5.21.2022 (Friday)
 
Entry 1.    4:29 p.m.

Raymond Carver:



I canceled my backpacking trip slated for Memorial Day. I don't want to move, let alone  leave the house. How then, could I even conceive of preparing for and then going three days over hill and dale?  

I did force myself to go to therapy today, which was painful. Clinical depression coupled with grief has stripped me of any veneer. I am always on the precipice and always on edge. My therapist listens to me and asks questions and from that exercise extracts examples of emotional and psychological abuse going back as far as I can remember. 

Hearing our relationship described that way is quite eye opening. While Jenny and I had drifted apart these last several years, I didn't see what now is plain as day. These little things and big things, uttered and done mostly when we were places others outside our immediate family weren't privy to, became reality for both of us. I saw the world as if she created it and all the laws of physics. My therapist informs me, essentially, it's time to take off the green glassed glassed handed out at Oz, and to begin to see and live in my world, where I am the one to define who I am.

I miss her, having said all that. Which brings me round to the Carver poem. I keep thinking of one of my dearest friends, whose parents mistreated her terribly. If my mom took the silver for parent failure, her's stood above mom on the platform. And when each died, she mourned them. And in between moving out as a teenager on her own and the demise of her parents, she learned to forgive and love them. She mourned them at their passing. I was baffled. I couldn't understand. I hadn't forgiven my mother, when she was living, that is only because while I knew my family life wasn't normal growing up, I convinced myself that most of the weird parts were anomalous. Pardon the cliche, but it turns out, the weird parts were a bug (or lots of bugs) not a feature of a healthy family. And so I mourned my mother. As time passed after she was gone, clarity arose, largely through therapy. Still, I marveled at my friend's ability to love and mourn those who were terribly abusive. I minimized what I experienced. Not any more.




 

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