6WS ~ 6 WORD SATURDAY

Coming To Terms With Being Different

Different by the circumstances of my upbringing. 

Thinking back to elementary school, realizing that my piece of the childhood puzzle did not fit into the "norm", I would embellish who I was.  Had imaginary people and pets in my life, and was often to others like I was treated at home.

When I was an eight years old my cousin told me that the man I had known as my father was indeed, not. 

In my forties, finding the man I had been told was my biological father and later through DNA testing, it was proven that the man who had married my mother because she was with child, was in fact not remotely related to me by blood.  Legally because he was on my birth certificate, I was to discover something he and my mother already knew! 

The divide grows wider.

Mother is a largely dysfunctional human being, abusive, unfaithful, alcoholic.  Singling me out and culling me from the family after my two half-sisters were born.  A daily reminder of her past discretion's, to this day there is no normal family for me.

Revelation rushing through my childhood being.  Daily emotional and physical abuse.  It is no wonder that I developed a safe place to land and began a lifetime of "knowing" that if I found the man she told me was my biological father that he would love me and hate her too.  Both turned out to be true, he did love me and passionately hated her for what she had done to his young life.  But he was not my father, never had children, and a few years later would die in his sleep. 

In my late forties I would send a copy of the DNA results to "her".  Choosing not to respond to me, she told my sisters that it was almost fifty years ago and she could not remember anyone else.  Later she would say that the DNA results could have been doctored. 

Oh the story is so long and unbelievable, one hesitates to continue.  Suffice to say that we have not spoken going on twenty years in the not too distant future.  She will never be the mother to idealize, my sisters are lost to me now.

Today and with therapy, I continue to work on self-healing.  Today I have grown children of my own. Today I declare out loud that I am, "Coming To Terms With Being Different"!