A breakthrough!

I know that I never write on a Saturday but I am up late and I had a huge revelation last night while talking to a good friend.

For YEARS (decades actually), I’ve been unable to feel any emotion and that leaves me incredibly frustrated. No tears, very little true joy, I generally try to “parrot” other peoples reactions because what I feel is nothing. My psychiatrist calls it “numbing”. I call it freaking annoying!

As for the breakthrough… I think that I have found the place where some of my emotion lives. The fact that I have cried twice this weekend alone is showing me that I am on the right path. Now to share it with you and then eventually my therapist. I see him next Wednesday and will bring this short letter with me. Please do let me know what you think. Is there any chance that emotion lives in the same place for you?

The place where my feelings get made in to cement.

There is this place where my life and it’s stories are turned from horrific memories in to beautiful pastures filled with daisies. This place between the two is where cement is made that gets poured down my throat and it hardly ever gets smaller. Only larger and more suffocating.

You see, I start by recounting a memory or a fear. Perhaps I begin to speak about how I never knew what to do when I had my children. How I had nothing in me to give them. I had no instinct at all.
This comment is almost immediately followed by a good friend or professional that rushes in to remind me how well I did. How at least I knew that I needed help. I did not raise my children the same way and I should be proud of myself.
I don’t disagree with anything said here but it is the place between my statement and the rush to make it better for me that the cement gets poured.

If I was ever allowed to stay in that spot where I grieve for what I did not have? My feelings live there.
If allowed to stop and think about what I really felt at that time? It was mostly my wish to be a better mother but it was also a place of great loss and grief for what I never had. It became so incredibly obvious in that time of my life that I’d had nothing at all to prepare me just to be a normal human being let along leave me equipped to raise tiny human beings of my own.
And I am angry. I am resentful.
I wish that I’d been birthed in to a toilet and thrown in the garbage I’d have been better off.
I feel overwhelming hatred towards my mother for having me and my father for closing his eyes thereafter. The insane degree of neglect, making me feel totally worthless, and letting me know in no uncertain terms that I was a filthy, useless, empty, worthless, and in my parents words? “A complete and utter waste of the skin God gave me”.
I hate them.
I grieve for the life I should have had.
My emotion lives in this place but never gets a chance to see the light of day before someone quickly reminds me how wonderful I am with my own children. How well I do “in spite of everything”. They are not wrong but they take away my chance to actually feel what I need to feel before I can ever really move forward past the story about how hard it was to raise my kids.
The story really isn’t about my kids or who I am as a mother.
The story is about me being a child and being so incredibly hated.
It is a story of grief for what I didn’t have.

And yes, I can get past it all but I can not heal until I am given the time and space that I need to really sit there and feel what needs to be felt.
When I finally do that? When someone holds that space open for me and doesn’t rush to slam the doors with well-intentioned kindness? I can break up some of that cement rather than pouring even more.