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Event #1 of the weekend is done. It was really wonderful to see everyone. Last night and this morning I realized that I am in some emotional limbo. It's like teetering between falling apart and pulling it together. It's not "right here, right now", it's the emotions that are filling up in the background of my head.
I saw family that I haven't seen in over 20 years. Seeing faces is so nice, but it's the memories that come to my mind that aren't. When they talk about me, they talk about someone that I don't even know anymore. Someone that I don't want to know. I always wanted to "fit" but I never did. I never fit. I never, ever fit. I had to bury so much of my childhood away because there is so much I simply can't understand. There's so much that I can't cope with, I can't work through. There were so many bad situations and everyone had their way of coping and I was too young to even understand HOW to cope. Everyone was able to run out and into their own lives and I was still too young to get out. I just stayed in a black cloud and my way of coping was to "understand", to "accept". For a long time, I felt everyone left me. My mother caved into her depression and there was a time in my life that I caved. The black hole of just listening to everyone else tell me what I was supposed to do. I left a rough relationship because I thought that happiness was out there and I had to find it. My sister told me that my husband was not supposed to be my friend, he was my husband. "Life is not a fairy tale." I knew that but I just hoped there was more. I duplicated a lot of my Mom's mistakes, but unlike her, I pulled myself out. No one really understood what was going on with me. They didn't KNOW me to begin with. I don't know who they knew. Happy and go lucky? What else was I supposed to be with everything that I had to deal with? It comes down to that. They just didn't know me. I was always clinging to someone's happiness and trying to make it my own because I couldn't find it for myself. I didn't know what happiness was for ME. I never fit. I felt for the longest time that there was "them" and then there was just me. I needed to find where I fit. I remember in the worst of it my brother had left me a voicemail, "I'm not trying to say you're a loser but..." He was right, I was one. Still, whatever he was trying to express to me, that was the only part I heard. It's the only part that was the same thing I had felt in myself and that's all I would ever be.
I could have stayed right there. It got really bad. Somehow I still had a belief in me that there had to be something more. I closed down to everyone and I tried to get back on my feet. I got into therapy, I got a good job. I got surgery to correct something that had always made me feel bad about me. It will always be something I have but not as bad, but it was something. Something that was better. I was finally emotionally and mentality in a solid place. That is when I met my husband. I set so many standards on him because I knew what I wanted in my life. You have to be responsible, carry your own weight, I am not carrying baggage. He had to fill so many boxes and amazingly enough he did. My family told him, "Thank you for coming into her life." In their eyes, he made me better, they didn't know that I became better on my own. It took my father passing away for me to open up to everyone again. I love them. I have always loved them but needed to open up again. They have always looked out for me and done such great things for me too. I don't think of the past. I think of now and how grateful I am of how things are now. I purposely blocked out so much.
This morning I woke up and told my husband that it was really nice, but it probably wasn't good for me. It musters up a lot of rough emotions for me. It makes me start to close up. It makes me think of my mom and cry. Her choices were hers, and I was on my own rough road and I let my kids be the reason I got myself together. I could've stayed stagnant. Stayed that person struggling through life trying to figure it out. I'm not her, I don't know her, I don't want my kids to know her, or to know of her. In any sense. I don't want them to hear stories about how desperate I was to fit because life should not be lived that way. All I can do is raise them differently. Keep them with positive people surrounding them so they can be confident in themselves. Happy. I raise them to believe that life is too good and they deserve the best there is. My husband and I show them this.
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