Don’t you think, if I’d had someone I could talk to before my boyfriend came along I might be a totally different person? I do.
Why was my childhood so difficult? It wasn’t difficult, it was all I knew. I had no idea my life was ugly, until I grew up a bit and noticed that my friends homes weren’t like mine.
I loved playing in my bedroom, even though I was belittled for spending so much time in my room. I had fabulous Barbies that my mother found for me at garage sales that we went to, together and she still has a majority of them. She followed her mothers patterns of keeping her childhood toys. She thinks I don’t remember her telling me how sad it made her, that her own mother never gave her a majority of her childhood things, but I remember. She is her own mother, unable to willingly give her daughter her things, that she fondly played with, for as long as she can remember. My Barbie ship, oh how I loved that imaginary voyage I took with my Barbies.
My books, I had so many books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Narnia, and dozens of others in my childhood desk and bookcase. I didn’t know it then, but I sat and wrote a majority of my memoir See You Later, Life Calling Me from Beyond, as I wrote in my many diaries. I drew upon my childhood words and used them in my writing. I struggled back then, but it’s only now that I realize how much I truly had it together. I wish I had that desk and bookcase. So much of me is pressed into the surfaces of it.
My heart is in those diaries and a lot of that same heart is in my memoir(s). My mother rejected my heart. I asked her to read my memoir and after 4 months she simply told me that she was free and done with me. It’s humbling to face a lifetime of rejection. My best friend, as I grew up, was myself. I could say anything to myself and still love myself, even if my parents could not come clean and ever say that they loved me. The justifiably ugly way they raised me is on them, completely.
I absolutely loved playing cassette tapes and cd’s. The life those melodies gave me, was how I survived until Tom Mosley came along. I was never alone, as long as I had a music to listen to or a book to gaze into and absorb the flora and rainbows within those pages. I was never alone, as I befriended those characters in the books I was reading. I even loved studying, yes, I did. I melted into my studies, becoming one with whatever I was learning. I presented myself as a smart, wholesome, and regular girl. My studies had me academically accepted by my peers.
My history with abuse was my secret and I kept it. It would be redundant to keep asking my mother for help, because one day she would abandon me, and it’s like I had a premonition about her disappearance, so I fought feeling true closeness with her. I parented her, as I played with Barbies and read Little House in the Big Woods. It’s true.
My signature mantra has always been, I’ll figure it out. I played pretend and figured out my life, as best I could, completely alone. I always figure it out.
I loved my pets, the rare times I had some. Their ugly endings at my fathers hands scarred me. Eventually, anything I loved, I kept to myself out of fear of having it taken away.
I loved painting and I still do. The brush and the first stroke of paint on a canvas is spectacular. Vibrancy of oils and brushes on canvas is invigorating for the mind and the heart.
Writing. It’s my way of loving myself. I love myself, young and old. I remember all of it. Writing helps me cope with all of it. My ride or die always said, “I got you.” Well, I’ve got him and I always will. He doesn’t leave me and it’s been my honor sharing a bit about him with the world. He saved me. He loved me.
I care so much about so many things. My words are my sacred pledge to being honest about all of it. So many lack participation in my childhood, and all of it is on them. Those people are constrained by ineptitude. It’s not easy laying out your heart on page after page, only to have your mother not feel the desire to beg for forgiveness. And I say only my mother, because my father does not care, nor does he recall it, at this stage of his elderly illness.
My mother is her mother.
I am not my mother and I only have myself to thank for that.

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