While listening to a novel, it came to me how I have changed myself twice in my life;
Once...to survive sexual abuse, I fled reality and lived an awkward life one step removed from reality; where my mind created stories about life...and I had very little contact with real reality. I became someone different in order to keep the abuse at bay and to keep 'loving' parents. It required that I would leave out parts of reality...the parts that would taint the family's image. My mind began this process to protect me from knowing.
And the second, when reality came crashing in...when someone dared to speak of the darkness that tainted our family. I woke up to reality and had to change to fit it. I had to become one with reality; no matter how ugly and grief-stricken it was...or how much I would have to lose. I had to lose it all to become who I am.
The grief I felt yesterday was the losses I have lived through.
How both of my transformations of self were so very costly.
It leaves you without a home to return to. A familiar landscape that welcomes you home. It is to be without a hearth to rest upon.
The emptiness and separateness, the belonging nowhere, often times is overwhelming.
The novel was of the Jewish people returning to their homes after the war...to find nothing there. No family. A home; but with strangers inside. They had to begin a new life; with so much missing.
I don't understand what they lost. For, most lost loving parents. Parents that would have died to see their child spared. They lost loving families.
What I know of breaking the cycle of abuse in families is the loneliness of building a new legacy. To be the generation that ends it, you start out on your own.
Alone.
You may have companions for awhile; but be prepared to end up alone.
This is why most families of abuse continue passing the abuse on; no one wants to be alone. Their needs are stronger than the need to change the legacy.
There isn't a literal war that separates us.
The enemy lives within the family.
We become the enemy.
I had to transform myself to stay in the family as a child. And, then in order to stand against abuse; I had to transform myself to be different than family.
To not be the enemy of my own children.
The Jewish people lost all their valuables, their pictures, their family members.
I have all they lost.
I could return home.
The family is there.
But, they are hollow or empty of what I seek.
Deaf to what I hear.
Blind to what I see.
Uncomprehending to what I say.
It is to be a foreigner in your own home.
There is no welcome there or feelings of comfort and peace for me.
There is no going home again.
It is to begin the process so someday my children, grandchildren, and their children will know what home and love is.
The loneliness I am forging through today is so they don't have to.
The love begins with me.
And, as I look forward and be here now....there is love.
A love of value.
A love of truth.
A love of reality.
A love of courage.
A love of self, life, creativeness, freedom....
While I have lost much....I have gained more.
I have transformed abuse back to love.
Peace on Earth to Me...
