CHALLENGES

Go, go, go. Do, do, do. The more done the better person you are? Then? Tiredness.

There is a great underestimation of the wreckage completed before my life really began so early in childhood.

The expectations now often ignore the facts because for decades the imposed silence about something as tragic and horrific as being hit by a Mack truck wasn’t treated as such.

How does a child grow with a monster, or many monsters in her belly? When around every corner in her own home, her own bedroom, there is terror disguised as ‘family’ that she once loved?

So, go easy dear one. Don’t push. Don’t allow that critic to start yammering- or ignore her as she is a compilation of those voices that silenced you all these years out of their own need for safety from the truth.

It is such in families where sexual abuse occurs. Silence the victim, victimizing her further. And victim is just a word. When the devastation is silenced, that is what destroys.

A child is resilient and can take waves of change, even pain. But in this silence, she is entombed. Who she was dissolves away like a puff of smoke. The only leftovers are anguish and a loneliness that gnaws like a piercing dagger.

A shell on autopilot. Who you expect me to be, I become. A pleaser. What you want, I am or give, ignoring my own needs, forgetting them, going from obscure invisibility, to nothingness.

But I am.

This time of peace after a period of healthy sleep. The critic starts up with shoulds. You should be more of this, and that, like a better friend, sister… If you don’t, you will be all alone. But energies are instead focused on the most important relationships, wife and mother/grandmother.

After attending to my own psychological, spiritual, and physical needs, paying attention to Samuel comes next. For the first time I’m really getting to know him and be the best partner I can be, enjoying this rare and valuable time together.

We have come to a place of peace together. After 45 years of kids, jobs, and stress, it is cherished. The little voice trying to worm in with buts about not deserving peaceful times? That is the voice to silence by countering it with self-care and kindness.

Never Hush an Abused Child- HELP HER

And they said through actions not words, ‘don’t speak of it.’ And decades go by without barely doing so.

How does a little girl sustain such injury, all alone, inside herself? While walking on a gorgeous summer day, my glumness took me places I’d rather not be.

But after a life of being other than who I am, allowing myself the freedom to feel what’s there, maybe remnants of a dream needing working out, I go where I really am.

So there Mom. Mom and the rest, wanting to hush up the reality of what those in our so-called family had done. To suffer such trauma, repeatedly, then? No one comes to help, love, cuddle, protect.

But hushed. Hushed from ever speaking a word of what they had done. And they kept doing it, over and over. Then you make me be quiet about it, but don’t help?

The injustice is more than unfair, or cruel. It took me away from myself for an entire life. Buzzing around myself. Pushing to do, yet not being in my body while doing it.

Just an anxious mass of mess trying to survive. How I did makes me wonder, and offers a look into a person worthy. Appreciating just how hard it was and offering a blessing that all the wonders found today are OK to be in, enjoy, and be whole in.

SUMMER

Some mornings it is hard to sit still by myself, with myself, the cat nearby on the screen porch, the little candle aflame flickering softly, the birds not yet up. A compulsion to do something is quelled knowing that going to my core only happens in stillness.

Why is so repulsive to be there? There is where solace lay, in my own being, with my own words, feelings and thoughts. Yet throughout life… running. Detached from it, and no wonder. Coming from a place of terror, chaos, and fear, fearing the very people I lived with- family.

So now the fears are from monsters dead. Chet, still around the corner ready to pounce, though now long gone. And others.

The peace of the land stills my fright with its wonder. Summer slips by fast, resolving to savor each moment more thoroughly as the days dissolve, sometimes with regrets for not wringing more out of them.

The flowers are abundant, tended and watered with care, along with the birdbath scoured out and refilled daily- bathers coming right after the fresh water is put in, splashing their feathers, lining up, who’s next?

As the sun sets the bedroom fills with golden light, my retreat, the yellow walls bouncing sunshine with a splash reflecting on walls, mirrors, and hanging sparkly gems twirling in an arc above. Yet another cherished time of day, that hour before dusk as the gold turns to red, orange, and all hues of yellow.

SUNNY DAY

While riding the bike trail along the banks of the water, my legs pump hard and fast leaving Samuel behind.

Once he caught up I said, “If I go too far ahead, I’ll just wait at the turn around spot,” adding, “I think I’m mad at life.”

Physical exercise might metabolize the medication needed the night before. But no, it didn’t really, once coming home the most that occurred was vegetating on the couch with a bag of Oreos feeling sorry for myself.

But maintaining the ‘keep quiet and still’ routine hours before bedtime so that my system doesn’t light its rocket worked… sleep came, fitful, but good enough. It is a challenge to do these things that are needed, preferring instead to pretend I’m just like everyone else I know. (in person)

While biking my thoughts sort out things, like gratitude. Sometimes friends don’t always come like usual, in person. The closest women friends now are those I’ve never met in person, but rather through emailing, pen pals, the usual term.

But for me, they are more than that. We share hearts. No hiding, no show for conventional social etiquette, which requires saying, ‘I’m fine,’ when you’re not.

It’s an understanding beyond that, much deeper, more meaningful. So, I’m lucky. Yet the saying ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps?’ Uh, no.

I will feel what I feel, after a life of being trained not to, so much so it is an everyday adventure discovering just who I really am. Act upbeat? Be happy? Be positive? How about just being me.

The self-talk while gliding on the path with sun splashing through leafy trees on a brilliant summer day reminded me; I have one life, live it. Live each moment my way. Take it, it’s mine.

After a life of feeling owned, what’s left I want to be mine.

LEARNING TO LOVE MYSELF

The answers are in the very place you are running from, inside yourself. But who wants to be inside a place where a haranguing voice is beating you up so constantly that when it doesn’t it feels uncomfortable? Because I am a child of incest, a survivor. And it’s called that for a reason.

So many times thoughts of death to take me away from myself. A child run over by a truck laying there bleeding, your family walks by hardly noticing or looking at you. What kind of message do you receive placing cloth over the bleeding wounds all on your own?

This morning my eyes mist thinking about just how this has affected me, not in words, because so many times throughout life others have said to me, ‘you’re too hard on yourself,’ but more so in feeling it for what might be the very first time.

Think of the child I was. All alone. Devastated. Tortured by the constant comings in the night. No one to help. No one to make it stop. Just blame.

And the compassion? No. A bleak, loveless life, where love is pretended enough for children to grow, perhaps feeling real love for the very time since touched wrong at age eight. Love for my little human sons, because animals always were safe to love. My sons knew love, but no others were safe to love. No, not even Samuel.

So at almost age 70, barriers are being smashed, taboo’s shattered just as I was, talking about what happened, and after years of doing that openly on my blog, another glass ceiling annihilated, learning to love myself.

Daddy would soon drop dead by my feet, and his sons would begin their attacks.

How Dare I?

And so, as my custom, Louise Hay is put on this pedestal, a place unreachable yet if she found such love and joy, wanting to be like her is my next best person to copy. NO.

This cannot be. Yes, she seemed so beautiful, it radiated from her 90-year-old eyes. And yes, though passed on, her words helped on a hard day.

But a lot of what was said has been discovered on my own path these past many years. I’m not her, I’m me. And imagining myself to be like her, trying to emulate what that might be like, would be just that, imagination.

She wasn’t dwelling on her dark times, which sounded like many. She only talked of the great joy.

So, plod along discovering what is needed in my own life, because it isn’t her life with the same needs.  

Samuel is not a man of many words, but he said some things that made sense, that it’s possible with weight loss hormones and other chemicals might go awry causing difficulty with sleep issues which seem to be  worsening again. A lot.

Also, it might be a huge kick in the ass from what was taught in the origin group of people, all requiring silence for horrific traumas. That message to a child translates to; YOU’RE UNWORTHY, UNLOVEABLE, SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN BORN, NOT WORTH HELPING, NOT CAPABLE….

That list could go endlessly, but a reversal is happening. All rules are being shattered as I am put myself back together.

No wonder sleep won’t come. How dare I?

The Journey

Feeling bones, my body thinner, scared, a few pounds easily were put back on. Feeling safer, it is easier to control my eating. Becoming smaller comes with threats of success and a great urge to numb out with food.

Of course there is a link, but I haven’t figured it out yet, or all the way through. The urge to eat when not hungry, a typical day for me since age 8, fades when a softer, kinder voice is heard and felt.

Though happening for periods of time creating success with weight loss as a secondary plus, sustaining kind thoughts of myself takes primary focus. That is the goal, food and weight are symptoms of the self-hate developing in childhood falling in-line only when kindness to self steps in.

The voice whispers positive things about myself that are allowed into me. That is challenging to sustain after living most of my life otherwise. Much of that grew as I grew pleasing the origin family, living by implied rules if wanting to remain a part of it… toxic as it was and still is- what’s left of it.

What grew with the ugliness of repeated sexual attacks by supposed loving brothers with nowhere to talk about it, and no one to help or stop it, was a life of unprocessed trauma, chronic, embedded, PTSD, with a critic inside me louder than anything else—a life of punishing myself for having been abused.

Hate myself, blame myself, eat, eat, eat, both to numb out the hate and to comfort myself from the internal nasty word beatings, that voice in my head that came from ‘family’, but became mine. No, it was not spoken aloud, but the messages were imprinted into my soul because no one talked of the tragedies that befell me, nor stopped it. The imposed silence, and the implications of blame I felt entombed me.

A miracle occurs when a more honest view of myself is heard, one that can look at mistakes and flaws kindlier, but much harder, and more importantly, looks at the positive qualities, feels them, believes them, and taking them in as my own.

When that miracle happens, the overpowering urge to eat when not hungry dissipates because my soul is being filled, finally filled.

Naomi Judd

Thoughts dwell on Naomi Judd. We lost one of us, one of the little girls sexually abused. Though she came forward in an interview with Robin Roberts, did people still shun her as they seem to do because hearing about such things is repugnant to them?

I could sense her anxiety watching the interview, the wringing of hands that shook though she tried to hide them, the maddening back and forth of the smile we are forced to portray then the real wrenching pain of unhealed parts ripped to shreds as a child… and no one comes.

Back and forth, the smile, the paralyzing agony depressing her being so much she took her own life. That could be me.

My body does not cope with the decades of hypervigilance- daily adrenalin rushes with cortisol bursts over a tiny insignificant sound, or someone coming up behind me, even my child or husband. That happens even now.

We lost one of our own, and the sorrow cannot be wiped away. Someone needs to talk about it. People need to listen. This is happening to our little girls. Boys too, but little girls far more, we just hear about boys more.

Do a TED talk? Do a youtube? People don’t want to listen, but they must. Isn’t it time to protect our children? Who protected Naomi? She seemed so happy through the years with that smile.

Performing. There is so much performing, as families insist on keeping it quiet, and the child performs. But a body can’t hold out forever and the agony must be released be it too much eating, shopping, drinking, drugging, marrying someone to beat you, or dying.

It is hard road, and I am saddened that this woman has died because her sadness caused it to be so.  

The Origin Group

Had two brothers from the city down for potato waffles. No coincidence that come nightfall I ate too much right before bed and had a rougher night than usual. I should not, and usually don’t, eat right before bed as my tummy can’t digest well lying down.

And if I felt I needed to, a smaller snack would have been fine. But no, two big fat peanut butter sandwiches and a whole glass of milk! OMG I never eat that much even in daytime. Seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. Oh, how old habits rise up to sink me!

It is perplexing to feel love for them yet find it very tough to be around them. They did not touch me in bad ways. But in families the victim is supposed to act like nothing happened and I was a great actress for my entire life.

So, it’s hard to be around them because all along they’ve been friendly with the last one still living who did abuse me- then spent his life trying to cut me down because of it.  Little snide cut-downs hardly noticed by others but still making a vision of me in them that makes for treatment that says, ‘I’m not worthy.’

There are those that commit crimes, then those that stand by and do nothing. Which is worse? Both feel equally cruel to me.

I hope the dichotomous feelings that always seem to occur when interacting with origin members wears off quickly and I don’t do it again for a long, long while. I seem much happier without doing so.

There is one more factor- this time it felt more right than wrong. That offensives committed when my mother was failing were forgiven. I was able to feel love for a few moments during an embrace. Love and warmth.

Most of the visit I had to remind myself to breathe, relax, and let go, because trust is not felt fully. And considering our ages, they are in their 70’s, if trust is lacking that makes spending much time together uncomfortable.

And how do you trust others who choose a relationship with an abuser? That is not something I know how to do, or want to do. It makes for waves of discomfort after they leave, confusion, and a sense of sadness at the loss of ‘family’ all over again. But now? Acceptance takes out the sting and softens the sadness.

The Origin Group of Toxicity

Once again it is time to let go of origin family, that group of people I was unfortunate to be born into. The pressure on me over the last few years to interact with them has worked, because I am pliable if you keep at me.

Don had his wife work on me the most. Don wants to have his chief role of family leader once again but does it through her. And she is a prickly kind of animal, not one I’ve ever been able to be close to, and felt guilty about as if that’s my fault. (as usual)

And that has been what has occurred. I’m at fault. She has talked about me to the two other brothers because I didn’t serve the promised apple pie. Samuel and I ate the apple pie, but when they came with sidekick Seth, I presented a perfect grape pie from our own grapes. Making a grape pie takes much more work. Not enough for her.

Over the next months I heard about not making the promised apple pie at least three times. She’d email about it, say it at the next get-together, and yet again another time. More of a shock, while setting down the gorgeous perfectly made pie with Don, Seth, her, and Samuel at my table, Seth smirks saying, ‘not apple!’

Stunned at the rudeness, my reply was, ‘how many people have you told?’

Rolling over letting myself be kicked, the official doormat. The thing I do is is what you need, not what I need. Where once feeling left out as they made this new little group, but then relenting, I became a plastic replica of who I used to be… a robotic pleaser. I need to stay OUT. They keep digging at my insides making them bleed all over again.

Seth would only have said that because she must have complained to him about not saving the promised apple pie. And she must have extolled my failure of a human being to my younger brother up north too. Both Seth and Stevie have made her apple tortes and pies. To make up for my shortcomings? This is true sickness, making me oh so sick too. If what lies below a certain flavor dessert is a hurt over broken promises, talk to ME, not everybody else. But that’s what they all do.

Each time the absurd complaint was aired I rolled over as my face was smashed in her shit, once even by email several weeks ago. After that latest complaint I email back, ‘I do owe you an apple pie.’ Really? Why would I continue with this idiocy, even cruelty?

Virginia, why not just say ‘thank you?’ How the fuck did this become a thing about me to yet again blow out what little self-esteem I’ve begun to muster? My work on all healthy things has slowed greatly ever since caving to the pressure to be part of their little dysfunctional sick, sick, group.

But this is how it goes in the origin mess. Even though the worst member, Tom, who sexually attacked me when home on Christmas break from college when I just a little child, now lives out west, Virginia, Don’s wife, the apple pie demander, has taken up where Tom left off chipping away at me, talking to others about me, bringing me down. Some people don’t like to see others fly. All about an apple pie? This is why I’m bad?

And I let her, rolling over each time being kicked. No wonder my weight loss has stalled ever since relenting to Don needing me to become part of their little group. Being bad and being fat go together. Self-punishment for being wrong- but not knowing why, just that my existence is wrong.  

My standings in this so called family are as shitty as always. They gang up having all the control. I am the lowest of scum you can kick whenever you want. That’s the awful message souring my soul that has only just begun to learn brightness, lightness, and freedom. Freedom has gone. The bonds hold me tight. Their demands are everywhere.

It is time to start fresh. Live my life with those who truly care for me. Not like Mom whose love came only when I kept quiet and pretended to love her sons who cruelly attacked me but never said sorry.

Sorry? I’m sorry I can’t be strong enough to stay away. But today is a new day.