Connecting Some Dots ...

 I think.

I woke up with a really interesting and direct though this morning. It was the fact that I could recollect the very moment when things changed regarding my Abandonment Issues.

The moment everything took a drastic, dark, and dangerous turn in that regard. I can remember now, with sharp exactitude, the very moment when the synapses in my cerebra were chemically and biologically altered to the point of radical ramifications.

Please understand that I am not pointing blame to anyone—I promise that I am not saying that it's anyone fault. What I am saying is that I am identifying when the real problem started and how it changed my life.

March 2007

I found myself back in my parents home with all four of my children due to a very ugly and awful breakup. One in which I lost everything. Literally, everything. Including my dignity. I was a very broken woman. A broken woman who didn't even know who she was anymore, and was doing her best to get by and stay strong for her kids.

I did the only thing that I knew how. I tucked the pain away as deeply as I could, proverbially "sucked it up" and "kept on trucking" for the sake of my kids.

I was not given permission to deal with the pain, nor did I know how.

I was not give permission to mourn, nor did I know how.

I was told by the only people I had left in my life—my family—that "oh well, shit happens" and that I just needed to find a way.

I had fallen so far into a darkness that was choking my every waking second that I didn't know how to get out of it. Furthermore, I had no way out. Much less, someone to turn to.

Yet, in all of this smut, I was trying as hard as I could to heal.

But there was ONE light in the midst of all of the chaos.

Above it all, I had my kids. They were my life. My everything. Especially my eldest. She was my best friend. We'd grown up together. We'd been through it all together. She was so special to me because she was my confidant and my daughter. She was my angel and my child.

I admit that when one is in that type of pain, one doesn't make the best choices. One of the choices that I made that wasn't the best, was dating when I wasn't ready. When, in fact, my kids weren't ready for me to either.

And to make matters worse, my parents were being devils incarnate. So—this was something that I found out much later—whenever I went on a date and left my mom to babysit, she put the responsibility on my eldest daughter.

She would leave my eldest to babysit her younger siblings when it my mom who supposed to do it.

One day we had a HUGE blow-up, family fight.

When I say huge, I mean it was FUCKING HUGE.

However, if you'd ask me now what it was about I couldn't tell you because I don't remember.

That day, tempers were flying and Amanda said something snarky.

Hell if I remember what it was. I flipped shit. I yelled like a freaking banshee at her.

Her response was to leave. She just up and left and didn't tell me where she was going.

That wasn't like her.

I didn't see her again until the next week.

I, of course, blew up her cell phone, I searched the entire block, I even called the cops, until I ran into one of her friends who told me that she had been at her boyfriends house that whole time. I had him tell me where that was and I drove over there.

She came out.

I ordered her to go back home.

She did.

That led to yet another argument, in which she packed up some stuff and left home.

She moved out and moved in with him and his family.

Mentally I was in such a fucked up place that I thought, "If she wants to leave me too, then so be it." I realize now that this was the beginning of a very unhealthy way of coping with loss.

So much happened after that. Soooooo much! Too much to write about here.

But I know this.

In a matter of some months I'd lost the man I had given everything up for, and loved too much. I'd lost my home, my safety, my identity, my dignity, my life, and now ... my child and best friend. The only best friend I had at the time.

The only thing I remember after that is pain and anger, anger and pain, and pain and anger some more.

Blindly, ardently.

Just furiously blind with pain and anger but fervently trying to push it aside for the rest of my kids.

I cried myself to sleep for months on end after that, if not well into a couple of years.

But no amount of tears shed lent to any sort of alleviation of the pain and anger.

That incident altogether changed the way I saw the world.

Now, I was resolved that I would never be hurt like that again.

But wouldn't you know it ...

The times after, when I tried to trust again, I was let down profusely. Again. Abandoned, again. Hurt, again.

This only cemented my belief that allowing people too close would lead to more heartache. With time, and many more shitty experiences from tons of shitty people, all I see now is red. Red. All the time, red. Red with anger and pain, and bitterness, and a sense of potentially being abandoned. Again.