Childhood Traumas

I seldom had real friends as a child. I was reasonably comfortable playing outdoor games with the boys, but found few girls I could connect with.
 
My mother was no help. Even when I did find a girl I could get along with well, my mother would seldom let me go to their house. She was so afraid I would do something I wasn’t supposed to do. And girls almost never came to my house more than once. They would say, “Your mother is weird”, and they wouldn’t come back.
 
Once, while we were living in Sugar Land, I almost had some real girl friends. A new family moved into the neighborhood. They had three girls. When we met, we hit it off well. They were so nice, and their parents were so nice.
 
One day, they asked me if I wanted to play some card games. They had Go Fish and Old Maid. I said I didn’t know how to play. They said they would teach me. So they did, and I had the most fun for a couple hours learning how to play those games. When I got home, I excitedly told my mother I learned to play Go Fish and Old Maid. She went ballistic!
 
She started ranting and raving about how cards are of the devil, and I was strictly forbidden to ever play with those girls again. Of course I couldn’t tell them why I couldn’t play with them again, so I just withdrew from contact with them.
 
It was always like that; always some excuse to keep me from having friends. And since I got almost no affection or positive attention from my mother and most other adults in my life (and nothing but abuse from my stepfather), I poured out all my attention on my pets.
 
If I’d had the maturity of an adult, I would have quit accumulating pets. But I was a desperately lonely child. My stepfather would get in one of his rages, and either carry my animals off somewhere (I never knew where), or he would force me to watch while he brutally murdered them.
 
It’s no wonder I was never able to hang on to friends even after an adult. Something would trigger one of those bad memories, and I would have a meltdown, and nobody would understand. I would indicate I had bad childhood memories, but I was never able to bring myself to give any details. So people didn’t have a clue, and they would just say things like, that was years ago, you need to get over it. Or, you need to pull yourself up by the bootstraps.
 
But what gets hard-wired into a child is not so easy to dismiss.