I M Perfect lady

Tag: abuse

  • A Man abusing a woman.

    I have such great admiration for the choreography of the Universe, how it manages to give to you the right and perfect set up to heal your wounded self.

    In my quest for wholeness, the main theme has been feeling and seeing. As a child of abuse, I had separated myself from my body, and what I need most is to bring up those emotions, to feel them and greet them with understanding, and they recede on their own, once I ‘get it’.

    The message.

    What I was able to feel and see is beyond what I can hope to put into words.

    It gave to me the access of feelings that I feared I had lost.

    It brought forth a visual so brightly displayed for me to witness the dance of luring and grooming of an innocent girl.

    Delivering to me, the need of the perpetrator over shining the care this innocence needed.

    Showing how innocence the friendship begins and its ultimate conclusion, where the courtship is long and subtle, their needs small at first and how they build, how we start simple and grow into a complex adult scenario long before our time.

    How we are changed slowly and you don’t see yourself change, how you gradually succumb to the tiny wishes, one at a time, trusting and going along, until one day you wake up and your no longer there, in its place is another woman.

    It showed me how a mother should respond and how a mother did respond.

    My daughter found herself in a relationship with a married man, the man she was babysitting for, a man whose children she cared for, tended to like a second mother for many years, since the time she was just a girl herself. To see her in the role of being the other woman, to see her self so changed, broke my heart.
    To see her lost of her inner self worth shattering.

    The overall picture of seeing my young and innocent daughter being courted by such a knowing man, brought me back to the way my abuse played out for me, but with a different ending.

    The dual lesson that my daughter and I danced through leaves me breathless and to feel past overlapping onto the present, the weight of the legacy and it’s vine stretching into the next generation and feeling and seeing my abuse from all angles left my mind whirling.

    I had to first feel the devastation as a mother seeing my innocent daughter in a friendship with a man who single-handedly soiled her fine reputation, without blinking an eye.

    To feel my worthlessness in undoing what was already done.

    To then see the dance and the lure and the friendship and its ‘friendly like’ image have such a dirty ugly affect on the girl, left me shattered and broken as I clearly saw what she failed to see.

    And to be the one to shatter her dreams and love and to flood him in a new light, but then to also put the image on to her self and to see what she ‘allowed’ her self to be. By showing her what the other woman does.

    I was able to see what my mother couldn’t see.
    I was able to do what my mother couldn’t do.
    We both, my daughter and I, were able to stand taller and stronger in truth, than either of would be able to do in lies.

    It was an incredible and heart breaking 24 hours.
    My daughter feels she carries the shame of being the other woman, I feel she carries the experience of being abused.

    I can see how we carry forth from abuse, that we were at fault, that we allowed it, we dance too, but there usually is One with more power, more experience, more everything, that leads the dance to lowering our self worth in their blind desire for their needs being fulfilled.

    The fail to see how it affects us.

    My daughter’s reputation was damaged while his remained unchanged.

    She approached the friendship as innocent.
    A young girl who didn’t realize when you knowingly do what you feel is wrong but do it anyway, you are giving away your self worth.

    We do it for many reasons, to be liked, to please, to get attention, to feel good, and what we all fail to realize, is this feeling is fleeting, it is like a drug, we are forever needing more.

    A habit of pleasing another for our high of feeling good, while our sense of self gets depleted.

    The subtle disappearing self in the dance of friendship that has a greedy needy thirst on one side and the other willingly feeding the supply is a train wreck waiting to happen.

    How grateful am I, that my daughter was able to see and feel her sense of self being lowered, being changed, how she became a stranger to herself.

    Yet when this happens as child, we don’t even have a self established to see disappear, it is gone before we knew it.

    The lessons I was able to experience while she experienced it first hand is like a mirror image of me as a child.

    I can see how my mother’s reaction affected how I was unable to see myself. For my mother’s affection and allegiance was to my father. She didn’t see my change within; she didn’t see my self worth leave.

    I can see how my husband reacted, how she had a loving space to show her the difference between what is a loving friendship and what lowers you.

    There are a million ways this has opened my eyes and hers, how it shows us both, our own boundaries of self love matter most before any request outside.
    Some may see her as the other woman and call her awful names, judge and criticize her actions, view her as the home wrecker etc. I will see her as a victim of
    Abuse.

    Her babysitting children’s father took advantage of her.

    The lack of self worth on his part lent itself to overstep his boundaries. He took liberties that were not his to take.

    He tried to make an adult friendship and press it further with someone who was way out of his league.

    Her innocence was no equal match for him. It was like taking candy from a baby.

    I will see his strengths and her blindness and trust, see her having to lower who she was to become his friend.

    Friendships like that we don’t need.

    Friendship and love will raise you up, not lower you down.

    What a great lesson to learn as such a young age.

    The reason I was having such a hard time seeing her as the ‘other woman’ was that she was just a girl.

    An innocent girl being swept away in an adult world of lies and secrets, of being chosen for the role of ‘other woman’.

    It wasn’t that she auditioned for the part, that she was out seeking this; it came in while she was babysitting.

    The contrast to the label he put on her back and the girl who sleeps on the top bunk in our home is a world apart.

    They don’t even come close to matching.

    Imagine, she still shares a room with her sisters.

    She occupies the top bunk. How can the other woman be the girl who sleeps on the top bunk?

    I feel so fortunate that we have her on the top bunk to have her in our home, to have this wonderful loving, kind and gentle girl in our home.

    What a close call.

    She now knows that when a ‘friendship’ lowers who you are, it isn’t a friendship, you are being abused.

    It is not the other woman on my top bunk, it is my little girl.

    My little wounded girl, who we will love back to her bright sunshiny self.

    We will love her as we always have, for this family didn’t believe, was shocked to the core that our innocent girl was put in the role of ‘other woman’.

    It is abuse, no matter the age.
    A man abusing a woman.

  • Help you be you.

    A letter of apology to my daughters, for I have taught you wrong, all my selfish pleadings to do well for me, as created within you a program, that is better to give than receive.

    To give up your attention on self and in return receive accolades of a job well done.

    To wear proudly the tag of people pleaser, to lower your boundaries bit by bit to take on more and more, until you are swimming in a life that is minus of you.

    I taught you to please me.
    I taught you to do for me.
    I taught you to think like me, dance for me, talk for me, and become a victim JUST like me.

    To let go of your own needs, to be the need pleaser of many, to be in a vacuum of Other inside of you.

    Where your first and only concern is Other.

    Helping other, feeling other, healing other, dealing other, pleasing other, loving other, seeing other, with only a teeny tiny smidgen of space, a speck that is truly just for you.

    By the time adult friendship and relationships are due to arrive, you have your role all mapped out, you will be drawn and have feelings for the deepest hurt, the most messiest, and jump in and begin to save, rescue and recreate a better life for them.

    I taught you to love the messiest, I taught you to love me. So, love for you is to find the lowest among us, the most selfish and the most wounded, and you will allow them to abuse you as I did.

    I didn’t let you be you, I needed you to help hold up me. For inside of me was nothing of self. You had to be my self.

    I never let your self be born, to let it flourish, prosper, life in its full light, instead I used you to also.

    I used you making you a victim to me.

    Unknowingly I needed you to fix me.

    The past six years I have spent fixing me, what I failed to notice is that the fixing I am doing, may not be enough to overflow on to you.

    You may have to fix yourself.

    To rescue a speck of self and slowly nurture it to bloom as you.

    I covered up that little bright self, each time I hollered in fear, when I needed you to look a certain way, act a certain way for you had to make me a better me.

    It was your job. I assigned it to you as a baby.

    All your accomplishments were to make me better.
    To shield the fact that within me lay nothing but a wounded victim, not a whole mom.

    I wasn’t a mom, I didn’t know how to be.
    I was victim posing as a mom.

    I used your little lives and little bodies to cover-up my deficiencies.

    And now, I fear that this is the only role you know.

    That you are destined to a life of serving Other and neglecting you.

    You all have served me well, and I am sickened by this and feel to the depth of my being, that the legacy that I was born in has its tentacles in you.

    And there is nothing now that I can do to make you shine bright inside of you. No amount of praise, love and attention will melt away the program set as a child.

    It will be up to each of you to reset your inside, to find the Spirit of self, to set up boundaries, to find a value of self, and I am setting you to this task with very little self.

    It can be done, and it has been done.

    I found a me inside of me buried deep waiting.

    She is who you now have as a mother, a reformed victimizer, and sadly she now has to sit and watch the affects of years spent being abused by me, play it self out.

    The legacy is hard to get out from beneath, and harder still to watch in real life continuing on slurping up another life.

    My greatest plea as I lay in tears on my yoga mat, was if this is my lesson, I got it. I got it, and please let my children get it too.

    The saddest day of my life is to see too much, to feel to much, to know the intricacies of the legacy, of living a soulless life, to see what I created.

    It is like I wanted puppets to please me, but the puppets are only set to please messy people, selfish people, mentally unbalanced people, and I can’t reset them to be puppets to self.

    To turn all those wonderful attributes and let them serve you.

    Love you.

    Feel you.

    Please you.

    All the love and attention I needed from you, I now need you to turn that back to you.

    Be the most wonderful caring loving trusting self to your self.

    I am sorry.

    I love you.

    Words mean nothing, actions speak loudly.
    You have witnessed myself in the past six years taking care of my self.

    I am here to help you be you.

    I pray it is not too late…can I be stronger than the legacy I planted?

  • Felt Its Worth

    Before beginning yoga today, I cleaned the mirror I stand in front of, it was layered with weeks of dust, and I appeared fog like behind it. Today I felt the need to wipe it free, as I did so the line from a song arose in my head, “I can see clearly now the pain is gone…”

    Then into yoga I went.

    I was on the third part of the Awkward pose, where I go from standing up to squatting down, and Bikram asks us to descend slowly, and I lost my control and fell into a squat and smiled as I did so.

    This smile took up my whole face, my cheeks, my eyes and my mouth rose into a delightful bend, and inside I felt its wonderful wave of joy.

    I smiled at my rendition of his yoga; I smiled at me and the transformation of my face and received fully my smile about me.

    A smile about me isn’t something I have any memory of ever receiving.

    I was shocked first at the way this smile changed my look, and even more stunned to receive its full value inside.

    To feel myself worthy of a full-blown smile.

    I froze for a half of second to feel such sheer delight inside myself.

    My smile quickly disappeared and I struggled to smile while tears of sorrow dampened my face.

    Imprinted in my minds eye is my smiling feeling being over swept by sadness as memories flung themselves upon me, one on top of the other.

    A 50 year long life review flashed before my eyes, all the places where I mistook myself for being bad, wrong, and despicable, how I had not seen my own worth or how I had lost sight of myself inside myself.

    The simple fact that I was unworthy of a smile from me about me is so harsh and tragic; yet it was never my smile I sought. I didn’t even know I was missing my smile for me.

    The mouth I tried to change was my mother’s.

    Before putting my words to paper, I spoke to my brother and then did some mindless cleaning, and it came to me what love I had for my mother.

    I literally gave my soul, my insides away in order to bring a smile to her face and to keep it there.

    How tragic that she wanted my smile more than she wanted my tears and my sorrows, and even more dreadful for a little girl to be left with such sorrow inside, such darkness.

    In denying my abuse, she left me in the dark.

    It is funny in a sad way, how I wanted her to have a smile, more than me.

    I could cry a river of tears for the little girl who wasn’t allowed to feel her sorrow out loud, to be heard and valued as abused.

    Valued as abused and not having to hide this fact.

    I can see I took up my mother’s view of me.

    My mouth and facial images reflected hers in my mirror and even more tragically inside.

    Inside I knew my mother blamed me.

    I took away her sunshine, I stole her lovely story, I was darker than the darkness that abused me.

    I changed her smiling face to anger.

    And it was my job now to put her smile back.

    And I tried and danced, and pranced and worked and slaved and toiled to bring it back, and to keep it in place.

    When I was tired of holding up those cheeks, when I simply didn’t have anymore to give, or when I tried to tend to myself, I heard her angry response, “How dare you Beth Ann…” and up I got and began dancing again.

    Six years ago all my dancing for her was over, done, finished, the end.

    I stopped where I stood and in the middle of the darkness began to see what I did for me and what I did for others.

    Life offered up to me a million situations for me to choose again, their pleasure or mine, their smile or mine, their feelings or mine.

    Each and every time I found the strength to disappoint my mother and chose me; I opened up inside, made room for that smile.

    Today, I feel that I have made it to the other side, to the side of worthiness, or at least I have felt the wave of joy lap at my feet, I feel that I am worthy to now frolic in the ocean and swim to its depths.

    I look forward to seeing another one come out of me and shine upon me and for me to welcome it in!

    I have been waiting in vain for her to arrive and tell me that I am a good girl, that I am of value, and that the abuse didn’t change who I am, in her eyes.

    I wanted her to smile that it was okay that I was abused, it didn’t matter to her, and she loved me any way.

    Again, the smile I sought was hers and the one I found was mine.

    What I love is that the first smile I was able to receive was mine!

    A smile in full acceptance of all of me, the darkest dark and the brightest bright.

    I smiled at me and felt Its worth.

  • I was Missing?

    One theme of fear that has nagged at me in the past six years is; I don’t belong.

    I don’t match, I don’t fit in, I am different, I am at odds with those around me. I stand out; I walked away, leaving behind many.

    I see them fitting together and me fitting out.

    I see a flock of people being in life in harmony and then me, singing off tune.

    The feeling inside was one of separation, loneliness, not belonging, forever standing on the fringe.

    What I failed to do was take one more step back and see the completed picture.

    My focus has been on the group, not on me, my view is from this odd angle of group mentality.

    Understandably so, for I was raised to be a group member, but not an individual and I excelled at this.

    I was a superior group member, outstanding in blending in, merging my life into the group, that I simply disappeared.

    Each time I felt the separation I felt lonely and not whole and grew smaller and smaller.

    I seemed to disappear from their life while my own life seemed to loom larger and larger.

    If you could see me from both views, you would see me growing fainter in their light but if you stood on my side you could see me growing bigger and brighter.

    My success or failure depends on where you are standing.

    If you are expecting me to return and become a group member, you will see me fading, growing weaker and farther away.

    And if you jump over to the side of individual your view will totally change.

    You will see a person standing up for her own feelings, her own passions and truths, a separated soul finding its own self worth.

    I too fall victim to the group view, to see me in their eyes and each time I do, I feel less.

    However, when I stand inside myself and witnessed my life from the inside out, I feel my uniqueness and my independence of free will.

    A group no longer owns me.

    As a child I was taught to give up my body, my feelings, my life and my individual stakes for a group called family, which was governed by religion and undermined by abuse.

    They took ownership of me piece by piece.

    Or I gave them pieces of me little by little, believing the more I gave the more I would become.

    I gave til I was gone.

    It has taken me a long while to remove the sense of self from the views of a group and see myself within my self, to feel my self as self.

    To weigh and measure myself by my own ruler, to no longer feel my value is defined by the Ruler of the group.

    This separated wholeness I see of me outside the group is to see and feel something I am not familiar with, a self beyond the group.
    My favorite image or saying is, “I am going to go find myself, and I don’t know who I am or even that I am missing…”

    I had no idea who I was separated from a group.

    I had no individual view of self.

    I was nothing out side alone.

    My whole composition of self was defined by their needs of me.

    My fear of being alone was that alone I am nothing.

    I recall being scared spit less to the point of frozen immobility, to be naked without a group.

    The group I had woken up in was filled with filth, untruths, lies and cover-ups, forgiveness of sins, a mess.

    It was me!

    The group looked liked me, talked like me, walked like me, it was a direct reflection, a bird with the same feathers.

    There was no dividing line between it and me.

    I found me, lost, brainwashed, blind, abused, broken, confused, mental…I was upside down and tilted away from reality.

    It’s denial and mine were equal.

    My long walk back to find myself and see myself in reality has not been an easy road, but one that has set me free to stand alone belonging to me.

    Isn’t it funny I found myself exactly as I felt, Lost but not knowing I was missing?

  • Joined them back together.

    The way I described this past Christmas was an ugly beautiful one, where inside I was so dark and the outside so light, how mental psyche steers my world, not the decorations on the outside.

    I was clearly shown that no matter how I orchestrated and decorated and baked and made perfect the outside, it had no influence upon my inner world.

    It wasn’t even a blue Christmas it was black.

    Frozen darkness inside…is that called depression?

    Yet it was a moving depression where I was working on the outside to cheer me up inside.

    I always pictured depression as sitting in a stupor, unable to move. Is there a moving depression or a fallacy that if you can create a warm peaceful atmosphere you will have the same inside?

    What I think I thought, was that if you were dark inside you could change it up on the outside to help alleviate the feelings, yet what needs to happen is that you have to go deeper into the feelings, leaving the outside alone.

    When I started to spiral into darker feelings, I kept
    cleaning, instead I should have stopped and sat with my feelings.

    Writing and exploring why I felt the way I felt.

    I wonder if depression is repressed feelings, if denying them and focusing on changing the environment you live in, instead of investigating your feelings and relationships is the cause?

    What I feel is I was given a real life experience, situations and feelings that represented the flavor of my childhood, and then a dream to show where the seed was planted, how my mental psyche was developed.

    A main piece of the puzzle was cleared up for me.

    My father was happy and desiring me.
    And I was happy to please him.

    The sheer terror wasn’t there, perhaps too young to know…in my mind no terror.
    And my head seemed detached from my body.

    My body and head separated.
    Hence, no memory in my head, but my body held on tight to the trauma.

    I am filled with admiration for the little girl who so bravely withstood such trauma, who did her best to please in the most horrific of circumstances, all she wanted was her daddy to be happy.

    When it is over, and the child seems ‘unaffected’ it is because they no longer are one.

    The mind and the body separated.

    The body holds the truth while the mind was elsewhere.

    Bikram Yoga is about bringing the mind back to the body.

    In the 360 days that have passed, I have missed 32 days, days in which I was working so hard to reconnect my head to the rest of my body.

    To live as mind body and soul.

    Yoga is the yoke that joined them back together.

  • Where I stopped caring for me.

    As I read back a few days in my blog, I saw where the trimmings had a hold of me and almost ruined Christmas, and then the actions and expectations did the job the trimmings had started.

    It is like negative energy travels from item to person to thing, to any place in my world to latch on, and if I am not aware where my power is, it slips in and takes over.

    What I believe happens as well, as the busier you are the more unaware you become, so busy doing you forget to be.

    My Christmases of past were very busy doings, they wore me out to the last drop of energy, it was what I thought was needed to make a great Christmas to do over and beyond what you normally do.

    To put your self into trimming the house, oodles of gifts, baking, card sending, wrapping your self up into a dozen places until there is no you left.

    Exhausted and depleted.

    A manic Christmas cheer.

    Taking the season of giving into a manic state of doing and overdoing and then doing yet more.

    This holiday season is a playground for those of us who have ‘responsibility addictions’ who feel we carry the power to make others happy. It is like a drugstore of places for us to get our hits.

    There should be a warning label on Christmas.

    “Be careful not to give your self away.”

    I had a very odd dream on Christmas Eve, well actually very early Christmas morning, as I awoke from it, it left me knowing its content was a metaphor for how I lived my life.

    It isn’t a nice dream, but I will state it here anyway.

    I became aware I was in the back of a station wagon, face down, naked from the waist down, I was a young girl and I was watching a man approaching the side of the car, the windows are open and I hear him say my maiden name. In the middle seats are young kids, and the feeling I have is that I will offer my body to him to spare them. He climbs on my back and does his thing. I don’t feel anything, except that I am making him happy.

    When I awoke from this dream it seemed like a complete metaphor for my life.

    How I will be a whore for another and I will do so to spare another pain, I will abuse my body for the sake of others.

    It stayed with me this ugly dream on Christmas day.

    Its contents a visual of how I navigated life in co-dependency, how I will use my body in two ways for the pleasure of others and to spare pain for the innocent, to protect them I will abuse to my body.

    How others use my body was clearly displayed with my approval and willingness.

    Perhaps I needed that shocking dream to wake me up to how I get lost in another’s life.

    And what was so telling was the age of this young girl, as I caught sight of her in the rearview mirror, very blonde hair and young body, her flat chest, being strong beyond her years, willing to suffer for another.

    Courageously selflessly boldly the sacrificial lamb.

    Perhaps I don’t have images of my child abuse, but this is as close as it gets.

    And what I feel was that I truly didn’t focus on his deed and my pain, but his happiness and who I spared.

    What began at the moment of abuse was the fragmentation of living life for self.

    It is there my responsibility gene was developed and pruned, where I became the pleaser and the saver.

    Where I stopped caring for me.

  • Boldly slips away unscathed.

    What struck me last night is that the definitions of good and evil in my childhood home were competing for the upper hand, that my father’s heaven was my mother’s hell, and visa versa.

    It truly is that one man’s heaven is another man’s hell.

    My father’s heaven depended upon my silence, and my mother’s actually too…she needed the image of his being just a loving dad, and he did too, both sides terrified of hell, if truth be told.

    I can see how easily it was to manipulate a child in our home, for the values contradicted each other, the front divided, two roads leading to hell if truth be spoken out loud and unforgiving.

    Life was much easier on my father and his pedophile ways, to have silence…it was much easier on my mother, for she didn’t have to know.

    She may have heard us tell our stories, but she didn’t have to believe. If you don’t believe the words spoken, you don’t have to act. If you don’t have to act, your life doesn’t change.

    It is by far harder to change, than it is to remain committed to the cause.

    The cause of us remaining all together.

    My father’s hell was the truth.
    And actually my mother’s hell is the truth as well.
    They lived in heaven in silence.

    But for me, the truth has set me free.
    Hell is being quiet…Heaven is speaking out loud and often.

    I can see how many a child faces the same thing, that the adults in the room lose big time, if the child speaks, that the ones holding our survival need us to play along, pretend and hold up the façade.

    As my friend said, “what will people think” if they knew what was really going on.

    We are to act like it is heaven, while dancing in hell, going with the flow, following the lead of those taking “care” of us.

    Preachers preach of the evil on the outside, while we are imbedded in the camp of evil on the inside.

    What is up and what is down, who is right and who is wrong, or is our camp of evil far reaching?

    The compound has its own boundaries that reach far and wide.

    I know that when I first discovered the evil in my childhood, I quickly seen the churche’s evil, and then even the law of the land.

    Claiming to be the fighters of evil, while many are incapable to actually combat it when they see it face to face.

    When evil knocks at their door, some bless it.
    Some reduce the charges and set it free.
    Some open up their homes allowing access to more little girls.
    Some love evil as a way to heaven.

    The list is long and powerful.

    We are dancing with the devil each time evil knocks and we treat it with goodness, kindness, fairness, compassion, etc.

    Evil dances in our faces, showing us all that it is, an unruly force, taunting our weak defenses, it boldly slips away unscathed.

  • Actions towards Self.

    On facebook as we all add cartoon characters to our profile to stand against child abuse, we are just nudging the tip of the iceberg and the action steps needed are not for the faint of heart.

    I watched my father travel through the system that society has in place to ‘deal’ with the perpetrators, and I watched him exit the other end, a free man.

    After 40 years of abusing little girls, he was ‘tried’ on one reduce criminal offense. That is the court system in action. Believe it or not people were paid to act as a detective, act as a judge, act as defense attorney, and their actions all benefited my criminal dad.

    I watched my mother and her response to all this, how she visited him in jail, how she drove him (after he was set free) to her daughter’s house. Her actions enabled him til the bitter end.

    I watched my siblings, most who had been abused by him, act in accordance to their upbringing, using their definitions of conditional love do what they needed to do.

    Keeping the family together, knitting back after the hole that was ripped in its fabric, holding on tightly unknowing what they are holding on to.

    Actions of dysfunctional love.

    I watched actions and there were plenty of them, all the actions are supporting the pedophile, all.

    Not one supported the child.

    To support the child, the family falls apart.
    To support the child, the love is shown to be abuse.
    To support the child, the court systems not be a tunnel to pass through, but the end of the road.

    The child carries the weight of evidence.

    The child’s actions have to stronger than the judge, the detective, the family, and society at large.

    The abused child has to topple it all.

    The only hero I see is a brave abused child saying who abused her, and after telling nothing was done.

    Everyone failed her… one by one they fall.

    Somehow we feel if we can only get the child to speak of it, if we can teach them what to do.

    Guess what the child is the only one who is doing this right.

    We need to teach the judges, the lawyers, the families, the mothers, wives, daughters, and sons.

    We need to stop focusing on good touch bad touch, and focus on the actions and what they are really really doing.

    I am incensed by all of the folks who knew and did nothing well nothing would be nice.

    Who knew and then made their action step one that was for the good of the man who raped me.

    Like mad puppets, they responded like robots, pulling strings to see him free.

    Actions. Be wary of your actions.
    Who do they serve and what is their message.
    Who are you standing near?
    What chorus are you singing with?

    Actions.

    Actions are what I watched in total disheartening disbelief.

    I watched as once again, just as it was when I was but a little girl, all hands, deeds and actions moved to cover him.

    While I was displayed with my underwear down, my abuse showing, no one tended to my wounds.

    The detective pleaded that I wouldn’t allow this to change my relationship with my dad.

    My mother says, “forgive and forget and move along, we have wasted five years, now six” pull up your underwear and get back to the family tree. She is back where she once began.

    With all the actions, nothing changed.

    At the end of the scene all roles remain firmly in place, all except one.

    Mine. This required me to change me.

    Be the change you want to see in the world, it begins with you.

    I agree with Buddha.

    I couldn’t change the world, so I changed me.

    Actions towards self.

  • Love Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

    In the children’s book, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C. J. Lewis, the youngest child during a game of hide and seek, looks into a wardrobe and discovers a portal to a mysterious world of Narnia.

    This is how I see the land of disassociation disorder.

    Where you have the ability to slip into a portal that takes you out of this world, into a pretend place where life is beautiful all the time.

    Escape, until it is safe to return, failing to record the happenings while we hid in the closet of our minds.

    This gives us a blackout affect or an on and off again visual of reality’s time line. What happed as we slipped through the portal?

    The past 6 years I have been dealing with all the stuff that went on while I was frolicking in my far away land, trying to go back through feelings and emotions.

    This reminds me of what I heard, “Emotions are time travelers.” So I use them as my vehicle to transport me back in time.

    Mostly it is to see what I missed, what spaces I left out, where I built myself without these crucial points.

    It’s like I had sculpted a life based on the land I escaped to.

    A very overbright rendition.

    Now I am bringing into my magical space all the stuff I ran from.

    Adding the dark patches and smashing the sunshine pretend images of love and kindness.

    It’s to find myself standing in the portal between both worlds, the dark and the overbright and re-creating what is real.

    On this pinhead in time, I have to sort everything from both sides holding them up to reality’s discerning eye, leaving behind my ability to turn straw into gold, and weaving the most plausible story.

    I am now without a magical closet where I can leave things on the shelf untouched.

    In the portal, the space or second between the two worlds, I live there now minus all magic.

    A convergence of both into one.

    Combinations of old fantasies and stark bare reality.

    The fantasies allowed me to survive, but in the end they were still fantasies.

    I now see the land, the brightness, and the fluffy white clouds of escape and thank it for welcoming me in as a child, for protecting me when I couldn’t protect myself.

    A space of refuge in a storm, I lived there for 46 years.

    6 years ago to this day, my magic closet stopped working, the darkness flooded my bright world, shattering all the fantasies in its wake.

    Flinging me into reality and slamming the portal shut, locking me out of the closet naked and terrified.

    Alone in the cold truth, everything I ever ran from came home to roost in that one second in time.

    All my fears were realized, all my feelings were validated, my mind’s disassociations clashed into one bang, fantasy met reality, and it was all wrong.

    Horrified I died as me.

    Dead but alive, another wonderful oxymoron!

    In order for me to live, I had to rewire and unravel and re-write the history of me, dissolving fantasy after fantasy, to find the me I had run from.

    I had to begin the long walk back to me.

    Uncovering and unwrapping the entire pretty pretend fantasies and sit with reality.

    Some pieces were harder to unwrap and see.

    Knocking on each door in my fantasy only to hear,

    “Love doesn’t live here anymore.”

  • In My Mother’s Eyes

    Being in this moment of time and healing my childhood wounds requires me to make changes now what I was incapable of doing back then.

    It is like living in two places at once, or being a grown woman and a little girl at the same time, my past is brought to the present to be healed or the presence goes back to the past to feel, heal and deal.

    What I failed to understand about the term, “healing your childhood wounds”, was that you literally are bringing forward the stuck emotions.

    Meaning you are made to revisit emotions that are stuck on, or places you are stuck and not free.

    Where you carry fear that is unreasonable as a mature woman.

    It is incredible to be a big lady in her own home, feeling feelings of being a ‘bad’ little girl, disappointing or displeasing, hurting her mother.

    How I don’t have this right. This option is not available.

    How the fear of her reaction seems to overshadow my independence and freedom.

    Yet, if I capitulated to the fears, I get stuck in the place emotionally being afraid of my mother’s reaction.

    It is her reaction that I fear.

    This is a very strong iron clad idea that I am not to upset my mother’s world, but what I also didn’t want to see is her reaction.

    It is twofold.

    That there is an unspoken rule, “thou shall not displease thy mother, for there will be a consequence IF you do.”

    It is perhaps the consequence… of what will happen or what do I not want to know?

    There seems to be more than just fear of her reacting badly, but rather seeing what’s beneath.

    In a dysfunctional home, I bet we know that the depth of love for us is very shallow, that we can’t push them very far and we will fall off the ledge of love.

    For in a dysfunctional home, the love of child seems to be last, the very last, in the furthest reaches, out beyond selfish needs, addictions and desires, and what we don’t want to know for sure is that this is true.

    That it is true we are barely seen.

    That we come behind a long list of things that matter more, that even with all the physical evidence to the contrary, we just don’t want to know, our well being comes second, third, or tenth on the list.

    Speaking up, making my wishes known, is to go against our usual dance.

    I am putting down my co-dependent wand.

    My greatest fear is that when I stand and offer to her that my well-being come before hers, that I will be seen as useless to her.

    That my value drops to zero.

    In My Mother’s eyes.