As mentioned in my last entry, my therapist has asked me to journal about my relationship with my parents. I am to reflect on what it was like with them when I was small and speculate on how that's affected me as an adult.
Doing this has been much harder than I imagined. There is a much deeper pain here than I realized.
But that's why this is so important. It is time to deal with this. It's time to get some healing from it.
I am going to start with my mother, since I think that will be the easier of the two. I may write several entries about both of them, I'm not sure yet. I might write a lot of this off-line so as not to bore the few of you that read this.
My mother.
My mother is a sweet woman with a lot of energy and a wicked sense of humor.
Very mid-western in her sensibilities.
A truly beautiful lady.
I think I get my sense of humor from her. She is sarcastic, but in a jovial non-threatening kind of way.
She married my dad when she was still in high school. He is five years older than her. Whatever her aspirations were before she met him, she gave them up to be a pastor's wife. She says she enjoys it. My only reason to think she might not actually enjoy it is the fact that I know I wouldn't.
She might be happy. I just know she's not when around me.
I was born six weeks premature with minor cerebral palsy, asthma, severe allergies, and a wholly deficient immune system.
I was a bubble boy.
The doctors assured my mom that I would not live past two.
Which makes me her "miracle baby."
As such she coddled me and was a bit over-protective.
She and my dad fought about it all the time.
He thought that the only thing I needed was to be toughened up.
My mom knew I was actually sick and nurtured me.
Naturally I grew closer to my mom.
My dad was sometimes verbally and physically abusive to my brother and I and my mom would always defend him to us.
He was beaten by his dad and he doesn't really know how to love, she'd say.
My brother and I have decided to never have children. We don't want to run the risk of generational patterns.
Since I was home-schooled my mom and I remained close.
I didn't have a lot of friends, so she would always go to movies with me or do other things.
she taught me to bake.
We were really close all throughout highschool
Our relationship really began to fall apart when I start questioning my faith.
It wasn't the questions themselves, but the symptoms that arose from the questions that troubled her.
I started writing on Diaryland at that time. This blog was a safe place for me to wrestle with these bigger questions.
I did not know that my mom was reading this blog in secret.
First, she told me that it was wrong for me to so publicly question God. I was a youth pastor at the time and some of the kids in my youth group knew about the blog.
I was in leadership, she said. I needed to appear strong and together.
I failed her though. I wasn't strong. I kept writing on here.
Then I wrote the word "fuck" once. It became the first fight I ever had with her.
It sounds silly now, but it was a big deal at the time.
I wanted to please God. I wanted to please my mom. But I just couldn't do it. Nothing was making sense. I stopped turning to her for advice because I couldn't deal with the shame of disappointing her further.
I was living with my parents at the time, working at my dad's church.
One morning I came home from our youth group's Friday morning prayer breakfast and found my mom in tears.
She had searched through the internet history on their computer and found that I had been looking at porn.
My mom was convinced that I was a sex addict. And even though I was looking at hetero porn sites, she was also convinced that I was homosexual.
She tried to send me to one of those gay conversion camps to turn me straight.
I fucking lost it.
We screamed at each other for a while. I didn't go to gay camp (though I would carry shame for my sexual desires for several years after that).
Something broke with my relationship with her that day.
We had a few other tense moments about my behavior over the next few years as I went on to be a missionary. I think she had good intentions, but these talks only served to remind me of my short-comings.
I felt like a failure every time I talked to her.
What makes this all so horrible is that this was a time when I really needed someone to talk to. Christianity was my whole world, it was all I knew. When it started to crumble around me, it caused a literal nervous breakdown.
I turned to friends and pastors for help but they would condemn me for my questions and my lack of spiritual strength.
I turned to my parents and got the same, but with added guilt and shame.
I needed them. I needed my mom.
But all she could see was my sin.
If I told her how depressed I was, she would just tell me that maybe if I stopped drinking...
or got rid of that lust in my heart...
or just turned it all over to Jesus...
All of this only made me feel worse.
I eventually left the ministry and pretty much stopped talking to my parents.
After a few years, we came to a sort of ceasefire.
We would talk, but we would never talk about these specific things.
We would never talk about anything that mattered.
I call my mom once a week now. We talk about the weather.
She knows little to nothing about my life now. She doesn't want to know. Ironically, this makes her think that my life is much more wild than it is.
When I think of her, I feel like a disappointment.
This has affected my self-worth.
This has affected my sexuality.
This has affected my ability to trust and be open with people.
This has hurt me in more ways than I am even aware of.
These are my memories of my mom.
I hold them all with grace and loving kindness.
May they awaken in me compassion.
Up next: father of mine.
7:06 a.m. - 2014-07-17
Recent entries:
Awake in My Tiny Cage - 2014-11-03
God. - 2014-10-27
I remember me. - 2014-10-17
The Paper - 2014-10-13
A Post About Not Doing Anything - 2014-10-12
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