Messy, unscripted, healing

Breaking cycles vol 1

It was a cold morning, I was wearing my favorite blue and white Sesame Street shirt, and a pair of tiny jeans. I was thoughtfully eating raisins one by one, out of a little red sunmaid box in the grey passenger seat of my dad’s truck while he “warmed it up” before we left the garage.

I missed real breakfast. I missed my mom.

Without realizing I sighed and then wondered out loud, why did mom leave?

My dad’s mood darkened and then he shifted the car in park, and he turned towards me to make eye contact and he said: “Do you really want to know why your mom left Kimberly?”

I shook my head yes, hoping there was a solution in his answer that included her return and hopefully the return of breakfast.

Then he responded to my head shake. “She left because she doesn’t love you anymore.”

My heart sunk into my stomach instantly. My tiny brain was trying to comprehend these words, as tears filled my eyes. I felt like I was being absorbed by the seat of the car.

He shifted again, began to pull out of the garage and said: “Don’t cry, you’ll choke on your raisins.”

I don’t remember anything else from the rest of that day, but I’ve hated raisins ever since.

Overtime I had so many conversations like that with my dad that they all just collapsed into reality and became truth. I didn’t really recall them all individually anymore they just became a fact of life.

I was unloved. I was unworthy. And, I was living with an adult who got real mad, real fast, so I learned quickly; to stay loved by him and anyone else I needed to be good, be cute, be pleasant, and be useful, resourceful, helpful.

Before I ever even entered grade school I learned how to manage the emotions of an adult and was conditioned repeatedly to abandon my own.

I lived for years being told how I felt, what I liked, and what I wanted.

I lost my own sense of truth before I ever got to develop a critical faculty.

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Being unloved by my own mother was a scarlet letter I begrudgingly carried with me for 35 years. It silently deposited itself into the recesses of my fascia, was a driving force behind a life dedicated to helping other people so they would like me, it kept me from believing in myself and knowing who I was and what I actually wanted, and as it turns out it wasn’t even true.

I didn’t find that out though until about six months before my mother died, and when she did I felt robbed, and betrayed, and devastated. And honestly sometimes I still do.

It was just a couple of sentences. A few words strung together.

A string of words that became a snowball, then an avalanche, an internal dialogue that called the shots, a host of illnesses, and something I’ve been working on healing from and through in a million different ways my entire life.

It was the moment I was born to break cycles. And, the only way I know how to keep moving forward is to share the journey, and to connect the dots. So consider this chapter one.