Good Morning and Happy Mother's Day to all the Moms out there. Boy do I know that we can be unsung heroes over the years of raising our kids.
This morning Dan and Keisha made breakfast for Jennie and me. Dan even taught Keisha how to make the coffee and she did an excellent job.
Of course, you know there is a funny story coming.
Keisha wanted Jennie and I to play school and write words on these pieces of paper she brought out. I didn't want to. Then she had a litle book she was writing letters in. She laid next to me and walked away. She told me not to write in it. So, I took the crayon and made a little line under her letters. She came back and told me I was in big trouble. I told her it was just a little line and you could barely see it. She told me I had to change my attitude!
Then she decided to give me a manicure for Mother's Day. I already had painted my nails so I asked if she would do my toes instead. she thought for a minute and then got a cloth and wet it attempting to clean my toenails.( I have a fungus in my big toenails and she doesn't even like to look at them). She " cleaned" my toes and then found a polish she wanted to use. ( Only a Nana would do this) conjure up this picture in your head-" Ruby Slippers " yes, as in Dorothy, Wizard of Oz. You have it! So she proceeded to paint my toenails emphasing a large drop on the big toenails. This was a huge gift from her. So, I now have deep, blood red toenails and parts of my feet coveed in Ruby Slippers! Later, I went outside thinking they may dry faster. Today we are having a lot of wind. We have had some pretty bad weather in the last 24 hours.
Well, its so windy that honeysuckles are falling off the trees and littering the driveway. ( I know honeysuckle grows on bushes but these are so big they turned into trees.)
So then the honeysuckle was sticking to my toenails. I do not have a lot of mobilityor range of motion. Here I was trying to bend down and remove these from my toes without falling on my behauncus! ( That is a word my youngest daughter came up with when she was small) Mission accomplished.

Adding to yesterday's blog I want to add that it is a fight worth fighting for to the end. I've worked on this issue by myself for my entire adult life. It was always there in everything I did.I was probably too protective of my kids becaus my mission was that what happened to me would never happen to them.
If I had it to do over I would still be the same way. I learned to trust my instincts that if something didn't feel right it wasn't.
I have like a sixth sense about people probably from an innate state of observation as a child. I was always looking for the signs that it would happen again. And it did; over and over.
I wa told never to tell because I wouldn't be believed. At 41 years old I told my Dad this coming out of an issue relating to my oldest daughter. I don't know that I will tell that story yet but it was a horrendous experience for her. My abuse started when I was 4 or that is my earliest recollection of it. My Dad chose not to believe me. All those years later and my abusers were correct. Not being believed does not mean it didn't happen. It just means that I wasn't believed by a person who was supposed to be my protecter.
Its easier to not believe than to have to deal with the issue.
So it was just another form of isolation that had been there in place all those years.
For years I carried guilt for so many issues one of them being that I was told if I allowed this to happen to me They would " leave the little ones alone". I don't know if I can put into words the horror I felt when one sister revealed to me it had happened to her. I felt I had failed her, them. and I had failed at so many things as a daughter, sister, wife mother, friend. Or I thought so. My judgement was clouded.My faith was rocked to the core.
Eventually, I learned that my faith was all I had. So the work was in progress to rebuid it. Now, its pretty solid but I went through my episodes that I felt God had abandoned me. I went through the episodes of maybe I deserved all the wrong that came to me.And there was plenty.
So if you think I don't know how it feels, yes, I do.
I could probably tell you how you feel by knowing where you are in this walk.I've made my share of poor choices over the years. Some of it is related to being bipolar and some of it is relating to the sexual abuse and you mix it up and you end up with one screwed up person.
I remember when I made a serious suicide attempt in1999 at the physciatric hospital all the doctors, nurses, clinicians, therapists related to my case looked at me after me answering a barrage of questions one of the doctors said," we are not surprised you are here. What surprises us is what took you so long?".
I didn't know how to answer that except to say I didn't want " them" to win.
There are those of you who will understand what I am saying.There will be those who can relate to what I've said but don't know how to begin the fighting process.
Well, this is how I figured it. There isn't anything fair or pretty about fighting. It's ugly. War is not fair and it is ugly. What happened to us wasn't fair or pretty. If I'm going to be scarred up over this I decided that they were going to be scarred up to.
I was going to fight back. That meant I was going to attempt to hanle my healing in as healthy of a way as I knew how. I couldn't do it alone.
For me, I needed God's help.
Society never thinks or even knows the largest healing needs to be within the soul because that is the essence of YOu. It is who you are . It is the God within me.That is why sexual abuse goes unnoticed because no one wants to address the real issue which is your soul was violated.
If you contract a STD from it they give you medicine. If you get screwed up from it eventually most of us end up becoming some kind of psychiatric stastistic but who addresses the REAL issue?
That's the part of the person I am talking about/to.Until that part of you even knows it needs to heal you cover it up with alcohol, drugs, medication, crime, etc.
And there is an element of you out there that have been abused and don't even know it because it was in a benign manner.
Were you uncomfortable about someone's sense of humor because it always related to sexual issues and in a crude way? you were violated. Did someone "come on to you" in a way that made you feel uncomfortable? You were violated. Did you ever experience someone who just wouldn't leave you alone no matter what you said or did? You were violated.
These are examples of abuse that the general public does not associate with abuse and yet the victim has now experienced a puncture in his/her soul that they may not be aware is there but it does, in fact, exist.
I mentoned the 2 women yesterday, but forgot to mention the organization they represent. It's Mary's Hope. They can be reached by diane@maryshope.org
They are basically it- Diane and Sherry. They are trying to educate adult survivors that there is hope and train those that are farther in their healing to help those that are begining.
That is a resouce available to you. In a later blog I will give the name of a couple books that are excellent on this subject.
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