Responses to comments

Each comment I've gotten so far from yesterday's post deserves a response.  So here they are.  And thank you. I arrived home tonight realizing I am ready to apologize to my sister.  Not who I thought would be first, but she has forgiven me enough  that today I was one of the very first people to ever get a giggle from my niece.  Most awesome feeling ever.  So I'm going to start that tonight or tomorrow.

Anyway, in the order they are listed:

WinnyNinnyPoo-
I do feel safe.  Strangely so.  Dr. Mind was very wary when I wanted to do this now, as the usual plan is to provide some adjustment time after an episode and then move gradually into something hard.  So he was quite surprised to hear I felt fine after the first session on this, and while the 2nd was harder and more tearful, I came home and slept like the dead, which has ONLY happened when I was really medicated lately.  I think I felt such weight lifted just going near this that instead of the upset he expects I just feel relief.  I think this stuff has been waiting to turn into words for a very long time, and yet it took precisely the wrong hurt and the precise dose of anger at my mother for it to cohere enough to become words.

Michal-
Thank you for the perfect verse.  There was a time many years ago, about 18 months before I was diagnosed with bipolar and still thought I had severe depression that I could not stop crying.  I could make it through work, but then the tears were in control.  At that time I thought crying was wrong and a friend spent a lot of time trying to Biblically prove that it was ok to cry.  I remember during that he finally made me read the story of Elijiah and how when he was emotionally worn down God himself made him eat, rest and then try again.  The story made such an impression that I named my next kitten Elijiah as a reminder that God says the way to handle depression is to take care of yourself (which in my case included having an Elijiah). You have just handed me the verse to help me feel strong during a time that feels very weak. I have told you I can't memorize verses, but I will write this out and keep it with me during this experience.

Learp17-
Welcome and thank you for taking an interest in a subject most people want to avoid.  I wish more people would get interested and learn because so many people have mental illness and so often people don't realize this and adopt an us/them mentality that is often the worst part of the whole experience.  Thank you also for knowing about child abuse and not avoiding it as "icky".  I can't imagine what it is like to be a parent and look at your own child and imagine them in that situation.I think that one thing that is very helpful with abuse though (as well as detrimental) is that it is often all you know of childhood.  At least for me that's true.  There's no "before and after" like so many bad memories we gather during our lives.  Abuse is a terrible thing and I wish that as a society we worked harder to prevent it.  If you read more you'll eventually know that I grew up in a small town where virtually everyone knew what was happening in our home and while there were calls to child protective that went nowhere (because my already assigned caseworker would like to protect her friend my mother) and there were the coaches who protected me quite a bit, but that was about it.

And yes, my father's girlfriend and I were in school together.  He was a teacher/pedophile (this story will make you want to remove your children from public circulation) who we believe molested various girls over the years.Somehow this one first he started with all this special treatment, gradually brought her to our home more and more, ignored the rest of us (including my mother) in favor of her and would become unhinged if his time with her was disrupted.  He got sick with MS soon after this and the school board pushed his disability retirement through the system rather than deal with the legal mess and publicity.  This was at a time cases like this were huge national news because of a few cases that I don't remember adequate information to name right now.  Eventually she moved in with us and he had an affair (if you can call it that when the 2nd woman isn't even a woman yet, she's 15 or 16 year old) in the basement while the rest of us functioned upstairs.   So she and I went to school together; she was 2 grades ahead.  It was not good.  At all.    He was even more physically (and obviously sexually and emotionally) abusive to her than the rest of us, which is saying something.   Later on when I was in college my parents divorced, he married his girlfriend, they had a baby when I was about 21 and then she realized what he had done/was doing and left.  A messy divorce where his visitation status was all over the charts occurred and by the end all parental rights were terminated.  After that eventually I lost tough and my brother will be 14 next month and I will not have seen him in 10 years.

My life is not typical, praise God, but it is also not boring......That's probably the craziest true story you'll read for a while......I hope anyway because it was a very hard life.
 and that's the nutshell version.

Everyone-

I know this gets confusing, there are just so many factors involved.  Please feel free to ask anything.  If I don't want to answer I won't (don't see that as likely ) but am going to be talking about stuff that is confusing if you haven't had time to read 1200 plus posts written by someone who tends to be long-winded and sometimes makes no sense, and even then some of the posts with explanations felt too detailed and were removed.  And I have no clue where to link for explanations; tags would be nice but let's face it, tagging 1200 posts takes time and I have a 3 hour commute daily.  However, I'm planning to have my ankle operated on in 2 years and when I do that I'll have about 12 weeks of sitting at home, so that's on the list of things that might help keep me sane.  But I don't mind.  My past hurts, but not because someone asks.  It's not like you are reminding me of something I'd forgotten, and if you do that's probably a good thing.  It is through comments on this blog that I'm really able to start doing this project, and that's an awesome thing.