Are you living the dream?

If you seen what I seen nothing is clean.

Ivan Moody (Five Finger Death Punch)

As a child I was convinced my eyes were liars. 

“You don’t know what you saw,” they’d say. “You don’t understand.”

I thought that maybe they were right, how else could I explain the woman who stood on the safe side of her patio door when I looked her in the eye and desperately pleaded for her help? 

“Go back inside!” the monster disguised as my father, that night, screamed at the lady. While he dragged my mother through the parking lot by her hair. 

“PLEASE,” I screamed, while holding my 5 and 3 year old sisters' hands, as she slammed her door and closed her curtains. 

My eyes must have been liars, otherwise how could she see what I saw and walk away? 

My eyes had me scared of my father, while I watched him wrap his hands around my mother’s throat and try to shake the life out of her, yelling at us to stop screaming or he’d kill her. 

Later that night, I went searching for food for my sisters and I. I found my mother, naked and duck taped to a chair; while my father stood in front of her holding a gun. 

“We’re hungry,” I said. “Grab the cereal, and go back to your room, Kaitlin.” My mother pleaded. 

After hours of fearing him, the police came and took him away. He went to prison, and they blamed her. 

“She threw him in prison!” I’d hear them say about my mother, “it’s her fault he’s gone.” 

I felt maybe they were right because how could the man whose arms I felt safest in, and the man who taught me how to write my name, be the same man who could do such things? Because that was my daddy, he loved me. BUT that night the monster that is drug addiction possessed him, and he wasn’t him. . . and I watched him do things I never knew the people I loved were capable of. 

My eyes must have been liars though, because the people said so, and so she must be the bad guy. 

They hated her. 

As time went on I wondered even more if they were right. When she remarried a man who at first seemed good, but after a while his monsters emerged. I wondered if it had just been her all along inviting the monsters to play? 

Because the cops, they’d come and they’d arrest her. After a night of fighting that ended with my step father punching himself in the face, calling the police, and telling them it was her who hit him. I tried to tell them it wasn’t so, but my eyes were liars. 

“She’s crazy,” they’d say about my mother. 

The night I watched them come and pump my mother’s stomach, after watching her scream about how she wanted to die as she swallowed a bottle of pills. 

“Why is she going to a  mental hospital?” I heard the neighbor kid ask his mother the next morning “Because she’s a very sick lady,” his mother responded. 

What they didn’t see was my stepfather feeding her addictions, and then holding her next fix over her head every time she wouldn’t do as he said. But my eyes were liars. 

But maybe not, because when I looked into my mothers eyes I could see that our eyes shared the same truths. But they said she was crazy, and they said that she was sick. . and so that must have meant I was too. It didn’t seem as if they thought her worthy of their love, and so I thought that maybe they thought I wasn’t either. 

There’s a thought that children who survive trauma find different ways of coping. 

One child might adopt the same mechanisms their parents may have had. . drugs, alcohol, sex.  These children grow into adults who most of society deem as unworthy, because the “apple didn’t fall far from the tree.” When some of these people were, at one time, just children who had no control over their environment and no healthy support. So, what little control they could see seemed so far off and unattainable they decided to hand it over fully to addiction. 

These people, as most of society believe, are beyond help. 

Another child copes by trying to convince the world they are worthy. They do this by ignoring their own needs. They believe that to express any type of need is seen as a burden, and if you are feeling scared then you better not voice that because then you will be seen as weak. So, keep your mouth shut and get over it. They kill everything about themselves to better fit what other people need them to be. So that they might be seen as worthy. 

These children grow up learning to hate themselves in the pursuit of convincing others to love them. 

But they seem normal so their childhood couldn’t have been that bad, so society decides that they don’t need help. 

“I don’t know how you girls did it.” people say. But I didn’t do it, I didn’t get over it. As a little girl I just decided that it seemed our family wasn’t loveable and I had to do everything in my power to become what I thought I needed to be in order for them to love me. I was surviving but not living. 

It’s only been in the last few years of my adult life that I have come to terms with this. I’ve been able to do that because I have a strong support base, a husband who allows me to be authentically me. . .and a son, who unknowingly, has shown me just how powerful and worthy of a human being I really am. In my journey of loving him, I have learned how to love myself. 

and my little sisters. I thank the universe for them everyday, for I don’t know what would have become of me without them. No one understands my soul the way they do. 

Today, it feels like I live an entirely different life from that of my childhood. While hard earned, I truly am blessed and I know that. 

I say all of that because in writing this I fear some of you may misinterpret my perogative entirely. The goal of this blog is not to have you pity me or anyone else. The goal of this is to create a dialogue. 

How do we show children who are living in traumatic environments that we’re here? How do we acknowledge their fear? How do we let them know that they are worthy of so much more? How do we let them know that we DO love them? 

I really don’t have all the answers, but I do know that it could start with three little words. 

I believe you.