As a single mom, working two, sometimes three, part time jobs while going to school full time, I had A LOT of tasks that seemed insurmountable at times. Tasks I could never seem to complete or complete in a timely manner. Things I NEEDED to do, but just couldn’t or wouldn’t get to. Say…like laundry…which was a lot like my life. A menagerie of yesterdays soils, piled high, unkempt, clumped together…waiting to be cleaned and put away in the rightful place…

My days during my adult college years usually started at 5:00 a.m. Dishes from the night before sometimes needed done if I was too exhausted to squeeze even one more task out of my day the evening prior. Making “the boy” his breakfast and lunch, finishing up my homework or studying for the next exam, then getting the boy up and ready for his day. Get him to the bus stop, wait til the big yellow banana came and scooped him up. Then onto classes til about noon then off to one of my part time jobs. I always connected with people like me to keep me grounded for an hour or so somewhere in the day. Run and grab the boy, head to his practice or game. Then head home to get his homework (and mine) done while making and eating dinner. Get him in the tub then ready for bed and a bedtime book. Back out to the studying and house tasks. Except for Friday, Saturday nights when I would work 12 hour overnight shifts while the boy spent the night with a sitter. That’s pretty much how my days went for years and years.

Then there was the laundry… That was my struggle. For more reasons than one. (Kind of like my insides). Sometimes it was because I didn’t have any quarters (or any money at all) to use at the laundromat. Sometimes it was because I didn’t have money for laundry soap. {Side note…there were many times when the boy was washed with laundry detergent and the clothes were washed with dish soap in those years – and when he dramatically reminds me of this, I ask him “but, you lived didn’t you!?” LOL!}. Sometimes it was too dark and I was too afraid to go there (into my soul or the laundromat). Sometimes I ran out of day. Mostly though it was because I hated the laborious task of laundry. Preparing, sorting, separating, wash, dry, fold…ugh. Worse yet, folding the socks. Underwear and socks…all the irritating minutia. Yep, hated it. It was a meticulous task in life that I could gladly live without ever having to face…like most things I didn’t like…despite the obvious consequences. I usually told myself “I’ll get that tomorrow” like most things I NEEDED to tend to, but avoided at nearly all costs. The boy’s clothes, my uniforms, towels…then…the damn white load – which always included the socks. Socks were like the pieces of my life that I just didn’t want to face. Scattered, strewed about, unmanageable, and always in disarray. Trying to match things up – like feelings with behaviors that I never wanted to look at – so I just threw “them” aside. Lying to myself and saying…I’ll get that later… I would just throw the socks on top of the basket – sometimes stuffing them down under (just like my feelings) the surface stuff so they wouldn’t spill out all over as trotted back to the house to head back to study with the boy in tow. Sometimes, like many things in my life, I just threw them in the corner and left them there. Walking past the socks (or problem) as if I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see it and/or take care of it.

I avoided A LOT of unpleasant things back then. Denial…my best friend and worst enemy for many years. Actually, come to think of it, denial kept me alive for a very, very long time. But that’s another story…

Then one day after hanging out with some like-people chatting about our common dilemmas, I realized that my laundry habits were a lot like my life skills. Avoidance. Procrastination. Excuses. Denial. Or just plain obstinacy! I DON’T WANT TO FACE IT! Whatever “IT” was…if it was uncomfortable or difficult or painful or take time to accomplish…I didn’t want to do it!

But I really wanted my life to get better. In order to do that I realized I had to learn to do better. I also knew that I was teaching my son life skills. Everything I did was an example to him. Somehow I knew that deep down. I was terrified I would fail and give him the same poor examples that I had received in life. I didn’t want him to turn out like me. I wanted him to live his best life, not just survive like I had my entire life. And I wanted him to know better, do better and to be and have better than I ever even imagined I could be, do or have in my life. For whatever reasons, I was not guided in my childhood and aimlessly went out into the world … and I fell flat on my face more than I care to remember. I desperately wanted better for the boy…desperately.

Act as if…

So I started doing the white load – or the socks or the feelings, emotions, pain – first. Tackle the most difficult task at hand FIRST, then move on to the less painful tasks – shorts, towels, preparing dinner, homework, etc. I began sorting through the confusion and contradiction in my life. When I started to look at my life, feelings and behaviors (or my socks), match them up as they belonged and deal with the most uncomfortable issues in my life, I got better. Folding things neatly and placing them where they rightfully belonged. Things got better. Because now I knew better. The result…? I created a better life for myself. But most importantly, I was able to show the boy by example how to live better.

Today…? Socks first.

Listening to a motivational speaker from the Phili-Jersey area in 2002 sitting in a large conference room with likely 350-400 people, my life, once again, was changed profoundly via self awareness throttled at me by brutal honesty, followed by a flood of humility drowned by self-accountability…ugh…

My mother, a male family member and his spawner of children had conspired to take my property. I received a legal document in the mail issued by the spawner advising me that it would be best if I “Quit Claim” ‘ed my property over to her and ultimately to the male family member. I was shocked and hurt that the very people I had “helped so much” just one year early or even my mother could even think of something like this debacle. For the next five years, I was in and out of lawyers’ offices and courtrooms. at the tune of $15,000. I even had to face the spawner in court while she was in jail shackles…numerous times. She had been arrested for numerous felonious events. I was even crossed examined by her WHILE SHE WAS WEARING HANDCUFFS!!! Ya gotta love our legal system….

So sitting in this conference listening to this speaker who was there to help lift our spirit and our lives, I was engulfed in self-pity and my person drama…poor, poor pitiful me. “How could (my family) do this to me?” Well, Krissy, they were snakes when you met them dumbass! But that’s another story…

So the story this gentlemen told went a little like this…

A gorilla went into a forbidden forest. A forest that was known to be dangerous and he had heard of the horror stories of those that attempted passage and got caught. Yup, he went anyway thinking it would be different this time. Soooooo…He gets caught. The gorilla is offered two choices of punishment…be killed or have a sexual assault performed on him. He chooses the sexual assault vs death.

The last line the speaker utters transformed me from a Victim (yes, capitol V) to a “willing participant”.

The speaker concluded with “The moral of the story…? In order to get screwed, first you have to get into position.” Yup, that whole thing was on me…

I knew my mother had betrayed me countless times in my life. She had done it to all of her children. My MFM (male family member) was a known violent criminal. The spawner of children had already been arrested countless times. What the f..k was I thinking?!?! I entered into a rental agreement that was never written with the spawner and the MFM so my portion of the mortgage would be covered when I moved to a nearby neighborhood. I never got receipts for the mortgage and tax payments that I made to my mother in prior years. I did not follow up with the proper execution of those rent payments to my mother via the MFM and spawner. I never documented all the work I did on my mother’s property. They won’t do anything to me, right? They wouldn’t do any of that stuff that they did to all those other people to me right? We’re family, right? Ya, right…

Being the Victim was removed from my M.O. that day. I could never again NOT take responsibility for where my feet were in any given situation. Self responsibility and my own self accountability denies me the opportunity to blame others for the messes I find myself in today. I am where I get me. Ya, people can do shitty stuff, but if I choose my position wisely, I get screwed less often…

When I seek to understand, I find empathy

When I live with empathy, I find compassion

When I live with compassion, I find love

Love is the answer

Love, me.

• 

I had just lost my second sibling and I was angry. I was angry at my parents for what this sibling had endured. I was angry at how he died…an unspeakable life and death. It’s difficult to type this passage recalling all the abuse. I was angry for all that we had endured. Our lives, the suffering, the tragedies, the sadness of it all. I was still angry. I felt like his death had ignited the memories of our childhood and all that had happened, and didn’t happen, back then and through the years. I was mourning the loss of another person that I loved. One of MY pack. My friend. My buddy. My little brother. And I was mourning the loss of a family that never existed…I did that my whole life.

The September after my little brother’s death, I went with a dear friend to a Women’s Spiritual Retreat in Cocoa Beach. I needed it bad. I wanted the anger gone. I knew what it would do to me if it stayed much longer…physically, emotionally and mentally. It was there that I completed the poem.

Several months early, I had also made a journey to the grave of one of my abusers. I went to forgive them and let them go. Let them go forever. I needed to forgive. I knew I needed to forgive for my sake. I needed to be free. All the pain that rose up with my baby brother’s death was wreaking havoc in my soul. I HAD to be free, or else. It was there that I began the poem.

At the grave site of my abuser, I began to understand that person’s life. Abuse is not innate, it is learned. Hurt people hurt, right? How had that person been hurt? What was that person’s story? How did he come to be an abuser? Sitting at graveside I envisioned this person as a child. A child that was being hurt in the same way that I had been hurt. I realized that if someone told me that day about the story of this little person and that they were being hurt by someone, I would have such empathy and compassion for this child. How terrible that this child was being hurt…a precious child…a little spirit being broken and abused. Horrible. Tragic. Unjust. I wanted to hug that child that day and take their pain away. Empathy for my abuser, not excusal. And so the process began…Understanding, Empathy, Compassion…for the love of self.

Forgiveness does not mean excusal…it just means forgiveness. Freedom from the bondage… Release of the pain. Letting go of things that did not define me…they just happened to me…a long time ago. They were not happening to me today. Those things are of no use to me. I had already turned them into lessons. I didn’t need that pain in my life.

We had an old army duffle bag when I was a kid that we moved from place to place to place. It was dirty, stinky, old, filled with old, broken sports equipment that we no longer used. On one of the moves, I picked this duffle bag up again, looked down, and asked myself…”why do we keep dragging this crap around everywhere we go?” I stopped, dropped it and realized that that is what I did with that pain…dirty, stinky, old, useless equipment that I no longer needed…carried it around in my soul. That’s when I decided to “drop the duffle bag.”

Empathy freed my soul…

When I seek to understand, I find empathy. When I live with empathy, I find compassion. When I live with compassion, I find love. Love is MY answer…

I think early on, we humans seek a pack. That is, if you don’t already exist in one. Somehow, I think we need to feel like we belong, or at least I did…my whole life…

I think I was taught my value (or lack of it) and therefore, my pack status early. I think that that’s when our little souls wander. We wander to finder the pack, the value that we need. The value that tells us we matter. Our sense of belonging…belonging somewhere.

I was pretty young when I realized , I didn’t matter and I did not have value and that I didn’t “belong” in the pack in which I was born…my people. My mother spent most of her days in bed, door closed, absent from our days. Probably depression, but most likely dysfunction too. But that’s her story. Home was empty. We were all well aware that we were a burden…unwanted. Any tending to us was followed by how much she disliked what she was doing for us. I broke my arm once jumping in trees. She was ticked off that she had to get up from bed and take me to Dr. Grossman. Value.

I think all five of us wandered, a lot, everywhere. My youngest sibling, born in 1968, arrived when the maternal absence Was well established. . She laid in bed most days. The paternal absence had always been. He traveled, and when he came home, it was bad, progressively bad too. So…we all wandered away from our pack..

Feeling alone, when really you’re not, can be confusing. I don’t think our little souls can make sense of that feeling. Every little person needs to feel secure…to feel like they belong…somewhere. I think that’s why I wandered…searching…always.

I was 4 or 5 years old. We had a neighbor, “Mr. Bill”. He and his wife, retired couple, lived one block over in our little Connecticut neighborhood. Mrs was so sweet…just like grandmothers should be, but obedient. Her apron tied snuggly up under her breast with a grey dress that stretched to her shins and an up-do hairstyle that was neatly tucked up with hairpins. Those were the times. Mr. Bill paid great attention to us kids in the neighborhood. We were always welcome to visit. Always. We played dominoes on his picnic table down in the back yard. Played “fly away birdie” too…a silly paper trick with sing song. Silly games, hanging out, ate little mints…the ones that melt in your mouth…kind you used to have a weddings…I think they called them butter mints. Family…this is what love and family must feel like…trust-this must be trust…I belong…welcoming, always…then it changed.

Mr. Bill then moved things inside the garage/basement – entered down in the back yard. He said we were “gonna play a game”. Sheets hung from the clothes line, like a curtain. Like a stage. Mrs. would yell down..”what’s going on Bill?” “Nothing…don’t come down here….leave us alone”. And she did. Those were the times I suppose.

Mr. Bill had us take our clothes off behind the “curtain” and then dance for him. I didn’t like it like I liked playing dominoes, or laughing, or eating the mints. Seemed it was part of the package though.

This must be what families do, right? He gives us candy and lets us play here. We laugh and talk together. Some days they give us lunch outside. We mattered.

I belong here, right? Why do I feel bad and ashamed? We can’t tell anyone? Well, Why? Because then we won’t belong. We won’t matter again. We won’t have a place to be. No more candy. No more pack. Why did we all keep going there? The candy? The games? The laughter with the other children? Maybe. But I think it was mostly because I wanted to feel like I belonged…somewhere. And if I belonged somewhere, then I mattered, right? An innate need that little beings have to feel a sense of security that comes from being in your “pack” was never filled at home. This gave me value.

Now, the messages were screwed up…forever more. Being in a place where people acted like you were welcome, where they gave to you, but at a price. Hurting you and making you feel shame? Part of that package deal. Made you feel you would lose that sense of value if you told? It never made sense. But nothing ever really made sense in my world anyway. My “normal” for the rest of my life. It makes more sense to your little soul to feel like you belong somewhere. Cuz it’s better then feeling lonely where you aren’t wanted…like home. Where you don’t seem to matter.

I learned lessons while visiting Mr. Bill and the other kids. Feeling shame seemed better then not have a pack. Feeling guilt felt better than being alone amongst your people. So we kept coming back.

I learned self sacrifice there…at any cost. It kept me alive and amongst people and with “gifts” for a long time, until it nearly killed me.

I don’t eat mints anymore.

Self sacrifice, at any cost, holds no value.

I have a story to tell. It’s my story. I’ve learned many great lessons…sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Some easy, some very, very difficult. But it’s my story and my lessons. I’d like to share them with you in hopes that you will – 1. Know that you are not alone, and 2. Know that you will make it through. Grab the lessons by the balls and hold on tight.

(proceed with caution…graphic reality ahead)

My first conscious lesion:

I was 13 years old. My mother was fighting with my 14 year old sister. My oldest brother was trying to prevent blood shed. We finally confronted her about our abuser who was sitting at the table, smoking his cigarette, drinking a cocktail…as if nothing was happening 2 feet from his ashtray and the dining room table. My mother didn’t want to hear it. My mother…she was raging…louder and louder… Then, my mother kicked my sister out. Told her to “get your shit, and get out”. Sister grabbed what she could and headed for the door. “Oh no you don’t…you’re not going to embarrass me by walking down the fucking street. I’ll take you to the bus station and you can go wherever the fuck you want.” And by God she did…11:00 o’clock at night – down to the Greyhound bus station, gave her $40.00 bucks cash, and she was gone…my sister was gone…just like that…gone. I later learned my sister went to the counter, asked how far she could go with $40.00. Seems she got off the bus in Raleigh, NC at 3:00am. She slept in a ditch that night. The next day, she found the carnival…but that’s her story.

I learned my first conscious lesson that night. A life lesson. A survival skill. Kept me a live for many years…then, nearly killed me.

The lesson? Keep your mouth shut about the dirt. Don’t tell anyone. Tell them only what they want to hear. Or I’d be homeless too. Went to bed that night and the covert became the overt. I was officially on my own. If it was to be, it was up to me. Survival mode was in full swing. For the next 30 plus years, I groveled and begged for a family that never existed…much to my detriment.

I later learned it’s called “people pleasing”. Which sounded a whole lot better than what I called it…which was “fucked up”.

Thanks for joining me.

These stories are from my life.  None are to whine or place blame or guilt.  Just to share. My hope is that if there is one woman…even if only one…that can relate to my stories and grow in a positive way from my lessons, then I’ve accomplished my goal.

My mantra “Nobody’s Bleeding” came from a new perspective that I developed in 1994 while I was a single mom, going to school full time and working three part time jobs.  But I’ll share that story later.

During my journey, I’ve tried to look at things…tough things…in a way that they become more emotionally palatable…more useful to me in the forward movement of my recovery process.  I’ve tried to take a lesson from each adversity and pack that knowledge into my “tool bag” (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly) and use it down the road to manage the adversities…adversities many of us encounter…to not only survive, but thrive and grow from each challenge.

I wise woman once told me…”when you’re walking through shit, just keep walking”.  And, so I did.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton