This, Too, Is a Single Mom's Journey

OR a Love Letter to My Son, Lukas - the bringer of light to my life :)

You cannot imagine what it’s like, coming back to my own apartment, my own, safe space, after visiting my parents, and to NOT feel this freaking dread looming over my head, this feeling that you are being abused and you literally have nowhere else to go, like a trapped bird in a cage with walls closing in and suffocating you day by day, minute by minute. It is an absolutely awful feeling that just eats at you day and night, knowing that you could be called names, ridiculed, and screamed at at any minutes, while feeling absolutely trapped by your circumstance, with a small toddler in your care, sitting in your lap, and you don’t know where to go or whom to turn to.

This evening, when I returned back to my own apartment, I remembered how that felt, how horrible I used to feel when I still lived with my parents, a lot of the times. I think that we, as people, often forget to appreciate what we now have and how much and how far we have come to, to today, to this moment, to now, and all the messy obstacles that needed to be crossed and climbed over to get to the now moment. Do you see what I am saying? What is that one thing that you have forgotten to appreciate and to be grateful for? Where were you 5 years ago? 10 years? How different were you as a person then? Have you grown and changed at all? I am betting that you have, you just have to remember it and acknowledge and be grateful for what you have today and for where you are TODAY, and in the THIS moment, you know what I’m saying’? haha.

So, when living with my parents, I remember having to learn to walk and to just be as quiet as a mouse, as they say, because I did not want to be heard or seen. I also remember the times that I cried in front of my son because my father would abuse me verbally and emotionally in front of other people, strangers and family alike - a scapegoat, a punching bag. Or the time that my son cried in another room and I couldn’t hear him because I was asleep, and my father got so mad at me that he slammed the door open of my room, started yelling at me with his booming, all-house-can-hear voice, and abusing me verbally of what an absolutely horrible mother I was and that I needed to ‘get your shit together’. I actually ended up in a mental hospital after that incident because my father kicked me and my toddler baby-boy out, and having no idea where to go and having no money at all, we ended up staying in my car that whole day. I remember crying so much, not so much for me as much for the baby-boy on my lap who was hugging me and trying to make me feel better. I literally had no idea what to do or where to go. I remember driving us to the library, and to try to calm down I took some medication. I told my friend about it, which led to her calling police on me because she thought that I was trying to kill myself. I don’t think I was, but I literally saw no way out of the situation that I was in, especially with my son. And I know that for a moment I did think to myself that he would probably be. better off with someone else - but definitely NOT my parents…

I think that sometimes I forget to appreciate the peace, the quiet, and the safety that my son and I have right now, and it just feels so amazing and so incredible to have a place that you can come back to, a space of your own, where you don’t need to be afraid and can just be yourself, whatever it is :). I let my son be as creative as he wants in our place, to make messes, to experiment with water and toothpaste by mixing them and making me his ‘special teas’ and ‘soups’ to try out (wink, wink :)); or to paint on the walls of our bathtub and on his body with his little fingers (yes, I have photos and videos of all of that to prove it haha :)). I know that none of this would be allowed if we still lived with my parents, however, which is OK. My parents are who they are, and it is fair that they have their own rules in their house. But it is not ok to be abusive to your kids, to demean and belittle them, to yell and to threaten them, to pound on your room’s doors with their fists and to call you names.

Again, I am definitely not saying that I’m not grateful to my parents for allowing my son and I to stay with them and to live at their house until we were able to leave. However, I know that the relationship that I have with my parents today, or for the most part lack of a relationship, is due to everything that happened. I think that we create our own lives with the choices we make. AND, if you are someone who has anger issues or problems with addiction or whatever it is, then it’s your responsibility, as an adult, to admit that you have that problem and to them go and search for answer in healing those problems.

There is something that I wanted to share in regard to my mom. Yes, she is not perfect, and none of us are, neither am I, by any means. But, my mom DID make a lot of things happen to me, and my parents have also created a lot of mess in my life at the same time (especially my father, unfortunately, with his forever unfulfilled promises). My mother co-signed all of my student loans for me; she has also watched my son many times that I needed it (not all the time, but many times). They have also screwed up my credit score by using it and manipulating me into signing some documents that ruined my credit score history for the next 10 years of my life - so maybe I wouldn’t have needed my mother to co-sign stuff for me if things had been different and I was educated and treated differently. Maybe.

But, I think that what I am saying here, is that I am 100% certain that there are MANY people out there RIGHT NOW who are in the same exact shoes that I was in while living with my parents, much worse. And, I just want to tell you, that I have been there. And, it was really, really, REALLY dark and really hard for me for a minute. And, I didn’t think that I would make it - I think that there were many days like that for me, or that I’d be where I am today, right now, in this moment. And, I know, that I have felt like I didn’t deserve something better or to be happy, or what ‘to be happy’ even looks like. I know that there are still days today where instead of standing up for myself and protecting myself, because I don’t think I am worth it, I take the anger and the blame on myself, because I've been conditioned to think and to feel and to act that way by my father, and his father did it to him beforehand, and so on and so forth, because neither of them knew any better.

But, today, I think that I DO know better, or at least I am learning to do better, because somehow I HAVE survived and pulled through, and I still keep surviving and pulling through.. Because I think that I am breaking the cyclical chain of my family’s generational trauma by doing the work on me, so that I can do better, by talking about it, about my abuse and the rape that happened to me recently (which most or many people didn’t really seem to want to hear about and even some Facebook groups rejected that post because according to them ‘it wasn’t positive’ - I’m not really sure how a woman speaking up about being raped is not positive, because the alternative is staying quiet, keeping it inside, and not saying anything at all about it - which that very much seemed to tell me, which also tells me that perhaps a lot of people still think this way, that you should basically shut up and keep all of your pain and upset inside you and don’t make waves because no one wants to hear about it and that people just want to hear the good and the positive stuff - is that correct? But that isn’t a human experience. No one has a positive life and positive experiences all the time. Maybe the difference is that Tony Robbinses don’t talk about their pain when they are actually IN IT. They only talk about it afterwards and how they conquered it. Is that better then and more normal? More positive? Anyways).

I think that when we don’t talk about trauma and these horrible, awful things that have happened to us, or when we don’t give space for others to talk and release their pain and trauma, we are literally stuffing it down AND we are also ALLOWING for that kind of stuff to continue to happen by keeping it this BIG awful secret that no one talks about, especially when you get this message that no one even wants to hear about it. But, when we DO allow for others to share their pain, we learn from it and it isn’t this big bad secret we don’t touch or talk about. We learn from it and understand, and I think then we also start to see that there are WAY more of us out there, with these big bad secrets than we thought initially - we’re just somehow conditioned to always smile and always be happy, or pretend to be happy, because no one will like you if you’re unhappy?

The only way that I did start to feel better, about being raped that is, was when I started to talk about it and share it, share it with safe people who didn’t tell me to not tell anyone about it and that I should be ashamed of it or something, sharing it just like I am doing it now, again, even if only ONE person reads my words and get something out of it. I have made a promise to myself, long time ago, that I have to survive, I have to survive, so that I can do something in this world to help just one person not to experience or to get through the stuff that I have gone through. I truly hope that I am doing that.

Because this, all of this, nothing that I said here was easy, for me to share and to talk about these things. But, I think that my driving force for doing it is this: If my words can help another person in some way, then I will be vulnerable and I will share my big, bad secrets.

Lastly, I want to share with you something that happened to me recently, that I posted about on Facebook, to show you when I realized what it would mean to me if I ever lost my son and how fundamental he is in my life and in who I am today. Here it is: