Saturday Morning

I have just read the responses to my journal.  So much love, so much caring I see here at DS.  I am truly in awe over this support group.  I have never been on a support group like this.    I feel I am like a cheer leader telling everyone I meet about DS.  Was at a suicide meeting one evening to better understand and help those who are contemplating suicide and the right thing to say when someone is dealing with this issue.  As a vocational rehab worker, we deal with this very issue with the people we work with.  After the meeting was almost over I mentioned DS.  Since there are so many different support groups here, I felt that just maybe someone could use support in dealing with their relative, friend, child or just needing a place to ask questions.  The speaker wrote the site down.  My hope is that they too find the support they need.  I would think there are so many people out there in the universe who feel that lonliness, that despair, that sense that they are the only ones suffering. Having people to hold your hand, to lift you up thru that difficult time truly does heal.  We are all one and as a child of the universe we all belong.  I embrace that love and cherish it.  Since, for so long I did not feel love, only a deep black hole inside my soul, to be loved truly shines a bright light on that black hole.  I do not feel that sense of a black hole any longer.  I feel a lightness, a belief in who I am and a love for who I am.  I have come to a place of accepting me, with all my faults, my frailities.  I know I feel this way because I love Little Jeanette for the first time in my life.  I hated her for a long time.  Thought she was an annoyance, that she would get in trouble and do things that were not in her best interest.  That she would undo all the hard work of healing by sabotaging her recovery.  And she did that even while in therapy.  I know there is stil some residual guilt about all the acting out, but in time that too will pass.  It took me 40 not to deal with the issues of my childhood, so I am sure it will not all go away in a few months or even a few years.  My task now is to undo all the lies told to me, that I was unlovable, that I was a horrible child, that I did not matter.  I do matter!!!!!!!!!! I say that in my head and believe it.  I write these words and belive fully that I am of value.  I do not say these words or write them with any kind of arrogance.  As a child, I was not able to say I am a precious child or I am a good child, or I am valuable in the eyes of others.  That would have been too vain to say those things.  I would have been thought of as a spoiled brat or whatever they would have thought.  So I closed down any feelings of self worth and did indeed hate the very person I was.  Here I sit, 61 years old and look back and say all those lies were to keep me submissive, to keep me down, to keep me hating myself.  But the real truth as I see it is that my foster parents hated themselves, but rather than look at their lives, their wounds, their insecurities, as I am sure they too were abused by their parents, instead they took all that rage, that anger, that despair and dumped it in my lap.  They saw that innocent child in me and capitalized on that vunerability they saw in my spirit.  Hard to understand that a person could feel that much hate and hurt me when all I wanted was to be loved, nutured, cared for.  I still find it hard to believe that there are people out there wanting to hurt.  Can't get around that mindset even to this day.  But I am not THEM.  I am not that heartless, uncaring individual who could ever hurt a person.  I thank God I am not THEM.  Instead I was given a soul, a spirit that was kind and caring and compassionate.  It could have went the other way.  I am very aware it could have gone the other way and I too could have become an abuser.  That was not the case.  I was kind to my son.  Never, ever spanked him, never demeaned him as a child.  I might have neglected him by acting out with other men, and that is still a concern with me, that I might have not been there for him in some ways because I was looking for that love outside of the marriage.    All I can do now is forgive myself for what I did, act out.  Guess in writing this I am still feeling some guilt and shame over how I viewed myself and what I did to get love, when in fact it was never love, just Little Jeanette looking for love in all the wrong places, looking for love in too many faces, when all along that self love was all I needed to stop the damaging behavior I did for many years.  Ah that felt good to get that out of my psyche.  Today I can stand tall knowing I have come so far from what I was years ago.