When you grow up in a household with a physically abusive dad and emotionally unavailable mother; in an environment where you don’t know if you’d get enough to eat that week; where you don’t know when you are going to get the cane and for what; where you don’t know if you’ll still be staying in the same house the next month because the rent is not paid, it impacts you.
I couldn’t rely on the adults in the house to attend to my emotional needs, they were unpredictable. I wouldn’t know when I would get into trouble and for what. So, to get through the day, I often relied on my toys to give me emotional succor. I would create a small world for myself in the corner of the family bed with a teddy bear, turtles figurines, a Nintendo Game Boy, and a few books, all handed down to me/gifted by my younger cousin, who used to visit from the US. They constituted the world I would escape into, when I could no longer bear to stay in the house, but had to. These toys were my crutches. The only constants in a household of unreliable adults.