I'm ok

First of all, I want to thank each and everyone of you for your comments to me, public and private. It really meant a lot to me. I was never taught how to express my emotions when I was younger. I learned to hide what I was feeling. I released my emotions when I was reading books.

I do not have a lot of childhood memories. My earliest memory is that of a woman crying and holding me. I recounted that memory to my mama one time and was told that the woman I described was my Grandmother that died when I was less than a year old. Another memory was one of me trying to reach for some pretty, sparkling lights and then falling. I remembered that after seeing a chandelier in my Aunt’s house. It turned out to have been the very same one that I saw when I was 1 year old. It was packed up that year and placed in storage not to be opened for a dozen years. My mama and aunt remembered me falling down a flight of stairs and knocking myself out, I remembered why I fell. My memories are sketchy. I often wonder why I have memories that I do. I look back trying to remember happy ones and find very few of them. I remember sitting in my daddy’s lap while he read the paper or watched the evening news. I remember getting up at night and getting in bed with my parents and my daddy carrying me back to bed. He would tuck me in and kiss my forehead. I remember proudly giving him my report card to sign. He had a beautiful signature. He wrote with a Parker fountain pen.

A lot of people have pictures to look at to spark a memory. My brother and sisters do, as does my niece and nephew do that moved in with us when I was young. The pictures were not there of me. I guess that is why I like to take pictures now. I took lots of my daughter when she was growing up but most were lost. Her father kept almost all of the ones when she was a baby and she took the others when she got older and lost them. She did not have a happy childhood and she will need those few pictures I have left of some of those few times to help spark memories. I take lots of pictures of Brook. There are a lot of pictures of her doing the same things but I do not care. Her past is now and these pictures represent that.

The past is past but it still weighs on me everyday of my life. The things that I experienced are always there, some of them too close and fresh in my memory. No, I was not abused as a child. My choices I made in my life are what haunts me. They are the ones that come back to me and mock me. Someday I may get up the courage to write about them. I look back at them and I think to myself that if I wrote a book about my life who would believe it? I am amazed myself. I am really amazed I am alive.

I am alive. I will not allow this to control my life anymore. I do have too much left to do and I cannot do it feeling like death. Today I am fighting to regain control in myself, to like myself again. I will succeed. I must because life is here and I need to live.