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Eagle, I have read your book and your posts for years, and not until your post above did I understand that you suffered from verbal/emotional abuse. I think you did not explore this in your book.



Lynn, I skirted around the periphery of it in Chapter 1, but never really delved into it. It wasn't until my therapist asked me point blank "Did your Mother love you?" that I completely broke down and finally came face to face with the truth and extent of that abuse. What's always been confusing and agonizing to me is that she was a wonderful, generous, kind, lovely woman to everyone else. My two youngest brothers lived with a completely different mother. It wasn't until the mid 1990's that they too began to see the cruelty that I had lived with. After one incident that sent me down to the basement sobbing, my Dad came after me and told me that he had known she was mentally ill ever since just after they got married. But he hadn't known how cruel she had been to me...and he never knew that she had always warned me (since very early childhood) never to tell him anything or else I would make him have a heart attack, thereby stealing my Dad away from me...I lived my entire childhood scared to approach my Dad for fear that I would be the one to kill him!

Anyway, I always knew there was something at the root of the woundedness. You know from my PM's that I thought it was abuse that I couldn't remember. This is what it turned out to be. Again, invisible and insidious, no scars, but lifelong fallout from the damage. We're fixing that. As you've said elsewhere, it's impossible to ever completely remove the smudge, or repaint history so that it never existed, but I'm finally learning how to reclaim my life and not allow the past to steal any more of my joy.
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When you don't like a thing, change it.
If you can't change it, change the way you think about it.

(Maya Angelou)