I started the New Year reading. Meds help. I can read more easily, but what I really missed was the fact that I was losing my ability to ‘grasp’ anything anymore. It seems to be coming back. Meds help.

My childhood was not the best; it was not the worst, but it sucked more often than not.

I was an emotional wreck in High School and for a few years after High School because it hurt that I had to go back into Foster Care because the damn system couldn’t place me with a nice family to begin with. I felt robbed. Like no one cared to begin with, and they certainly didn’t care to fix their mistake.

This was true, of course, for both my adopted parents and the ‘system’ in my eyes.

My adopted parents had 4 kids between them from their previous marriage. The eldest 3 were long left the house by the time my sister and I came along, and the other was on her way out within a couple of years. The three from my mother’s previous marriage had known the horrors of my mother. Perhaps they were forced like we were to lie otherwise.

It is only as I write that out now that I ever thought I could think that. Or that the thought was even in my mind I guess I should say.

It makes sense though; when my sister was beat by mom so badly that she had head-to-toe bruises, CPS had to be called into our home for the first time. My mother was apparently given the heads up and called me and my other sister for a meeting to ‘nudge’ us in the proper form of conversation with these people.

See, my mom had put my sister into a mental institution inciting ‘defiant disorder’ as the reason for admittance. CPS was called because anytime you bring an underage child into a hospital [mental or otherwise] with inexplicable [or actions verified to be harmful to the child via the parent] abuse, it is the duty of the medical facility to do so. My mom hadn’t counted on this when she put my sister there.

Otherwise she wouldn’t have.

And none would be the wiser.

This was our life up until that point. My mom had beat us before. Beatings were normal. Beatings were easy. You can forget how bad a spanking feels. You can even forget how bad having your head banged into the floor feels. You can forget the feeling of physical pain.

Sometimes you can forget it in the midst of it. My sister mastered this earlier than us all.

My sister and I were adopted together, but we didn’t share the same foster homes/places every time before we were adopted. Naturally, my sister came a year and three months after me so it only made sense. I have fewer and fewer memories of life before I was adopted, but I have a faint memory of right before I got adopted or soon thereafter where I got to meet some of my natural family. It felt like I was there to see if I would ‘fit in’ enough to stay. I have this sense like I was going there to be on my good behavior so they would keep me.

I just can’t remember if it is an actual memory, if it is an actual memory of my natural family, or if it was just during the adoption period of trial and error. It is a single memory that feels ‘out of place’ in my mind.

When we were first adopted, my sister and I relied on each other for support. The way my adopted mom tells it, my sister would more often than not follow suit if I did something. I loved my sister; still do.

It kills me that I don’t know what she’s been through. I don’t know what she went through her first couple of years in the system….And it is only this very moment as I write that out that I think I couldn’t have been on the verge of my 3rd birthday if my sister was so ‘capable’. The picture of us being adopted shows my brother as a baby, but not an infant even and he’s almost 4 years younger than I am. I couldn’t have been on the verge of 3! I had to be on the verge of 4. Not that it matters to much, but for the fact that it makes some of my ‘other memories’ even more real.

I wondered why I could remember my foster mom giving me a birthday gift before leaving to live with my adopted parents if I had yet turned 3. The first few years of our lives are more often than not, a blur slurred more by people’s recollections of events than our own.

But I was frequent bed-wetter; I remember nap times and feeling safe with MeeMaw and PeePaw. They helped so much in the beginning, but we moved further away to the country for a few years and didn’t get to see them as much. It is so hard to write about times with them because they were so good. I don’t have any bad memories of MeeMaw and PeePaw Berry, and if anything, they prepared me well.

I wasn’t always with MeeMaw and PeePaw when I was in foster care, but when we got adopted, they did help a lot when we were in school and my mom needed after school help. MeeMaw Berry knew what would make us smile. Campbell’s Star Soup! I loved them very much. I didn’t realize how much I missed them until I find myself getting all choked up thinking about them.

My mom fooled them. Had them convinced we were in good hands, but we weren’t. But we couldn’t tell. We didn’t know that we could.

It’s funny too; my mom knew what she was doing was wrong. I know because at one point she told us it wasn’t abuse. See, in the beginning, it was just spankings. Grounding was ok because it allowed me to be by myself and get lost in the world of fantasy that I had created to ‘escape’, but the spankings hurt. I don’t remember the feeling, I just remember that they did.

I learned about ‘fear’ very early as a kid. It’s ‘funny’ because I am still the inverted thinker; I still try to escape reality into fantasy to feel better, but not as long as I did when I was a kid. Not that I don’t believe in fantasy anymore…I just know that it is not a healthy place to play in for very long. And I was thinking about how I ‘think’ so much recently; and it reminded me that this is how I have always been, but progressively worse.

See, it is okay to escape from reality from time to time; that is not the worst part. The worst part is when you spend so much time there that you don’t know what is real. The worst part is when all your thoughts want to come to a head at once all the time because they are not being given life. The worst part is when you feel like you are losing your mind even though you know otherwise.

I am consistently stuck between a rock and a hard place: the rock being my mind, and the hard place being my heart; I can never seem to get the two to agree at the same time. It’s hard when your heart tells you that you are supposed to love your parents, but your mind tells you that they don’t care for you so why should you care for them?

And it’s not a ‘what can you do for me’ attitude that I have; it’s more of a ‘how long can I continue to do for you without you doing a single thing for me’ type of attitude. I don’t do so I can receive; I do so I can live, love, and be happy. But when the mind won’t shut up because all it sees is constant abuse, the heart fights with it. And then I am lost.

I have been in that state of lost for a few years now.

I have been reading a book that brings a lot of pain back to my mind, but I also see where I have truly grown and made significant, successful strides to being a better person and overcoming my past.

I was blessed to have met someone I could see weekly to get over the feelings that the years of physical and emotional abuse had instilled in me and work towards a more ‘healthy’ me. I was blessed to find this person early on in my young adulthood as I think I may have been on a path very similar to [if not more destructive than] my sister.

This lady helped me find me again.

Aided by the associate pastor of the church I used to attend whom I had loved very much, I was able to meet a counselor who was going to help me during my transition from my adopted parents’ home into foster care. I went into foster care before my Junior year in High School and it was difficult. If not for Miss Susan showing me how to respond to pain and deal with hurt and just a bad life, I don’t think I would have sought out help after graduation, if at all.

At some point in High School I think it was, I started referring to myself in the third person. I have no clue how it came about, or how I did it, I just know that the word ‘I’ was not used for a good year and half to two years. I would have had things remain that way for God know’s how long if not for Miss Susan. She helped me come to terms with feeling. I had disassociated myself so much to the point of referring to myself in third person so I wouldn’t have to ‘own’ anything. My feelings were not mine, they were Jennifer’s. My hurt was not mine, it was Jennifer’s. Jennifer had a messed up childhood, Jennifer was hurting, Jennifer felt alone, Jennifer felt unloved, Jennifer felt, but not me. I didn’t feel.

Miss Susan taught me how to own myself again. If not for that, Jennifer may have been on a far more destructive path outside of High School than she was.

The problem remained though that the damage my adopted parents caused to my being was still buried. I didn’t know it. Miss Susan couldn’t know it because I didn’t know to tell her. I didn’t know until this year. 2012. When I started reading to understand someone I cared about.

I see I have made many of the positive steps/strides that the book suggests to ‘recovery’, which is great for me because I am ahead of the game, but the feelings and thoughts it provokes in me is a little difficult [and only increasing in difficulty as I read further]. I see that I have to dig even deeper in my mind to understand myself fully. I see that I have to understand myself to be able to change myself.

The book doesn’t fully apply to me, but a great guideline. It is the part that doesn’t apply to me that sparked me to write this post, but what I intended to write, and what I ended up writing turned into something very different. See, what I intended to write was about how people can be so scarred by their childhood that they have this view that they cannot be loved by anyone because the people that were supposed to love them [unconditionally even], didn’t. In other words, since their parents didn’t love them, no one could. And because of this, they feel the need to hurt the person who loves them before they are hurt by that person.

I don’t set out to hurt the ones I love. I don’t set out to hurt people really. I may say hurtful things in anger or pain, but it is because I am angry or in pain, not because I have the intent to hurt my loved ones. I don’t, therefor, ‘understand’ the concept of hurting someone first. I always seem to hurt in retaliation just fine, just not usually first. I say usually to allow for error, but I can’t honestly think of a moment where I instigated the hurt. I’d have to think further on it.

In a relationship, I am 100% loving. I haven’t been in very many committed relationships, but the ones I did have dissolved due to the other’s lies, cheating, and abuse of our relationship. The one built on lies was doomed to fail because the foundation was a lie, but I wanted to believe otherwise. The others were too young or only looking for a relationship for the ‘now’, not the ‘future’. Whatever the reason, the relationship never ended because I wronged, but because they did. That sounds hard to believe when you write it out, but I didn’t have very many committed relationships so not many chances to be at fault for their demise. I may have contributed in the end, but it was only after trying to overcome the situation that the lies and cheating put me in; the feelings they invoked in me and the neurosis that developed out of not knowing what was ‘truth’. I was constantly lied to, and only by proving almost conclusively that I knew the truth and brought it to light was the truth actually given life. Otherwise, it stayed in hiding until I could reveal it. Some I never got to reveal.

It was an emotional roller-coaster for much of my young-adult life and into my mid-20s. I will be 30 next month and I am finally to the point of thinking about myself first. My late-20s were spent ‘lost’ because I didn’t care to ‘find’ myself, but as I approach 30, I have spent more time trying to figure myself out.

I have spent more time being honest with myself.

I still have reservations about the future, but I know I can do something about them now rather than just stuffing them inside hidden from everyone including myself. I know that I can take action. I don’t have to just exist. And yet, right now, I still just want to exist. To exist is easy. You just be. To be happy takes work. To be healthy takes work. To be free of the pains of my past takes work.

The pains of my childhood don’t hurt me like they did when I was a young-adult. I felt so hurt by the emotional abuse of my mother then that I just could not control my tears. As I have gotten older, it is almost completely gone, but now and again, I find I am still angry or maybe upset. I was a good kid. I talked back, and wasn’t perfect, but I was a good kid. Straight-A student, never smoked, hated the taste of alcohol, too scared to sneak out [too often =P J/K– I snuck out once and once was enough for me, lol], and with dreams of the future.

When I went back into the system, I didn’t dream of the future as much; I concentrated on survival and present day. I lost the chance to be able to try and fail because if I failed, only I could help myself out again. I lost the chance to have the support of my parents as I entered adulthood so I had to learn to be an adult on my own. It was surprisingly easier than living at home, but I did not keep it easy. I thought I could do everything at once and I failed. A few times. Sometimes to the point of living out of my car or on the streets. A couple of times to the point of giving up.

I hope 2012 and my 30s are as eventful as I plan for them to be. I am going to get my own place. I am going to go back to school. I am going to feel like I am somebody on my own merit, and not on whether or not certain people like me or how they view me. I am going to change. I just got to take baby steps each day and actually stick to my word. That will be the hardest part: commitment.