I found myself trying to find your story.
We had gone through the privacy issue here on the site some time back. I removed my information at that time. I didn't want my kids to be hurt by what I need to do to come back from what has happened to all of us. I will make a new information for all of us because you are right, Iwantpeace. It is helpful to know one another's situations.
I am 63. I have been married to, or living with, my D H since I was 20 and he was 26. We have two children. I was a mom at home. I did all the typical things a mom at home does. Brownies, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, Great Books, P T A. We were a happy family. I believed I had escaped, had changed the course of things, for myself and my children. You may have read some of the things I have posted regarding my Family of Origin issues. Though our daughter had always done extraordinary kinds of things, though she had always had night terrors and oh, I don't know. So much of what I know now, I did not know, then. She was our first child. She was perfect in our eyes, and we dealt with whatever I did not know how to do through other moms, through parenting classes and Dr Ben Spock and books on raising healthy children. Through her pediatrician. But then, all at once, she began ~ there was something wrong, and we knew we could not help her. You come to that place. She began running away. It was like we could not keep her home for love nor money. I think the police were involved by that time. I would call and report my child missing but there comes a time when the police understand what we do not. That your child is out there somewhere, and that however worried you may be, she is only beginning the journey she is about to take you all on. They would say things like a missing child is not missing for 24 hours. And we must have had some kind of social services involved by that time, because someone somewhere told us that for our daughter to hang around the mall in the heart of the city was okay for her to do.
?
And we hated that.
And one day, she was missing, and D H and I took off work and went there to hunt her down and bring her home. And we spotted her with a man. (We later found out a man who took away little girls just like ours and set them up as prostitutes in a very large city to the south of us.) We didn't even have a clue that could happen to us in that time. We spotted our daughter. D H crooked his elbow between one of hers and I did the same to the other elbow, and we dragged her, kicking and screaming, out of that mall. When we got her home, we called therapists to see who could take us that day. An adolescent crisis center in our city could take her 45 minutes sooner than one of the therapists I had found who would have been able to take us that day.
So, we took her there.
She was there for two weeks.
That was a very bad mistake, that we did that. Or maybe it wasn't. We only have the terrible results of the things we do to help our children to gauge the successes of our actions on. The thing is that the unspoken question was what family pathology was this troubled child acting out. The unspoken accusation was that she was acting out unspoken pain. They told us initially that our daughter bore all the symptoms of a child without a father in the home. Well, that wasn't it because D H was there, waiting for her, before she was ever conceived. They told us home was not safe for her. They told us she needed treatment or she would die.
They told us she was alcoholic.
She was only fourteen. She was blond and blue eyed and she played the violin and took ballet classes.
And they told us there was no difference between treatment facilities.
And that was a total lie and we know that now but we did not know that, then.
And all of this kicked in my Family of Origin stuff big time.
And somewhere along the way, our son began using drugs and got addicted and we missed that somehow. And we could never in a million years believe in that addiction piece because something was not right with our first child, too.
It was for our son that I found this site. I think it may not have existed when our daughter was ~ when what happened to our daughter began to happen. We had a computer, but the internet was a new thing, back in that time.
Well, let's see.
So, up and down, helping one or both kids. Our daughter had a child. That is another level of vulnerability, another kind of horrible disappointment, unimaginable to anyone who has not gone through it. The father was ~ whoa. Unbelievable to us that this could be happening. That any of this could even be happening. It was like we could not think fast enough to identify all the bad things that kept getting worse. Somewhere in there, I decided it must be that I had hurt both my kids in the ways I had been hurt by my family of origin and then blocked it out. So, I went into therapy to find it and fix what I had done.
And I kept not finding it.
So I took the same kind of leap I take here regarding FOO issues, and enacted some pretty scary therapy to find out whether I was evil, or just plain stupid, or what. But the therapist was not a therapist but only a holistic physician, and something called counter transference happened. And though I am posting mostly about our daughter here, our son was into and out of the ongoing wreckage of addiction.
And at one point, we took our granddaughters in. When I brought them to the school here, we learned they could not enroll them because we did not have guardianship.
So, I learned to home school.
And we did okay, because the next year, they went right into the next grade with flying colors.
But that was a pretty hard thing, too.
Our daughter was somehow enamored of men from a culture where woman beating is normal. Both our granddaughters are children from that culture, too. So, no matter how many times we put everything right for our daughter, she would always go back to on or the other of the abusive males who had fathered her first two children so the children could know their fathers.
Our daughter became a teacher. A math/science teacher. She worked, and loved working with, disadvantaged kids who were really bright and just sort of pissing their lives away.
And she was very, very good at what she did.
Three years ago now, she walked in on a male teacher in a closet with one of her former male students.
Which reawakened old trauma. She did the right thing, told her principle, was primary witness for the charges that were pressed and so on. The teacher was a former Marine or something. A big man, a mean man, a man whose job it was to deal with the unruly students in this school devoted to students with these issues. He threatened our daughter. Did things like tie dead squirrels to the door handle on her van. And that reawakened everything she had fought down having to do with all the bad things she had done, and all the bad places she had been.
So, she moved home.
And right smack into those same old friends from her past.
And she had four children by this time, three living at home.
And when we went South that year, our daughter fell apart altogether. But what we heard was mostly ~ there was nothing specific. Nothing I could know to call Social Services and tell them to get the kids out of there until we could get home. The police did checks on her for me and found nothing wrong enough to take action, either. Family here checked her, too. Something not right, but nothing wrong enough to merit coming home or to merit calling in Social Services. Our daughter's ex husband went to visit his sons at Christmas. And walked into a living nightmare. Addiction, drugs, homeless people, vicious criminals. So, he got the kids out of there ~ all three of them, though only two were his. And our daughter was evicted and went homeless and we got stuck for that because we had co-signed. And winters there are often thirty degrees below zero. And she was so battered and addled and addicted. (!) And all I could hang onto was that the kids were safe with the ex-husband. And I couldn't know what to do about the guilt I felt at all the things I should have done. She was state mandated into treatment. When her tax return came in (working teacher with a life and a fiancee and a home nine months before, remember) she escaped and took a taxi back to that city and those people. She would be homeless for some months. We would be sending money. She would come in off the streets the very day, I would receive the call ~ the very moment, we were leaving for the airport to collect our Southern neighbor. So, we brought clothing for her, picked her up off the streets, and went to the airport to collect our neighbor, who did not know a thing about our children. Which was awkward, but he is a very nice man, and our daughter is so funny and sweet and honest about pretty much everything.
So, we got through that somehow.
And our son was still addiction boy, with everything that implies.
But somehow, we got through that. I had come back onto the site at some point as we were going through what happened with our daughter. And then, our daughter and the father of her youngest daughter, who was thirteen then I think, fell back into love and then, back into addiction, together. And just after Thanksgiving a year and a half ago he beat her over a period of three days and left her for dead. But she did not die. There was bone damage, and there was brain damage. She was emotionally labile, she was not able to maintain her balance.
Oh, somewhere in there, the male she was living with while homeless and we were still down South ~ after she ran from the state mandated treatment center this was. And he crashed her van into a stone wall in an attempt to kill them both.
This is what I mean, when I post about every new trauma punishing us back into the unresolved old ones. Even now when I am only posting to you, I am getting the trauma times confused.
So I know what I'm talking about when I post that to one of the others of us.
So. The beating. (The male I just popped back into trauma mode about beat her too. Same culture. I am posting now about the beating in November of 2013.
Well, there are grandchildren in here, and there are other really bad things that happened, but that is the basic story.
The male who beat her in November of 2013 was charged at the Federal level. He is in a Federal prison currently. But here is the twist: I trusted and believed in and loved him, too. He is the father of one of my grandchildren. I know his mother, his sister, a niece.
I have watched him grow up, suffered when he fell.
And I don't want to lust for vengeance, but I do. And I don't know what to do with any of it.
Our daughter is miraculously doing well. We did not enable. We did not bring her home. We did not take our grandchild or our grandchildren. Though, somewhere in here, our son called demanding we take he and his son.
So, we just stood that and said no and no and no.
And that hurt us, but anything else we had done hurt us too. So all we could do was stand up. That is how I know what I mean when I post that we are flying by the seats of our pants with our hearts in our throats.
That is how I know that true thing.
And our son is doing well now, for now, too. Little rough around the edges; times when he hates us (me). Times when he needs the strength in me, times when he doesn't know how to see his way through challenges of his own.
Hearts in our throats, flying by the seats of our pants.
So, the only thing I really know is that loving them, loving ourselves if we can do it, that's how to keep moving through it. That is why I want those family of origin issues clarified. I cannot do therapy at a level deep enough to risk vulnerability to any one person ~ not after that first therapist.
So I am doing that here, with all of you, and I am so limitlessly grateful for each of you.
And that's my story.
It's like Leonard Cohen's "Halleluiah" the way kd lang sings it.
It's like looking into the eyes of the Mary, holding her own Son.
How do we learn to suffer, and to savor our lives, still? Well, like that. Like this, like what we do, here on the site, for one another.
So, I will put some little something about all this on my identification piece, because you do merit that. It's just hard to know what to put.
:O)
Here is a quote that helped me. It's from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.
The quality of Mercy is not strain'd
It falleth like the gentle rain from Heav'n
upon the place beneath.
It is twice blest;
it blesseth him that gives
and him that takes.
Tis mightiest in the Mighty.
