Money

This is a discussion I avoid at almost all costs.  Money.  Yet I am surrounded by it. 

Literally.  By way of my profession.

My family was wealthy.  So now that they are gone, I am left with a mess.  It's not a mess to most people but rather an inheritance.  I have now stood up the estate attorney four times.  I make the appointment and then I don't go.  His office assistant drives me crazy.  She probably is a pretty nice person and she probably wouldn't drive me crazy if I showed up for appointments. 

I get in my car.  I drive down the freeway.  I have even made it to his office.  And then I break out into a cold sweat, my head begins to spin, and my heart pounds with the anticipation of finality.  And then I leave.  I just can't do it.  I can't go in and legally acknowledge what has happened.

My family is gone.  A family that I never quite had in the first place.  So if I never had them, did I really loose them at all?  Perhaps my loss is bigger, even different than just their physical presence.  My loss was the chance for a caring mother; a loving father; a best friend for a sister.  I never had these things.  But I hoped for them.  I begged for them.  I even prayed for them.

Well meaning people offer me encouragement and ideas for what to do with these funds.  I nod my head and listen but each idea hits a dead spot in my brain and travels to a broken part of my heart.  Money doesn't make this better.  And while this would be a welcome addition for most; it is a painful insult to my own existence because I did not die.

I survived and they did not.  And for walking through hell I get the prize.  When I sign those papers I will make this official.  The black and white proof of their end and perhaps my own twisted beginning.  I want to say that this is good.

But all I feel is that money makes a dirty and really shitty band-aid.

Autopilot

First, thank you all for your kind, helpful, and concerned comments.  I promise I will respond to all of them shortly.

Dissociative Identity Disorder has a fascinating side to it and that is its auto-pilot feature.  I have been on autopilot these past several days with others sharing the load of my daily life while I have been checked out or dissociated if you want to get fancy with the terminology. 

Sounds unfair?  They think it is.  I take a vacation while everyone else does the work.  Not really. 

In the past, this has been closer to the case.  I would get really overwhelmed and I would check out.  Others would maintain the facade of "me" and I would return when I was up to handling life.  I am, or I should probably say we, are really, really good at this.  After nearly 30 years, this is a pretty seamless presentation.

This time was different though.  I didn't take off out of fear.  Yes, I got overwhelmed.  However, I actually did something healthy.  This time I turned my attention inward and took care of those new friends brave enough to surface after learning he was finally dead.

This was not a pleasant experience.  These friends are probably some of the worst off.  They were hurt, broken, bleeding, and despairing.  It will take me some time to put into words what took place.  But for now, I can describe that I did my best to care for them like I would my own daughter.

On to something I can explain...

While in autopilot mode, I have also had some time to really think about the process I have found myself in.  Most refer to this as a healing process and I am closer now to understanding that than ever before.  I hope that is the case at least.

I am a former athlete.  I abused my body, pushed myself beyond injury, and never paid attention to pain screaming orders to stop whatever it was that I was doing.  And I have paid.  And I still pay with arthritis that runs through multiple joints starting when I was in my mid-twenties.

I have had two shoulder surgeries, two knee surgeries, and two foot surgeries.  All reconstructive including a shoulder replacement when I was 20.  Yeah, I know. 

Surgery is never fun.  Anesthesia is rough on me; I am slow to wake up.  The pain... well, it hurts.  You take pills to control that pain that make you nauseous.  And then if you are me, you get addicted to those pills and that is an entirely different bitch of a process and another post all on its own.

Day one, surgery day, is a blur.

Day two is better.

Day three... you might as well be dead.  That's my experience at least.

Day four is once again better.  Point being that the pain typically peaks before the healing process really takes off.  And here is where I begin to pray that my father's death was the peak of my pain.  Or at least the leading catalyst for real healing. 

When I woke up this morning I found myself thinking this is my day four...

I will always have arthritis.  I will also always have the dull and painful ache of memories.

I will always have the scars of my athletic career.  But if you ask me to show you my surgery scars, with a vague amount of pride I will.  I will point to one and tell you how I got it, how I endured, and yeah it hurt but I was tough and made it through.

I will also always have the scars of abuse and reminders of my past.  But one day I hope I will be able to point to them with another small sense of pride and tell you how I survived, how tough I was, how I made it through.

And how I began to thrive.  Here's to day four. 

Hidden

I thought that being dead, he would no longer haunt me.  Tucked away in the corner of my mind are found over fifty hidden children.  Nameless, with faces containing nothing but a mouth, they are dirty, bruised, and broken. 

He now simple ashes, they are limping... crawling... carrying one another forward.  In groups of two they are crossing into my conscious stream.  In the light of my mind's eye I am horrified by what I see.   A pupil widens and then is fixed with pain.  Unresponsive, I do nothing but squeeze a single blink of disbelief. 

A razor sharp child slices as I extend a forced, yet hopeful hand.  As drops of blood pool, I become the injured helping the walking wounded and I am filled with doubt.  I do not know how I will be able to continue this.  How does a sick and injured doctor care for an even more ill and disfigured patient?

One single child reaches my feet and as she does she brushes her dirty hair aside and I see one possibility of an eye behind the matted hair.  Behind a squint in the light, I see an unmistakable muddied crystal blue eye. 

Mine. 

Hidden from light for many years.  But not from his terror.  Hidden from love.  Hidden from care.  As I look into this eye I am freshly exposed to his ravages.  I am no longer hidden but face to face, and I am flooded with his unmistakable memories.

They won't stop.

Surprise

Sitting on a small couch last night, I felt as if I was sitting on the corner of some cosmic world.  Alone.  Completely alone.  And this particular world was not round; rather it was square.  Square because there is no circular justice.  Not unless you count being tortured and murdered as some sort of redemptive revenge.

And then I felt injustice pressing squarely behind my tired eyes.  What has happened is not just.  Nor is it fair because they have made their exits and I have survived.

Everyone is dead... that keeps ringing in my head.  I know that is not the precise case but in my own twisted world, everyone is, in fact, dead.

So now I sit week after week, even moment after moment, left to deal with their abuse, their hatred, their woundings, and their deaths.  Then there are my scars, my memories, my terrors, and all the collateral damage that comes with being a member of this disappearing family.  Theirs and Mine: two separate and fancy walk-in closets full of skeletons and ghosts tucked away in every nook and custom built drawer specifically designed for keeping the best and most wrenching secrets.  What an inheritance.

All this while their ashes stir peacefully in the smallest pockets of square cosmic spaces.

Death let them off the hook.  And now I feel that I am on the hook for the lion's share of the damage.  This hurts deeply; deeper than I ever imagined.  This surprises me.  I knew and yes, I fantasized, that this day would come.  And here it is and I writhe alone. 

But with this pain I have also discovered a considerable peace.  I can sleep.  Really sleep.  I have never slept well, even as a married adult sleeping in a safe environment.  From the day he fled I held my breath dreading his return.  Checking on my daughter five times a night was nothing strange.  I had to know that he was not in her room.  And with that knowledge I stole another hour of sleep.  So now I sleep surprised, soundly and deeply. 

While I always knew this day would arrive, I never believed it would. We are no longer looking over our collective shoulder. 

And that freedom is a complete, yet lost, surprise.

*Sigh*

It has been a collective *sigh* kind of week for me.  And a collective upheaval.

I am still terribly conflicted over this impending death and I still do not have it sorted out.  I have taken this weekend for myself; to feel how I need to feel. 

It is a slow going process.

So while I have not been writing here; I have lots to say.  I am truly grateful for the thoughts that all my readers have shared and I am hopeful to be back in the next day or so to respond and share more of where I am at.

Thank you.

Orphan

It is funny how I just wrote about perfection and then I turn around and I'm getting smacked in the face with the unexpected, the uncontrollable, and a definite lack of perfection in my life.  And this is the shit I couldn't control even if I wanted to.

I am back on the mental roller coaster of sorts; blindfolded and going backwards while refusing to throw my hands in the air because this is just not fun at all.  I cannot write in great details right now but I will say that it appears that something has happened to my father.  So sans the details, which are gory, I can write about how I feel.

I would be lying if I said that I wasn't unsettled.  I am.  In a big way.  My head is full of screaming chatter and not one bit of that chatter agrees with the next refrain of chatter.  I have always been conflicted over him and this is no different.  There are those who love him and proclaim his innocence.  There are those who hate him and wish this to be true.  And there are plenty more who are just terrified about the situation all together.

As for me, I want it to be true.  I want to be free of him and never have his thoughts cross my mind again.  When I think, I feel very little.  A lump of shame I suppose, because this is my father and I should not wish these things on anyone.  And then a single frame of my own torture is smashed into the back of my eyes and I feel an overwhelming helplessness and pain.  It appears that he finally got a taste of what he inflicted for so many years and I am at an emotional loss.

If this is true then I am an orphan.  In legal terms I would be the sole survivor. 

Survivor. 

In the singular.

Game over.

I have watched my family fight its demons to the collective death.

I am the last one standing.

Did I win?

Need

From The Pliers: The question that occurs to me tonight as I follow the progress of your reclamation project is, What is the singularly most important thing that any given reader of your blog can do for you, with you, or on your behalf as s/he or reads your words?

To be an effect.  To be affected...

There are remarkably unique readers here.  I wrote to another reader that I want my readers to take from my words exactly what they need, not what I want them to need.  That would be rather selfish of me as I have spent a lifetime being told what to feel, what not to feel, and how to feel.  Here is not the place for that.

I began writing here to keep a journal.  One out of ink and out of nosey hands.  I love my family but one member in particular likes to read my spilled guts.  I'm anonymous here and so I write freely.  I have in fact shared printed pages of this site in person but that is as far as I have gotten.

In my writing you will find love.  I deeply love my daughter and my husband.  On paper I am not capable of love.  I believed that lie for far too long.  Love is what drives me to succeed in this; to excel at being whole. 

My love goes beyond those who live in my home as well.  This is a bold love; a love that hopes and believes for the best.  This love hopes that every time my father calls that he will be calling to tell me he has changed.  This love hopes that my mother found the end of her turmoil.  This love envelops hate, consumes despair and braids the three into something fierce and sharp.  My love for my parents cuts and and shreds but loves these imperfect people because they gave me life and they did not kill me; this is the best I got from them.  Underneath the shards of pain, I love them.  Not for what they did but rather for what they didn't.

In these pages the closed mind, the unscathed will find truth.  There are those who hold tightly to a small little world where nothing all that bad happens.  It does.  To children and adults alike. An awareness can be found here as brutal words are wrapped around the perspective of a small child.  It is hard to ignore.

And lastly, for the broken, for the survivor, for the lost; there is hope.  What I write is only my version of hope so seek your hope out as well.  But take from me what you need even if it is just the smallest understanding that you are not alone. 

Because you are not.

For those who are able, take from me the awareness that there are others like me; your neighbors, your friends, the child in your own child's class who forces a smile but carries a frown that is just a little too deep for a tiny face.

What can a reader do?  Please do not waste my woundings.  Take what you need.

Be an effect.  Be affected by love, truth, hope...

Writing

It is interesting what a life of its own this blog has taken on.  I originally began writing here because my husband continually found my written journals in the house, read them, and then became very angry over the content.  Anger is not something I handle well. 

So here I began to write.

I have taken a few breaks here.  Once because it became too hard to spell this shit out; it hurt too much.  And another break because of some internal conflicts I had within myself.  Those conflicts led me to this conclusion of honesty.

Writing from an honest place has been very freeing.  Some of the secrets I have held  close, I have shared here.  Those held even closer, I have not.  Yet.  When I write I am writing from raw place. There is no order, rhyme or reason to my posts. It just is. I do not see that I am any sort of writer simply because I sensor and edit what I write very little. I write for myself; to purge the poison I feel inside.

I struggle with self-esteem; I have very little of it.  I walk around thinking "if they only knew...", positive that "they" would hate me, despise me, be shocked or even disgusted by me.  However, I have learned my lesson here and it is the opposite of what I believed I would learn.  I have not had one hateful comment here or even a single hateful email.  The things that horrified me the most, horrified me for the wrong reasons.  I am not all that horrible.  The kindness shown by others here is amazing to me.  Perhaps it doesn't surprise the average person who believes that generally people are good.  However, that has not been my life experience.  But that is changing now.

The last surprise this blog has revealed is the help and awareness it provides.  Like other survivors, I have asked "why" over and over and never received an answer.  I still do not have a complete answer but I am beginning to believe that what I endured might possibly help another person.  Selfishly, I cannot say that it makes it all worth it though. 

Maybe someday.

So here I write.  I have good days and I have bad days.  Some words are what I think and wrestle with.  Other words are spilling what has happened; previously unspeakable words.  Writing is a way that we all communicate but there is a certain power in the spoken and audible word.  I have been encouraged to read outloud what I write here.  Verbalizing what I write scares me.  But just as writing has been an exercise in freedom; my wish is that speaking these words will take the sting and power out of the tragic while giving life to what is good and hopeful.

Shattered

You could call me shattered. I'm a wife, mother, step-mother, misplaced daughter, confused religious person, and an abuse survivor. My life has been painful and hell, my life is still painful; probably more so now than ever before. I'm learning to feel and it is one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life, next to surviving.

I'm a funny person but it's a dark, wicked kind of funny. I find humor in odd things, in my misfortunes, in my struggles, and in how others relate to me. Despite the humor I find, I deal with, at times, crippling depression. I'm medicated now so I'm fine. "Fine" is my response to any question of how I'm feeling. It's a lie and I have to change that. I envy the person who can answer my question of "how are you?" with honesty. They are honest because they know how they feel and they know the corresponding words. I'm weird, I assign numbers to my feelings and seek to keep a total perfect number which equals "fine". That means that I have to discount, or subtract, certain feelings to maintain the number "fine". I've learned that this is a bad habit; detrimental to my physical and emotional health. It is soul killing.

Fine is no longer an option. I can't teach my daughter to be fine. I want her to live and feel. She's five now but I often watched her toddler expressions of anger, disappointment, happiness, fear, etc with amazement. She knows how to feel; she was born that way. She cried as a baby when she needed something. She laughed at a new discovery. It's an innate part of our human psyche. Somewhere along the way, I dismantled that ability and secretly I know why. I cringe when I hear myself telling my daughter that she's "OK" when she falls and scrapes her knee. She's not "OK". She's crying. I don't tell her that to make her stop crying; it's my way of trying to soothe her. It's the wrong way and is the exact reason that I have to learn my feelings much like a preschooler learns their letters. Elementary? Yes. I'm a grown, intelligent adult but quite stunted in many emotional ways.

So there you have it. Much like a toddler's emotional outbursts, I'm raw and extreme. I may not outwardly express this but on the inside I'm stewing and boiling at a blistering pace. Makes keeping track of my feeling numbers very difficult these days. On the outside, I'm a perfectionist and everything has it's place. It's all or nothing; black and white with me. I'm literal and it drives my husband nuts at times. I'm scared to let what I have on the inside spill out. It's toxic and I love those around me too much to let them get burned. But the very things I'm scared of the most, those feelings both good and bad, are what keeps me from embracing those same people that I love.

At this point, you're probably saying "good grief, this girl needs a therapist". I have one. A good one. I've have had one for nearly 4 years. Thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours later, here's where I'm at. Not impressed? You should be. I was a blob of flesh when I randomly picked a therapist off my insurance list and wandered into his office for the first time. I was a single mother with an 18 month old daughter, newly divorced and a complete wreck. I really am better if you use that term loosely. I encourage you to do that because "better" is different for everyone.