Editor’s note: The following article was written by a Lovefraud reader who we’ll call “WalkonMom.”
I used to think that “six” was my lucky number. And sometimes, I used to remind myself to show gratitude for six little things, like, the sound of New England leaves as they rustle underfoot, the first snowfall with really huge flakes, each breath flowing in and out, especially when you recognize that you are free for the first time, the scent of your baby’s head as you cradle and rock her in your grandmother’s rocking chair, the preciousness of each holiday, along with the sacred spirit of wonder that fills you as you see your child grow from year to year. Falling in love, and realizing that, no matter what, you’ll be strong enough to fix any boo boo or heal any abuse in the relationship, however seemingly impossible, because, well, you chose to love that man, and that’s supposed to mean forever, and, besides, you’re a mom—that should be enough.
But to survive in a situation of domestic violence, how much love could it EVER take for you alone to mitigate or hold it at bay? And when you realize that nurturing is never enough, that you can’t solve or ever heal it, and when you need to leave Hell to save your child, how much LOVE will it take to get you both out—alive? How much love will it take, years later, when your once kidnapped child chooses borderline behaviors to blame you for everything the sociopath did?
I’ll never forget. November 4, 2008. The night my 17-year-old daughter returned to NH from NJ after nearly six years, finally reaching out to me for help—a plea in the darkness. It was late, and I was tucking her into bed. My second husband and I had just returned from our honeymoon to pick her up in Hartford earlier that night. She had recently voiced some problems (again) with her Dad. I wasn’t given to know what the seriousness of his issues were over the past several years. She and I had only visited on a few rare occasions during her six-year transition to womanhood.
This is what I do know: While she was away, she’d attempted suicide and ended up in the hospital on multiple occasions. She’d cut herself, developed impetigo from self-injury. She took varying cocktails and combinations of drugs over the years, sometimes in dangerous and lethal quantities. She’d engaged in dangerous sexual activity, run away, sometimes being found on a city bench. Most horrific of all, as I was to discover that night, she held an ominous secret close to her heart, one that loomed much larger than the two of us. Bigger even than life itself.
No match
I’d left my first marriage in 2000, and with nothing, save one child, and a NH restraining order. I was no match for this cruel man who would stop at nothing to punish me. He was incapable of love, and as his warped mind was obsessed with obtaining and destroying the one thing he knew I cared about, his sole aim became that of molding our precious child’s soul into something he could torture me with forever, a meted out, deliberate punishment for my daring to leave his controlling, jealous, narcissistic personage, a payback for my rejecting his penchant for enjoying watching me suffer—and for leaving the abuse. “You’re it until I die, baby,” he used to say, over the years. “You’re IT.”
And so I had to borrow money from Mom to keep NJ courts from snatching my daughter back unwillingly, even as she and I had moved to NH with his physical help, and his written, signed understanding that I had no choice but to leave the marriage because of his abuse.
We endured death threats, were in hiding twice, hired one corrupt NJ attorney, “enlisted” the aid of therapists, NH DOVE attorneys—family services workers. But we were no match for the lies, death threats, the unending stream of NJ Italian family money, all fueling corruption that carried a singular purpose: to wear me down while making me appear as “crazy.”
Thus, we fought a three-year long, fledgling court battle with a corrupt judge, between two states, both warring for the acquisition of my child’s tender flanks.
Kidnap
It was in 2003 that he decided to kidnap our child, at the end of a month-long visitation. And it was during that fateful year that the same vulnerable girl who used to plead desperately for the abuse to stop, decided inexplicably, to go back to NJ—to live with her father.
When she returned for a short time to NH with FBI help, she’d evolved into a demanding, enraged, uncontrollable, borderline, destructive teen, filled with angst, three-inch devil horns super glued to her forehead, and Celtic swirls painted where two eyebrows used to be, in the style of her famous half brother’s band.
Once I’d witnessed just how cleverly he’d turned her head with those expensive Lolita skirts, shit kicker boots and a multitude of other promises to be involved with the band, how he coerced her with things he purchased during his “quality kidnapping time,” I knew my role as a mother was over. All I had left was my right to mourn, to breathe, and to try to walk on.
She walks away
At 12, she’d arrived at her own ironic version of an age of reason. For me, it was just another hellish turning point in the ongoing dialectic of domestic violence, an unholy grail of horror from which I knew I would never emerge, because he’d continue to use her to seek and secure a lifetime of vengeance and vitriol from me. What else could I do? I had to play dead, and let her go. She tried to push my mother down the stairs—threatened to kill all of us. So on one fateful summer day, I watched her put on her goth armor, the teeny weeny sexy skirts he’d purchased, and I let her choose to walk away. July 27, 2003—that remains the date of her death, regardless of our current and future interactions.
And so, this same beautiful soul and creature who once begged me to leave her father, now openly rejected the peaceful life it had taken several years for me and Mom to create for her, after finding the courage to leave the abuse. In the silence of one oceanfront family home, I was left alone to nurse these impossibly painful, openly weeping, inner wounds. From that day on, I mourned my daughter as dead. The mere possibility of having to hold, within, the fear and possibility of her death at his, or her own hands, in light of the risks I knew awaited inside the Hell she was to re-enter, now alone, without a mother’s protection or presence, would have driven any mother mad. I screamed and ripped my hair out for a week, and cried and vomited for one more. Then, I donned my teacher’s clothing, and went back to work, telling the story as if I were reciting summer vacation details. The only eyes that no longer had tears were my own.
No one validates this kind of death as mourning, so again, I was not given the grace of sharing it with anyone, for fear of being called crazy, or over-dramatic. Those few people I brought into the circle of the story blamed me, for being stupid enough to “choose” a sociopath, for letting her go, for feeding her Twinkies in grade school, for simply having been born at all. “What kind of mother leaves her child?” they would query. Well, the kind whose child threatens to kill Mom or use their Daddy to kill the family so that she can live the “Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (that he promised her, replete with sex, drugs and rock and roll in NJ), that’s who! I couldn’t compete against a band that was becoming famous; without that, he’d have had no power to sway her into the world of the perverse. Boundaries. It all boils down to boundaries.
Loss of motherhood
For six years, half of me tried to imagine living again as some fictitious single woman, one would never be again a wife or mother, while the other half keened as the woman whose child was absent and had died at the age of 12, to a murderous and conscious-less husband. I checked the NJ obituaries on a weekly basis.
Since that time, regardless of whether or not my daughter still breathes, I will always mourn the loss of motherhood. Life can be ironic, particularly if the devil won’t let you out of Hell.
I’ve read that children of divorce in the context of abuse tend to seek love unrelentingly from the parent with whom they feel unsafe, the one they instinctively know does not love them sincerely. My daughter and I were always so close that, had I demanded she stay with me, she would have given me the middle finger and left anyway, not because of hate, but because she needed me to prove to her, against her father’s protestations, that I loved her enough to let her go, to figure out who her daddy was on her terms, not mine, or the court’s, or any therapist’s. She compartmentalized her love, keeping me in a box only for the tough times.
Meanwhile, after years of trying to keep her safe before puberty, and to hold all of this up alone, I was battle worn, devoid of personal power and hope; in some ways, it was a relief to let her go. Years of his unrelenting torture had kept her hostage, and me from moving on with some kind of half-life. You see, she and I were so connected that I know that she knew all this, too. Deep inside, she knows that she and I were always just pawns, even as her budding psyche needed to fill that void in inner space in which we all need to KNOW that we are loved by our parents unconditionally, even if it’s not true.
Just a pawn
She had always been scared of her father’s unpredictable, controlling nature—many NH friends who called, after she left, validated this when they told me how shocked they were to discover she had chosen to live with him. But the hardest part for me throughout all the “she said” accusations, and through all the dirty legal tactics, his M.O., to avoid accountability, was my knowing from his eyes (and her mouth) that she was “just a pawn” between two equal parents, and an innocent victim of a lose-lose, power-over scheme, in which her Mom was the sole instigator, merely a cartoon character in a b-movie, a buffoon, an inconsequential, incompetent piece of shit, whose indomitable spirit as a mother existed in order to be squelched and mocked, at all cost.
Yet she could only see the situation at that time as any child would, stuck between two divorcing parents who would act upon love only and therefore fight for HER behalf. In spite of circumstances, children all need to believe that their very existences hold real meaning, and that both parents are acting sincerely. That is why she felt so vehemently angry. Since she knew that she could always be herself with me, and that I would love her back without question, while holding her very birthright, which carries also a permanent reminder of my sole personal responsibility for her rage about being born in the first place, within my own being.
In 2008, six years had passed since I’d experienced being a mother to my only child, six years since I’d been lost inside his torturous definition of divorce hell, a place in which I was stripped of all motherhood, raped from the inside out by a cruel and damaged man. Looking back, she and I both knew that all this irony and complexity required that she release herself from the fire of her daddy’s life, and from mine. She had needed to figure it all out by herself, to pull herself up by her Goth corset straps, and eyebrow-less face.
Something to show you
Within this set of sixes in years, I hadn’t known if my child were alive or dead, or even whether or not I’d ever find the will to continue living for myself. So simply for us to come back together, just before she reached the age of 18, was a small miracle. Naturally, she and I were catching up, that November night, on lost years of talking, about little things—how she’d run away from Dad again, how she was missing too many days at school in her senior year, how she didn’t want to live in NJ anymore. I remarked on how very thin and frail and sad she was, compared to how she had looked when she had visited in the summer. I asked her if she was feeling better. She’d vomited when we picked her up, lying in the back holding her stomach all the way to NH. She said, casually, “Oh you know, Mom. I’m withdrawing from heroin again; when I ran away from Dad last week, I had to stay with my friends.” Her friends had held her together, even as the drugs to mute the pain of trauma and long-term abuse were gradually killing them all.
I tried not to pry, even as I felt that sudden, old and all-too-familiar adrenaline rush from the past, that trembling murderous rage within that makes you want to kill the bastard that did this to your child, to erase that power-ridden, sociopathic smirk forever from his evil, stinking face.
It was then that she said, “Mom, I have something to show you.” I tried to draw her out tenderly by guessing what it might be, but then she slowly lifted the fabric of her pants up over her emaciated pajama-donned legs, revealing a horrendous, ugly truth, a horrific badge describing the six years she had taken on a un-winnable and pointless battle all on, by herself. Her precious flesh hung in tatters; there was a long series of deep muscle scars running up and down her thighs; some cuts were half-infected, others long healed. A few were one to two inches deep. I could not breathe, but I knew this moment could either save her life or end it; her future, carrying the basic will to live, was in my hands. I felt IT coming. I stayed steady, like a ship withstanding a rogue wave, turning my bow into the white squall.
His son
And then she said, “I know now why I’ve done this since I was young.” My response was a silence in deep waves of impending grief and doom. I held my breath, as I could sense that dread and nausea and relief were rising up faster than I could feel the blood coursing through my veins. Slowly, and with utterly slow agony, she revealed that her 29-year-old half-brother, son of her father (from his 1st marriage), had raped her, had sex with her. He’d done it while her father was downstairs; my former stepson and daughter up in her bedroom. She said that it was consensual, that she loved him, but that it also led her to take heroin. It made her cut. It made her run away. She’d stopped going to school. It was her senior year. She had done this over the years. I knew then that it hadn’t been the first time, but it wasn’t mine to say it. Her half brother had thrown her across the room before coming to see me; that’s when I realized there was no going back. This was bigger than incest or abuse. This was a life or death situation.
My daughter’s precious life depended, in that moment, for me to be stronger for her than the ocean is deep. She needed, more than oxygen, for me to hold her as a fortress- of understanding, compassion and love. And so as I rocked and held her, I struggled to keep all my past wolves at bay. She spoke only of one incident, yet the cutting and the sex and the problems with her father and his son likely occurred since she was a little girl.
As long as I could focus on breathing out into that eternity, into the inferno of that moment, and as I held her, I felt that we both began to let go, to breathe back in all the life from those lost years back into the corpses of one other. To keep the horrendous thoughts from ripping me apart, I consciously drifted into my realm of gratitude, and uttered seven silent things for which I was now truly grateful, as “six” was no longer my lucky number:
For scent of song in a sky of blue, for dancing and healing and walking on, for the gift my daughter bestowed, which was to let her mother go so that she could be free and learn to grow strong enough to climb back into the abyss again to save her daughter’s life, for the phrase “love goes on forever” engraved on our laundry basket by one nine year old child, for newspapers that do not yet contain the obituary of my own child, for the hope that someday truth will prevail over lies, with the spirit of good triumphing over the hell of insincerity.
Lastly, for the power of imagination lying deeply within the understanding that there will always be many different kinds of deaths we must accept, all of which she and I have endured.
Into the fire again
As she was a minor, the abuse was reported by her, to therapists, and to her father, and to DYFS. Yet still, She chose to enter back into the fire again. She is now 21, trying to bully me into believing that “none of this happened,” trying perhaps to assuage her guilt that I’m slowly dying, by striking the truth from the records of her history. She also has developed borderline personality. In the meantime, I’ve been diagnosed with a rare connective tissue disorder, and fear that these things will never be resolved between us, as my time on earth is limited, keeping me from being able to let go of her. Time is short; most of all, it is unfailingly precious.
Motherhood, too, with a sociopath, is a tenuous, bitter, lose-lose hole into which we fall; it burns me inside that the revelation of the perpetrators must die with me. Yes, against my better judgment, I must do as I am told by US therapists: to keep these secrets under wraps until after I die. One never wants to stir the hornet’s nest, and the revelation of the names themselves will be the margin of safety I leave for my new husband and his family, in the event they are ever threatened. It all seems so ludicrous, and it is exactly why perpetrators continue to get away with murder. I will never see the fruit of my womb heal from her own wounds; I will never be able to protect her from this genetic disease, which she, too, carries. Most of all, as she eschews the truth of her history, she refuses to honor our connection as mutually respectful. I am no longer a mother.
In life with a sociopath, I believe now that one gives up the right to motherhood. The rights to breathe and live on are defined by sheer whim, luck, space, and a lot of grace.
Yet, The one thought that will always bring me the only comfort as I die is this:
In the bowels of Hell, there is but one gravestone, and the only surname that is and will ever remain engraved on it belongs to the sociopath and his son.
WalkOnMom – your post has been on my mind and I’m hoping to offer a perspective.
I am the daughter of a sociopathic mother. My father ended up staying with her until he passed when I was 32 years old. Throughout my life, I chose to please my mother because bottom line she was extremely dominant and I was deep down terrified of her. I’ve thought so many times if I had just chosen my father all would have been “well.” But in struggling to make sense of all my what-ifs, I come back over and over to the stark reality that she was so busy and so crazy and so over involved and so controlling that it would have been difficult to truly pay attention to the quiet voice of truth at the time. I’m trying to learn to forgive myself for being terrified and unable to cope better.
Here is what I want to say to you. My healthy parent’s voice was quiet, but there. As I’ve grown older and found my way, that voice has somehow magnified and taken shape even after he passed. I grieve beyond words that I did not see my way to a better life at the time. Hindsight tells me that there were alternate paths, but I could not think straight through all the sociopathic noise. My father’s constant kindness was not always acknowledged by me, but it was priceless and has given me strength even lately (I’m 57 years old).
My father and I ended up estranged by the time he died. I had given up on him and he had given up on me. There were no kind words from him prior to his passing and no words of deepest appreciation from me. Papa – I’m sorry.
My point is, your presence in your daughter’s life is greater than you can possibly know right now. Your continued kindness is never wasted and may resonate years from now. The most important piece is your example. Both you and my father show/ed their children by example that there is another way of being human on the planet (besides sociopath). If not for him, I would have thought exhaustion and drama were necessary to be a legitimate person. Seriously.
It took me years through completely insane and unaware choices to find my way back to my father’s quiet truth – that I am precious and loved and do not have to live like a refugee. He is the reason I even had a chance at being alright. Unless heaven really does look down on us, he does not know that I am alright and safe and that I understand everything. He had written me off.
Even to your last breath – and I’m praying for you to be well – send her good thoughts and good words – they do matter. Something about the life events she has shared with you and her dual feelings resonate so strongly with me. Something about your description of her speaks to me. She is the sociopath’s daughter, but she is also your daughter. And your words and your example are priceless even though it looks totally lost right now.
Thanks so much for sharing with us. Bless you – God bless you. I now know how amazing my father was for being there and setting an example in the face of pure, ultra-busy evil. You are amazing for protecting your current family, for reaching out to your daughter, for being the voice of truth. The Voice of Truth. May your voice grow in strength inside your daughter as my father’s did inside me.
Love and Prayers – OpalRose
Kim,
I just read your post about your ex-husband.
((hugs))
My thoughts are with you and your family.
OpalRose,
You talking about your loving parent’s voice being quiet—-over powered by the louder one of the abusive parent….RUNG A BIG BELL within me. My loving step father did have a nurturing and loving voice, but it was QUIET…and only now that he is gone am I hearing some of those words, and feeling that comfort. I spent the last 18 months with him while he was in his final stages of cancer and they were some of the BEST months of my life. We had such a connection and such a connecting time and I never felt more loved than I did then.
Sometimes when I have a decision to make, I ask myself “what would Daddy have said/done” and I think a minute and I KNOW what he would have done..he would have done the kind thing, but he wouldn’t have put up with any BS either. This has been a great comfort to me.
Your father’s love is still with you, and his quiet voice is still there. No knowing why your dad or mine put up with the loud obnoxious overbearing hateful voices of our egg donors, but for some reason they did, but their loving of us is still thhere and will be as long as we live. That was a wonderfull gift.
Thank you for reminding me once again that I DID HAVE THAT and I STILL HAVE THAT.
Dear OpalRose,
Your perspective was a pure gift worth more than gold, resonating deeply at the heart of my keening. Thank you. God Bless you. I forgot, in all this “trying to hold on to motherhood that I lost years ago,” that relationships continue to evolve and grow after death.
Your perspective demonstrates the power of that quiet connection to your father within, and it helps you make sound decisions; your courage to share brings the Truth full circle for me, and I cannot thank you enough.
Silencing the man-made fear/sociopathy through working toward radical acceptance is such an understated power. For no matter how much of our lives these damaged people strive to destroy, the machinations of psychopaths are no match for real values, whose resonances lie deep inside the souls of most folks. This same force makes the Universe Itself and the interconnections between mankind and the Golden Rule a part of nature. Reading your post, I cried my eyes out, because you reminded me that the faith, the hope and the love are all in the waiting, and that death does not end a relationship. In fact, it forges it more deeply, and nothing, no one’s lies, or fictions, or machinations to hijack a soul, can EVER touch or destroy that. Choice: yes. Boundaries, YES. The freedom to choose. Opal, you are a gem!
Kim,
My heart bleeds for you and your family. You must harbor so many conflicting feelings; sending love and light your way.
Kim Frederick, you’re in my positive thoughts.
Brightest blessings
Walkonmom,
I don’t know if you read the article I wrote but here is a quote from one of the best books I ever read about how we respond emotionally to tragedy. It was written by Dr. Viktor Frankl after he lost everything and spent years in a Nazi prison camp. Here is a quote from that book “Man’s search for meaning”
“We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves.”
When I realized that my son patrick was a psychopath, that he ENJOYED how brutal his murder of Jessica Witt was, and I finally had the good sense and back bone to turn my back on him, to give up my delusional hope, the malignant ope that he would change. That we would have a loving relationship when he got out. Even though Patrick had not lived in my home since he was 17, he was “living” in my heart and my head and was part of my every day life. I wrote to him about everything that happened at home, about what I thought and felt and hoped.
Then I realized I had been writing to “Ted Bundy” not some person with a conscience, but someone unrepentant and evil.
It felt like my heart had been ripped out when I realized that I had NO CONTROL over what happened to my son, that I had NO CONTROL over making my “dream” come true where he was concerned. I had been living in a fantasy land thinking I had control over something that I had NO CONTROL over.
Life isn’t always what we wish it would be…and from the day we are born we are getting one day closer to death every day. We bring a child into the world knowing that it will not live forever. Yet we think that life even with eventual death is better than no life at all. We must also come to accept our own eventual death. Whether it is young or old when it happens, known in advance or sudden.
I love my life, I love living. I want to live. I feel like I am finally learning how to live now that I am on the down hill slope at age 65. But I am going to enjoy every moment of every day. Even sick or infirm. Dr. Frankl found joy, found satisfaction in every moment, and found meaning and I intend to as well.
Walkonmom, I hope that you will not hang your enjoyment, your peace, and your life on what your daughter chooses to do or not to do. She is a free agent just as my son is and while she had a “hard life” with a psychopath for a father, she also has CHOICES as well. God bless.
Hi Ox,
We were reading from Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” last night (it’s one of my favorite books, too!) I agree wholeheartedly, and do live each moment in the fullness of joy and being- the story I wrote was the first time I ever found the courage to expurgate and tell it the way it was (we’ve always held to strong boundaries because we knew she had to make her own choices, and because we needed to protect the safety of our own family). I don’t hang my definition on what my daughter does, but I do want to leave her with the no B/S side of it; my happiness belongs where love is both given and received mutually. With my new family, I’ve experienced and given love for the first time. However, you see, when you know you may not have long to live, the “things left unsaid” issues come to the forefront- letting go is a journey rather than a destination. Yes, we all die and carry that in the back of our minds, but as a half-mother who loves my child, I must attend to the honesty that I always insist to keep between us and with her, and to remain open; to do any less would not be truly letting go. To simply be alive now and have this chance TO let go is a luxury that many do not have.
Every week for the past month, my daughter calls me, and she says she loves me; that is an opportunity to communicate. As hard as it is to see her “split,” it leaves the soil fertile for her to initiate gives her seed a chance to grow back into the sun and feel safe. Recently I wrote to her and told her that I would not allow discussions in which her father and his son were catalysts for her to abuse or denigrate me or my new family. She didn’t speak to me for a month, but then, suddenly, she began to initiate and to agree to a boundary. Seeing her willingness to accept a boundary is evidence that she is not necessarily going to end up always “borderline.” Every day that I can relish in her successes, is another day that she can choose to either stay away or engage.
I’m so deeply sorry about what happened with your son- my heart keens for you, too. God bless- I’m delighted that we were both reading Viktor Frankl at the same time- his writings always call me back when things get tough! What a synchronicity!
@walkonmom,
I’m so sorry to read your story. My heart hurts for you, and I hope that you can find some measure of comfort, hope, and healing here.
@OpalRose,
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your earlier post. With only one minor exception your story is my story, and my story is yours. My father left my mother after 27 years of marriage, but he waited until my brothers and I had left home before he did it. Tragically it was too late for him, by that time he was a broken and hollowed out husk of his former laughing, fun-loving, affectionate self. But, like yours, his words, his actions and his love of life spoke quietly and sustained me throughout mine (even though I didn’t realize it at the time). My father too died while we were estranged from each other; he too had written me off. I too had allowed a version of parental alienation to blind me to the incredible courage it took for him to stay there with no defences against a raging sadistic psychopath, just for the sake of the children who had all been turned against him. I can barely stand to think about this, at my guilt for not realizing my stupidity and how I’d been brainwashed until it was far too late.
So thank you for writing about your experience with such eloquence.
Like OpalRose, I want to add in my voice of gratitude to walkonmom; your quiet voice has a power and lasting ability that will remain with your daughter for the remainder of her life, should she ever be ready to hear it, that will far outlast your own. You, and OpalRose’s father, and my own, are the quiet, unsung but glorious heroes the world needs in order to keep itself on its proper course. Thank you for everything you’ve done. I send prayers that, as Oxy has said, this stage of your life brings you fulfillment and grace.
Dear Walkonmom,
It sounds like, in spite of the pain you have been through, that you have your head on straight. I’m so glad of that and that you do have love in your new family. That is also what makes life worth living every day of it.
I feel so fortunate that I have my adopted son D and he is a treasure and a jewel, a son and also a friend. I feel that God has blessed me beyond measure.
I’m glad that you are able to set some boundaries for your daughter (for your sake as well as hers) and that she is responding positively to them. While “borderline personality disorder” does NOT mean “on the border of” and it is very difficult to treat, some people with this diagnosis do manage to live reasonably “okay” lives. I hope and pray that your daughter is one of them.
Yes, Viktor Frankl’s book was a big turning point for me. At first when I read it I thought “my God, how can I whine about my own pain when this man had so much worse things happen” and then where he talked about pain being like a “gas” and that it filled the container totally…so a “little” pain is the same as a “big” pain…and I thought how a baby dropping his passie is in 100% pain…while we know that he is not ruined forever, the baby doesn’t know this and so he cries in total pain. So the pain experienced by anyone is total, and we must not be ashamed that our wounds are not as “big” or as “bad” as someone else’s
I am glad that you were able to tell your story. It seems that it does help us to do that. I know it has with me. To have my pain and loss validated was important, but I also am learning to validate myself, so that if no one in the world believes me, it is still MY TRUTH.
God bless, and thanks for sharing with us.