It's Almost Christmas

 I looked through my Facebook memories this evening. Photograph after photograph of days gone by... The Naughties batting at Christmas ornaments, snow-covered apple trees, grandchildren and gingerbread houses, and The Cabinetmaker. Everything I loved with all of my heart; my home and my family. The only thing I ever really wanted. My treasures...

The ache, softened only slightly by time, returned once again... I could delete the blog. I could erase the photographs. I could refuse to look. Instead I go back time and time again. Sometimes the memories bring a smile. Sometimes I laugh out loud. Other times a lump grows in my throat and tears spill down my cheeks.

Holidays are emotional. Rather than softening the blow of family secrets revealed, time has made impossible sitting in the same place and pretending everything is fine. Everything is not fine, no matter how much my heart and mind want it so. Everything is not okay.

In the past two months, two of my children have blamed me for not protecting them from the abuse they suffered as children, but the truth is that I did the very best I could with the tools and knowledge I had at the time. I read recently that "abuse doesn't necessarily start out in a very obvious way; it creeps in slowly like a poisonous gas. The more you breathe the gas, the less clear your thoughts become. By the time things start happening that a sane person would easily recognize as abuse, it's generally too late- you are no longer quite 'sane.' Your sense of what has happened has become completely distorted by exhausting mental games and emotional torment." Early on I knew a very real and present danger existed, but somewhere along the way, as I breathed in the "gas," I lost focus. Even now my mind wants to rationalize and deny.

I sent out the apology letter I'd been contemplating weeks before the first child approached me. Seven identical letters sent privately to each of my children. I heard back from six. The seventh has seen it but not responded and this was not one of the two who had voiced blame. Abuse is a complicated poison with the perpetrator often being forgiven for offenses committed while the "non-offending" parent is left holding the blame. I've been told kids are smart and they will figure it out eventually. Maybe. But they've been breathing the gas all their lives. If it's been so very hard for me, how much harder it must be for them...