I was wrapped snugly with my arms at my side like a new baby. It was for the purpose of protecting me from lashing out at the lights and instruments coming at my eye in the operating room. A necessary part of the procedure, but it had a side effect; a feeling of security, a feeling of nurture and protection.

The clearest thing I remember was not wanting to be unwrapped when it was over. It has brought me to a new insight about myself. I have always wanted to be protected, cared for, nurtured and yes, mothered.

I have not liked being out in the big, bad world without life skills, social skills or safety net. I have not liked doing battle with my mind and emotions, the old negative tapes that play unbidden, and realities that reached out and slapped me up-side the head whenever the mood struck.

Growing up didn’t happen to me, just growing older. Born to a mother who bragged about never having to hold her babies, in a family where nurture had no meaning and the sister-mamas were needed elsewhere and left the farm, and me, as soon as earthly possible, I likened childhood to being hatched and set out to pasture. But most animals nurture their young.

Of course there was incest, domestic abuse, the cold war between my parents, all of which had to be coped with, navigated through and never spoken of. I do not know when I would have learned positive life skills to carry into the big wide world. What I carried with me the day I left home was a sack of coping skills that were limited to surviving childhood and the sureness that the outside world was somehow kinder than my family home. There was Leave It to Beaver, My Three Sons, and Father Knows Best out in the real world after all.

It has taken many decades for me to admit my toolbox was empty. It has taken decades to admit I have never known how to fill it up. It has taken decades to admit to never knowing what I never knew and that I am in need of a good overhaul in my thinking, but lying there all swaddled in blankets in the operating room I got a better feeling of where to begin. I begin at the beginning.