Archive for May, 2009

I like to write. I find it healing and I find it extra healing when I have an audience who says in words or just by reading my posts, “You’re not alone.” I find it super extra healing when someone in the audience says, “Your writing has helped me.” I don’t write about secrets. In fact, I haven’t written about things that aren’t well-known to friends, family, and even acquaintances. There isn’t anyone who knew my family who doesn’t know our struggles.

Is it selfish to be so concerned with my mental health that I would put my family’s pain on my blog? Perhaps. But my mental health is so important to me because it directly affects my children and my husband. My kids are my favorite people. My husband is my best friend. I owe it to them to deal with my life in the best way I know how. If my mental health is poor, my children have a poor life and my marriage sucks. If my mental health is good, my children have a good life and my marriage is good. It’s a simple equation.

I use sarcasm and humor to make light of the tough parts of my life, but everybody knows that right behind humor, there’s pain. I make light of the issues I’ve had with  my parents and my grandmother in order to bring them to light so I won’t be stuck in the darkness of emotional paralysis and denial. It’s denial that makes it impossible to heal. It’s denial that causes our health problems. It’s denial that causes us to repeat these cycles. We all love our children and it’s a basic biological desire to want them to have a better life than we had. I’ve had a better life than both of my parents and I know that the experiences I complain about don’t even scratch the surface of what they had to deal with. Where my mom and dad had practically insurmountable mountains to climb, I only have a few small hills. Still, they’re my hills and sometimes they’re steep. I walk those hills and I get blisters and sometimes it feels like my canteen is empty and my tongue is swollen with thirst and the pain is too much and I want to stop. I will always struggle with the habits that come along with experience and DNA. But awareness is the best tool I have.  Awareness of my failings, both inherited and learned, can only serve to bring about healing. Awareness is my Blister-Block and the fresh cool water that fills my canteen. Of course there will be issues that I’m not aware of, brand-new mistakes that my children will have to deal with. Of course. And then they’ll work it out on their own blogs or on a talk show or in a magazine or a book and it will all be fine because they won’t be in denial and they won’t repeat my mistakes when they have their own kids.

My parents know that it’s sometimes hard to be their daughter. They don’t deny that, but they also have a sense of humor. They have a sense of understanding. They know how important it is to make sense of my story in my own way so I can give my kids a better story. They’re not going to disown me. They might cringe at some of the things I write, but they’re not going to throw a  fit and demand that I take this pain and tuck it away so we can watch in horror as it oozes out of me in destructive ways when I’m parenting or when I’m trying to be a decent wife.

I now have the distinct honor of being the first of my generation to be disowned by a small minority of my mother’s generation because of things I wrote on my blog. I’ve totally been dooced, family style. I honestly thought the “You’re out of the family!” rhetoric would have been buried with my grandmother, but that shit don’t die unless you kill it and you can’t kill it if you act like it’s not there, which brings me to my oft-repeated bottom line: It helps me to write about it. And what helps me,  helps my kids and helps my marriage. And that, my friends, is priceless.