Jun13

New Directions…

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I’m feeling more and more like I need to write SOMETHING every day. If I want to be a writer then I have to write. I have to practice the craft of writing on a regular basis. Even if it’s nothing better than sheer blather, at least I’ll be putting words to [digital] paper. Plus, if I want to have a blog that I’m willing to publish and that people desire to read and follow, then I have to give them something to read on a regular basis, and it has to be something meaningful enough that they’ll come back for more, and bring their friends along for the ride as well. It also has to be something that’s interesting enough to me that I want to keep on doing it.

I can use this as a multipurpose blog: it can be a place to practice my writing, as well as a forum for me to talk about issues that are important to me. In addition I can use it for the purpose for which I originally intended it, which was to help me work out my childhood abuse issues. And besides all that, once I’m posting on a consistent basis, I’ll start publishing my posts, which means I would publish my posts on my Facebook feed and possibly my Twitter feed, something I’ve never done before.

So…

With that in mind, let the words come!

Jun10

The Continuing Saga of My Struggles With Mom’s Death, or Why Can’t I Cry?

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Well, it’s now May 8th, seven weeks to the day since Mom died.

I’m still struggling, though the issues are somewhat different. Now it’s more about realizing how much I miss what I had with her while she was here. And the frustrating thing is, while she was here, I didn’t know I had it.

Jeff says I was never, not from the very beginning of my life, able to establish a real bond with my mother, so it’s understandable that I wouldn’t feel much in the way of grief when she died. I can see where he’s right about that, but it still feels wrong that I’m not all broken up that she’s gone.

I still haven’t had a memorial service for her. I’m fairly certain there are people who would come to one, but I can’t seem to rev up any interest in planning it. I just want to forget about the whole thing and go on with my life, but I don’t know if it’s okay to feel like that, and even more, if it’s okay to do that ~ mostly because it feels like if I did that I’d be pretending my mother never existed.

I feel like my mother left a desert in my heart. I know that’s not true, because God has done a tremendous amount of healing in me, but somehow, that’s how it feels, and that’s the picture I get when I think about my mother’s influence in my life over the years. I guess I shouldn’t worry whether my feelings are right or wrong, and just accept them as my current reality. If I do that then I can ask God to heal what’s there and change my current reality to a new one that’s better and more God-honoring, as well as mother-forgiving, with no desert. Isaiah 35:4-6 says,

4Say to those with fearful hearts, “Be strong, and do not fear, for your God is coming to destroy your enemies. He is coming to save you.” 5And when he comes, he will open the eyes of the blind and unplug the ears of the deaf. 6The lame will leap like a deer, and those who cannot speak will sing for joy! Springs will gush forth in the wilderness, and streams will water the wasteland. ~ NLT.

That’s what I want my life to be like: where flowers are always blooming, and hearts are always joyful, and God is easy to find. In other words, Heaven!

Apr17

Mom Died and I’m Struggling…

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Mom died. It happened almost three weeks ago, on March 27, 2017 at 2:55 a.m. I’ve been dealing with various aspects ~ like getting her buried (actually encrypted) next to Dad at Forest Lawn, getting her death certificate, and notifying various insurance companies and pension plans of her demise for starters. Then, once I get the forms from the aforementioned insurance companies and pension plans, I get to fill them out using the copies of the death certificate that I got from Forest Lawn ~ and I HATE filling out forms.

But it’s got to be done. Harrumph.

I’ve been flooded with a myriad of feelings since she died, and I haven’t really had any place to take them. I know I can talk about them with Karen, or Helen~Kim~Rachel~Jesse~Jacob~Rob~Isaac via email, or God via prayer. Of course, I’m talking to God about them ~ I talk to God about everything ~ but sometimes it FEELS better if I can talk to a person I can see with my eyes. And that precludes all of the above-mentioned people except for Karen, but it’s hard to think of talking to Karen, because there’s never a time when she’s not sleep-deprived and therefore struggling to stay awake as you’re talking to her.

So that leaves here. As in talking about all these roiling feelings here, regardless of the fact that here isn’t a person I can talk to face to face. Here feels like it would be the same as talking to God, because He knows my every thought even before I think it, but writing it down here feels somehow different. Maybe it feels different because I feel like I can say whatever I want and/or need to without regard to what anyone might think of me. I’m pretty certain I can do that with Karen, and with my email friends, but because of the issues already mentioned, it’s much more difficult to talk to them. Another complicating factor with my email friends is that they live all over the world ~ literally. Helen lives in Sydney (that’s Sydney in Australia). Rachel lives in Northern Ireland. And that’s just for starters.

With that said, let’s get on with it.

As I said, I’ve been flooded with a myriad of roiling emotions since Mom died. Actually, they started beforehand, once I knew she wasn’t going to survive this illness, but I didn’t really let them come to the fore until after she was gone. So I’ve decided to use this blog to process all of it. It may take several posts or it may take a few. For all I know it’ll only take one, but it may take many. I just don’t know. I only know that I have to get it out from inside of me, because if I don’t it’s going to fester. I can already feel myself getting seriously depressed, only for the first time in my life the depression has a temporal focus and isn’t free-floating, like it’s always been in the past. This time it’s actually related to something in the world that happened to me that I can pinpoint on the calendar. Which means that, hopefully, it will end at some point. Hopefully.

So…

One of the biggest things I’ve been feeling is that I hastened Mom’s death because I didn’t visit her often enough. And my fear isn’t without justification. By not often enough I don’t mean I visited her once a week when I could have gone to see her three times a week or everyday, even though there were times that I did see her once a week. I mean that, while I did see her once a week at times, most of the time, I came up with reasons and excuses to not see her at all, every reason in the book, in fact. I did pay her bills as needed, though I wasn’t very good at that either, and whenever there was a care-planning meeting for her at Monrovia Gardens I always showed up and asked questions and signed whatever papers they needed me to sign. Whenever she ended up in the hospital I would visit her everyday while she was there. I just couldn’t seem to make myself go and visit her at Monrovia Gardens on any kind of regular basis.

Mom never did advance beyond mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease. She just kind of gave up. I know what advanced and end-stage Alzheimer’s looks like. Karen’s mother is in end-stage Alzheimer’s (I think). If she’s not in end-stage, then it’s very far advanced. Mom never got that far. She was still able to talk and feed herself when she felt like eating. She was no longer ambulatory, but she wasn’t yet bedridden, and she could still socialize and interact with other people when she so desired. Karen’s mom hasn’t been able to do any of that for a very long time. Karen says she can understand what her mother is trying to communicate, even though she’s completely nonverbal.

As I said, Mom just seemed to give up. She stopped eating and drinking, and then she ended up in the hospital because she got dehydrated and came down with pneumonia. At first her doctor told me he thought she’d recover from that illness, but that she’d fairly quickly become ill again, and that she wouldn’t recover from the second illness. As it turned out, she didn’t recover from the first illness. She died two days after coming home from the hospital.

I had started praying that God would take her Home right around the same time she stopped eating and drinking. I just felt like her quality of life was such that she wasn’t happy, and wasn’t at peace, and I couldn’t really ask her about it because she wasn’t able to communicate on that level anymore, and hadn’t been able to for a long time. And the point of it all was that she wasn’t going to get any better, but rather would only get worse over time. So the overall picture was fairly bleak.

On that note I’m going to end this post and continue with this in my next one…

Oct10

Am I Afraid of Anger, or Do I Get Angry at the Fear?

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I originally wrote this post back in April of 2013 for a blog that I kept on another blogging site. That blog was shut down by the website without my consent, and I was never able to get it back, so from time to time I’m going to repost some of the posts I wrote from that blog as they seem appropriate to what I’m dealing with now.

This post contains a letter that I wrote to my biological father to deal with some of the unexpressed anger and rage that I feel about what he did to me. My therapist suggested that I write it but not send it, so that’s what I’ve done. Here’s the post:

April 10, 2013 ~ I’ve come to realize that most of the anger I feel and/or express is misplaced and misdirected, either at myself, or at the people in whatever TV program I’m watching at the time, especially if it’s something having to do with someone being raped or abused, or being treated unjustly or unfairly in anyway. I also get angry at certain news stories having to do with violence against children or women, or about registered sex offenders.

I’ve also found it interesting and a bit puzzling that I’ve never once felt, much less voiced, any anger towards my father for all the awful, horrible things he did to me. I have forgiven him, and I’ve never ever had any desire for revenge, but by the same token, I’ve also never felt any anger towards him. I don’t know if it’s because I’m terrified that he’ll come after me or because I’m afraid I’ll go ballistic if I start letting it out, or just what.

So maybe it’s time for me to do something about it. It’s not good to hold anger inside, especially for long periods of time, and while I’m getting better at not holding my anger inside, when I do let it out it’s almost always directed at the wrong person. So I’m thinking I should do something to express some of it towards my father, instead of towards me and all the other people who aren’t supposed to get it. My therapist says I should write him a letter, but I wouldn’t have to mail it to him. So that’s what I’ll do.

May 15, 2013 ~ I think it’s curious and probably significant that, after I start thinking about writing a letter to my father to tell him how angry I am at him, even if I know he’ll never see it, all of a sudden I avoid this blog like the plague. I wrote the first part of this post at the beginning of April and now it’s the middle of May.

Up until now I’ve always avoided dealing with any real feelings about Harry, and I think the reason is because I’ve been afraid, terrified, actually. Terrified that I wouldn’t be able to control my anger, petrified I’ll go ballistic and do something I’ll regret later ~ all because I’m panic-stricken at the idea of no longer hiding my true feelings about him. As I was sitting here thinking about what to write, I beat a retreat in the middle of this paragraph to play solitaire. Sometimes it helps me to think. Actually I think it’s an excuse for not having to think or write about what I’m supposed to be working on. Anyway, I started playing Solitaire and it wasn’t going the way I wanted it to (I was losing game after game) so I got more and more frustrated, and I ended up hitting myself a whole lot. Which is the point of all this in the first place: I get angry at myself instead of getting angry at the person ~ Harry ~ who’s the one I should be getting angry at.

So I’m going to step out in faith, and instead of being afraid of the anger, I’m going to get angry at the fear, and I’m going to start writing that letter. So here goes.

Harry:

First, I have to say that there are certain things about my childhood for which I’ve always been grateful: the piano lessons, and the love for classical music that you and Mom instilled in me, plus the keen intelligence, analytical mind, and desire for knowledge that have made me a voracious reader, and given me a life-long love of learning.

I thank you for those things. As I said, I’ve always been grateful for them, and I consider them a gift. However, there were many things I got from you for which I cannot be grateful. That will be the subject of the remainder of this letter.

I have a lot of things to say to you. A LOT. You’re supposed to be my father, at least that’s the title they gave you on my birth certificate. I have to tell you, however, that I don’t buy it. You’ve never been a father to me. I’ve had a lot of memories of things you did to me when I was a child that no father should ever do to ANY child, much less his own daughter ~ that no human being should ever do to any other human being. Even animals shouldn’t be treated the way you treated me. So I have a hard time calling you my father.

You abused me. You abused me physically, verbally, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. You made me hate you, and you made me hate myself. Everytime you abused me you told me you had to do this to me because God hated me. Everytime you abused me you told me I was as ugly as if someone had thrown acid in my face. I don’t know why you felt the need to say those awful, hateful things to me. It took me many, many years of healing before I could believe that God didn’t hate me, and many more years after that before I could believe that anyone, much less God, could love me. I’m still working on whether or not I’m ugly. I think I can finally say that I’m not ugly, but I’m not sure I can take it any farther than that yet.

I’ve finally decided that maybe you told me those things because you were projecting onto me how you felt about yourself. However, that’s no excuse for that kind of cruelty! Do you have any idea the kind of pain just those two statements spoken over and over into my life have caused me? Agony! Do you hear me? Agony! You caused me years and years of anguish and agony, plus nine suicide attempts just from those two statements, not to mention the torment from all the other horrific and terrible things you did to me.

You abused me within an inch of my life. The only reason I survived infancy is because God gave me the ability to become multiple.

You forced me/us to lie about what you were doing to us so you could keep on beating, raping, and otherwise assaulting the life out of us. You told us that if we ever told anyone what you were doing to us you would kill us, and then you played Russian Roulette with your revolver between our legs to make sure we believed you. There was no way we could have known back then that the gun was loaded with blanks. We were children, tiny children, so we had no choice but to believe you, and we had to become liars that no one could trust as a result. You stole our integrity,  our innocence, our childhood, and our hope when you did that, because you left us with no recourse and no ability to seek rescue.

Do you remember our habit of picking our cuticles? We started doing that at a very early age, as young as two years old. Do you know why we did that? Because you told us we couldn’t tell anyone what you were doing to us, so we had to come up with a way to tell people without using words that we were in peril. So we picked holes in our cuticles, sometimes to the point of getting them infected. Tragically for us, our efforts were all for naught, because no one ever caught on or reached out to help.

You used rape as punishment for wrongdoing, and you kept changing the rules so we never knew what they were. It didn’t matter what we did or how we did it, it was never good enough, so no matter what, we were wrong and had to be punished, which meant you had yet another excuse to rape and/or hit us. I don’t know what we did to become the brunt of your rage; I doubt we did anything. We think you just needed a scapegoat, and we were small and weak enough that we couldn’t fight back.

And then there was the time when we were three when you decided that just raping us yourself wasn’t enough; you needed to spice it up by getting your friends involved. So you orchestrated a little gang-rape with four of your cronies. I don’t know what you were hoping to accomplish that day, but it certainly couldn’t have been anything good.

Do you have any idea of how traumatic that event was for us? That one incident was so devastating, so damaging to us that you caused the creation of 12, that’s right, twelve, new alters. It was so horrific that Catherine Belinda, the core personality, decided she’d had enough of your lies and betrayals. She determined that she couldn’t stand your abuse any longer, so despite the risk and menace inherent in your threats, she resolved to tell someone, anyone, what you were doing to us.

But God and the rest of us knew that you meant business when you said you’d kill us if we told. So we all hid Catherine Belinda away and put her to sleep, and kept her that way for the next fifty years. In her place someone else was created to run things. The new alter’s name was Sarah Abigail Kuriakos, but she answered to Catherine Belinda’s name so no one would notice or suspect anything was different.

You know, all we wanted was to be accepted and loved. That’s all any child wants. Was that too much to ask? We don’t think it was, but you couldn’t even give us that. A child is a gift from God, yet you treated us like trash. A child is a reward from the Lord, but you acted like we were your personal property to kick around and beat up as you pleased. We were a small, innocent child! You were nothing more than a cowardly bully, picking on your own daughter, someone who was too small and defenseless to stand up for ourselves. If you’re going to pick on someone, pick on someone your own size!

I think the thing that hurts me more than anything else about all the horrors you visited on me/us throughout the years of my childhood is that you made it nigh unto impossible for me to have a relationship with a man, or with God. I’m terrified of men and I’m terrified of sex. As a consequence I’ve never been able to consider even going out on a date, much less anything more serious, because I might have to let him touch me, and ultimately I might have to marry and have sex with him.

Fortunately, as far as a relationship with God is concerned, God had other plans, and it’s only by His grace and mercy that I’m alive to tell this story, or that I know anything about Him at all. I owe my life to God and to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and it’s only because of His healing power that I’m able to trust Him or believe in Him. I will never be able to express enough gratitude to God for all He has done for me in setting me free from all that you did to me. One thing you should know however, is that the same God of Love who healed me won’t allow me to hate you anymore.

That’s right. Jesus loves you just as much as He loves me or anyone else, without reservation or condemnation, and because He’s healed me, He’s helped me to forgive you for everything you did to me. And yes, I have forgiven you. I don’t want revenge, I don’t desire any kind of evil to come to you, and I wish only good for you. This teeny weeny paragraph stating my forgiveness may sound a little trite, like nothing more than a bunch of platitudes after my great long letter expressing a lot of pent up rage and apparent vitriol.

In truth I was only expressing my heart and my truth as I saw it, plus this is the first time I’ve ever expressed my anger towards you all in one place and directly towards you. But my forgiveness is real and heartfelt, and the ball is now in your court. It’s your choice as to whether you will accept or reject it or not, because with my forgiveness, I’m also offering reconciliation with you and the possibility of a relationship. I don’t know if that’s something you desire, but my offer is there if you choose to accept it.

That’s all for now. I wish peace with God and health for your body and soul. I know that you now suffer from emphysema and are on 24-hour oxygen, and I wish healing for you from that as well.

Blessings and Peace,

Sarah

Well, thankfully it’s finished. As an addendum, I want to add a little bit of history to bring the story of the multiplicity aspect up to date.

As I said in the middle of the letter, at age 27, in October of 1980, I changed my name from Catherine Belinda Pfaff to Sarah Abigail Kuriakos. At the time I was only just beginning to have memories of being abused and I had no idea I was multiple. I thought I was changing my name to cut myself off from a heritage of abuse, and I thought I was choosing a new name. So I chose three names that were Bible names with really good meanings, and that meant things I had never meant to anyone before: Sarah means, “Princess,” and Sarah, of course was Abraham’s wife and the mother of Isaac. Abigail means, “a father’s joy, or a joy to the Father,” and Abigail was one of David’s wives, and a virtuous woman in the Bible. And Kuriakos means, “belonging to God” and is used twice in the New Testament.

In reality, I was already Sarah Abigail Kuriakos, but I wasn’t consciously aware of it. Everyone inside decided that the name of the body, which had been Catherine Belinda up until then, should be changed to match my name so there would be more congruence between inside and outside. It made sense. Catherine Belinda was hidden away and asleep, and had been for a long time, and would remain that way indefinitely, so it didn’t make any sense to keep using her name. It made much more sense to use my name because I was running things, so we found a lawyer amongst the people at my church, and we went to court and changed it to my name. And strangely enough, the change wasn’t at all hard to adapt to. It was like that should have been my name all along. I’d had this weird feeling for awhile that Catherine Belinda was a name that belonged to someone else ~ which turned out to be true in a strange sort of way. Plus all my friends said that Sarah Abigail fit me much better than Catherine Belinda did. Funny thing! Maybe that was because Sarah Abigail was actually my name and Catherine Belinda wasn’t.

And, being Sarah Abigail Kuriakos has made a huge difference in my life, and brought me closer to Him. Everytime I hear the names I hear their meanings, and God has used that to heal me a tiny bit everyday. Plus I’m no longer multiple. In October of 2001 I decided I wanted to seek integration, so I went to the pastor of the church I was going to at the time, and asked him if they could help me with that. I knew that the process of integration takes many years, often in excess of ten, if it’s done in therapy, and I wanted God to do the healing, not some shrink. So my pastor and some people in the church who knew of my background set up a team of prayer warriors, and they prayed for me once a month over a period of 18 months, and by the end of that time I was fully integrated. It was a wonderful thing. Instead of being many I was one ~ for the first time in my entire life! There was no longer any chaos or confusion inside. Blessed peace! Wow!! Praise God!! And the really cool thing was that the process was complete right around my fiftieth birthday. And just before the final integration was done, God woke up Catherine Belinda and brought her out of hiding so that she could be integrated into the whole along with everyone else. Amazingly, God had been watching over her the whole time, and had been causing her to grow while she was asleep, so when she came back it wasn’t a huge shock to her system, or mine. I was seeing a really good Christian therapist at the time, and she was fully supportive of the prayer group’s work.

And then there was the whole situation with Klepto, who was a little four-year-old girl who stole things because that was the only way she could get what she wanted. Of course, stealing is, and always has been, absolutely antithetical to everything I am, so when she came out and started stealing stuff from work (I was working at an arts and crafts store then), I got very upset. The first thing we did was talk to her and told her she couldn’t do this. She had to take everything back, and put it back where she got it without getting caught, because I didn’t want to lose my job. Then, on the advice of my therapist, we changed her name to Elizabeth, because Klepto as a name was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. She came out one more time in a toy store where she tried to shoplift a game. Fortunately I came out and stopped her before she could leave the store with it, but it was rather embarrassing. And then she was integrated into the whole, and was no longer a problem, thank God!

So, God gave me the most amazing and wonderful birthday gift for my fiftieth birthday, and I’ve been eternally grateful ever since. I can’t thank Him enough. Certainly I’ve had my struggles since then. There was the whole seven-year period where I was angry at God because I couldn’t understand how He could allow me to be abused. It turned out that what I really didn’t understand was about God’s sovereignty, and that I didn’t have the right to challenge it, which was what I had been doing.

And then I realized that all I really wanted to know was where God was when I was being abused. And ultimately God showed me. He showed me that He had been right there with me, protecting me by making me multiple, saving my life by creating new alters as they were needed. Each time there was an abuse incident that was severe enough to require a new alter, God put His finger on my personality in the exact spot where He wanted the split to occur. It was God who created Sarah Abigail Kuriakos, and chose her name ~ which gives the meaning of the names even more significance when I think of it in that light.

Well, I guess I’d better finish this and post it. It’s turned out to be VERY long, a lot longer than I expected, though all of it was important and needed to be said.

Until next time then…

Oct6

O God, Let My Blood Cry Out On My Behalf!

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O earth, do not conceal my blood. Let it cry out on my behalf.” ~ Job 16:18, NLT.

Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” And the LORD said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” ~ Genesis 4:9-10, ESV.

The Lord showed me something recently. I was doing my Bible reading, which at the moment is in the book of Job. I was reading Chapter 16, and I got to verse 18, and I was reminded of Genesis 4:9-10, both passages quoted above.

God showed me from Job 16:18 that Job was praying that the earth would not conceal the blood from his wounds because he was afraid God would forget about him if it did. That reminded me of Genesis 4:9-10, where God called out Cain for murdering Abel. God told Cain that his brother’s blood was crying out from the earth, and therefore he couldn’t hide what he’d done, and especially he couldn’t hide his crime from God.

Then God showed me using Job 16:18 that the reason I had already started picking holes in my cuticles as early as age two was because I was trying to get someone, anyone, to notice that something was wrong, terribly wrong with me. Harry had already begun abusing me, even at age two, and he had already threatened to kill me if I told anyone what he was doing to me, so I couldn’t say with words that he was hurting me. I had to devise a way to communicate that I was in peril without using words. What I came up with was to pick holes in my cuticles, at times to the point of causing infections.

Unfortunately, as hard as I picked, my efforts came to naught, because no one ever caught on. And while I know people didn’t think about things like child abuse and childhood sexual abuse back in the 50’s and 60’s, much less do anything about them, the fact that no one, not one single person, paid any attention to my attempts to make known my distress makes me very sad for the child that was me back then.

Sep16

Codependent Me Becomes Entitled ~ Or Was I Already? ~ ‘Tis a Mystery…

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I haven’t posted anything here in just about a year. Last September was the last time I wrote anything; however, I’ve been going through some things that have made me feel like I might benefit from writing about them, so here I am. I’ll have to see if I can actually make a go of the whole writing thing over the long-term. In the past I’ve only been able to keep it up for a couple of weeks or a month at the most. Maybe this time will be different. We will see.

So now, down to what’s been going on…

I’ve come to the realization that there’s a part of me that actually feels entitled and narcissistic where Mom and her money are concerned, something I dislike about myself rather a lot, and something I wasn’t aware of ~ at least not to this degree ~ until just the last couple of months.

I think I understand the root of it. When I was younger the only way I could get what I wanted or needed, no matter what it was, be it physical or emotional, I had to do it for myself. I couldn’t depend on my family to get it for me to save my soul. For example, one Christmas or birthday, I can’t remember which, I wanted a specific cookie press from Williams-Sonoma, so I told Mom and Dad about it, hoping they would get it for me.

When the big day arrived and I opened my gifts, Mom started telling me this tale of the trip she and Dad made to Williams-Sonoma to purchase the cookie press I’d asked for. However, the cookie press I ended up with wasn’t the one I asked for, because… And that’s where it gets weird.

Apparently they made the trip to the Williams-Sonoma store to get the cookie press, but when they got there they had a difficult time finding a parking space ~ my stepdad had multiple sclerosis and, even though he was still able to drive, he had a handicap placard because he could only walk short distances.

So they started out on the bottom level of the parking structure (there were four or five levels) and couldn’t find any available handicap spots. Next level, same thing, and so on up to the top. I don’t remember if Dad was using a wheelchair at that point. If he wasn’t I can understand a little better why they didn’t stay, but even then they could have ordered it from the catalogue~at least that’s how it looks to me as I look back.

I might have asked them why they didn’t order it from the catalogue, to which they would have replied that it would have been late if they’d done that. As far as I’m concerned that’s not an excuse because they’ve given me things before that were ordered from catalogues, and that were late for whatever reason, and it was no big deal. They just gave me a box that contained a picture of the item, and said it was coming late, and I was fine with that.

So whenever I feel like this, where I’m complaining about some gift that Mom and Dad gave me when I was younger, I always feel guilty, like I should have been grateful for what I got, like I was lucky to get anything at all. I mean, there are a lot of kids who are so poor that they don’t get anything at all for Christmas.

I think my problem isn’t so much one of ingratitude for the gifts they gave me, but rather, the fact that I could never depend on them for anything. And the issue of the gifts was simply how their lack of dependability was expressed.

And the other root of the entitlement thing is that Mom did nothing to protect me from Harry’s horrors. Nothing whatever. Plus, she abused me herself as well, though not as viciously and violently as Harry did. So I’ve worked hard to forgive her, but I’ve come to realize that it’s a work in progress. I’ve heard it likened to the layers of an onion. The deeper the layer the harder and more painful it gets. Well, I’ve dealt with enough pain in my life that I’m not especially worried about that

So that’s about it for now.

Sep19

A Game That’s Not a Game

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I’ve been playing this online game called TrainStation on Facebook for a long time, probably a year or more. I spend too much time playing it, and I’ve had a feeling for awhile now that the Lord doesn’t want me to play it anymore. I’ve tried a number of times to stop playing it to no avail.

One time I managed to stop for a little over a week because I unfriended all the Facebook friends that were playing it with me, but I felt so uncomfortable that I ended up going back to it. I shouldn’t have allowed the physical feeling to rule over me like that, but I did.

I’ve begun to realize that I’m addicted to it, which may have been why I felt uncomfortable when I stopped playing for that week. Not a good thing!

The reason I like playing it is because it’s fun and relaxing. There’s no violence and I don’t spend any money on it. It’s just quiet fun that’s relaxing. I’ll admit there are a few times where I get frustrated because the screen moves unnecessarily in full-screen mode as my finger brushes against the trackpad when it’s not supposed to~something I can’t help. But that’s the only problem I have with it and it’s more of a technical issue with the trackpad and my straying fingers than a problem with the game.

I’m going to post what I’ve written thus far because something happened with Mom yesterday that I need to write about. Once I’m done with that I’ll come back and work more on this.

Life can be SOOO interesting at times!

July 24, 2019

This update is almost four years later. For the most part, I’m no longer playing TrainStation, but I am playing four other computer games. However, I don’t spend as much time playing them as I did while I was playing TrainStation. Additionally, the frustration I used to experience as I played any game is no longer a problem, thank God. The self-abuse is gone, hallelujah!

The fact that the self-abuse is gone is probably the biggest change, and the most welcome. Self-abuse has haunted me for many, many years, and I have longed to be free of it. I’m so grateful to God for setting me free from this besetting sin!!

Aug17

Revelations Anew…

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Ever since I moved to Rancho Cucamonga a year ago last January I’ve had an almost impossible time cleaning out Lily’s litterbox. During my last couple of years in Irvine I had gotten to the point where I was able to clean it out everyday and be consistent about it, but moving to Rancho seemed to erase that habit completely.

SO FRUSTRATING!!

And so not good for Lily too, but I just could not get myself to do it differently, and it’s been like that since January of 2014 when I moved.

HARRUMPH…

So fast forward to August of 2015 and I’m still struggling with Lily’s litterbox, but I’ve been praying about it and I’ve been asking Jeff to pray about it in therapy as well.

God finally answered (God’s timing is perfect)! Jeff prayed about it in therapy on Saturday, and Sunday evening I started cleaning out the litterbox. And God started showing me that doing what has always felt to me like the world’s most odious, vile, and onerous task is actually a great privilege, kind of like Jesus washing the disciples’ feet (that was the illustration He gave me).

The reason for this is that Lily has always been the most incredible gift straight from the Lord to me, always making me laugh no matter how I feel, always filling me with delight, always just being there with me no matter what, and being there for me too I suppose, if a cat can be there for you as a friend can. So cleaning out her litterbox, something she can’t do for herself, is, in a way, thanking her for all the things she does for me just by being herself.

Well, knock me over with a feather, I’d never thought of it like that before! That puts a whole new and different slant on what has always been the MOST difficult job for me! It almost changes it into a completely different task, one that I can almost enjoy doing because I’m doing it to care for my treasured companion’s most basic needs.

I could almost get into this!

Jul19

Which Came First, the Chicken or Lily; Or, God’s Love Gave Me Jesus Gave Me Lily

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Which Came First, the Chicken or Lily; Or, God’s Love Gave Me Jesus Gave Me Lily

Following is a post about Lily from my old blog. Well, no; in point of fact, it’s about God and Lily, and it was originally written Tuesday, January 18, 2011. Anyway, here it is, updated…

I’ve been having this feeling like I should write about Lily. So here I am.

It seems like the way I love Lily is a metaphor for the way God loves me. When I contemplate the implications of that my brain seizes up, but I’ll deal with it. Lily is dealing with it by napping beside me and hugging her head. I think I like her way better.

I love to just sit and observe Lily. She’s absolutely fascinating to watch, especially when I’m in the bathroom. She always follows me in when I go there, and she loves to bring me wads of paper to throw so she can fetch them for me. She also loves to go behind the bathroom door, especially while my back is turned brushing my teeth. She goes behind the bathroom door and just sits there, and if I don’t notice her after a couple of minutes then she’ll say something.

I get the feeling when she fetches for me that she’s bringing me little gifts, because she goes through a process in choosing which wad of paper to bring me. She’ll smell one, and if it smells right she’ll pick it up and bring it to me. Sometimes she changes her mind en route and drops it for a better wad~or no wad at all.

The upshot of it is, if the Bible is right and I believe it is, God is with me, and identified with and connected to me with the same joined-at-the-hip intensity as Lily is, and a whole lot more.

I find that very exciting because it allows for an intimacy with God like nothing else on earth, something I’ve always desired but never felt like I could attain.

It’s a good thing feelings aren’t to be trusted and God’s Word is!

Jul17

Of Unsolved Mysteries and Old Blog Posts

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Here I am writing another post. I’ve discovered that I have to write a post, and finish and publish it pretty much all in one sitting, because if I take much longer than that the draft gets lost somewhere in cyberspace. I have yet to figure out where my unfinished drafts are on wordpress.com, and it’s not a little frustrating, because I have at least two drafts waiting for me if only I could find them!

So with that mystery as yet unsolved, I write on…

From time to time I plan on taking a post from my old blog and using it here. I can’t post there anymore because Google shut it down, but I don’t want those entries to go to waste. So, as appropriate based on topic, I’ll use old posts as is or altered, depending once again on topic. There were a number of key posts; for instance, the letter I wrote to Harry, which was quite therapeutic, by the way.

And then there’s the one I wrote about Lily. I had started a new post here about Lily and had planned on using the post from the old blog as part of the new entry here, but before I could do that I got distracted, and ended up losing the new post before I could publish it. So now it’s one of those drafts that’s floating around out in cyberspace and I have no idea where it is or how to find it, and I’m so frustrated! Harrumph!!

Sooo…

I’ll just have to keep on writing and posting, and trying to do it quickly enough that my posts don’t get lost! I’m also going to keep on looking for those lost drafts.

That’s all for now…