for bullies to torture those they see as “weak”. I guess I could be being a bit bias, seeing as most of my school experiences range from bad to worse. Plus, I’ve never stayed in a one school long enough to see what it’s like to go through the system with the same people. Anyway… My new school wasn’t as great as I first thought it was. I was bullied a lot by the other students- especially those older then me. My classmates would chase me around the playground singing mockingly about me, even when I screamed at them to stop. They would also blatantly ignore me in class time, mimicking my “posh” accent every time I dared to make conversation. Sad and alone, I mostly hung around with the teacher at playtime, holding her hand while she watched over the other kids. But that didn’t last. When I got into a higher year, I managed to make one friend. Her name was Antonia, and we were as thick as thieves together. But she had family problems, and couldn’t always help me see off the bullies. That’s when the older bullies struck. They were twins- that I remember- and one cold winter day, one of them distracted me while the other one crept up behind and ripped my jacket off. Upset that these nasty big girls were stealing my jacket, I said bravely that I would tell on them. It didn’t work. The twins just sniggered and told me if I said anything to anyone, they would kill me by sticking a spoon up my nose. I knew that wasn’t possible, of course, but I kept quite anyway. Keep in mind that I was under the age of six, and easily intimidated.
But, that wasn’t the worst thing, or indeed what made me beg my Mum to let me switch schools.

When I was five, I had a lovely elderly woman for my teacher, whom I now know suffered from diabetes. She went into hospital every couple of weeks, which we were used to. But one week, she didn’t come back. Our principle came into the classroom, a grave expression on his face. Apparently our teacher was very sick, and wasn’t going to return to our classroom. We were going to get a new teacher in a couple of weeks, but until then we’d stay with the substitute. Being little, I didn’t understand and thought my teacher would come back anyway. But she didn’t.

And that’s when things turned ugly.

A lot of people can say they’ve been bullied. But unfortunately, I am one of the few that can say a teacher has bullied me. No, I do not think I am over-reacting. She was just that- a bully. I blame my low self-esteem on her, along with my anxiety and complete distrust of most adults. Some things you just cannot do or say to a five-year-old… Not without some severe emotional repercussions.

Around the time of my old teacher getting sick, my Dad had started getting a multitude of jobs in Australia. The first time he visited, he went alone. The next few times, he took my Mum and I with him, eager to share the beauty of this new found paradise with us. It became a yearly thing for our whole family to go to Australia every year, so that we didn’t have to face the perils of a cold English winter. Unfortunately, unlike Australia, school was still on in the months of October, November and December. I missed a lot of things from class, which handicapped me severely in my schoolwork. Plus, unknown by most adults around me, I suffered from dyslexia (a learning disability where the brain sees everything scrambled and back to front).

My teacher didn’t understand this. She screamed in my face and ripped pages out of my books when I failed to write anything legible from my worksheets, often calling me “stupid” and “lazy”. Maybe if she’d realised I had a learning disorder she would have been more sympathetic, I don’t really know. I became the class example of “what not to do” and again a social reject. To make matters worse, I had trouble controlling my bladder and bowels. This resulted in frequent accidents, which I was too scared to tell anyone about. I was “stupid” and “lazy”. I should’ve made it to the toilet. It was all my fault.

The straw that broke the camels back happened when I was six years old, in the year 2000. As well as signalling the end of a centuary, it signalled the end of my time at that school.

Around the playground of my school was a huge chain-link fence, the type that a small group of six-year-olds can hang onto pretty easily. It was the source of many new games and fun activities- including avoiding the older boys when they stampeded across the playground. One day, I slipped off the fence, just as the boys came charging across the playground. With a scream, I landed on my face, praying that they’d stop before they trampled me. My childish prayers were fruitless. They ran straight over me, one foot pressing my face into the ground, causing a piece of gravel to lodge into my cheek. At the end of recess, I stumbled into the classroom, bawling my eyes out because I thought, “my face was ruined”. My teacher didn’t care about my tears. She took one cool look at me, and said something that I would remember for the rest of my life:

“It’s your own fault, you know.”

What kind of a person tells a six-year-old that it was their own fault for being trampled? I immediately went home and complained to my Mother, who pulled me out of that school. Unknown to me at the time, she had been planning to get me out of there anyway. A maths teacher at my school had sexually abused a little girl in my class, and my Mum was just waiting for an excuse to stop my education there.

I bounced around schools for the next couple of years, psychologically unstable and hostile to others. I bit, I scratched and I kicked anyone that dared to come near me. In my mind, they were all threats and all wanted to hurt me. I was particularly afraid of running crowds- even today I freak out whenever I’m in a crush of people. But, with a lot (and I mean a lot) of patience and nurturing, I gradually stopped being so hostile, and started to settle into my new school. My teachers realised I had dyslexia and put me into a special program, which I credit for my above-average reading and writing skills today. I had friends, and I was finally feeling safe.

My parents, however, weren’t so happy. My Dad was tired of getting sick because of the cold weather playing up with his asthma. My Mum craved to see the sun, and became depressed by the grey weather. They couldn’t be happy with all the cold and wet surrounding them, no matter how well I was settling into my new school.

Australia had work for Dad. Australia had warm weather for Mum. I liked Australia. It seemed like the perfect option.

The last few months of my eighth year on earth went by in a whirl of cardboard boxes, going away parties and reassurances that I would “really like our new home”. Surprisingly, I was actually looking forward to living in Australia. I guess I didn’t think about the people I was leaving behind, or how much things would change. The whole thing was a big adventure to me, and that was all that mattered.

Australia is where I finally settled, and it is where I reside now, tired of all the travelling. For you see, travelling countries wasn’t enough for my parents. They soon realised they had gone to live in the wrong part of Australia for their lifestyle, and drove half-way across the country before plunking their baggage down in a tiny Australian town no one has heard of. I have lived in this town for about three years and a half now, and my family has shown no sign of wanting to get up and leave any time soon. I hope that we don’t uproot ourselves, and that I can go through high school uninterrupted by moving.

I wish now that I had realised the gravity of the situation before I moved countries. I could have said much better goodbyes, and shown a lot more compassion to those who loved me and didn’t want me to go. I am reminded painfully about how cheery I was about my new adventure every time I call my grandparents, or see a forgotten email address from a person I promised not to lose contact with. I was too young to know- too young and too foolish. Hopefully one day I will go back there, and show them all how I changed from a cheerful plump little girl who loved purple and Scooby Doo, to a mature opinionated young woman with a passion for Green Day and sticking out of the crowd.

In my life so far, I have moved houses nine times, moved schools eight times and moved countries once. I feel all of that moving has formed who I am today, and given me a childhood filled with experiences unseen in a generic home. But, after all that travelling, I am happy to stay grounded.

At least, stay grounded until I finish high school. After that…

The world is my oyster.