Was there a moment for you when your childhood was over? (TW perhaps depending on replies if any).

[TheChinaBerryTree]

With hindsight or otherwise?

I will share my experience.

I have been seeing a therapist recently. And this issue has come up for me.
I struggled with starting/being at school. It was all a bit much for me. I was/am bright/academic, it was more so the socilaisation, dynamics of other children, being 'on' all day I think albeit at the time I couldn't have articulated this at that age of course.

Anyway I settled in eventually and got used to it although I still found it quite overwhelming. Had a good small group of friends.

We moved house when I was 6 and parents moved me to a new school the same year, when I was 7.

I simply did not cope, at all. I couldn't make friends and didn't try to, I think it was just too much for me. The kids all seemed older and somehow 'tougher' more confident, not like my old school which was a very cute little old village-y one. The work was harder, which wouldn't have been a problem if not for my being so miserable. I had an eating disorder within a year that has plagued me most of my adult life. I think at that point, with hindsight of course I just stopped developing 'properly', and no fun was to be had any more other than on the odd occasion outside of school, and through binge-eating!

I am interested to know if anyone else's childhood had interruptions or 'before/after' life-changing events. I know some kids went through far more than I did too.

I was really bullied in senior schoool by all the girls. I found out after I left (One told me.) It's because all the boys fancied me and the girls were jealous. If only they knew-I am a lesbian too! I'm sorry it still affects you. TBH I've never been able to fully accept my sexuality either.

when I saw my dad abuse my mom the first time when I was about 9 yrs old.

I am sorry this was so difficult for you both.

I am a lesbian. I think that I would have realised I was much much sooner was it not for much of childhood been so focused on 'survival' of each day, once I moved schools days were hellish as were many evenings with my Dad being the way he was, I just didn't have a 'me' to consider at all if that makes sense. It goes differently for different people I realise. The woman I am currently seeing had an abusive childhood too but she still retained her own self and knew from an early age her sexuality. Maybe I matured slower due to ED and reliving my childhood in my late teens/early twenties, I was very daft really, I was thrilled to finally have freedom and friends and a body I didn't hate, and did not focus enough on career progression or anything 'adult' properly until much later than I should have.

When I first realised, I actually thought that I must have gone mad. Then came the dawning of it, when I look back at childhood and early adulthood it was absolutely all there plain as day. And then came the euphoria, I actually felt as though I was so lucky to never have to have a relationship (or sex!) with a man again.

Mum killing herself when I was 16, weeks before I sat my GCSEs

eta probably years earlier when I saw my mum constantly abused by my dad - but her death was when it really ended

I am so sorry this happened to you. I hope you were supported (although it doesn't seem as if you were).

My dad was a raging alcoholic who managed to get up and go to work throughout the week but Friday lunchtime to Sunday evening was a vodka drinking marathon. I used to hope every week that the coming weekend would finally be the weekend he didn’t get drunk. My 11th birthday was on a Sunday, he got hammered on his own, I spent the day sitting in the garden alone because I didn’t even want to be in the house with him. That was the day I grew up and realised he was never going to change.

One school move at 6 ended your childhood?

Id been in 3 primary schools by the time I was 6 due to due to moving. And before that, I'd been living abroad.So being in a nursery school in a foreign country at 3.

It got a bit wilder after that in.Terms of moving around, I think the longest I was ever in a school was about three years.

That does seem to be not such a significant event that you couldn't recover from that it could be to do with resilience or social anxiety.

By contrast, my childhood was over.When I was a tweenager and my sister developed severe mental health problems.Constantly screaming the house down self harming threatening suicide, being violent, and doing god knows what else

And all my mother talked about was her when I was alone with her.And what she had to do with her. That was the life defining situation that ended my childhood. I didn't exist anymore.It was all about myself sister
A school move was nothing.

From my bedroom window, I watched my mum arrive home after visiting my dad in hospital.
She pulled the car onto the drive, sat there for a few seconds gripping the steering wheel, rubbed her face with her hands, and got out. I knew she was coming to tell me my dad was dead.

The ten seconds between her getting out of the car and then being in the house calling me downstairs felt like I was held in stasis between childhood and adulthood. I knew that when I went downstairs, everything would change because life, childhood, as I knew it before would be over. June 1999.

@PleaseDontAsk I'm deeply sorry for the erasure of you as a person in your own right in your teen years.

Of the people I've known who had to move school six or eight times by the time they were 14, few of them have escaped unscathed. Some find it very hard to make friends because they stopped investing in outside people. Their immediate family became massively more important to them, more so than usual, because they were the only constant in their lives. If that was the case for you, becoming 'the trouble free child' who had to hide everything and was only a listening ear for your mother would have been even worse for you.

Please don't diss @TheChinaBerryTree 's experience though. Sometimes some children are particularly sensitive and struggle at school, and then to have to move rips all their security away. People are different, children are different.

It's not a competition.

Thank you @TFImBackIn @ReleaseTheDucksOfWar

There are some things I can read that deeply affect people and think 'That wouldn't/wouldn't have bother(ed) me at all!' but I'd never think negatively of that person for it, as you've both said, people are very different. And children are people.

But no, it wasn't really 'one school move' by itself.

It was the knock on effect.

I already found school very overwhelming and tiring. I am a summer baby and an only child and I wasn't used to the dynamics of other children, I didn't understand the things they did or the games they played and the fact lots of them already seemed to know what they were doing and knew one another (I assume through older siblings, wider friendship groups etc). I did eventually settle in somewhat but it was a work in progress. I had a small group of friends, they are all still friends to this day and have grown up together. We'd sometimes play out or at one another's houses. My friend's mum used to look after me after school too as my Mum worked and she didn't. I was very close to my Mum and my friend and her siblings.

I was taken to a new place, and moved schools. There was no preparation for it, I was told on a Friday night that I would be starting on the Monday. I was terrified. I also had a realisation that I had nobody. If my Mum could do this to me, then it wasn't only my Dad who hated me.

My Dad was abusive, and my Mum worked long hours. I was now often alone with him now as nowhere near my friends. He was violent and aggressive and the move made him miserable too so he was worse. The school was huge compared to my old one. I was bullied for being 'quiet' and 'weird' and then kids found out about my Dad and bullied me for that. I began comfort eating and was three stone heavier within the year. So now the kids had something else to berate me about. I was stripped almost naked more than once. It was a long walk home and I'd be bullied on the way home too. I hated my body and didn't yet correlate food=fat, so I ate more and more and with hindsight was very addicted to sugar, it was the only thing I really had left that was pleasurable.

I did have loving grandparents. I saw one set often, one not so much. They noticed a change in me both physically and mentally and begged my parents to do something but they didn't, that is until the last 6 months of school where they reluctantly moved me to a different school. I sort of 'reinvented' myself here and made friends but that was very short-lived. I was massively overweight at this point, no real friends and still 'the weird kid' and that's never really left me. High school was much the same, I hung around with other outcast kids who were all under the radar somewhat. until I developed a different eating disorder. I became very underweight in my teens. I started drinking at the age of 12, probably in some effort to be 'cool'. I found it ironic that my Mum was now so worried about me being underweight when she'd also been so awful about my weight when I was overweight.

My weight has ruled my life since I was 7, now. On the plus side, as mentioned above, I am now a weight lifter and back in control. But I do wonder what a different life may have been like if someone had have paid any mind to me in childhood.

My friends from my original school are all still tight-knit. We msg very occasionally but that's it. Around ten years ago, the friend whose mum used to look after me died tragically. It was bittersweet seeing my old friends all together and their closeness! I was mentioned at the funeral by her brother who wrote the eulogy as being 'their honoury sibling' which was nice.