The legacy of my fibromyalgia pain has its roots in a childhood that was steeped in trauma, anxiety and fear. These things are imprisoned so deep within my psyche that I can only draw them out with extraordinary effort. My writings, not unlike a lanced abscess, provide relief when all else, less invasive, has failed.
I am better now, but that's another story for another day. For now, I go back...
The girl pressed hard against the wall in an effort to back away from the grim scene that lay before her. It was ironic that the men treated the mother with the same cold indifference that the girl had known for all of her life. The men were efficient as they deftly moved about to complete this final but necessary humiliation. Watching in horror as they inelegantly slid her mother’s frail and lifeless body into the black bag, the girl looked away, gasped and then wretched uncontrollably as the sound of the bag’s zipper filled the tiny room. The very same room where the mother had lived as a child and then died as a woman - not so many years later.
The girl relinquished her childhood on that very day and she knew, if only by intuition, that everything would change, but not quite as much or in quite the way that one would ordinarily think.This is because the mother had long been purposeful in her absence from the girl’s life. Maybe she never meant to be there at all. The mother did not show the child the things she needed to know to be human – like compassion and love. But maybe the mother did not know these things either.
The girl did know that she was deathly afraid of being suffocated by her own self pity. She likened it to being unconscious and drowning in her own vomit. She didn’t know anything else for sure except that it was terribly important not to waste even a single moment on useless attachments. This, of course, was easy because the mother never offered much in the way of protection or comfort but it was this turning away that caused the girl to have the same nightmarish dream again and again. She would see herself falling face up into an endless crevasse so cold and so deep that there was no possibility she could ever be rescued. But she couldn’t help herself and she could not stop dreaming.
The girl was a quick study and she learned how to be alone in the world. Asking for help became less and less of an option as she repeatedly turned away from anyone who thought to help her. Unfortunately this sort of stubbornness prevented her from making the kind of alliances that would have improved her condition. Instead, during the especially difficult times she would console herself with the bits of childhood that were not dark and hurtful but she did not allow herself to linger there for fear it might make her weak and vulnerable.