bag lady chat

In our second lifetime, post abuse, my girls and I lived in a small, two bedroom, second-floor apartment. During the summer, new tenants moved in across from us. A woman and a little girl.

I don’t remember when I started to notice that something was very wrong over there. It seems like maybe it [...]

You may not want to face that danger.
You may decide to wish it away,
pretend it doesn’t exist,
but what you may not know
is how close you might be to terminal violence.

So, you think that you still love your abuser?
Really?
You think that you can work it out with patience and kindness?
Or maybe you think that you can handle it, until it gets better.

Counseling might help.
Forgiveness might work.

Or not.

what draws a woman to a man who berates her?
to a person who takes power over her?
what flame is that with such power over us?

if there is nothing but love
or hate
in this world

which will you choose?

Now that I am old enough to enjoy thoughts of what I want to do when I grow up – and to effect decisions about how i will live my life as it is now – i can finally feel victorious over those painful memories of the impossibility of living the life i was in at the time . . .

Back then, i was unable to create any life at all, for myself and my daughters. I couldn’t make the break with the past and go forward. I couldn’t find the answer – my life was at checkmate.

The grim Reaper waited, hands reaching toward me, willing me to quit. My daughters needed me to be strong, to take care of them, to make a home for them.

Go forward or die.

Some of us are only mildly neurotic about our bodies, and some of us are severely neurotic. This fawker figured out one comeback for every woman alive. I suspect he practices in front of his mirror; as he expects some kind of wrong to happen to him daily. He says: You are a Fat Pig, and now he feels superior. Certainly his command of the English Language is to be applauded.

How will you ever dig yourself out of this hole if you do not love yourself, and your own life, enough to push the emotional rubbish off of your face and climb out? Self-love, amazingly enough, is simply having a basic sense of self-preservation that is intact and functioning.

dreams and wishes are made of moondust
and, if you believe,
little fairies will sprinkle moondust on your eyelids at bedtime
you will have beautiful dreams
and
a beautiful day tomorrow
if
you believe in moondust and fairies
nobody changes, really
we wish they would, but they do not,
we might even pray that they will
but they can not
god will not change him for you
only [...]

I am in favor of the “get out while you can” strategy, rather than that “try again” claptrap that is preached and prodded and counseled by the best of the educated but uninitiated. If you go back, or keep trying to fix the thing, you could end up dead. Or worse. (And yes, I can assure you that there are worse things than being dead.)