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.

Does it count when you trounce your enemy in the dead of night when no one is there to see? Does it matter? If history is told by the winners then I alone get to judge the win. Or not judge at all only bask in the light of victory when my assailant is vanquished.

My brother walked into my dream last night and touched me. For the squeamish I will not elaborate. He has walked into my dreams dozens of times over decades leaving me weak with fear and shame and disgust for myself.

For those who do not believe that incest shaped my life, stop reading now. You do not want the truth.

Last night I lit into my brother like a rabid dog. I dismantled him to my mother’s horror, her precious boy, lay beaten in the dust. When I awoke I felt none of the shame and guilt that was drummed into me from childhood. I felt no remorse, only power, the power to control at last the trajectory of my life.

I never see my brothers, those that led me astray from a tender age, they do not count among my “family.” I tried to find peace with them and they tossed me aside like the mad old cow they painted me as. It does not matter. Their cowardliness is my gain, I know now I am strong and capable and true to myself.

But it was only a dream. Don’t believe it. It was me getting stronger. Let me bask in my glory.

Every time I listen to the news I shed an internal tear for all the misery this world holds and perpetrates on the young, the old, the infirm, and the poor. And don’t forget the women and people of color and without religion or with the “wrong” religion and those who love the “wrong” person and those who have no one to love. The list is miles long. Hardly anyone is created equal and those in power let us know it.

I had gotten good at hiding the tears, masking my feelings, and carrying on as we all must or die, living the best life I may with what is given to me to do with. Of course there is the proverbial “pulling up by the bootstraps” people who have, telling people who have not must do in order to succeed. The general idea is that everyone have bootstraps to begin with, and of course that does not happen.

I shed many tears, both for myself and for others, mostly in private and even then diverting my eyes while my brain spun lies to tell me it did not need to feel. Then George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight with a knee on his neck of a smug faced man flouting his authority as though nothing and no one could touch him. I was horrified, yes, but what could I do? I shook my head, felt appalled, and mentally added his name to the long list of dead black people wrongly murdered by hate rather than any form of justice.

When the protests began surging around the country as well as right below my window in downtown Raleigh, NC I felt a measure of disquiet soon replaced by fear in the dark of the night with helicopters circling, fires, shattering windows, chanting, shouting, marching, and motorcycles squealing on the pavement. I did not want to exit my building the next morning for fear what I might see, but I had an errand to run that could not be put off. Out I went, slowly taking in the scene with every step, feeling my way really, breathing deeply to quiet my nerves, taking in the experience with my whole mind and heart.

For decades I had known this moment had to come. One day black people would rise up against the never equal justice of the system and the racist bastards that held them down. But it was not how I thought it would be. It was not a black against white war with black people violently claiming their human rights and liberty from the knee forever on their necks. It was kind, angry, fed up, but kind.

I was mesmerized by the messages on the walls and sidewalks speaking of unity and peace, about freedom and cooperation and respect, and being heard. In that moment I knew a greater anguish than I had felt in many years and I stood there feeling it, savoring it, knowing it was a necessary step I had to take towards my own freedom. Day after day I walked the downtown streets snapping pictures as I felt the weight of my heart with the weight of the messages and I could barely divert my head.

Black people were not separate from me. I too had a lifetime of silent screams streaming through my veins pleading to be heard and seen. I too have a raging desire for justice that never comes. I too have been oppressed by circumstances out of my control, by people who felt superior and above reproach due to the forgiveness of a Jesus that has nothing to do with the Jesus in the Bible. I too had been silenced time and again for discussing “uncomfortable” topics.

No, I have no idea what it is like to be black in America, but I, and millions like me have a common message, we will not be silenced forever, nor will we continue to be ignored and invalidated. The message is the connection for all people fighting oppression and for their right to basic human rights and to be heard.

I will fight to not lose this feeling, this drive. I have ever only had one life, and I will never allow people to discount my life as something I dreamed up. I am real, and I will be heard.

“THE ORIGINS OF THE “TALKING CURE”
Psychoanalysis was born on the wards of the Salpêtrière. In 1885 Freud went to Paris to work with Charcot, and he later named his firstborn son Jean-Martin in Charcot’s honor. In 1893 Freud and his Viennese mentor, Josef Breuer, cited both Charcot and Janet in a brilliant paper on the cause of hysteria. “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” they proclaim, and go on to note that these memories are not subject to the “wearing away process” of normal memories but “persist for a long time with astonishing freshness.” Nor can traumatized people control when they will emerge: “We must . . . mention another remarkable fact . . . namely, that these memories, unlike other memories of their past lives, are not at the patients’ disposal. On the contrary, these experiences are completely absent from the patients’memory when they are in a normal psychical state, or are only present in a highly summary form.”
(All italics in the quoted passages are Breuer and Freud’s.)
Breuer and Freud believed that traumatic memories were lost to ordinary
consciousness either because “circumstances made a reaction impossible,” or because they started during “severely paralyzing affects, such as fright.” In 1896 Freud boldly claimed that “the ultimate cause of hysteria is always the seduction of the child by an adult.”
Then, faced with his own evidence of an epidemic of abuse in the best families of Vienna—one, he noted, that would implicate his
own father—he quickly began to retreat. Psychoanalysis shifted to an emphasis on unconscious wishes and fantasies, though Freud occasionally kept acknowledging the reality of sexual abuse.” The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

Of course, Freud had great courage, up to the point he ran chicken. But he is no less or more to blame than any other person or system which silences any great distasteful truth. Still it is worth noting that what backed him down from helping to rescue countless millions of children from sexual abuse was the implication of the finest families, including his own father.

Who were the fine families? People of wealth and fame and power just as they are today, people in government, royal families, people who can crush any hint of a smear on their “good” name. Yes, by all means do not rile the people at the top. But what about the people at the bottom? Would Freud have sullied their name for the sake of science and knowledge and saving small children from a fate near to death but with far more drawn out suffering? Perhaps.

What does it matter now? Freud did the best he could with what he had to do with, as have so many since, as have I. And still the world is rampant with incest and child sex abuse and child trafficking and people saying do not ruin some man/woman’s life over some accusation or suspicion, or as in many cases, in the face of proof positive.

The fact remains that just as there are people at the bottom involved in crimes against children, there are just as many “fine” families involved and powerful people covering it up. Why is legislation so lax when it comes to sex crimes of all types? Sex. I think many people would be appalled at the number of “fine” people involved in sex crimes, though it would not surprise me in the least.

Freud knew. And how many people could he have helped with what he knew? We will never know. My mother and father knew, and how many people could they have saved? We will not know, as the generations are still being born who will be effected by the generational fallout from a family reeking with incest. And I know, but I drift in and out of focus when it comes to this fight. I know people do not want to hear about incest and child sex crimes, nor do they want to hear about the long term effects on their minds and bodies. Sometimes I do not care that people do not want me to speak out so boldly, and then I begin to question my right to confront and force other people to confront, but if I shut up, if I back away, who then will speak for me? Someone else? Maybe, but the fight has been known for so long with so little accomplished and so many lives lost in the midst of silence, how can I add to that loss?

Sometimes people mistake my focus on my past as a not letting go, and think that if I could only let go I could be happy. But there is no letting go. There is only my life formed from a heinous act of selfishness and my struggle to survive in spite of the many times it has taken me down. There is who I am, and who I can be, but always with what happened to me as a constant companion. And that is OK. I am me because and in spite of what happened.

As for being happy. It is no longer a thing I search for, hope for and work toward. It is not a thing to wait for until… Happy is what I make it. Happy is a walk in the park, the smile on a child’s face, or laughter in the air, yours or mine. I expect I feel more happy moments these days than I did in a lifetime of searching or faking happy. It is no longer about what or who in my life, it is about me being present and aware.

Poor Mr. Freud, he could have been a great man.

Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control
What You Can Change and What You Can’t
Authentic Happiness
The Optimistic Child

“When I first began to work on learned optimism, I thought I was
working on pessimism. Like almost all researchers with a background in
clinical psychology, I was accustomed to focusing on what was wrong
with individuals and then on how to fix it. Looking closely at what was
already right and how to make it even better did not enter my mind.”

Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D.
Learned Optimism

I found this book when I looked for the book “Learned Helplessness” by the same author. I am glad. Learned helplessness seems to explain how I lived my life after overwhelming conditioning in childhood. My life is no longer stuck in the past, really, I am not stuck, it remains my story, the shaping of me. Beyond that, learned optimism and the practice of optimism through my gratitude and daily actions is me in the present.

Life is, indeed hard. We all know that on some level. And so many circumstances leave us feeling powerless, like being born black in America, or for me, being born DeGolier in a world I thought functioned “normally” outside my four walls. As a child I used to gaze at other peoples houses and wish I lived in one of them because surely other people were not like us. Now, of course, I know every household has its own set of dysfunction and being “not a DeGolier” would have only meant not having the same set of woes.

Back to helplessness; I needed to know where my helplessness came from that left me pitching and swaying like a boat crashing through rough seas at the slightest hint of a brewing storm. The following passage is from Seligman’s book “Learned Optimism.” Just a heads up for animal lovers, it is hard to read about use of animals in tests. This is a mild shock.

“His most senior graduate student, a friendly, almost solicitous Mid-
westerner named Bruce Overmier, immediately volunteered an expla-
nation.

“It’s the dogs,” said Bruce. “The dogs won’t do anything. Something’s
wrong with them. So nobody can do any experiments.” He went on to say
that over the past several weeks the laboratory dogs-being used in what
he un illuminatingly called the “transfer” experiments-had had Pavlovian conditioning. Day after day they had been exposed to two kinds of stim-
ulation-high-pitched tones and brief shocks. The tones and the shocks had been given to the dogs in pairs-first a tone and then a shock. The
shocks weren’t too painful, the sort of minor jolt you feel when you touch
a doorknob on a dry winter day. The idea was to get the dogs to associate
the neutral tone and the noxiolls shock-to “pair” them-so that later, when they heard the tone, they would react to it as if it were a shock-
with fear. That was all. After that, the main part of the experiment had begun. The dogs had been taken to a “two-compartment shuttlebox,” which is a large box with
(as you might expect) two compartments in it, separated by a low wall.
The investigators wanted to see if the dogs, now in the shuttlebox, would
react to the tones the same way they had learned to react to shock-by
jumping the barrier to get away. If they had, this would have shown that
emotional learning could transfer across widely different situations.

THE QUEST
The dogs first had to learn to jump over the barrier to escape the shock;
once they’d learned that, they could then be tested to see if tones alone
evoked the same reaction. It should have been a cinch for them. To escape
the shock, all they’d have to do was jump over the low barrier that divided
the shuttlebox. Dogs usually learn this easily.
These dogs, said Overmier, had just lain down whimpering. They hadn’t
even tried to get away from the shocks. And that, of course, meant that
nobody could proceed with what they really wanted to do-test the dogs
with the tones.
As I listened to Overmier and then looked at the whimpering dogs, I
realized that something much more significant had already occurred than
any result the transfer experiment might produce: Accidentally, during the
early part of the experiment, the dogs must have been taught to be helpless.
That’s why they had given up. The tones had nothing to do with it. During
Pavlovian conditioning they felt the shocks go on and off regardless of
whether they struggled or jumped or barked or did nothing at all. They
had concluded, or “learned,” that nothing they did mattered. So why try?
I was stunned by the implications. If dogs could learn something as
complex as the futility of their actions, here was an analogy to human
helplessness, one that could be studied in the laboratory. Helplessness was
all around us-from the urban poor to the newborn child to the despondent
patient with his face to the wall. My father had his life destroyed by it.
But no scientific study of helplessness existed. My mind raced on: Was this
a laboratory model of human helplessness, one that could be used to
understand how it comes about, how to cure it, how to prevent it, what
drugs worked on it, and who was particularly vulnerable to it?
Although it was the first time I had seen learned helplessness in the
laboratory, I knew what it was. Others had seen it before, but thought of
it as an annoyance, not as a phenomenon worthy of study in its own right.
Somehow my life and experience-perhaps the impact that my father’s
paralysis had had on me-had prepared me to see what it was. It would
take the next ten years of my life to prove to the scientific community that
what afflicted those dogs was helplessness, and that helplessness could be
learned, and therefore unlearned.
As excited as I was by the possibilities of this discovery, I was dejected
about something else. The graduate students here gave shocks that were
in some degree painful to perfectly innocent dogs. Could I work in this
laboratory? I asked myself. I had always been an animal lover, particularly
a dog lover, so the prospect of causing pain-if only minor pain-was very
distasteful. I took a weekend off and went to share my doubts with one of
my philosophy teachers. Though he was only a few years older than I, I
regarded him as wise. He and his wife had always made time for me and
helped me sort out the puzzles and contradictions that filled undergraduate
life in the Sixties.

“I’ve seen something in the lab that might be the beginning of under-
standing helplessness,” I said. “No one has ever investigated helplessness before, yet I’m not sure I can pursue it, because I don’t think it’s right to
give shock to dogs. Even if it’s not wrong, it’s repulsive.” I described my
observations, where I thought they might lead, and, mostly, my misgivings.
My professor was a student of ethics and of the history of science, and
his line of questioning was informed by what he worked on. “Marty, do
you have any other way of cracking the problem of helplessness? How
about case studies of helpless people?”
It was clear to both of us that case histories were a scientific dead end.
A case study is an anecdote about the life of only one person. It provides
no way of finding out what caused what; usually there isn’t even a way of
finding out what really happened, except through the eyes of the narrator,
who always has his own point of view and so distorts the narration. It was
equally clear that only well-controlled experiments could isolate cause and
discover cure. Further, there was no way I could ethically give trauma to
other human beings. This seemed to leave only experiments with animals.
“Is it ever justified,” I asked, “to inflict pain on any creature?”
My professor reminded me that most human beings, as well as household
pets, are alive today because animal experiments were carried out. Without
them, he asserted, polio would still be rampant and smallpox widespread.
“On the other hand,” he went on, “you know that the history of science
is littered with unpaid promissory notes from basic research-assurances
for techniques that were supposed to alleviate human misery but somehow
never did.”

Here is the part that intrigued me.

“They had concluded, or “learned,” that nothing they did mattered. So why try?
I was stunned by the implications. If dogs could learn something as
complex as the futility of their actions, here was an analogy to human
helplessness, one that could be studied in the laboratory. Helplessness was
all around us-from the urban poor to the newborn child to the despondent
patient with his face to the wall. My father had his life destroyed by it.
But no scientific study of helplessness existed.”

In this time as no other I can recall, there is an overwhelming feeling of helplessness, almost universal, against the mad dog in the White House spreading terror everywhere. (never imagined I would say that) I feel it like a knot in my gut but keep plowing forward like a snail pulling a sled full of weights up a slippery hill. I have learned that feeling helpless is not the whole story because feelings are not facts. It is true there is nothing, in this moment, that can be done to thwart this monstrosity, by me.

Setting that aside, and needing desperately to get off this topic, I can vote, I can feel my helplessness then do everything I can to stay positive, I can put out a face of gratitude and positivism to others, probably a long list of actions I can take rather than to be helpless.

But back to MY learned helplessness, no, don’t roll your eyes, I learned that I was powerless many times and many ways as the 20th child in a family of wackos. When I asked questions I was often answered with “Don’t you know that already?” or “Don’t pester me, go play with the cat.” I learned to not ask questions.

Incest, yes, another eye roll please, get it over with, but without incest being a fact in my life I just become a selfish, spoiled, lazy, manipulative, cruel, and “crazy” woman.

So, incest. Began at 3 1/2 years old, I’ll leave out the graphic, let’s just say it was my first introduction to a penis. OMG I feel the creepies, still. One brother, two brother, three brother, and when I finally thought I was free of all that, my nephew when I was 12. He was surprised when I cried. He said my brother said I would not mind. Then he apologized and never came near me again. I lay there in the tall grass beyond the barn where I”d hidden for a game of hide-and-seek on a balmy Sunday evening with family all about and fire flies glowing their alarm as I cried my eyes out. I cried because it was not going to end. I was 12 and I was completely helpless against some form of sex happening to me. I was 12, and there was no way out for me.

Then my dad put a nail in my coffin when I was 16. The lesson? OK, if that is all I am worth, then that is who I will be. Learned helplessness. I would be helpless against being sexually used and abused for decades. Can anyone call be a whore, or slut, as mother used to refer to the girls? I dare you, go ahead. I know who I am now, and no one will ever shame me again.

I did not try to escape it. In fact, I thought I had learned the secret of getting and keeping a man. I had nothing else to offer, after all. I know my actions condemned me, even by my husband who once told me no man would ever marry me because all I was good for was sex. And when his girlfriend accused me saying that “sex is not everything” she did not know that sex had been everything since I was 3 1/2 years old, and I could not tell her that because my childhood, where I came from was buried instead of dealt with. And I sat and cried because I did not understand why they condemned me so harshly. I’d lived what I learned, not having a clue how to be anyone else.

I am not helpless, though I feel it often. I have power in myself and the knowledge about myself. I have power to feel what I feel and act the opposite. I have power in healing and in smiling and in research, and in writing.

I have a voice. It is my responsibility to use it, for me and for the millions who still don’t dare to speak.

Bessel Van Der Kolk MD said in 2005 that trauma, due to child abuse and neglect was the single most important health challenge in the USA. I heartily agreed and was ready to take up my seat at my computer and do battle with my mighty words. After all I am a lifelong survivor of oppressive child abuse, and I honestly admit to being the bringer of oppression and trauma to my children, however unintended.

Then George Floyd was murdered. Protests abounded, and rightfully so, because no one listens when you say “pretty please” will you stop killing us. I cowered in my bed on the eighth floor in downtown Raleigh to the sounds of chanting and broken glass and squealing tires in the street below more ashamed than afraid. I was too busy with my own survival to do anything but give lip-service to other peoples tragedies.

I walked out of my building the next morning to a blanket of sadness that sat upon me like the cloak of a humid Florida summer. I didn’t walk far, just to the parking garage to take my friend to work. There were ashes from a fire, windows caved in, black tire marks in little circles where motorcycles roared and spun, and never-ending chalk drawings and messages, names to remember and names saying “I was here.”

I started my short walk numb. I’d had a lifetime of practice shutting down my emotions, hardening my heart against tidal waves of anguish and suffering. I’d once stormed out of an AA meeting because some whiny girl reached a soft spot triggering a slew of flashbacks. Hardening my heart was a survival tool I no longer use; it saved my physical life often, but my heart was always in ruins.

By the time I reached my car and began the ten blocks to my friends house my heart was open, and as I drove slowly up Wilmington Street with its smashed windows and people looking stricken I felt a change coming, a big change, hopefully for all people of color everywhere, but definitely a change inside of me.

Later the same day I began snapping pictures on my phone and reading messages on sidewalks; names were signed everywhere, and no matter the words, the message was the same; stop killing us. I suppose I would have expected a lot of cussing and meanness from an oppressed people shouting “no more” but love and kindness and hearts and flowers in pastel chalk lined the way, like walking through a garden.

I remained on the edge of tears for several days as I scoured the side-streets for more artwork and messages. I felt I knew these peoples pain, I cannot fathom the circumstance of living black in America, no, but every emotion rising up in me for them was an emotion I was long familiar with.

There is an epidemic of child abuse in this country. There is a very long list of epidemics that need attention. And I struggled with how to say it. I felt dwarfed by the sheer magnitude and power of the Black Lives Matter movement and at the same time grateful for their message, for their courage, and for their efforts to be kind in the face of systemic abuse and yes, murder. I also felt their pain as my pain, as the pain of all oppressed people and I felt some sort of guilt not being black and perhaps using their message and their pain to energize me.

My story is also a story of oppression and cruelty by people with the power to wound, the circumstance is different, and no where near the magnitude of the oppression of an entire race, but a simple truth is, sexually abused children in particularly have no voice. To be fair, sexually abused people in general have no voice of any real consequence. Many of us stay silent until it nearly kills us and then speak out and are shamed and shunned and silenced. Many abuse victims take their own lives because they find no peace ever again on this earth.

But no long sermons.

There are enough battles to go around and if we are able to relate through our emotions to other people in other battles then perhaps we become stronger together.

I want 1 + 1 to equal two. Growing up in a right or wrong world I felt assured that I knew the basics. Lying was a sin, yes I grew up in an era when Bible instruction was part of my school day. I want clarity. When someone lies I want to rule it wrong, Then someone says “yeah but…” and in comes the gray area.

In a world where there exists far more gray area than black and white 1 + 1 can equal anything anyone’s imagination can dream up. Simplicity is gone. There is no clear cut list of things we are for or against.

Perhaps it is just me. I have been introduced to massive gray areas through recovery from thinking life should be fair. Life has never been fair. Attempting to make it so will drive me mad. And then there is love. “If you love me…” you will never hurt me. I want that belief sometimes, but I had it and it was not true thereby leaving me forever feeling unloved and unlovable, as well as unloving. What is love? What is hurt? Define these words in simple terms I can use to define them in my life.

Most things cannot be solved by love alone. The old movies I grew up on had always a happy ending and the gal gets the guy and they wander into the sunset blissfully unaware that real life awaited them around the bend. But I did not know either. I would watch the scene blissfully misty eyed wishing I could have that. And all the time it was a hoax. I did not know. I believed in happy ever after.

Life is complicated by reality. Sometimes life is unbearable because truth rears up out of the perfect fantasy we have created in a quest for happiness. For me it happens mostly in the moments after I turn off the light. I close my eyes to view the upcoming nightmare pasted together from bits and pieces of truth and lies and imagination.

“I’m sorry” escapes my brain. “But…” And I close my mind to shut out the gray area where my life can be put in context and someone will see who I am. Maybe it is enough that I can now see my life in context. After all, it is my life alone.

The snip of a girl who loved and trusted and laughed and played before my brother led me to the slaughter in his room? I remember her, She delighted in everything. Thereafter she delighted in little

Am I the tender sweet sixteen charged with lying about my father coming to my bed? I remember her too. She’d been free of roving hands and ever hopeful there would be no more. And Daddy finally loved me, until he stuck his tongue in my mouth and said he was just showing his love.

Am I the woman who struggled on in spite of the pain ignorant of the lies about me spreading around the family that colored me as a spoiled, cruel, callous person, hurting people at whim?

Am I a wife and mother? Or the woman my ex-husband painted me as, a loose woman, crazy, a woman he just HAD to divorce I was so horrid?

Am I a childless mother, set adrift without boat or oars in a foreign world I could not relate to? Who is a mother without a child? Grief stricken, barren, mindless, soulless, alive and yet too dead to make sense.

I am all of these females, and more. Despite the lies, the rejection, the endless sea of nothingness stretched out before me, I am the me who forged paths, dug fox holes with my bare hands and lived through the dark and horrid days with hands stretched out to hold all the big and little me, together. We are all one and as separate as the petals on a poesy. We are all real and true and faithful to the cause.

I am me. I am all of me, all parts embraced in tender compassion for the me I shunned in shame so long ago.

I am so proud of me.

Every person arrives at any moment through experiences as unique as a thumbprint. I remember reading books on babies and children: I was going to get it right. The books told me about feeding times, bathing, sleep, burping, and diaper rash. And siblings, Mother, and every person with or without children was an expert. Limit sugar, or give them all they want sort of back and forth. My step-mother-in-law once grabbed the spinach out of my hand and threw it in the trash. “You can’t expect her to eat that.” She popped open a jar of Apple Cobbler.

Books had their place. But looking back from where I sit today, I see the one thing absent: nobody told me that every day, every moment a babies brain is creating, transforming, grasping messages out of thin air to learn what the world is about. The books did not tell me my baby was already creating its foundation with every smile or frown or hug or missed meal, with every voice, with every cry.

The other thing books left out is that norms do not apply in abusive homes or families that are full of anger, remorse, drinking, abandonment, because in the absence of hugging and cooing, babies and small children’s brains are still learning their place in the family and the larger world. The choice to choose good things, good people, is stolen because the only thing they knew was negative.

Individuals are the subject of most books about babies, but do any tell you that every child is different? I suspect many do now days. But my recommendation to new parents would be to investigate the intricacies of brain development. There is no one way to raise a child or care for your baby, but understanding the basics of mind, emotions, and body will be an asset your child may one day thank you for.

Still, having a child will surprise you, delight you, and exasperate you, and they will never grow by the book.

I am not afraid of dying. I know there is no literal hell. What were my sins anyway but the stumbling and failings of a woman surviving a lifetime of abuse and lies and loss? There are the sins people who will deny my existence have placed on my shoulders, but they do not count. They are not fact, but only the assumptions of people who do not know and refuse to see me.

I do not want to die yet. It’s ironic really, as it seems death lay before me like a last resort for decades as I struggled through life in increments of one day. But I fear that I will pass before I bring my struggle to a close, before I lay my truth before the people I love most. Even so, truth is so often too unbelievable to believe. Truth is also incredibly easy to deny when so many voices have silenced me for so long and found such believable alternative explanations of my incoherent life.

What blocks me is the empathy and kindness and love that some say I do not have in me. To tell the whole truth means exposing other peoples lies and in the end hurting my children more. Where is the balance and why am I in charge of this decision when all I really want is for those I love to know who I am?

There is a circle I twirl inside with no beginning or end. I know what I want to say, I alone am willing to say it, and with the research I have done, I can begin to explain me to me. But it is not about me alone, the mess has been passed down to my children and grandchildren, and I ask myself if I have the right to strive for their respect, at the least, and love, at the most, by tarnishing a heroes shiny armor who deserves no adulation.

It is also ironic that I denied myself for almost half my life, terrified that people would find out what a “bad” “evil” girl I had been and still must be, and when I found the courage to speak was demonized by so many.

Where do the lies end and the truth begin. And can I accept the labels put on me by people who have no truth in them, accept my losses, and say no more?

Such a martyr I would make of me, and to what end? The only thing I would pass on to the next generation would be the lie that I was just “crazy” just “bad” just “hate filled” and just did not love them enough to do better.

I cannot leave my children thinking I did not love them enough.