My Mother’s Dead - After the Death of a Child Abuse Survivor’s Parent

I have been silent on my blog for over six months. I think this is the longest stretch of void in the history of my blog on abuse and trauma--hope and healing. I have been writing though. Frantically writing a memoir about before/during and after the death of my mother. It is simply that I have not posted about it on my blog.

And I am so tenderhearted still about a lot of it.

So much in my life, my psyche, has changed.

It sounds horrible to confess this: but so much has changed for the better.

My life is solidifying.

The fragments of disconnected paternal relationships, of the longing to have a parent with a continual  child-like dream to be a close mother/daughter, are no longer dangling like an unfinished craft project that continually mounds around in bags and boxes.

You know all those wonderful projects that you start and aim to finish but never get around to. The yarn still upon the knitting needles that never quite became that scarf or sweater. The cross-stitch canvas partially covered with beautiful mixtures of colorful threads that never became a completed picture.

The energy absorbed and expended through those dangling fragments is exhausting and forever trying to reach out as others share stories of their parents. You continually are open, raw and hurt.

Sadly this is what really happens with my family relationships, even with my siblings. They are bits and pieces of good, but mostly bad memories, that never reached completion. The family picture was never finished, never fully painted in honesty, so that it could be put into a frame of life being a real family with genuine relationships. And I kept longing, reaching out, trying to make relationships with my siblings, trying to build some kind of an extended family--even if it was without my parents. (In many ways, hoping we could have a family without my abusive father.)

But the death of my mother has changed everything. 

In so many ways it is finished for me, because I did the hard therapy work for over a decade and was just dangling around waiting to connect to others who had finished the junk so that we could have honest, vulnerable love relationships. It seems I can’t find them; maybe they are non-exisitant; maybe it is just a reminder of the damaged part of my life; but mostly, I no longer want to live in the chaotic drama of unfinished lives.

I just read a quote by C.S. Lewis who said, “To love is to be vulnerable,” and while I have so been willing to be vulnerable with all of my siblings and my parents in a authentic love relationship, it has never come to fuition because I have not been willing to be in toxic relationships, co-dependent relationships, or fake relationships.


So I am painfully, but joyfully, working through the manuscript that will my first published book, my first memoir. I am letting the writing dig deeply into my mental and emotional processing.

 In His safety, I am letting God grow me by leaps and bounds.