Good-Bye Burden

I no longer wish to wear your burden.  I will no longer allow your view of me to affect my view of myself.  I will not let your ignorance change how I handled my life.  I did what was right, for me and my family.

I see it now.  It took a long time to come through as a clear vision.  Before all I saw was the nightmare of losing my mother.  The overwhelming feeling of being alone when your parents can so easily disregard one of their children.  Why was I shocked?  They tried it with one of my siblings before.  What I feel now is sadness.  In my mirror is my mother.  The mother I remember.

My mom was one of the most intelligent women I knew.  She was strong and independent, everything that a woman strives to be.  She had a wonderful father, close siblings, a bread winning job and the family that saw her as the hub - the center of our world.

Looking back now I understand.  She began to lose things one by one.  She lost her father, she lost some siblings and slowly her health.  She saw these things as weakness.  I say that with confidence because I was doing the same thing, feeling the same things.  I understand her desire to hold on to what she could.  I get it now.

Grateful...all I can say is - I am grateful.  I am, for lack of a better term, blessed to of witnessed this at an age where I could comprehend what was real and what wasn't.  I own my part.  I was everything she was and I was strong enough to do it and go through it alone.

I will never forget being left alone to deal with my divorce.  Being judged because I refused to speak poorly of my ex-husband.  The nights of rocking in my bed, full of anxiety, holding in all that I was going through.  I was so afraid to share my ugly.  I was trying to avoid exactly what happened anyway...people judging.

What everyone forgets while they are sitting back in judgment of others is:

• You don't live in their home
• You don't know their life
• You don't know what is true
• You don't know what is false
• You don't know their limits

I do not think that I could of done it differently.  I strongly believe I did what was right for my children.  There was no need to speak badly of their father simply for others to understand what our family was going through.  My children had their own things to heal without me joining in with the bad feelings.

It feels absolutely horrible when you are disliked for being TO strong.  I didn't cry enough, I didn't morn long enough, I didn't wait long enough, I didn't try hard enough - you simply have no idea.  The things I lost in those years could not be fixed, replaced or even glued back together.  Not because I did not want to fix it; because you can't fix something alone.

There is less than a handful of people that know me well.  Those are the people that know I cried enough, I morned enough, I waited enough and I tried harder and longer than anyone in my position ever would have.  I do not answer to you and I do not answer to them.  I answer to me and I know the amount of loss I had in the four years prior to my divorce was more than I lost in my actual divorce.

It was time to believe in me again and the first step is walking away from the one person that believed in me the least.