I started this blog for a few reasons, mostly because I was in my twenties and thought I was special. After I lost a pregnancy at my destination wedding and suffered from ptsd I found myself writing to help clear my head and to keep things from seeming “secret,” a problem many of us growing up in alcoholic households suffer from (we’re only as sick as our secrets). My therapist acknowledged that it seemed a good idea to her. But I would delete many of the posts, thinking of specific people reading them and imagining my mother, or, horrors, of somehow my mother finding the blog or being told about it.
Recently, due to the age of my son and the rage I sometimes feel, I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents and how I was raised. Running with TNT for my father makes me think of him a lot. And it is hard to come up with happy memories. Which is unfair, because I know there must have been some. To be honest, it’s hard to come up with any memories, mostly there’s just a feeling of fear and guilt in the pit of my stomach, unconnected to anything I can put into words.
The people upstairs bang around a lot on their hardwood floors. It took a long time for me to realize why that made me want to grab the kids and hide under the bed, not breathing.
These things are things I need to talk about. Along with the positive, absolutely wonderful things that are going on. But to talk about one and deny the other has the ring of a secret. I hear my mother in the back of my head telling me not to talk about it with anyone. Not to mention it. And I can’t do that. The more I do the more I draw everything in, the less I talk about anything with anyone. And I can’t do that to my kids. So on my desk I’ve placed the secrets quote, and I’ve made up my mind to discuss what I need to, with the knowledge that for awhile it’ll probably be heavily negative. But once told most stories don’t need to be repeated.
I should probably follow through and try to be more anonymous, restart a blog without telling any of you where I’ve disappeared to. But it comes down to pride, as ridiculous as it may sound. These are MY experiences. I may not be happy with them, they may have sucked (and I’m the first to admit I had it better than most), but they are still what made me who I am, and I still was the one who survived them. In the end I can’t let fear of being caught stop me from relating my truth (good god, that sounds like such new-age crap).
I can not ask you for your discretion: I’m airing my dirty laundry for all the world to see. But I do ask that if you know my family, please keep in mind that we all have our bad moments. We are all trying the best with what we have been given. And you’re only hearing my side of the story, warped by my age at the time and immaturity, then and continuing to the present.
So, yeah, 2012, perhaps the year I can let my rage go, stop tensing up my back when someone asks if they can ask me a question, stop being so afraid someone will find me out, stop jumping when someone slams a door. Even if it doesn’t happen, there just isn’t any space left to hide this shit and it’s no place to raise children.
