JANUARY 9, 2019: “Agreement One” …

… and yet ANOTHER lightbulb moment! Or rather, should I say, LIGHTENING BOLT moment? This morning, while scrolling through my Facebook feed, I stumbled across this illustration (ownership unknown). Upon closer inspection I all but jumped out of my own skin as I headed frantically to an old box of drawings I’d sketched throughout my late teens and early twenties, which for those of you who didn’t already know, was the beginning of my outward struggle with a debilitating mental illness. As I scrambled through that dusty box, the memories literally flooded me. I couldn’t help but feel that I’d sketched something hauntingly similar to the image I’d just seen on the feed. Then, BAM!

THERE IT WAS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BOX! Yet another missing link in the diary of my perfection.

Meanwhile, I have given birth to three children in this lifetime. First, there was my Christian, “the other pea in my pod“, to wit it’s no big secret to the handful of people who know us both well that we are actually one in the same. Born into similar worlds of contingent based relationships where our overall human value was merely as good as we could ever be. No deeds, words, behaviors, or actions were ever quite good enough for any consistent or unconditional favor, and both forgiveness and grace had to be earned. We have the same shattered hearts, same missing pieces, and heard virtually the same less than optimal words from our fathers repeatedly, creating the sick, dark, lonely chasms deeply engrained within each of our souls. On the surface? Both Christian and I appeared to have it all and to have been given everything we could have needed for success in our seemingly picture-perfect childhoods and adolescences. If only. It’s not as easy as you would think to get out there and fly with burnt and mangled wings.

Next, there was the little one who passed go, but never collected the $200 before her tiny little feet hit the board. She was both the greatest gift and greatest tragedy of my life, wrapped softly in a yellow blanket and sent straight back Home in angel’s wings. Still, even with an often daily struggle with the hole in my heart that belongs to her, I must admit that there have been days that I’ve thanked God that He took her out of here before the pain and struggle of simply “existing” became her any longer than the few short hours she spent here.

Then, there was my Gia. The pièce de ré·sis·tance light of my life, and the very reason I finally found the courage some ten plus years ago to begin the arduous task of ripping the infamous Venom suit desperately off my sick and worn out mind and body once and for all.

My point being this this:

My two living children have been raised in virtually polar opposite environments. Well, for the most part. As was the case was for me, my son spent what were supposed to be the most innocent and carefree years of his life with a toxic array of “little toy guns” filled with hate, shame, anger, guilt and rage all but spat directly into his once unscarred and trusting heart and cemented permanently into his psyche. My daughter, on the other hand, once and finally removed from the cyclically toxic environment I bore her to, has, for the most part, had two healthy parents in the home in which we’ve dwelled since Zack came into our lives. No hate. No shame. No anger. No guilt. No rage being spewed into the depths of her heart. At least not on our watch! In this home, there are not one, not two, but three human beings who are cherished. Human lives that are treasured. Precious emotions, feelings, vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and differences that are validated, if not celebrated when possible.

With that, although the ultimate damage and survival reports are yet to be determined, it does appear that Gia is faring much better thus far as a result of the healthy words and ideals that are filling her mind by the driving forces in her life. Emotional and verbal assaults from parent to child are the crippling cause of a wide variety of adult mental illnesses and psyches, and from what I can tell you from my own experience watching two different children being raised in two totally different environments? Children do learn what they live! So please, if you are reading this, be careful what you are spewing into your babies’ ears. You only get one shot to fill those precious minds of theirs with hope, optimism and the potential for a lifetime of grace, not just for others, but themselves as well.

AGREEMENT 1:

Be Impeccable With Your Word!

Can you guess what the saddest part of this drawing of mine from 29 years ago is? Looks like I clearly had all this information within me before I even realized it, and what a fool I was not to heed my inner voice LONG before I finally did. Thankfully, because of my daughter AND my son, I finally found the courage to walk away from a childhood filled with “all the words I never needed to hear” and likewise a former marriage filled with the same. In true phoenix style I took hold of my little girl and lifted her out of not only my endless sea of madness and mountains of ashes, but as many future ashes of her own I could possibly foresee. Here’s hoping my Gia will be the first emotionally wealthy person to have grown from the twisted branches she came from only to find an equally healthy man to fill both hers and their children’s ears with only the most beautiful “words”.