Today, a wave of depression hit me. I can't help it most of the time. My day can be going great, then bam, I start to feel depressed. This time, I was thinking about how our lives are turning out.
Mike and I discussed when I become a nurse, and what that might mean for both of us. It seems like Mike will be a stay at home dad, while I work that 12 hour shift that the nurses at the hospitals work.
I just don't want our little family turning out like how my life was like a child. I know Mike will never be like Jack, but still. I am afraid that I will become like Jack. I can still see him in my mind sometimes.
In my memories that haunt me, it's always him asleep on the couch, and me being afraid of waking him up. That fear always stayed with us children every day. You did not wake the sleeping monster. But it was a catch 22. If you didn't wake him up, he would become enraged that we didn't wake him up to "check up" while we were outside. But if we did wake him up, he would make us go in the room because he wanted to sleep. Then he would get mad because we didn't go out and play.
I promised myself a long time ago that both me and my husband would work because I didn't want a mooching husband who abused my children. I guess it's a fail safe for them. That's another reason why I went into the military, instead of nursing school. You see, my mother groomed her twin daughters for the nursing school, so we can be a nurse. At least that's what I feel like what happened when she was homeschooling us.
I didn't want to be a nurse, with a family, and a husband who did drugs, stayed at home, and abused my children. Again, I know it's not like Mike to do that. Still, reality hits hard. If Mike and I both work, then who's going to watch Donnie? I am sure that my mother in law wouldn't mind for a little while, but after that?
I don't know. Sometimes Jack haunts me still. When I am punishing my child, I remember Jack getting mad, and I want to curl up in a corner somewhere and cry because I feel like I am not good enough to be a mom.
It's like I am too dirty to be a mother. That I will turn into the monster that I faced every day in my life while I was growing up. No one knows how it feels like to live with fear every day. To be afraid to go out and play because you know what awaits you when you come back.
Or when you do the dishes. I remember one night, my grandma Ginny came over with a kitten. This was around midnight or so. I can't remember the time, only that it was really late at night. Jack was sleeping all day, we went without dinner again, and my sister and I was laying in bed, trying to go to sleep. Jack called out for me. I started shaking, because I was too scared to get up. Usually, when he woke up, he would make something for himself, and if the dishes weren't up to his standards of clean, he'd beat who ever it was that did them last.
This night was different though. I forced my self to get up, to go out there. I figured the better to get the beating over with quick so I can go back to sleep. My sister was crying in the top bunk for me. She knew what was going to happen. Or her thoughts were running parallel with mine. When I got to the kitchen, I saw Grandma Ginny and her neighbor, whom I never saw before. I hesitantly came out to the living room, while Jack was getting more pissed that I was taking my time coming out.
There, on his lap, was a kitten. I was so relieved that it was a ball of fur, rather than a balled fist. I called my sister out, and I can see that she was relieved also.
But that fear, I don't want my child to ever know. To be too scared to come out of your room. The room that became your sanctuary because the monster never came in. He always called you out. Only rarely did the monster enter the room, and that was to pull us out to beat us out of the room.
Now my child flinches when he gets in trouble, as if I am going to hit him. Which I have never done before. And it breaks my heart every time he does. He is the exact copy of me, with a little of Mike in his appearance. So it's like watching a younger version of me getting scared.
How can I ever explain that feeling to anyone? No one knows the constant fear. No one knows how bad it got. No one has seen what I have seen in my life. And I am afraid that if I become a nurse, and follow Mom's life, that my children will suffer, because it's exactly like following in Mom's life.
My mother was as good as a mom as you can get while being in denial. While you denied the bruises on your children, the busted lips, the stick thin children looking at you hungrily. How I hated my mother while I grew up. How I hated my mother being in denial, telling us that our "father" was a good dad, and that everyone is just talking crap. She hid in her work. She went to the hospital, and forgot about what she saw at home, convincing herself that nothing was going on.
How I don't want my children to carry the same resentment. How I want them to have a childhood free of worry and fear. And I feel like I am letting Donnie down by being a nurse. That it's just going to be a circle again. A circle that cannot be broken.
I am a broken person, living in a shitty world, trying to raise my child better than I was raised. It's scarey, it's hard, and I feel like I am a shitty person by bringing him into the world.
I watch crime shows, and some of them have child victims, and I cry for my child inside, where no one can see. Because I don't want anything like that or my childhood to afflect him. To have him live with the horrible memories, while trying to find some good in his mom. To try and redeem his mother.
Maybe my sister has the right of it, to hate Mom so. She hates her with every being in her body. While I try and remember the good things about Mom. How she taught me to quilt, and knit. How she taught us both how to cook. How she home schooled us. But is it enough? Is it enough to try and teach us to be ladies while her husband beat us bloody?
I cannot express the emotions that are always going through me. The thoughts I have about my past. The things I have seen, and been through can make a grown man cry. I just hope that I am not following my Mother's footsteps exactly. I hope that I will be a better mom that my mother was. I hope I have enough of a backbone to beat the shit out of the person that dares lays a finger on my beautiful boy.
I also hope that he will never live through what I have. I know, this post isn't exactly like all the posts I have posted before. I just had to put it down, I had to let it out. I remember my therapist told me that writing out your feelings would help to vent them. To help you over come them.
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