So many moments come and go when I cannot believe who I became, the things I said and did to the people most dear to me. I turn my face away in disgust and anguish but I cannot blunt the stark reality. It was I, I say to no one, and no one answers.
No person can do battle with the past and win nor stem the tide for long by oppression of it. Reality can be lied about or dressed up to look like what was not but it can never be permanently changed for the past is what the present is built upon. People try to cover the past, I have done the same to the detriment of my self and many others, namely my children and grandchildren. We think somehow it is best, don’t ask, don’t tell lest the past lurch out and smite us from the unsteady ground on which we stand.
But science comes along and figures out that the past we bury lives inside like a traffic cop directing the flow and progress of every thought and emotion, every reaction and response until we are ready to annihilate ourselves in frustration. Only by accepting the truth of the past can we begin to impact our future, and for myself that acceptance has came late in life.
I was a good mother, and I was a horrid mother. Both are true, and both must be accepted, at least by me for I hold the memory of it. It is easier to accept the latter, as it plays with my mind and emotions on a daily basis. But it is not enough to accept only the awful truth but the whole truth with all it’s variation.
In The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk I learned the myriad reasons my life became a train wreck or as I used to say a wild ride on a merry-go-round that I could not exit from. “Let me out!” I used to say to the universe, Let me stop! Give me peace! Let me go! But there was no exit and on I rode. I have discovered I was more than a passenger on an out of control merry-go-round and thus the train wreck analogy, because all along the way I careened and collided and ran over other people whether innocent, as my children and grandchildren, or guilty, as my family of origin and my first husband.
There is no price I can put on the knowledge that I am gaining about my life. Does it relieve me of guilt and responsibility? No, for I was the vessel of catastrophe. I was the face and am the face of the ill wind that blew in and out of peoples lives leaving them hurt and abandoned.
I will tell you what it is worth to know the reality of my life course from severe childhood abuse and neglect to now when science has opened windows to let the air in to banish the putrid skeletons and self loathing. I get to see what I am sorry for and so when I tell my children “I’m sorry.” it will be with meaning and presence of mind and heart. Also it will not kill me as my wild imaginings said it would. Like the little girl afraid of shedding tears because they may never stop, I also will not die from accepting me as I am and can be.
I do not have pure acceptance every day. Rather, I need to re-accept each day and some day I fight tooth and nail to refrain from re-entering that hazy unreality that served as home for most of my life thinking reality cannot hurt if I keep it at bay.
Yes, buried reality can and does hurt in ways I could never have imagined.
The Road Forward 