One aspect to the human condition is our ability to live in our memories; it is both stimulating and problematic. \u00a0Sometimes they are enjoyable, like envisioning when you were a kid and went ice skating on a river or had a campout with friends. Or maybe it\u2019s when you took your first airplane ride at the age of eight or played trucks in the dirt with your siblings. The older we get the more we dip in to those memories to give us a feel-good-in-time moment. Our mind leaves present time and any future time so that we can traverse all the decades of different memories down through the years. The closer we get to dropping our body the less we think about the future and the more we meander in to our past.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been blessed. For some reason I feel the best years of my life still lie ahead of me. I don\u2019t know why I feel that way, just that I do. That\u2019s amazing since I\u2019ll be 72 in a couple weeks, have 13 grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and a stable marriage of some 15 years. When we\u2019re all together it\u2019s a veritable village. I don\u2019t feel 72. I feel maybe 52 and given that my daughter told me that today\u2019s 50 is 30 and today\u2019s 70 is 50 it looks like I\u2019m in the right decade. I have a great deal of energy, clean a 15 room house by myself, am in the middle of converting eight of my Kindles into Paperbacks for amazon.com, working on a revised edition of Repair Your Life, putting the final touch on three volumes of poetry, soon to be Kindles and have three incomplete manuscripts I\u2019m working on. I\u2019m in relatively good health, take a 30 minute walk every morning with Guinevere, our Golden Retriever, do 20 minutes of calisthenics and meditate for 30 minutes every day, read 20 books at a time (mostly non-fiction), have a keen interest in political and international news and spend many hours each week on the phone with my four children, my brother and dear friends. \u00a0I have many hobbies: traveling, watching movies, gardening in the spring and summer, am an amateur historian, in particular of World War II and the Civil War and spend many hours a week traveling pleasurably through the information highway with Google and the several social Internet organizations I belong to. I\u2019m always on the lookout for people to start Lamplighter chapters, hoping one day we\u2019ll have hundreds all over the world. It\u2019s a good life, right? Since I never expected to live this long I\u2019m periodically stunned at my good fortune.<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the dark side. We all have a dark side but people who were abused as children have more of it than most. Despite having completed a successful recovery program that included working a meaningful Twelve Step program, despite being a dedicated optimist, I have times when that attic in my mind that I keep under lock and key with heavy bolts on the door bursts open. The biggest percentage of the time I\u2019m in control of seeing that door never opens but there are times when, almost as if I had no power over it, dark and hostile memories tumble out in rapid succession, stumbling over each other, bringing with them anger, resentment, painful emotions and a tearing at my heart over things that were.\u00a0 All of us who traversed that ugly road in our childhood cannot always keep the pain at bay. It\u2019s the rare survivor who never looks at the past, who has total control over everything that flows through their mind. Sometimes it is set off by a similar experience in current time, one you don\u2019t anticipate.<\/p>\n
You\u2019re in the grocery story, enjoying yourself as you rummage through the produce, in a feel-good mood and you see a husband and wife who get in to a disagreement over something minor, something misunderstood as most disagreements are. They continue their harangue as you check through the frozen desserts and breakfast choices with the two of them still behind. You wish they\u2019d discontinue their argument, finishing it up somewhere in private if they need to. But no they keep it up. All of a sudden you\u2019re in a room from your past, one where your mate is lying to you about his infidelities, one where when questioning him further brings more lies. That\u2019s followed by a sexual assault and instead of standing in a grocery store you\u2019re in the middle of a painful domestic violence situation, one where you are powerless to protect yourself. You\u2019ve spun in a matter of minutes from a busy supermarket to living in a women\u2019s shelter, shaking with anxiety.\u00a0 Or maybe you\u2019re dusting the furniture in your library and out of nowhere you hear a scream, \u201cHit her again, hit her again!\u201d as your mother\u2019s face, contorted with rage, stands over you and you see your father holding his large black belt menacingly. You feel sick to your stomach; a dark cloak of despair falls over you. You try to shove the memory away but it attacks over and over as if it has a life of its own. The indomitable hostility flows over you in waves, bringing more nausea. You clutch present time, hanging on to it as if it is the only thing between you and that dark pit of despair.\u00a0It is as if painful memories from your past lay in wait for something in current time that is a shadow to set them off; almost as if they were connected by a silver cord.<\/p>\n
Somehow we make our way out of the hostile memories, either by keeping frantically busy, by battling against them with words stronger than they are or simply by waiting for time to pass as we talk to God and think of blessings we have. You know it won\u2019t last forever. \u00a0You must find a way to\u00a0disconnect the silver cord. \u00a0If only you had a safe space you could crawl into, one where the moments of darkness passed away slowly, the verbiage becoming fainter and fainter. If only no one would notice and no one could see the torment etched on your face. For if we want nothing else in these moments, we want privacy. Many years ago when I was engaged to and living with my daughter\u2019s father-in-law, the only decent man I\u2019d ever been with, tortuous dreams that made no sense, a steamroller crushing the life out of me would wake me in the middle of the night. I would stumble downstairs into the living room and put on\u00a0‘F\u00fcr Elise’<\/em> by Beethoven.\u00a0 Then, my eyes closed, I would move around the living room in a slow hypnotic dance, my white negligee flowing behind me, feeling the music in my soul more than I heard the notes with my ear. As I danced, the pain that had threatened to crush the life out of me, began drifting away. The first time this happened after we had moved in together my fianc\u00e9 woke up and appeared, wrapped his arms around me and murmured words of love. It ripped me out of my melodious reverie, bringing anger and confusion. I still did not remember my abuse; it would be another five years after he died of cancer that I would begin to face my demons. No matter how brokenly I tried to explain why I needed this alone time, Chuck never understood. One thing he was convinced of; something bad must have happened to me in my childhood.<\/p>\n Chuck has been gone many years and I hope now he understands why the anguish I suffered was something I had to deal with alone as we must all deal with\u2026.alone. Once we go through recovery we have the strength to wait it out, knowing we are stronger than our despair and that the pain is only a short passage of time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n