Oh, it's her again.

Stopped taking P last night.

Ocular: Optic atrophy, anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, optic neuritis, dry eye syndrome, ocular irritation, blurred vision, double vision

Today, my eyes have been clear with only a slight double vision.

I’ve sat down a million times to write you.  The words are always filled with so much anger and disgust and I read back what I’ve written and realize that that feeling of rage isn’t what I want to say to you.

I’ve always wanted to write to you and tell you that I have forgiven you.  I wanted to get to a point in my life where I could look back on my childhood and let go of the anger I have.  That I could look at you with adult eyes and understand that you did what you were raised to do, that you followed a line of abuse and carried it forward and that you did the best that you could.  But as a mother, making my own personal choices and decisions, and knowing that I have will power and determination, I know that you didn’t do the best that you could.  It doesn’t matter what sins your parents committed against you.  Each of us have the power within us to say stop… and stop.  We have no one to blame for our actions but ourselves.  You just never said stop.  I know how hard it is.  There are days when my children are being extra crazy that I just want to be you.  To scream at them.  To hit them.  To be every mean and nasty thing you were to me.  But that feeling lasts a millisecond and I breath in and remember that these are my children and that they will never ever know you and that they will never fear me.

My kids are good kids.  No.  They are phenomenal kids.  My daughter looks so much like me.  She smiles freely and is so full of life.  She lives life with so much vigor and self confidence and enthusiasm.  She knows that she can be anything she sets out to be.  She knows that when she puts her head on the pillow that her mother and father lover her unconditionally and that she can fall asleep with a smile on her face, instead of the tears in her eyes like I did so much as a girl.  My daughter is everything that I wanted to be.  Everything you told me that I couldn’t be.  Wouldn’t be.

And that gets me to the end of this letter to you.  The part where I have to thank you for doing everything you did.  For telling me that I would never amount to a hill a beans.  For beating my confidence into the ground and making me feel small and insignificant.  For taking away my dreams and holding them hostage.  For leaving me hurt and bruised and so very sad.  You, in all your abuse and anger and hatred, gave me a goal.  The goal to never, ever be like you.  To be more than you expected of me.  To be more than I expected of myself. To be the kind of parent that you never were.  You gave me the goal to be a mother who loved her children more than she loved herself and to never raise a hand to them.  You gave me the goal to be solid.  To find a man that would treat me like a princess, who provided for his family, who never hit me or our a kids or put me down.  You gave me the goal to rise above my childhood and start a business, be successful at it, and enjoy working and buying my family what they needed while never living in poverty.

I could have been you.  You tried hard to mold me to be your legacy.  In your determination to not say stop to your past, you forgot that sometimes you’re not as strong as you think you are, and that we all have free will and that no matter how much you yell, scream, beat and demean, it can backfire and that free will grows stronger than you.  Goals will be created.  Dreams will be built.  And at some point, there is nothing you can do to beat those down.  So thank you Richard.  Thank you for being an abusive step-father.  Thank you for giving me the strength to not be like you.

It’s not a matter of absolute.  Of certainty.  Of belief.  It’s not a matter of urgency or even truth.  It just is and there is little that we can do to persuade to otherwise.  We close our eyes.  Our brains slip into a self induced coma.  We dream.  The things we dream are conjured by our memories, experiences, fears.  Our needs, our loves, our angers.

I have lost few people in my life.  My grandfather.  I don’t dream about him very often though.  I dream about B though.  Often.  He died several years ago, was several years younger than myself.  We dated off and on for a while and kept in touch over the years.  He was a great guy with his own issues.  He helped me come of age.  He died after beating cancer.  His body was wiped out from all the drugs they pumped into him to kill the cancer.  He had just received the “cancer free” verdict from his doctor.  He then fell violently ill from several infections.  He died soon after.  Two children.  A loving wife.  A life that revolved around work, hockey, faith and his family.  A life gone.  I dream about B a lot.  The last one I had, he laid his head on my chest and I remember touching his hear and saying “I know you are dead, but I still need you”.  Why would my brain say that?  Why are those the words that my brain ripped from the depths of it’s tissue and hurled across the black abyss?  I sobbed in my dreams, I remember pushing against the cocoon of sleep trying to crawl myself back to awareness.  As the curtain came up on another episode of my dreams I realized that I was sobbing into my pillow.  In my bedroom.  And B was still dead.  And for some reason… I still needed him.

1994.  About 18 years ago… somewhere in May or April, I made a decision that left me with guilt, sadness, depression and angst.  I told my husband that I wanted a divorce.  M was a good man.  He worked.  He didn’t hurt me.  He spoiled me.  But I was so damn broken.  Years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse as a child took it’s toll, and I didn’t know how to fix me.  I didn’t know how to make me better and because of that, I didn’t know how to function.  I won’t say that he deserved better, because what he deserved was me to figure it out while we were still married.  I was scared and at the time felt that I couldn’t be fixed.  So I walked away.  That created guilt.  My issues hurt him.  I will forever be sorry for that.  After I left him I went through the oddest year of my life.  Depression.  Deep deep depression mixed with wild abandon and irresponsibility.  I kept hoping that he was doing okay.  That he would find someone who wasn’t broken.  Someone who didn’t need to be fixed.

I’ve thought about him a lot recently.  His brother passed away and a friend of a friend let me know.  I didn’t know his brother very well as they lived out of state for most of our marriage.  When I left the marriage I knew that his family was his.  It was not my right to hold onto them.  I missed them for such a long time.  I loved them like parents, siblings.. and my niece and nephew meant so much to me, and it was so hard to just walk away… but they weren’t mine anymore.  I gave up that right when I ended the marriage.

I fixed myself.  I found ways to find the things that were broken and worked through to the end.  I met E 2 years later and married him in 2001.  We had our daughter, our son.  I’ll never be perfect.  I’ll never be 100% fixed.  I will also never really forgive myself for putting M. through what I did, because he didn’t deserve it.  I hope that he has been able to find what he does deserve though.

For the last year I’ve been dealing with eye issues.  Double vision.  Blurriness.  No one really knows what is going on.  Eye doctor, specialist and now this Friday I’ll see another specialist.  I want an answer.

The moment I said it, I wanted to reach out into the air and pull back the breath that pushed it towards your ears.

The moment I said it, I wished it away.

I think about you so many times during the day.  While walking down the hallway and out of the corner of my eye I see a man who resembles you and my heart skips a beat and I have a momentary hope that it’s really you, only to look into the eyes of a man that I don’t know.  I expect you to fall in beside me, our steps echoing each other, our banter  playing tag in the air as it swirls and churns with burst of intermittent laughter.

But the only thing walking beside me is your memory.  A shadow that needs neither explanation or sunlight to create.  A shadow that clicks on my heels and makes me fumble just at the very moment I think that I’m strong enough to walk forward.  You never catch me though.  I fall, sprawled on the pavement, starring at the blue sky, and screaming in my head “Why does it linger?”

It lingers because we need it to.  We need to feel raw, hallow and raped of normal emotions.  Our world has been turned up side down, and in the upside down world, things are never what it used to be.  It lingers to remind us the love.  The dreams.  The hopes.  It lingers to give us the opportunity to sear into our brains every single memory that was important.   The stronger we feel the pain, the deeper the memories will burn into our souls.

It lingers so that we don’t forget.

But sometimes you get what you need.

I’m old now.  Long gone are the days where I cared about about what my classmates thought of me.  Long gone are the days of rebellion and anger.  Long gone are the hopes, desires, wishes, dreams.  Old is old and you can’t ever go backwards and redo what you’ve done wrong.  I’m old now.  The wrinkles crinkle at the corner of my eyes.  My face grows tired and my walk grows slower.

Today we were driving down the road when my 4 year old launched into a discussion about God.

Mommy, who makes the rain clouds?

God.

Is God a giant?

No honey.  He lives in heaven.

Does he have a car?

I’m sure he does.

Is it a cloud car?

Yes.

Or he could walk.

Are there sidewalks?

Yes.

Mommy, is there a ladder?

In heaven?

No, to climb up to heaven.

I love my life.  I hate death talks.  I always get stuck with them.  Always.  I hate them.  They give me panic attacks.  I don’t want to talk about them.  But the kids always pin me into a corner to talk about them.

I say that word a lot.  Just breath.  Just close your eyes for a minute and just breath.  Yes, you’ve heard your son say “mommy” 4,000,000 times in one day.  Yes, you have been their maid and gotten very few thank you’s in return.  Yes, you are running a business that is taking every ounce of creative energy right out of your sole.  Just breath because it will.  It has to.  Get better.

We have a huge project going on right now.  It’s brand new for the business and it’s exciting and tedious and a lot of work, but I’m so excited.  I so want to hole myself up in a hotel room, plug in Pandora and turn it up, plug myself into the computer and totally pump out all the information that keeps whirling around in my head.  This is what I live for.  The passion.  I’ll be honest.  It’s been missing from me for a while where the business is concerned.  In fact, this month was suppose to be the month where I was suppose to move onto greener pastures.  However, I believe in fate, and karma and what you deserve is delivered even if it’s not necessarily what you thought it was going to be.  Like that song “You can’t always get what you want, but along the way, you may get what you need.”   I know that this is what I was suppose to be doing and I’m okay with how it turned out.  It’s just not what I was expecting a year ago.

Now, just to breath for a little bit and collect it all into a baggy so I can peer at it for a little bit and try to put into nice little columns that make sense!

Waterdop 3-10-11 a photo by Stacy Carlson on Flickr.

I’ve been critiqued on my waterdrops saying that the drop should be vertical, but I’m just captivated by the angle of this photo and it’s perhaps my favorite one.