<p style=”text-align: left;”>ahh, for cuddles to feel good, not alarming but comforting.</p>
You were a beautiful little girl. You deserved to be surrounded by love. For your mother to laugh at your quirky ways, celebrate your achievements, and build you up in your sad moments.

I find it so hard to imagine child me and give her the love she deserved. I think perhaps it’s because if I’m imagining me as a child it separates me from being able to feel adult love and protection for me – whoever thought of a child caring for themselves in an adult manner??

I can most certainly imagine the lovely little girl you were though, and the love you deserved to have.

I’d throw some poop in her face and smear it all over her face. So, that would have been the last visual memory you’d have of her.

Gold!!! Thank you for standing up for me. I am deeply touched by this, a thing no one has ever done, and here I am watching you do it retrospectively 🌻

I love all your poems. I have zero poetic ability. Thank you.

There is so much more to say but my brain has fried itself reading that you would have washed my hands and led me away. My heart is breaking reading such a beautiful thing.

Instead, I imagine an eagle flying high above you on your morning walk. A hare gallops across your pathway with a fox behind it. The fox is startled by you being there so Mr hare lives for another day. Hopefully no wolves or bears are waiting for you, but if they are, you remembered the pancakes and you’ll throw them in their face, and they’ll lick maple syrup off their faces and forget about you!

– this is almost taken straight from the Cinderella movie:

Ha. I had to clean her bathroom and the children’s bathroom toilet each week too. One time someone blocked the toilet and she made me put my bare hands until the toilet and pull the poos and toilet paper out.

No one has ever been sorry for us, me and siblings. I’m bawling my eyes out now. I can’t focus on the other half because I can only do this much emotion then my brain sort of explodes and distracts itself.

I had a meeting of the eyes and minds with a black bear crossing the road

See! Distraction! Brave medieval Anita approaching a bear on a darkened overgrown lane on a moonlit night, weapons left at her camp fire because she hadn’t planned on wandering so far away.

(at a good distance), on the one day I didn’t carry bear spray with me, and right after I dropped a thick stick that I did carry with me.

See! No weapons! 😂

Judging by the size of the bear, the stick would have tickled him at most, and I would have been his brekkie!

You live in a wild, scary, magical place! I hope when big bear got home his porridge had been tasted by goldilocks!

I love make syrup! And lots of butter. They have jokes at work that I have some crumbs with my slice of butter. I’m thinking let’s go all out and have pancakes and French toast, and I’ll put a pot of coffee and some hot chocolate on, and we’ll sit in the sunshine on my back porch. If we’re up early enough we can catch the sun rise over the trees.

Thank you for helping me, and for caring to help me…

Thank you for caring to help me also!

…the (evil) stepmother and the man who had let her do her thing.

The very last time we went to live with stepmother and father I remember a couple of things about the last two days very well.  Stepmother allowed pancakes for brekkie on Sunday, only I wasn’t allowed mine because I hadn’t done my weeding chores well enough for her and had to go back and do them again, only she allocated me most of the garden as punishment for my poor job – I was 6 or 7 so I’m not sure what standard I did or didn’t meet!  I wasn’t finished until lunch time.  I went in for my pancakes and stepsister and her bestie had eaten my share.  I was so sad.  I had never had pancakes, except for one other time, but those pancakes are another story stepmother included.  I badly sprained or broke my ankle later on that day, but as we were a family that never went to the doctor of hospital I am assuming it was broken, as it bruised to black for almost my whole foot and part way up my leg.  The next day I wasn’t able to go outside.  I sat inside reading and listening to stepsister be nasty to my biological sibling, and sibling crying and asking her not to throw mud in sibling’s face, until sibling finally threw mud in stepsister’s face.  Stepsister fire engine siren screamed her way at great speed in to tell stepmother of sibling’s mortal sin.  Stepmother hauled sibling into sibling’s bedroom and gave sibling a few whacks, then went through sibling’s drawers and wardrobe, taking back all the hand-me-downs from stepbrother and throwing them out of the room.  Then she grabbed some ornaments our grandmother had made sibling and started smashing them.  sibling was so sad when she was taking the hand-me-downs, but when she started smashing sibling’s precious things, sibling started crying.  It broke my heart hearing him.  I hopped down the hall way, on my good foot, and stood up for him.  I told her that stepsister had been throwing dirt in sibling’s face first and had done it a few times before sibling did it back to her.  I told her to stop taking sibling’s hand-me-downs sibling loved and breaking sibling’s precious things.  Then I realised my mistake and got really scared.  I tried to run away, which was a fast hop down the hallway, and she pounded after me.  She stood over me and spit hit my face while she said her piece.  I don’t remember what she said because I was terrified.  She didn’t whack me though, which was a very big surprise.  Then we were taken to our grandparent’s and never returned.  Father was standing watching it all happen, saying nothing.

I don’t stand up for myself because.  Because it’s worse to than to keep it to myself.  Because we lost, because we got sent away, because worse things happen if I do.  We already lost our mother, we lived in four other homes before then and they didn’t want us.  We went to live with our grandparents.  It wasn’t all bad at our grandparents but it wasn’t good.  Lots of beltings.  I loved my grandfather as much as I was afraid of him.  He had a very bad temper.  He hit our grandmother sometimes, not just us, although sibling got it much more than I did, because sibling had a different personality to me.  Grandmother was tiny and gentle and a little bird.  She loved sibling so much.  She sat in her rocking chair cuddling sibling, loving sibling, the poor lost little sibling.  Sibling cried a lot, sibling was younger than me, I was quiet and tried to be a good girl all the time.

I don’t stand up for myself because I lose my loved ones when I do.  My mother cut me off because I stood up for myself.  She was telling lies about something she said I did, something I didn’t do, and I finally stood up for myself and said no that did not happen, you did that.  And she hung up on me and hasn’t spoken to me since.  I know, I know, I’ve lost the mother I dreamt she was, not the mother she was.

I got side tracked, sorry!

I feel anger at this evil stepmother, how dare she???

:'(  :'(  :'(  thank you.  No one ever has.  Thank you :'(

– telling her the truth, your truth, made you feel so evil.. So mean and nasty and dreadful. The worst human in the world because ..

Because.  Because I know what a broken heart feels like.  I know what hurt feels like.  Because hurting anyone is the worst thing I could possibly do.  And I would have hurt her so much saying that.  I might not have, but in my head and heart it would have, because if it was said to me it would hurt so very much.

And feeling undeserving of the enduring, years-long pedestal you placed her on, created a distressing cognitive dissonance in her mind: a lack of agreement between her knowing that she was a bad mother and you so very much not knowing that she was a bad mother. And so, she criticized and rejected you more than she criticized and rejected your siblings, so to cause you to drop her of the pedestal and end her cognitive dissonance..?

This is very confusing to my poor little brain?!?!  Maybe because it’s so far from how I’ve ever looked at her.  I tell you things she’s done but my heart still feels like she’s my fairy mother and perfect.  Intellectually I know she’s not.  But my heart can’t reconcile itself to who she is.

That’s a really good read.  I personally relate to quite a few of the points.  One of my employers said something mean to me yesterday, ‘******?  Who has that for their email address?  It’s just stupid.’  I felt quite hurt, and I replied, ‘I like it.’  But I spent the next half a day brooding on it, feeling hurt that she said such a mean petty thing.  I thought about saying something to her about it but what is the point?  So I am going to allow myself a moment of anger towards her for being so mean and childish.  Ha, can’t muster the feeling of anger!  Repressed!  Suppressed?

“3. Paranoia: Paranoia is a less known impact of repressed anger, but it can emerge. When someone has repressed anger, they can sometimes project it outward. Rather than acknowledging that something has caused them to feel hostile, they project these feelings onto others and perceive others to be hostile to them. They experience the world to be a strange and dangerous place and find it hard to trust anyone. Whenever they assert themselves, even only mildly, they experience an irrational fear that others will retaliate and punish them”– this fits me.. exactly. This has been my lifetime experience that I’ve been aware of for some time and need to continue to change.

This is so raw and honest.  Thank you for sharing.  I feel privileged.

– when I saw that you didn’t reply for a while, my automatic thinking was: SadSoul is angry with me.. because I tried to be funny guessing if she is doing the plumbing or fixing the roof.. she found offense in what I wrote, and she will never post again.. or she’ll let me know how angry she is with me. I felt a combo of fear of the anger-to-come and perhaps some anger at you (I don’t remember feeling the latter, but probably I did).

NO.  I am not angry with you!  I struggle to juggle all my balls.  I leave for work at the crack of dawn and get home after dark.  I also work as a contractor.  My health isn’t all that great so I am exhausted most of the time too.  So not replying is not you, it’s just my very busy life.  I’m sorry it felt like that but be assured it IS NOT YOU!  But I can see how it could seem like that too, so it’s not just paranoia, there are always chances that is a person’s reason too.  I will do my best to be honest when something upsets me – actually, I did when we first started conversing in this topic.  It takes some effort for me to speak up but I did then and I will do my best to always do this so you always know and don’t have to wonder.

I think that we have more in common than I thought: making honest mistakes, forgetting, not expressing myself 100% accurately, neglecting to omit something, neglecting to add something to what I say.. that’s a scary possibility.. as in, it’s perceived as danger?

Hmm.  Yes.  I don’t like being dishonest.  Very occasionally I try to come up with a story when I’m in a bind, a story that contains no lie, but leads the other person to think something a bit different to the truth.  But then I feel so shonky I can’t go ahead with it.  But being honest is another thing that isn’t because I’m a legend, it’s because of the floggings we got when we were children.  I wasn’t even lying but if they thought I was it was beatings until the ‘truth’ came out.  Somewhere in all that I took away with me a fear of lying, even if the ‘truth’ that came out wasn’t actually true, it was just what they thought was the truth.

A few years ago my father said to me, ‘Do you remember that time your importantobject went missing and you were in trouble with stepmother?  Stepmother accused you of all sorts of scenarios, etc.  And I (father) knew stepsister had it in her wardrobe but you agreed with her that you had lost it?  I (father) wondered how that would affect you (me) in adulthood.’  Faaaaaaark.  He wanted to know why I ‘lied’ and agreed with stepmother that I had lost it.  I said, ‘Because she would flog me each time I said I hadn’t until I said I had, so I learnt to say whatever she wanted to hear, so I would only get one flogging.’  He then said he knew stepsister had taken it and went and got it from her wardrobe.  I was so hurt and confused and betrayed when he said this.  He’d stood by and watched her flog me even though he knew where it was.  He let her intimidate and frighten me.  And he had enough something canna think of what the word is to wonder how it would affect me in adulthood.

Anyway, that honesty was beaten into us even if it wasn’t the truth?!  Does that make sense?  Also we’re lucky stepmother kicked us out of the house after less than a year.  Father stayed with her till I was a teenager though.  There were a couple of very short lived attempts to have us in that home over the years but they lasted about five minutes.

I hope you’re having better sleep and a better day today.  I’m a bit jelly you get to have anger in your repertoire.  I think it would help.  I’d prefer it to hurt which is the one emotion I do extremely well.

Hello, dear Anita

I am firstly going to respond to your anxiety thread because I can’t in it.  I haven’t really felt a lot of anger in my life, not because I’m special, but because I would get flogged if I got angry.  As an adult the handful of times I’ve been angry have caused me to lose a person, except that I have been angry at my children quite a few times and let them know it.  Interesting how I can feel it if I feel confident I’m not going to be abandoned.

Anyway, back to anger:  I believe it is a protective emotion, one that kicks in when we need to be motivated to protect ourselves, because it causes us to have uncommon strength whether that be physical, mental, or emotional.

Could your anger be a layer of protection?  Not that you need it now but childhood has handed you a carry-over champion in the form of it?

I don’t know if this will be helpful in the coping with it being with you as a constant companion, and I only suggest these couple of strategies because a clever person once taught me one of them to deal with fear, and the other has also been really helpful for me when dealing with all my negative feelings.  I have been an afraid person most of my life, really scared of everything, so I lived in ways that kept me safe.  This clever person got me to look around me and see if I could see anything that I needed to be afraid of.  I couldn’t see anything, just trees, grass, houses, power poles, sky, cars driving along, you name it.  Somehow having a little stocktake of what is around me helps me not to be so afraid.  I think fear and anger are similar emotions that have a similar root cause.  The second thing I do, which I’m told is called mindfulness, is to clear my mind and let my body feel the feeling it is having.  It usually fades away quite quickly.  When I’m having a tough time I tend to forget to do this, or because I’m feeling back so frequently, I feel like it’s not working but really I’m forgetting to sit with the feeling and let it pass through me without thoughts cluttering the process up.  I find it’s really important not to let myself think while I’m letting go – easier said than done when one has a stupidly hyper mind.

Thank you for caring.  It’s been a hectic week so far and I’ve been doing my best to keep up with it.  I think I might have caught up on most things but then I’ve been asked to work an extra shift so meh it goes on.  I care that you are okay!!!?  I’m sorry I’ve been MIA, just sometimes I can’t find the energy to do anything more than go to work.

You are a good person!  – random thought for the day which I could say so much more about but I just side-tracked myself with another thought.  I watched this amazing thing about how emotions are the cause of many illnesses – deadly illnesses, not just the type people think are imaginary or mental illnesses.  Are we allowed to post links on this website?  It was interesting how even being a people pleaser causes awful chemical reactions in our bodies.

You are safe, I don’t tell jokes, so you won’t ever have to get them.  I always start with the end and muddle it all up.  And the jokes I think are funny are my private party coz no one else does.  I’m sorry though that my contradicting the mud thing was so poorly executed.  I definitely was contradicting you but it was in a cheeky and excitable way, not a mean or argumentative way.  I’m sorry though that it didn’t vaguely sound that way in the text of it.

I really like your experiences and thoughts on people with nice childhoods.  It made me stop and reassess my negativity on that.  I agree re negative childhood survivors have many more negative emotions that can bubble over.  It’s a sad world but there is sunlight in it.  I’m sitting with three furry sunlit things right now <3

No plumbing, roofing, or tree removing has taken place by my hands – well, probably at some point in my life tree removal has, but not recently.  It was a much more fun chore than they would be, I think!

Today my muscles seem to be a little better!  Has your sleep improved?  I had a bad night last night, just tossed and turned so much, but woke up feeling okay.  My phone brings up the emojis but I think if you get the right symbols on you PC it makes them too.  I’ll try, I’m putting these two together to see if they do, but I’ll put a space in them the first time so you can see what I’m typing:  : )  🙂

If it doesn’t work you can laugh very hard at me hahaha.

I hope you’re doing well this fine day and you are in my thoughts.

– my point was not that we were born corrupt. But that we are born into a corrupt world, and we end up- eventually- with some corruption in us, and passing it on. At least at times, to one extent or another. And it is every person’s personal responsibility to identify those corruptions/ mud and remove it from our words, expressions and behaviors. I am still working on it.

This is beautiful. I don’t disagree with the mud thoughts either, just don’t want it to be true, and there needs to be the perfect cheeky emoji face so you can see what I’m thinking when I’m being cheeky. But it is beautiful what you’ve said there and the mud is sad. And no one deserves the childhood they get. I never looked at it like that. I Only thought abused children don’t deserve the childhood they get. But neither do the lucky ones, they just were lucky. This too is sad. People with nice childhoods do not seem to be able to comprehend how we are. But why would they? If you never got broken you can’t understand the scars that hold another together, how there are still places under the scars that the healing isn’t complete, severed spirits that found found ways to reunite the cells of themselves, but not in the way an unbroken heart gets to beat its happy song.

No! No skydiving 😂 a much more practical chore that I usually have to pay someone to do. It’s very hard work physically and requires some expertise. I think I’ll get my expert fellow to do the next go though, just to ensure I’m on the right track. Plus I don’t have all the tools so it may require his excellent work if it gets out of hand. Ha. Very secret squirrel 😂 oooh I’m in pain today though, so many muscles I didn’t know I have.

I went abseiling once. I felt so empowered but the feeling didn’t last, my fear of heights returned the same day, so this ate away at my ideas of going skydiving. I used to think I’d do that after I’d filled my duties to my children, just in case I died, but I realise that although doing something scary helps you in the moment it can be short lived, and also what’s the point of shortlivingly facing my fears at the end of my life anyway? 😂

One day I’m sure we’ll converse and share ourselves. But for now the internet doesn’t need to have that much info on me.

I quit smoking a lifetime ago. The friend that was there for everything. That’s what it felt like. I lost the thing (friend) who say with me in the good, the bad, the normal. Oh well, cancer sites with you through all those things too!

It is raining cats and dogs here. The weather is telling me to be still! I love it. My linen is getting soaked though. Oh well.

Well, dear Anita, I’m about to make a pot. There’s no lemon tea or poppy seed cake – although we’re lucky there’s none of that after the last one – so let’s put our feet up and enjoy the rain that is falling in bucket loads.

You just inspired me to look at the news, something I avoid, and I’m hoping what I read is a development since you last posted and the reports were actually mistaken. I read Iranian officials were saying it wasn’t a missile.

If you don’t have a dog, a neighbour’s dog is the next best thing. My neighbours have a lovely little dog.

Occasionally I wonder if having children was a mistake. If I’ve passed on the cycle of abuse somehow. I’ve read that a mother’s emotional state affects the foetus. I’ve read abuse affects DNA in bad ways. That is true the sins of the parents being passed onto however many. generations, although it’s genetically, not biblical. But maybe they feel abused. I’ve read lots of people who have issues with their parents for things I would have loved to have from mine, so I guess it’s relative, not just something that can be classified by one for another. Hmmm. I might have done them the biggest disservice ever having them. But oh how I love them.

Red wine goes with nothing other than cigarettes and I don’t smoke anymore so I don’t drink red wine anymore 😂

I saw your one in your thread.  You’re letting go of so many hurt emotions you never should have had to shoulder.  I’m proud of your achievements!  I’m having some moments catching up on the internet and emails because I can’t put one foot in front of the other just now.  There’s so much I need to do in my short hours I’m not at work but instead I’m falling apart.  But I think maybe in a putting together kind of way.  Thank you for being on the other side of this conversation.

It’s so, I can’t find the words, so something that I feel such a connection to your words.  I’m here for you too, close with only an ocean or two separating, but literally a heartbeat of internet speed.

Did you have children?  I find myself wanting to know the life you.  How you spend your days, because for now, I just imagine you walking down rarely travelled dusty roads, foxes and wolves and eagles living their lives around your wanders, golden sunset light stretching your shadow ahead of you.  I wonder if you have a dog who walks with you, or a cat who welcomes you home when you return, and I wonder if you’re a tea drinker because tea doesn’t got with chocolate cake!