True or False

In our formative years, there are incidents and judgements along the way with consequences that inevitbly wind up defining the way we view ourselves. I suppose it’s a parental method meant to build character, but in some families, or maybe it’s just in certain indivduals, the most honorable of intentions can take a strange turn and produce an individual who buys into every single negative thing anyone has to say regarding them, unable to distinguish between those things that were said in annoyance, exasperation, or angry and aren’t really true at all, and the character traits that are genuine. Other indivuduals that take that even one step further and don’t even notice when praised or complimented.

I was the kind of child that tested all the limits, and when faced with the consequences, bought hook line and sinker into every negative attribute assigned to me and from that day forward, it never even occured to me that I could challenge the opinion, or learn a lesson and rise above things and build myself up from the lessons into something good and strong and true.

This was no fault of my parents. It wasn’t as if they meant any harm. Their intention was most likely that I would automatically know exactly how to use their feedback to some advantage.

The problem with me was this. For instance, during a math lesson at home where I just wasn’t getting it after repeated explanations and dissolved into tears, my father said in utter exasperation “how can a bright girl be so damed stupid?”

I wasn’t a child to read between the line. To me exasperation wasn’t just exasperation, it was a prelude to anger, my parents anger frightened me. It wasn’t just my father’s disappointment in himself for not explaining it in a way I could understand, I wouldn’t have caught that nuance either … I would have automatically heard the rising voice and though “OH NO … and from that point on, I heard only the negative …. You’re so damned stupid is what I focused on rather than the beginning …..how can a bright girl be

A few rounds of math homework in this environment led me to believe in all truth, that math is a scary subject, and I’m not smart enough to ever learn it so why even try?

I’ve been this way all of my life … only hearing the negative and buying into that negative and applying it to myself as if it’s God’s honest truth.

I’m only now beginnig to realize I’ve bought into so many lies from so many well intetioned people that I don’t even know where to begin to sort the fact from the fiction.

What I’ve been left with is some weird character flaw that allows me to think one way one minute, and a whole opposite way the following minute.

See sawing all over the place.

I’ve never read anything regarding the greif process of a surviving spouse when death occurs after a divorce. I rather imagined immediately after our divorce when animosity was still thriving, that if when that time came I’d do a little jig and humb ding dong the witch is dead at his funeral … of course I never really thought it would happen either. He was only 61, in excellent health, while I on the other hand have multiple health issues.

Years after our divorce was final, we eventually were able to reach a friendship which I understand isn’t very common.

But grieiving a divorceed spouse seems to create a need in the survivor to carefully go back over the past and relive it, to sort through the crud and the not so cruddy, and of course this isn’t something you can sort through with your children … they love their Daddy, they have their own relationship with him to grieve … the don’t need my war stories and my experience to taint their’s.

My parents used to tell me they loved me, that when I was naughty and needed spankings, it hurt them worse than it hurt me because they loved me so much.

Ah, so that’s what love is?

My husband used to tell me that “if I really loved him I would make more of an effort to read his every whim without having to be told what he needed” … and when he’d withold affection without telling me why when I’d thought I had done everything right, he would punish me.

Ah … so that really is what love is after all?

And when the punishments became more complicated and bizarre, from the time I was little and under the rule of my parents, to the time I was all grown up and under the rule of my husband, it just never once occured to me that love is a two way street and that I should just as easily be able to “punish” anyone who I loved right back when things weren’t suiting my ideals.

Well it’s occuring to me now.

So true or false?

I am a stupid person. False

The truth is that I am a human who is just as capable of human error as the rest of the human race. I’d always given my husband and parents the benefit of a doubt, believed what they said without argument internalized my shock and distress at being so misunderstood initially, but within days, eventually agreed with the verdict without so much as explaining myself … and then wondered why it was that I always felt as if I were a big dissapointment to all of them.

Truth. They disappointed me as well, with all the name calling and punishments, and punitive “i’ll teach you a lesson” crap conversations.

But, in their defense, they didn’t know any better because I never had the guts to stand up to them and define the flaws in their cheap character assessments. In my parents case, I KNOW they loved me … in my former husband’s case, he eventually made it clear he didn’t and never had …. at least until now that we are divorced and I’m reading through his jourals.

Truth. I’m glad I’m reading the journals. He makes it sound as if I broke his heart by divorcing him. He seems to forget he’s the one who asked me to file, or that we actually lived together for 16 months after I filed to work things out and during that time he continued to have girlfriends and paramores and play his “poor me, I’m stuck with a wife that can’t even remember to put the cap back on the toothpaste and who can’t even maange to get dinner on the table without forgetting something”.

Odd, since our divorce, I’ve never seen the cap left off the toothpaste … yet that one was of his major peeves … and if there is something missing from the dinner table, it’s only a few steps away in the kitchen …. Truth …. he had arms and legs too.