I'm not sure where I first heard the phrase, "You're only as sick as your secrets" but it's stuck with me for a very long time and it wasn't until very recently that I realized how true it is.
Secrets are poison for the soul, the mind and the body. I am living, walking, talking proof of this.
Some days I want to come out here and completely unburden myself of all the nasty crap that's wedged deep within the recesses of my soul...the things that keep me from truly being free to embrace the life I want to lead and to root out the sickness inside and make way for the healthy.
I've been very honest - to the point of almost being brutally honest, out here about my life, the things that have shaped me into the woman I am, or I guess the woman I am and the deficits of spirit that I've lived with for such a long time. It's no longer a secret that I am a morbidly obese woman who is taking steps to change the path her life is on - permanent steps. It's not a big secret that for the most part I got myself into this situation after losing a child.
However, there are secrets that I still keep tightly tucked away inside that are slowly eating away at my heart, my soul and my mind. One of those secrets I am legally bound to keep which is unfortunate because I think it needs to be told. I think people need to know about The Very Bad Thing at least so that it never happens to another person again. However, because I don't want to find myself in trouble, legally speaking, I'll never open that pandora's box.
Then there's the secret about my relationship with my kids...so many have asked what really happened to cause this huge chasm between myself and my older kids from my first marriage? It's not really a secret per se, just something I don't share because in all honesty? It makes me look like the horrible mother I am. It all really boils down to the very simple fact that I had a nervous breakdown a few years after Joshua died. I was overwhelmed with the task of raising three small children when my heart was shattered into a million pieces. I never grieved his loss. Instead, I ate. The stress of his loss and the fact that I blamed myself for Joshua's death and therefore didn't feel good enough to be a mother to my three remaining children was compounded by the fact that my first marriage was never built on a foundation of love, trust and mutual respect. We were two kids forced into getting married...I literally walked down the aisle, five months pregnant. I wanted to wait. To others around us this was unacceptable. We were told to get married and married we got!
Everything came to a head in the spring of 1995 when my aunt Meta died. She was everything to me. She helped raise me. Some of my fondest memories of childhood are those where I spent time with her (she was technically my great-aunt, but I never thought of her that way), and my other aunts, her sisters, Wilhelmina and Gertrude. When my mother and biological father divorced, I was only three. Aunt Meta took care of me while my mother worked one and sometimes two jobs. For several years while I was growing up, I would spend weekends, holidays and summer vacations with her. In many ways my aunt was like a mother and grandmother to me. She was also one of my biggest cheerleaders and ultimately, my confidant, despite the fact that she was well into her late 70's, (she was born in 1905) during my teen years. Sometimes, during the most tumultuous and rebellious periods of my adolescence, she was also my advocate.
Aunt Meta was a beautiful woman, even in her senior years. Despite the fact that she never married, she led a very interesting life and I grew up with stories of how the old dutch Hoogendjk side of our family came over from Holland and how they settled in the Covina area of southern California. They established some of the very first citrus groves in the area.
When I was very small, I would often sleep with my aunt in her old, dark mahogany four-poster bed. I'd drift off to sleep while she told me stories about growing up at the turn of the 20th century. She told me stories of what life was like, as a teenager, during WWI and then as a grown woman in her late 30's amidst the tumult of WWII. She fascinated me with her recollections of life during a time when common staples used by families all over the United States were being rationed and how they would sit around the radio at night and listen for news of the war.
My aunt's death was yet another cruel blow, despite the fact that by the time she died, her health had failed her in catastrophic ways. Holding telephone conversations with her by the time she started to decline rapidly was nearly impossible as she suffered from dementia and was incredibly paranoid of almost everyone. Whilst I know her death gave her the ultimate reprieve from a body that no longer functioned and a mind that had crumbled, it was still incredibly hard on me. My former husband, children, and I were living well below the poverty level at the time which made traveling from Washington state to southern California for my aunt's funeral out of the question.
Her loss was the final straw in my world where stress was the norm and not an occasional event. When my aunt died, she took to her grave, one of my biggest secrets. It was something I should have told someone else about but I told her. She didn't know who I should tell and frankly I think she was so completely and utterly unglued by what I shared with her that she wasn't sure what the appropriate thing to do would have been. She knew that my fear kept me silent...the same exact way it does today.
In the early summer of 1995 after a particularly nasty fight between my former spouse and I, I left to go stay with a friend in Colorado Springs, CO. I left the children behind. I always intended to take a break and come back for them. I was slowly losing control of my emotions and ability to cope with things on a daily basis.
There was a lot of speculation about whether I was having an affair with the person I went to stay with. I wasn't. I stayed with a close friend and his elderly mother. I was in CO for about two months and then went to Alabama for about another month and then returned to Washington; to my family. I missed my children desperately and ached to be near them. However, I wasn't sure where my marriage stood and being that I was confused about that, it was a constant bone of contention between my former husband, "M", and myself.
I had been back in Washington for nearly a month when I came home from work one day and the house was emptied of nearly every single thing, including my children. M had cleared out, completely. I was heartbroken. I knew though that there was little I could do about it. With no local family or any close friends or the financial resources available to fight a long and ugly custody battle, I saw the writing on the wall. I felt as small and insignificant as a gnat and withdrew almost completely into myself.
There are other things that played into all of this...things that are of some consequence, but the bottom line is the same. I was the absentee parent. I could barely fight for my own life, so I didn't see how I could fight for my kids. This "secret" that rests in the murky depths of my soul has so much to do with me not feeling deserving of fighting for my own life. No one truly stood up for me when I was younger, and I never learned how to stand up for myself...until just very recently. I never once felt capable of fighting for my children, something that I will regret until the day I die.
I've been accused of "abdicating" my role as a mother to my three older children, and if that's the way you see it, there's little I can do to change your perception of me. Those that are closest to me know that is not how things truly happened but it also doesn't absolve me of the fact that for more than eight years, I was absent from my older childrens lives. Over the years I have tried to make amends for not being there. Meg and I are still a work in progress and even as close as we are, there are still times when my absence in her life plays a huge role in how we relate to one another as mother and daughter today. As far as my boys? Well, it's no secret that things have not worked out so smoothly in that respect. Time will tell if I am capable of trying to stabilize the very precarious bridge that my relationship with my sons rests upon.
In a way, when the Very Bad Thing (and I know so many of you are getting sick of me referring to it that way, and I really, quite desperately wish I could talk about it. But the case has been settled and as such, there is nothing to talk about.) happened, it not only destroyed me, but it forced me to get the help I needed to deal with this secret that lies buried so deep below the surface. As emotionally and physically nasty, foul and repugnant as The Very Bad Thing was, it tore me down to nothing so that I could begin the long process of rebuilding myself. In doing so, I shared this long kept secret with my psychiatric team and began the journey towards realizing that what happened, the issue behind the secret and then The Very Bad Thing were not my fault but because for so long I'd blamed myself about things that had happened - things that never should have happened.
Harboring this secret caused me to bury myself emotionally and then physically. From dealing with what happened to me as a young girl, to dealing with a highly dysfunctional marriage, not coping after the death of my son, and then completely falling apart after The Very Bad Thing. So much of the dysfunction in my life is a result of this damned secret!
So now I'm writing about things in the best way I know how. I know I say too much, yet at the same time am so vague as to not say anything at all. But it's the best way I know how to deal with this.
What I want to say is this - to the person who started me on a life full of blame, guilt, and secrets. I doubt you read this, I don't even know if you know this place exists, but on the off chance you do, know this... What you did to me, how you took advantage of your position in my life was wrong! I was a toy for you to play with back then and I didn't know any better. I was too terrified to say anything to anyone except to an old lady who was both disgusted and afraid herself to say anything. I didn't know how to cope with what was done to me so I tried to make myself unattractive. I've been doing that ever since. Now? No more!
You no longer hold the power to make me feel like I need to bury the beautiful girl I was or the woman I am. For too long I have hid myself so that no one else will look at me the way you did, do the things you did to me, and take advantage of me the way you did. You are everything that is evil and wrong in the world. For every pound I shed, I divest myself of the dirtiness and horribleness I've felt about myself since you came into my life. I will never be able to replace what you took away from me, but I can build upon the skeleton that you left me with. I can make her strong, healthy, vibrant, and more than that, alive! Alive in a way that she never was. For every pound I lose, I gain several more in power...power that you took away from me.
I don't hate you. Yes, I feel something akin to contempt for you but I also feel very sorry for the pathetic and miserable person you...a person who got off on doing the things you did to a young girl who wasn't able to defend herself.
I think you should also know that in taking my power back, I told this nasty little secret to not only my psychiatrist but to a few people in my life that needed to know. I no longer want to be as sick as this secret has kept me. I deserve to be the woman I was always supposed to be!
