This is a journey I wish to share with you.
My life filled with physical, emotional & sexual abuse - tremendous pain, self-destruction, love, loss and healing.
There are a lot stories out there that try to teach you that if you work hard enough, reach for the stars earnestly enough, and do just enough good, you can turn any bad situation into a good one. That you can repair any wound, you can overcome any obstacle, and you can achieve any dream.
I’m not here to tell you that. So if you opened this book hoping to hear a story about how I went through some tough shit, came out the other side stronger, and found a way to put a nice bow on everything, this isn’t the book for you.
But I hope you’ll stick around, because even though that isn’t my story—and it might not be yours—it doesn’t mean those hardships have defined me. It doesn’t mean that I’ve let my own heartbreak, betrayal, rage, and pain make me hard and cruel. It also doesn’t mean that I haven’t found and built beauty in my own life, even if it might look a bit different than what I had always pictured in my head.…
My entire life, my mother had made me believe I was too much. I was too big, I was too loud, and I was too needy. I needed to be more quiet, to not rock the boat so much, and I needed to just try to keep the peace more. Telling my dad about my mom’s boyfriend and the court case that ensued was the loudest, biggest, neediest thing I could have ever done. Even though everyone around me told me I was right to step forward, it seemed like no one was ready for the world after they heard what had happened to me. My mom chose her boyfriend over me. I lost my sister. I lost my home. And even my father, who kept telling me he was happy and excited to have me live with him, wasn’t in a place where he was ready to take on the care of a child full-time. I’d disrupted the life of the man who tried to save me from my mother and her predatory boyfriend, and I abandoned my younger sister. I couldn’t help but start to think that maybe I was all of those hateful things my mother had said to me. Maybe I was too much. Maybe I did seek attention too much, and maybe I was a liar…
Nothing felt more exciting than going to the corner store to buy myself a slushee, but money was always hard for me to come by so I’d try to think of ways that I could find spare change or earn extra money to fund my sweet tooth. I was thrilled when my mom’s boyfriend, David, offered me a way to earn some extra money.
He came home for lunch one day over summer vacation, jingling the coins in his pocket. I could tell he was trying to get my attention, so I perked up. “That’s a lot of coins. Can I have some to buy myself a slushee?” I asked.
Smiling, he walked closer to me, “I’m not just going to give you money. But you can earn some. How does that sound?”…
“Okay, what do you want me to do?”
He nodded, “Come with me.” We walked to the bathroom together and he turned to me, “Play a little game with me, and you can earn money. Sound fair?”
Needless to say, that unhealthy view of the world and others around me not only made for a tougher childhood for me, but it blossomed into some really destructive behavior as I got older.
The older I got, the more those feelings of fear, instability, and my poor self-worth shaped a worldview that said my body was an asset and a tool that I could use to get people to care about me. My emotions were unruly and scary, so I needed to do whatever I could to self-medicate and self-soothe, and that I had to be perfect if I wanted anyone to love me or care about me...
We hung up the phone and I stared at the wall for a moment. All of a sudden, I felt like I was that scared little girl again, desperately trying to get her mother to notice her, desperately trying to get her mother to care about her. Of course, I wasn’t that little girl anymore, and as I looked into the faces of my own children, I couldn’t imagine ever treating them in the way my mother had treated me. I was constantly reading parenting books, taking parenting classes, seeking advice from others and learning to better trust my own maternal instincts. I didn’t understand how someone could look at their own child and speak so coldly, be so harsh, and so abusive. For all of the work I was doing on myself, and for all the ways I was trying to be the perfect wife and mother, I never seemed to be able to do quite enough to earn my mother’s affection.
And as each new year ticked by, I wondered if I’d ever be able to do enough. One thing I knew for sure was that I was going to keep trying. I would do everything in my power to get my mother to love me, and I’d keep working every day to be the type of wife and mother that my new family would never want to leave.
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