Thursday, July 13, 2006

I just can't get away...non-deleted post #2
I thought I was able to escape my childhood. I thought that the past 9 years had been enough time to erase my memory & forget all about it. I was wrong. Apparently, very wrong.

It has come to my attention that the ungodly amount of stress that I'm under is due to a multitude of things, but exacerbated by only one. Selling a brand new house in the crappiest market imaginable is stressful. Feeling financially unstable is, as well as the worrying about what the future may hold. Becoming parents with the changes & the toll it takes on a relationship is a difficult adjustment. None of this is easy & it's being compounded with my childhood horrors seeping out from my subconscious & smacking me in the back of head like a frying pan.

When I met Bill, he was my knight in shinning armor. I felt that he literally saved me from my family, providing love, hope, safety & security. He gives me what I need, but yet, it's not enough to heal old wounds. To add more complication to the matter, I didn't know that when you become a parent, those unhealed childhood wounds are ripped open even more.

When the pregnancy test came back positive, this was by far my biggest fear. Becoming the mother that I had & hated, reliving my childhood all over again. When I walked out into the living room to tell Bill the results, I was shaking. Violently. Like I just saw a ghost. Logan was planned & I really wanted to have a baby, but I didn't know how the reality of parenthood would scare me to death. It rattled my core.

The way I always dealt with the events of the past was escape. Physically or mentally. When things got really bad at home, I ran away. After soccer practice on the first day of my freshman year, I had my mom screaming at me from one side & my step-dad screaming at me from the other, yelling that everything was my fault. They were getting a divorce (which never happened) & sending me to a foster home. I ran to my best friends house ( around the corner) & stayed there for a couple of days until my parents called the cops to report me as a run away & have me picked up. Then I was dragged home again to depression & quite literally, Hell. There were times that I felt that there was no way out, other than death.

After this event & the ultimate end of my living at home when I was 15, I had been picked up & sent to a detention center for troubled youth. I was picked up by the family, only because there was a time limit of a few days for the kids that were sent there. On the way home, I told them that I would just run away again. I wasn't ever going back & I knew in my heart that I didn't want to die either. I was sent to live with my grandma Nancy. The abuse was over & out in the open. I didn't have any secrets anymore. I stayed there for a little while, but with her declining health due to colon cancer, I was sent to live with cousins I had never met. I lived there while I finished high school & then I met Bill.

When Bill & I got together, there was no more running away, in the physical sense. The trauma was covered up like bad make-up with partying, workaholism & pretending everything was ok now that I had escaped. When I got tired of this, we stopped partying (for the most part) & moved. Work took over my life even more, since the "Vegas" lifestyle was over. Then we moved again & I got fed up with living my life & practically being a slave for "the company". I needed to fill a void, an emptiness. The parties & work weren't doing the trick. I thought that becoming a parent would "solve" this. I was wrong, in a way.

While my role as a mother hasn't magically resolved my feelings, it's making me take steps towards a resolution. Staying at home, there's no escape. There's no work to loose myself in. There's no alcohol. There's no self destructive vice to "forget" about everything. Every action that I take has a direct affect on Logan. And he is more important than I. My responsibility & devotion to him is making me face what has happened straight on. No cover up, no denial, no pretending to move on. It's right there & I can't even turn away, let alone run away.

The light bulb is lit above my head. The stress is more manageable now that I understand why it feels so bad. So now Logan has become my second knight in shining armor. Not that he has "saved" me, but forced me to save myself, for his sake.

2 comments:

Jezer said...

First of all, I am very sorry that you endured such horrors in childhood and teenage years. Also, you are a fantastic mother.

From reading your site, I get the feeling that you are the kind of person who can take those hardships and use them to make yourself stronger and reach out to others who need compassion and understanding.

It's so true that becoming a mom awakens the demons that you *thought* you had put to bed. I know that has been true for me.

Anonymous said...

I do not know what to say, but I could not read this and not comment.

You sound like a terrific person, and a wonderful mother. Your husband and son are lucky to have you in their lives as a wife and mother. That is impressive in and of itself, made even more so by what you have overcome.