Currently This

I've been musing this evening about the people in my abuse recovery group, while I try hard not to think about problems which can't be solved in a weekends time.

One of the things I was thinking about was how each of there, whether we like each other or dislike each other, shares a bond most 'normal' people can't possibly understand, a set of values and visions and views of the world shaped by things a lot of 'normal' people treat with derision and vast amounts of uncomfortable squirming. Aside from the 'can't we all find a way to either get along or ignore the people we dislike' thoughts that I find going through my mind more and more often, I got to wondering which of us had managed to over come that stuff and live up to whatever potential we feel it is we could attain if not for the abuse.

Do you know what I mean? Like, I could have been a writer...or at least, a published writer if not for the fears which come from the abuse issues, and I wondered who else in there has something they know deep down they would really shine at, something they want very much to do if only they weren't so sure down deep inside their efforts would be met with ridicule and derision when exposed to oxygen. And wondered how many people since I have been here whose visions and hopes I have helped to shutter away, maybe forever, by being derisive myself, by the remarks of being worthless.

To you, who I have done this to, I apologize.

Yes...sometimes things happen in our lives that clear our minds of all the crap and clutter and clarify things so that we suddenly see stuff we end up wishing we had seen a long time ago. I have gone, or more accurately am going through one of those places right now. There have been times when my anger and rage have been justified, and times when my anger and rage had to do with other stuff and I reacted badly.

But I'll tell you honestly...I don't want this sudden clarity, or at least, not the way it came. I would cheerfully choose to continue to react badly if someone told me I could have my kid ok. I would agree to almost anything, and I do not want this or anything else which comes of this except hearing she is ok and will remain so, that her brother and sister will be ok and stay that way.

On the heels of that, I was wandering around another writer's site and thinking, as I always do, what an astonishing person she is and how thinking like that probably makes her go piffle, and I came across photos that just make me ache for a real winter here in California...real snow and icicles and freezing air in the mornings, all that stuff. I long to be where real winters happen, and more than that, the incredibly talented woman she is who sees things the way she does and is not dealing with a sick child. I want to be a woman who has a car, is wandering with her love through a winter wonderland and whose children are safe and healthy.

But then I would be an HIV positive woman always living with the knowledge that she probably won't make it long enough to watch her kids grow safely to adulthood, longing as she keeps seeming to for sunny days.

I don't know...which is worse? To have a child facing brain surgery or to live knowing you may not live to make sure your kids grow up safe and ok? To be in the snow or the sun?

If you've gotten this far, don't look for answers. I have none. I want my kids healthy. I have a son who is almost certainly autistic, a daughter with this thing growing in her perfect, beautiful little brain, another daughter who keeps getting lost in between them, and for the first time in my life I find myself in a position with the kids where I don't have all the answers, where they are facing things I maybe can't fix, and I'm scared to death...and this other writer is out there in Nova Scotia taking her billions of pills a day, trying to extend her time long enough to see her kids to adulthood, knowing she probably won't be there not that long from now to pick them up or hold them or fix their hurts, etc... and the only thing I know for certain is that, like it or not, we just have to keep going.