There I stood at 19 years old w/my one in a half year old daughter on my hip giddy with happiness, as my husband, at the time, packed us up in our Green Volkswagen Jetta. I mention the kind of car we had because things were so very important to me then, status helped me feel like I was successful. I had things my family never had or just simply could not hold onto. My ego was on it's high horse and I let my family know all about it. I was going to be different, I was not like them & I was hell bent on proving it through every step of my life.
This man, my husband, whom I had betrayed more times than any one should ever begin to accept, & I was completely oblivious to how that betrayal was a reflection of how I treated myself, was the driver on the road to our destination of a new beginning. As if there is a place to find happiness, I was determined to reach it if it killed me. This new beginning was a mirror of the creative void filling I would manage to almost master along my journey into adulthood. Desperately trying to heal wounds with bandages that did not belong or that wore away leaving me raw and bruised once again.
I was leaving the only place I had ever known as home. The mother that sickened me, sitting on the curb playing with my daughter was everything I did not want to be. In my eyes, she was everything I hadn't become. It is amazing that the most destructive lies are the ones we tell ourselves. That one lie was only the beginning of a mass of lies I would continue to feed myself in the years ahead, but it in itself was the one that almost destroyed me. Now do not get me wrong, I am not here to paint a picture that my mom was the worst and up most horrible thing that had ever happened to me. She was the not the orchestrator of every ounce of damage in my life, she certainly could not be responsible for the decisions I made in the future. To give a true understanding of where I was and where I am now, I have to create for readers the images that filled my mind. At that moment in my life she was my enemy & I was not going to be destroyed. It was me against her! "The survivor" was a mechanism I had created to cope with the victim I had manifested within myself, & one day would become one of the worst & most imprisoning traits of my personality to this day.
If there was a cartoon drawn of the day I packed up and left my childhood behind, you could probably see the chain that tied me to it being drug behind the trunk of our car. The same chain my mother carried through her own life, threatened to remain attached to me. You could not have convinced me of that, not for one minute. I was high on life, my voids temporarily filled with the latest distraction of this new and exciting life I was beginning. The road ahead would take us to Connecticut, oh yes this Cali girl headed straight to a place that would slowly suck the life from the center of my being. Not enough sun and far too much snow for a girl who loved the beach, far more than she loved her mother or herself.
(More to come...)
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