trust

When you throw a baby in the air she laughs because she knows you will catch her.

I began this lifetime trusting that I would be taken care of. First by my mother and father. After all, they created me, provided for my basic needs and had an intimate stake in my wellbeing. Kind of a no-brainer that I would be safe in their protective arms. As I grew to spend more one on one time with my three older siblings my sense of trust blossomed to include other family members. It became apparent that when one of us did well, our collective wellness increased. And when one stumbled we all felt the fall. 

With my father in the Canadian Armed Forces we moved a lot.. to different countries, provinces, towns and cities, even different neighbourhoods within a town or city.  In the first seven years of school I attended 8 different schools, lived in eight different neighbourhoods, attempted to bond with eight different groups of friends. The only constant in our lives was each other. Our family unit was our childhood home.   

By the time our family slowed down I was a teenager. Two of my siblings had left home to create their own families. Our father retired from the forces and we stopped the packing and unpacking. Finally my brother and I had the time and space to develop meaningful friendships. 

The vacancy created by my siblings absences, provided fertile ground for my own exploration of the land of friendships. Understandably shy after a lifetime of being the outsider, making friends felt like a risky business. My first indicator for whether or not someone might be a possible friend was if they liked me. Being liked by others was then to be my first priority in life. 

If I unpack that realization I understand what that meant to me. If someone liked me they would be less likely to hurt me. Sure, my siblings might hurt me, unintentionally or not, but I always knew that they loved me and could be relied upon beyond any temporary feeling of betrayal. A friend would have no loyalty or depth of love for me. So the first requirement for any friendship to bloom would have to be that I believe they like me. Trust in that friend would develop with time. I longed for a friend I could trust.

Cultivating friendships took a great deal of trust. One can only know if a friend is trustworthy if the friendship overcomes difficulties with trust intact.  It took time to test a relationship. 

I went through several peoples models of how to live my life. First my parents, then my siblings, then my friends.. like Snow White trying each different bed, I kept trying with the hope that I could find a perfect fit.

Somewhere along the line.. after a few rough patches of disappointment, I began to believe that others simply couldn’t be trusted. The baton was passed to me. It was now my responsibility to take care of myself. I held a wealth of information on what works and what doesn’t in my own life experiences. Of course a number of poor outcomes created by my own choices completely blew that out of the ocean. By the time I was a teenager there were no secure options to rely on for my own well being. The only remaining option was to do my best to remain in a familiar lane. From that vantage point I would, at the very least, have a predictable path ahead of me. I could anticipate, with reasonable accuracy, how bad things might get and know that I could handle it, because I’d done so in the past.