Recently my son had a med check at the doctors office. We go every 4 months to make sure he is growing properly, gaining weight and that the medicine is not harming him in any way. ADHD medications are stimulants afterall and they have been known to stunt growth and cause heart problems. We keep a tight eye on the Wild Child so that we can be sure he is staying on track. So far, so good. When he was on Adderall he slowed down a little in his upward growth and the weight was a constant battle, since switching to Concerta he is doing much better.  He is now just over 5 feet tall and weighing in at 81.5 pounds!  Of course my Wild Child likes to compare himself to me and so he asked if I remember how tall I was and what I weighed at his age....I do remember but I wasn't sure if I should tell him.

See when you go into foster care you get a full physical at a pediatricians office. The doctor checks everything including height and weight. Now I knew my height, I was 4 feet 7 inches. I remember it because I had been 4 feet 7 inches since I was 9 years old. At 9 years old I stopped growing in height, I didn't grow a single centimeter, I have no idea why my school nurse couldn't figure out that something was wrong in my house since I had not grown in 2 years, but in any case I remember it bothering me that I was still 4 feet 7 inches tall. So at 11 years 4 months old I was 4 feet 7 inches tall and I weighed in at 42 pounds! Just over half my sons current weight! I was nothing but skin and bones! I always wondered why I didn't have that fat belly like those starving african kids on tv,  it didn't make sense to me since I too was clearly starving to death. I remember hating those commercials on tv because those celebrities on the screen seemed to care more about the starving kids on the other side of the world and they completely ignored the fact that there were starving kids right here in the United States, kids like me.  So yes, I knew my height and weight but I did not tell my son that, I simply said it was 30 years ago. I didn't tell him that I remember being called "String Bean" and people joking about how I could stand under a clothesline in a rain storm and not get wet because I was so skinny, I simply told him  how boys and girls are very different at this age and so it wouldn't be a very good comparison anyway. I will admit this one thing....this conversation with my son made me a little sad.

The older my son gets the harder things become. He's curious to know what my life was like and how it compares to his and I can not share it with him. I can't for so many reasons! I don't want him to know the horrors that surrounded my everyday existence,  I don't want him to picture his mother as that vulnerable little girl getting beat down every single day. I don't want him to know that kind of horror even exists in the world! I don't want him to know my shame. I only want him to see the strong person I have become, I want him to see the person I am now and not the path that got me here and then I find myself asking....can he ever truly see the strong person without seeing the trials that I passed through? I hope he can because there are some paths of life that are just too dark to share with him. My hope is that he will simply accept that my parents were bad  evil people who will spend their eternities in the deepest pits of hell! I hope that he can accept that my childhood is one subject that we don't talk about much because it wasn't good and that his life is a walk in the park compared to mine. Maybe someday, when he is older, I can give him a small window to look through into my life. I know there are some windows into my past that will remain darkened forever and I will never share with him. Not because I don't love him, but because I do love him and I just don't want him to know. Those are the windows that no one sees into, the windows that gets written down in a journal and burned because no one, not one single person, needs to know! The evil is too dark, it is the source of nightmares, it is stuff that even I don't want to know about but I dragged out of my head because it was holding me back from being the happy person  I wanted to be. When you know the evil you can let it go and become a better person, when you don't know the evil it festers like a cancerous tumor and it spreads deep into your soul keeping you in the pits of despair and depression without you even realizing it. I knew I had a dark past so I knew the root of my depression and I had the ability to pull those roots out and destroy them once and for all and it has made me a better person. I realize I shouldn't be ashamed of my past, it is what made me the person I am today and in no way was it my fault. I fully comprehend that fact, but it's not the stuff that makes good conversation  and so it stays hidden where others can not see, where others do not know, until I put it here in this blog for anyone and everyone to read. Maybe I can help someone else find and destroy their evil roots, maybe some good can come from all this, Maybe. Just Maybe


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sur·viv·al/sərˈvīvəl/Noun 

 The state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances.

 

It's what abuse victims do, it's the only thing you can think about from the moment you wake up till the moment you fall asleep.  It's in your dreams, it's in your waking thoughts, it's all you desire every single moment of every single day.

sur·vi·vor/sərˈvīvər/Noun 1. One who remains alive or in existence. 2. One who carries on despite hardships or trauma; one who perseveres

It's what abuse victims want to become, it's what you fight for because you know there's something better out there in the world. Once achieved it's something you are proud of, something you desire to share with others so that they can learn to become one too. It's what you become after you accept that you were a victim and you made it out alive, it's what you hope all victims can one day become because you know it sucks to be a victim, it's much better to be a survivor! 

I am a survivor and I am proud of that! 

Although I do not share every tiny piece of my terror, it was there, it was real, and I made it out alive. How much longer did I have? One can only venture a guess. A day, a month, maybe even years. I might have survived to adulthood, after all some of my older siblings made it there and the others were almost there. I stood half a chance, but something tells me if the state had not stepped in when they did I would not be here now to tell you my tale. I would be a distant memory, that's what my gut tells me anyway. My egg donor was evil and she became more evil and bitter by the day. She had evil roots too, I know that. She gave what she got. Instead of turning around and walking away from the dark evil path she chose to continue upon it like some dumb blonde in a bad horror movie. She kept walking right into the grips of evil and I think by the time we were taken away she had walked so far into the darkness that she could no longer see the way out. She was lost forever in her own deep darkness and that is what makes me believe that I would not have made it out of that house alive. That and the fact that she tried to kill me and once my siblings were gone off on their own there would have been no one to save me. Realizing you are a survivor is the easy part, the healing takes a lot longer. There is no bandaid for this kind of wound, all we have is time.

Recently I have been having dreams, I think they are more like flashbacks, but none the less they happen at night when I am asleep so I call them dreams. I don't know exactly why I have been having these particular dreams, but they are disturbing enough that I feel the need to get it out of my head and onto my blog wall. I find that whenever I have recurring dreams and then I put them down here the pain goes away and the dreams stop. Since I don't like having these dreams over and over again, I am all for doing whatever it takes to make them stop.

The dreams always start out with me as a little girl visiting my Uncle Victor and his wife. Now honestly I can not, for the life of me, remember his wife's name, we simply called her Mrs. Chin. Mrs. Chin had this long pointy chin and she always sat in a position similar to the Thinker Statue, you know elbow on knee and chin resting on the hand. My egg donor said that's what gave her such a big chin and I actually believed her at the time.  Anyway, we would go over there and then Uncle Deano would show up. I think he lived in the house next door or something, but I can't seem to picture it so I can't be sure. I just know whenever I went there he came by. He would always volunteer to take me outside to the barn to play or off to another room away from the adults, and my egg donor always was willing to let me go. The first time he had offered to show me the newborn kittens in the barn so the kitten lover in me had no clue what was going to happen. I got out there and he told me that the kittens only showed up with magic tricks. First I had to give him my shirt and if I took it off a kitten would magically appear. Dumb me listened, gave him my shirt and poof there was a kitten. Then if I took off my pants another kitten would appear. I gave him my pants and poof kitten number two. Then he told me if I closed my eyes and took off my panties that he could make 2 kittens magically appear. I took off my panties. Now by this time you can imagine what was going on with me. I was going into that zone that I have told you about before, that place where I become robotic and the little girl comes out and I do as I am told as if I am not even there anymore. I start to see myself from above, like I'm watching someone else from the ceiling. He produced 2 kittens but he produced them from between my legs. He had me sit down so that I wouldn't drop those little babies. With both my hands full he proceeded to fondle me, to slide his hand up my thigh and put his fingers inside me. I just watched the kittens and cried. I really was no dummy, I knew where this was going from my nightly meetings with the sperm donor and so I knew what I needed to do. I lay there and let him have his way with me and when he was done I put my clothes back on and went back inside the house in hopes of getting some cookies and milk from Mrs. Chin. Uncle Deano was actually one of my other uncles sons, he was a cousin but he was so much older we called him Uncle. He was always there when we visited and he always had his way with me. I hated him but what could I do? I was just a little girl and this is what I had learned was my role in life. I was there to provide satisfaction to older men, I was their play thing and I could never stop playing the game or say that I didn't want to play because then it would be forced on me and it would hurt worse than it already did. I was just a little girl, a victim of a cruel evil world.

Goodbye bad dreams!

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I mentioned my cousin last night, I know she's going to read this so to her and any other abuse victim I want to say this.  I think you're pretty awesome and (to you cousin C)  I hope that we can build a friendship that goes beyond our genes. I hope you too can learn to move forward and love yourself, that you can find the peace inside. I know it's not easy but writing helps so text, start a blog, whatever, just never let the evil win. You got away so now the healing can truly begin! It takes a lot of courage to write these things out and most times when I do I end up crying before the post is over, but then the tears stop and I feel a small scab forming over the wounds inside me and I know that the healing process for that particular piece of my life has begun. I know you and I seem to have a lot in common so I know you have it in you to do this, to heal and be the person you want to be. You are amazing because you too are a survivor! Never let anyone, not even yourself call you a victim anymore!

YOU  WERE ONCE A VICTIM, NOW YOU ARE A SURVIVOR!

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Have a great weekend everyone and remember kittens do not magically appear when you take off your underwear!

Thank you Facebook.....

Facebook is awesome, wanna know why? Let me tell you a really cool tale about facebook and you'll understand.

A short while ago while reading a friend's post I saw a name of a person I knew, she was a cousin of mine that I vaguely remembered. I sent a friend request and she accepted. Well today she sent me a message on facebook, she had apparently seen my link to my blog that I posted on my facebook wall and she came over to read. She read and read and read for 3 hours straight! She sent me a message to tell me how proud of me she was for being a survivor and for speaking up. She saw similarities in our personalities and our choices and she seemed to feel inspired by my words. 2 hours later she is still reading my blog and getting to know me through my words. She actually had thought I was a weird kid.....well I was so I don't hold that against her, but at least now she knows why. The best part about facebook, she's not the only person who has read my blog from my link and then sent me a message about how I had touched them with my words.

I had another friend, about a month or so ago (might have been even longer I am terrible that way lol) send me a message to say that she had read my blog and realized how blind she was to the people around her in high school. Obviously she came from a good family where mom and dad loved one another and their children and she didn't realize this sort of thing happened or just didn't want to know because she was a teenager and she really didn't need to know. She was always nice to me and always had a smile on her face. She always greeted me kindly and I truly appreciated that. She didn't know it, but she helped me get through high school just by being the nice kind person she naturally is.

This is why I write my blog and it's why I decided to periodically link it to my facebook wall, so that others who thought they knew me could understand that weird kid, even if it wasn't me that they knew back then. See, the way I see it is if anyone  reads my blog then maybe they will remember some weird kid from school and think "Wow this sounds like Joe Schmo" and maybe then they will think twice before they judge that shy weird person, maybe then they will think twice about how they see others around them. Maybe they will realize that they were wrong to judge that person as weird and they will think twice before they think that way again. There is usually a reason for people acting the way they do and quite often it boils down to the life you started with and in some cases it's the life you have now. Perhaps that shy woman in the next cubicle that doesn't join in on work parties is belittled and treated poorly by her husband to the point that she has no self esteem left. Perhaps she was abused as a child and simply can't move forward for fear of what might happen because bad things have always happened when she reached out. Perhaps it's both and you just don't know it because she puts on that fake smile everyday, stays to herself as much as possible and tries to stay under the radar.

Why do I love facebook? It's simple, it's because I feel I have made a difference in other peoples lives because of it and I have managed to connect with a cousin who realized her life, although it sucked, wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. Now she has someone she can talk to when she's having a bad day, now she won't feel so alone because she followed a link from my wall.

It's never easy being a mom

Anyone who said it's an easy job, well they simply have never had children and they can not possibly be a mom.  We moms can all understand how it's not a walk in the park and some days contemplating a walk in the park is more of a nightmare waiting to happen. Some days kids just don't want to listen or they think they know more than you do or worse, they actually do seem to know more than you do. Those are the days when you have to just take a deep breath and remind yourself that much like any other job, this one has a learning curve and it seems to change constantly as they grow older. You think you know your kid and suddenly you realize you really don't anymore because they have grown and changed. That's what I am dealing with right now with my Wild Child.

Just this past weekend he went to his grandparents house to stay for a couple of days. It was a much needed break and I learned a whole new appreciation for the term "Silence is golden" when I realized just how stressed I have felt lately. Money is tight, I'm going through menopause and my work is exceptionally slow. There's always some kind of computer glitch or something that keeps me from doing my job and it's not on my end at all. This is totally on their end  but alas, no work means no money which means things will stay tight for a little longer, which means mom is stressed. I know I'm not stressing alone, heck hubby is stressing more than me because he is the big bread winner and his work is slow as well. Hubby and I have a new motto now, "It is what it is" and that's what we are trying to live by. If we have bad days, we hope for a better one tomorrow, it is what it is and there's nothing we can do to change it. We both enjoyed the little break we had while the Wild Child stayed at Gramma's house and we are fully refreshed.

Of course while The Wild Child was away we had the chance to talk which was nice. I swear that child has ears like a hawk and he hears everything. There's no adult conversation with him around because the one thing you don't want him to hear is the one thing he will certainly absorb like a sponge and start asking questions about. Tell him to wash up for dinner or take a shower, in one ear and out the other because he also has selective hearing. So it was nice to be able to have a conversation with my husband without little ears listening in. These are the moments when we can discuss parenting tactics and ideas without the boys input and trust me, that is important. We need to stand united and be able to discuss our opinions on things regarding medications, discipline, and even just everyday activities without the input of the 10 year old. Sometimes we have to argue back and forth and come to a compromise and that is way easier without the wild child lol he's a great kid but when he tries to help all he does is make the other parent feel ganged up on, frustrated and ultimately defeated.  So we enjoyed our time as just us, hashed out some new parenting rules and ideas since he is getting older, and we enjoyed laughing over the old days before there was a Wild Child and every day was a heck of a lot easier than it is now. I even got to vent a bit about my family and the stress that has been caused by them lately. Stress I'm not really ready to talk about on here, but let's just say that Sissy is so mad at me right now that she hasn't answered a text in almost a week! Sometimes it's good to feel like you're a 20-something again with no worries or stresses in your life. Of course after a couple of days of destressing and relaxing, the boy came home and life began again, life the way it is meant to be and a life that really I quite enjoy. It was nice to get things off my chest while he was away, but it's nice to have him back with his laughter and smiles that make every day worth being here for.