My parents taught me…. Monday Listicles..

Ok I finally got the button. But I had to steal it from someone else’s post and save it.. grrrrr. So I am back with another List this week. The topic is 10 things your parents taught you. This should be interesting..

1. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who didn’t stay quiet I learned that sometimes it is not just your child’s secrets that scare you but your own.

2. That in that mindset of secret keeping a parental relationship can be destroyed because one doesn’t know and the other never told them. Leaving the child to think the parent didn’t give a crap.*my parents divorced when I was 10. When I checked myself into a mental hospital to escape my stepfathers sexual abuse my mom never told my dad the real reason of why I was there. She told him I was acting out and skipping school. Which I was but that was another thing in direct response to the abuse. I did not discover till about 4 years before my fathers death that he never knew the truth. It came up in conversation when he was visiting my sisters, who all knew. It was mentioned in passing, like oh yeah remember when Angel spent a year in the nuthouse because her stepdad had been molesting her for years. The look on my Dad and stepmom’s face was one I will NEVER forget. NEVER. My father nearly dropped his coffee cup in his lap, my stepmom dropped the toast she was eating and they both looked at me. Have you ever felt like the fly on the wall. Yeah that was that moment. My father was broken, simply broken. Because after the nuthouse I had gone to live with him. Begging for them to keep me and enroll me in school. They thought I was just trying to drop out of school and take a vacation. Me thinking they knew why I had been in the hospital, I saw it as a way to push me away and not have to take responsibility for me when they sent me back to my mom.

3. That secrets in your life only have power if you give them the power.

4. They don’t have all the answers, and sometimes the ones they do have can be more devastating to you in the long run.

5. That sometimes the person you think you will never get along with, can truly become the most important person in your life, when you are left with no choice but to do what you have to do.

6 Caring for your parent in their last days and moments of life can be the most rewarding and most painful moments you can live through. Sometimes more painful than childbirth.

7. When sorry doesn’t seem like enough for wrongs, when you see the full picture, it can become enough. We do what we know, it is up to the next generations sometimes to change that thought process and break their chains as well as ours. Finding out my mother was also sexually abused through her childhood changed a lot of the pain I felt at her failure to protect me. When I realized no one protected her. It was not talked about and was just something that happened. NO. No it is not.

8. How quickly roles reverse. When the child becomes the parent and the parent becomes the child. Bittersweet at its best, heart wrenching at its worst.

9. The value of simply laying your head in your mom’s lap and letting her rub your hair.

10. Never realizing, despite her horrible snoring, how desperately I would have given anything to crawl in her bed beside her in her last month of life and have her pat my hair, wrap her arms around my waist and tell me it really would be okay.