Please excuse the mess, it's a little chaotic down here right now. I put up my Christmas tree last night and today RD and I put the ornaments on. Yes, that's a FedEx Office beacon as my star...it seemed fitting. And yes, that is also RD on the couch with her laptop. We like to blog together.

I have a dillema with Christmas trees I have to admit. I really love them because the lights are so nice to look at. I enjoy putting the ornaments on and I enjoy remembering where some of them came from. It's not extremely sentimental but I remember the excitement as a kid of putting up the tree and the anticipation of Christmas morning. It's the one holiday I could count on not being a total disaster. I enjoyed the morning opening gifts and our family being kind to one another. Some of the ornaments on my tree are from the year I was born which is nuts..but super cool to have items that have been consistent each year in my life. At least some things belonging to me were not taken, destroyed or tainted by my mother.

The other part of the whole Christmas tree ordeal is that it represents to me when my father died. During my fathers first suicide attempt the paramedic practically knocked the tree down trying to move the stretcher out and all I can remember thinking of was how angry I was that they broke ornaments that were special. We had these glass bulbs with our names on them that each of us received our first Christmas and my fathers and my own were knocked off and shattered. A few others also came down and I remember cutting my fingertips on them as I tried to pick the pieces out of the carpet after my father was taken to the hospital. It was a strange thing to be focused on at a time like that but the attention I was giving the tree was far more safe than what was actually going on. I remember clear as day the sound of the ornaments cracking under the EMT's huge black boots. The next image I have burned into my brain is the blood that spattered from my fathers successful suicide onto the Christmas tree behind him when he shot himself. I remember finding those spatters the following year as we opened the boxes of ornaments from our summer home to decorate the second tree in our regular house. I remember the look of horror on my sisters face and the way she touched the blood as if she were trying to connect with my Dad. And then I remember Christmas that year...four days after he died. My mother trying to get us to open the presents that we did have, the ones my father bought for us. How could she do that. The last present my father got for me was a beautiful porcelain doll he purchased on a trip to Maine. She had red hair and a velvet green dress. It was the only present for me. Then shoot to the next memory, at my fathers memorial service the day after Christmas. The church was still decked out for the Christmas services and the smell of pine and candles burning filled the sanctuary. How could it look so beautiful when everything going on was so ugly? How were these decorations still up? And why are they so gorgeous? All that together and the first things I think of from that time are trees and the Celine Dion song "Another Year has gone By" to which my mother cried at, as if she cared about my Dad. And snow, it fell while we poured my Dad's ashes into the water.

It seems unfair at times how much destruction and filfth that my family has poured over things that should be beautiful. I am thankful RD helped me decorate and that my tree is so pretty. I am thankful that Little E is mesmerized by the lights and ornaments the way children should be, but I am sad for the little girl(s) in me that cannot pull apart the icky from the pretty.

My brother in law is extremely OCD and he got it in his head that we would rearrange the entire house, basically everyone got a new bedroom and Little E's bedroom was turned into an office because of it's ridiculously small size. I was moved to the basement...again. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand it gives me a lot more space and quiet time than my bedroom upstairs gave me and on the other hand it is the place that one of my most horrific traumas occurred. Everything about it is different, including the fact that I have a futon instead of a bed which was my choice because I prefer a couch like sleeping area versus a bed some nights. I have a couch and my 'therapy' chair which is the same IKEA chair that Therapist has in her office. All very different, actually it's a pretty awesome hang out space. But the light is the same, the walls are currently the same color and the smells are the same. That was such a difficult fall to begin with and then when the final straw landed when my mother entered our home and waited for me that one night...where she violated me in the worst ways and convinced parts of me that Therapist was the person that harmed me. I am waking up each night around that time with terrible anxiety and a desire to run outside. It's difficult to stay put and endure the night without the hope or comfort that I can speak with Therapist the following day so she can externally confirm that it was not her that harmed me. I miss that a lot right now. I miss being able to connect with her to convince myself that she has done nothing and that it was my mother in my room that night. Most of me knows this and that is helpful and comforting but as I had suspected there are still parts of me that hold onto the delusion that it was Therapist because it's too painful for them to believe it was my mother. That is a difficult grasp to break.

Sitting down here reminds of that time in my life, where reality was so unbearable and when my life shattered into a million pieces. That one act took 5 months inpatient to cope with, to get to a point where my system was not in utter chaos just from seeing Therapist walk by. A time where I was so torn about her place in my life that it was torture. Parts of me knew it wasn't her and others fought to almost death to defend my mother. The only way out of it that I saw was to end my life and I was determined to do so. It was a place where every object around me could be fashioned into a way to harm me. It was time that I was in such desperate need of Therapist but terrified of her at the same time. It's a time where dissociative barriers were being actively eroded in my therapy process when I still needed them to protect my brain and experienced a trauma without them fully intact. It took a really long time to repair the damage done that night, not just months in the hospital but years for Therapist to get to a place where we felt like 95% of me trusted her.

I am trying to make new memories here while still honoring those inside that have the memories right there...pressing on them. It's a tough place to be in but I have faith that I have the strength to win it. I want to win it which is different than before. I want my life to be my own and not my mothers. I want places that were stolen from me to become my own and safe again. I want to look at these walls and etch the way it is now into my brain versus the way that it was. It can be different right?

Last week I spoke to Therapist for a decently long time and enjoyed it. I felt like I was a kid at Christmas and it was nice. Not all of it was so sad and Therapist had a great opening story. I really miss hearing her talk like that. It was overall really helpful and it gave me the boost that I needed. It was kinda like the feeling when you wrap your favorite blanket over you and you're just comfy and happy. I really needed that! Almost a verbal hug if you will. I am thankful, so thankful for our conversation.

It is however, becoming increasingly difficult to stop my brain from processing trauma related matieral. I had a decent handle on it for the first month but currently I am struggling with a few overwhelming memories. I am unsure if I should be blogging about them or trying to process them on my own because of their content but at the same time it's not helping keeping it locked up inside. I suppose that putting it out there is no more harmful than keeping it in my head on constant repeat.

My mind continues to float back to the late fall in my childhood when I was probably around 11 or 12 years old. I can remember my backyard so intensely that it frightens me. The details of the trees and the way the light hit with different weather patterns, the smell of the moldy and wet ground, the sounds of the leaves and grass crunching below my feet. I can distinctly remember the smell of the chimney smoke in the neighborhood and how deadly quiet it would be on cold afternoons. I remember what it felt like to walk to edge of our property from our garage and taste the almost freedom from crossing the tree line to head deep into the woods away from the world. I also remember the anxiety I felt as I would pass our shed to the treeline, crossing so carefully in front of it as if the doors would open by themselves to yank me inside to the darkness. After the shed would be the wood pile where my father stored all our firewood for the season. It was just an open slate with a roof over it but it was exciting when he built it because I could climb on the top and hide up there on summer days. The sun would warm the top because the shingles were black, sometimes hot enough to make the backs of my legs red. I would lay up there with my towel and book and "tan". Once past the wood storage I would then pass my half of a treehouse. My father once decided he would built me a tree house that wasn't really in a tree. He constructed a frame that was speared into the ground. He connected the four posts with 2x4's and began to lay the flooring which only ever ended up being three 2x4's nailed to the frame. He never finished it and in the winter it stood there looking as naked and dead as I felt. It was like a monument to the childhood I never got yet tried so hard to gain. I remember sitting on those three little planks and pretending that my fort was finished. I would play up there for hours...no one ever thought to finish it for me.

Anyway, if I made it to the tree line uninterrupted I would get a wild feeling inside my stomach and I would take off running as fast as I could. My legs would burn and my ankles would give out often causing me to trip and jerk around against the trees. I am not sure why I felt as if I could run so freely after that point or what exactly I felt in those moments but I assume it's what a wild animal feels once it's freed from a trap. It's a sickening excitement mixed with fear and relief. I imagine my blood pressure to be very high and my heart would pump faster than it should. Maybe it was because it was so rare that I actually made it to the line that I became so excited...

Most often my mother would shout from the deck at me before I could take off. It was such a dangerous trip for me to try to make undetected because her hang out was most often in the kitchen which had a huge bay window that faced our backyard. She would see me and stop me before I made it. I would hear the door slam shut and turn to see her putting her jacket and boots on. I always felt so damn stupid for being out there because it was just steps away from the shed, her favorite place to torture me. No one would hear me from there. It was almost an invitation for her to go ape shit on me but the times I did make it in to the woods were my favorite. I had a safe spot out there, a whole fort I had made on my own. I kept snacks out there so I could binge when I was starving and I had a few toys that hadn't been ruined by her yet. I also kept my journals out there...I wonder if they are still there?

The shed, oh that horrible shed. It matched the colors of our home which were a sickening cream and a deep brown. It reminded me of a Boston cream doughnut and I hate those kind of doughnuts. The doors were locked with a deadbolt and only my parents had access to the keys. Inside there were no working lights unless my mother brought the lantern with her and there was only one small window in the back at the top. The flooring was just large slats of wood that had never been swept or cleaned since we built the damn thing and they wore my badges of courage on them. Everywhere were splatter stains and most of them were a deep crimson color. It smelled of oil and grass clippings and sometimes reeked of a dead animal or two. On the walls were rusty nails with all kinds of items hung from them, mostly rusty chains or gardening tools..but in the back left corner is where one funnel always rested. On the back wall below the window was a workbench my father had built with a vice on either side. An old can filled with nails, screws and pencils stayed in the exact same spot on the right for my entire childhood. Did anyone ever use the pencils in there? Probably not. Under the workbench was my mothers tacky toolbox which is where she kept her 'secrets'. She kept her torture devices in there is what she really did, but she told Dad it was her secret box and she kept in that way with a huge lock on the front of it that bore her initials. K.G.M. Underneath was also a wooden chair that my Dad had made for me but my mother despised being in the house. So she moved it somewhere more useful. My Dad had a lot of talent in woodworking only I wished he didn't when he made that stupid chair. It was more sturdy than the Berlin Wall and the armrests were perfect for my mothers chains.

Hearing the sound of that chair and her toolbox being scraped across the plank floor still haunts me. As soon as I heard it I would look up at the little window and watch the particles in their air floating through the stream of light and imagined what it would be like to ride on one of them. Once I was fastened in she would close the doors to the shed, it would click shut and she'd turn on this tiny flashlight. It usually rested on one of the shelves to the left of me, casting shadows on the walls from the shelving. It was a small black flashlight that most people would keep in their car but it was metal like a police flashlight...sturdy. Terrible things happened in that shed, things that no one should ever have to think about and I despise my brain for remembering. I lost myself in there at times, and only now am I trying to get it back. So many of my flashbacks are from in there and what makes me nuts is that I can't see much in them because the light wasn't bright enough to make out anything but shadows. People tell me that I ALWAYS have my eyes shut in my flashbacks and I think to myself that it doesn't matter because even when they were open I couldn't hardly see. My BODY remembers everything. It's as if my body experienced it all and my eyes were left out of it. When it comes to memories in which I can actually see it's easier for me to connect with the moment and the little girl that experienced it because I can see myself. I usually remember what I was wearing or what my feet looked like and I know how small and vulnerable I was. I feel sadness for those moments. For these, it's difficult because not only was I fighting my mother I was fighting some invisible entity which my body felt. The mind/body connection just doesn't always happen for me.

This fall I am trying to experience the same sights, smells and sensations that the Maryland outdoors and weather has to offer in a less traumatic way. So far it's working decently. But I'll keep you updated.

Traces - Album by Peter Bradley Adams

Wake Up - Arcade Fire

Maybe - Ingrid Michaelson

Kids - MGMT

The Heart of Life - John Mayer

Little Things - Pomplamoose

Breakeven - The Script

Feel Good Drag - Anberlin

What are you listening to?

OMG!!!!! Squarespace finally got their app approved!!!! I can now update via iPhone which is so much better for all of us. Yay!