Trying Not To Sweat The Stuff

I'm prone sometimes, to focus on the negative as it truly often once seemed overwhelmingly difficult, especially during the years that I was woefully unprepared to deal with severe, or criminal, adolescent mental health issues, which all culminated later into my own primary trauma.  In my defense, all parents are by nature unprepared for this as it goes against nature, or at least, our own realities.

Parenting normal children is challenging enough, parenting adopted traumatized children requires us to seek outside help in order to facilitate healing, and then we factor in severely emotionally disturbed children, well it pushes us into another level of needed help, and I'll go out on a limb and sadly state that there truly are some children just too violent or irrational to remain within families safely.

That's bothered me a great deal.

But to have resigned myself to it, to have not stepped out of the way, would've been grandiose on my part, a silent, "I'm a healer," bullcrap mentality on my own ego path.  I would've been an ignorant, total idiot.

Instead I realized my limitations as a human being, plus the need for my other children to be safe.

I grieved quietly while others on the outside criticized me brutally.

I've fumed, hated those who'd been so ugly to us, and am slowly learning to let it go, only so it doesn't poison me from within, killing what joy I do still own.

That we'd already barely survived serious assaults, that I'd been vilified, that my other children recoiled in fear, all propelled me to seek the help we clearly needed in spite of spiky walls thrown up in our pathways.

It's taken us the next couple of years to believe we can breathe without being attacked.

It's taken me personally a great deal longer to work through my own emotions.

I'm old enough to know that physical activity helps me to release my own frustration, anger and bitterness, as I then fought depression as well, the very black cloud convinced me not to push myself, but rather to kinda just veg out, and focus on breathing again.

I'm hopefully past all that now, I'm learning again to heal and to recover, and to help these other 12 children do so as well.  About two dozen grown kids of mine have also expressed their enormous relief that we are all protected now.

I would have to use names here to detail what we'd gone through and I'm not going to do so.  Suffice it to say that my very pretty daughters can now smile without having to defend themselves just because they'd smiled for no reason.  The irrationality with which we once lived, the brutal regime of terror often meant their clothes would be cut up by an equally pretty one whose perceptions were always colored by irrational misperceptions that provoked a violent lashing out at others.

See how difficult it's been to just shake it off?

Even with professional therapeutic help for us survivors, we still recoil at the memory.

I know I'm blessed by the amount of resources we've found, but if I'm still working through everything, it's only indicative of the depths to which we'd been forced.  How much more so for my kids?

We had an excellent five days down in Florida.  This funky old place, a refurbished remnant from the 1950s, had us in rooms that opened out to the grassy, palm-filled, tropical gardens with a heated pool, pool tables, ping pong and volleyball amenities, just steps from the white sands of St Pete Beach.  We'd gone there last year and the kids loved it.

I might've been born to be an old fart in Florida.  I love eating supper at 4 p.m., going to bed at 9, rising at daybreak, running onto the sands, and finding the beach full of others doing the same.

We ate at a China Buffet one night, IHOP on Christmas Day, as it was all that was open, and I gotta say, I'm not missing anything at all in life by eating at home the other 99.99% of the year.  By the end of the time all of my kids were all telling me their favorite meals they wanted me to cook back at home.

I went a little non-vegan at times and felt like crap in response.  Surely there were eggs in the pancake batter and I had some cheese as well.  The vegetarian line however is a line I'll never cross, I've never again had any meat products in 40 years, the very thought makes me wanna hurl.

I kicked off my shoes and walked for hours at the water's edge, happy as can be, glad I can still fit in my bathing suit, serene in the comprehension that us 58 year olds aren't gonna look good in a bathing suit anyway, and I'm super fine with that, it's an I don't give a good cahoot about it at all.

It's a relief overall, a wonderful sense of freedom I wish I'd had for the last several decades.  We women put too much stock into stupid stuff anyway.  Why can't we be more like men and scratch our big hairy bellies like they do when ambling down the beach all nonchalant and free?

Lily, Jack, Nando and I lolled about on my bed last night here at home, happily eating stove-popped popcorn and watching Duck Dynasty.  Oh my goodness, those men have totally nailed it.  They talk like us, they act like us, they're as all full of beans we we are on any given day. We all busted out laughing during the show, and we're still happily marveling that we can do so without having to pay a price by ones who'd once controlled our every mood with their fear tactics and threats of bodily harm, or their assaults and retaliations at the joy of others.

No one should have to live like that.

While we were gone, we received several inches of rain, (yay!) now I'm studying seed catalogs.