You don't speak ill of the dead

     It is said you leave the past behind you if you want to get ahead. You certainly do not speak ill of the dead. Otherwise, you just need a friend and shoulder to cry on. Research has shown, and I have found, that if it is not expressed, the past lives within you and holds you back. Every time it comes up and you repress it, it traumatizes the brain, gets stored in the body and brings you to an earlier grave. A friend who can empathize is a gift we only give ourselves when WE can give compassion to ourselves, when we have chosen to express and heal, to allow our mental and emotional being to mature fully. And that is why in the past I have met with resistance: I don't let the past keep me down. I own it, I express it, I drag it out by it's furry tail like the ugly ugly beast it is, hold it up and shine a light on it so I can become clean and give opportunity to others to give themselves the same thing: sanity, grace, relief. That does not make me ugly. So I will tell you the story.
     She was a normal giddy girl brought home on time from the school dance. Her boyfriend, friend, and friend's boyfriend of the day walked in with her. Noticing he was passed out drunk on the sofa in nothing but his underwear, the teen is embarrassed and about to whisper to her friends to leave. With super-human speed, the man was over and around furniture, the teen lifted off her feet and flying into one wall after another. Her friends watched stupefied, frozen. At a break in the flying, the teen whispers to her friends to wait out back for her. She runs up to the second floor into the room she shares with her cousin and locks the door behind her. She doesn't know why her cousin had come to live with her father, but she had missed her. She had missed all her cousins. But she didn't dwell on it. She opened the window and looked down. In the falling snow, her boyfriend and friends waited below. She told her boyfriend to catch her and she leapt from that second story window.
    She returned to the room the next day to get her things when she knew he would be working. When she got to the room she could not believe her eyes and was terrified of what could have happened to her had she stayed. The door had been busted open and the room trashed as if ransacked by a gorilla. So why had she chosen to come stay with him?
    She was just an average girl playing, not noticing the clothes had been brought off the line and lay on the bed folded and waiting. But she heard her mother yelling, we had failed to put away our clothes. So, she grabbed her pile and headed for her room, but not fast enough. Before she knew it, a hand was full of her hair and her head was being slammed into a wall, but she damn well knew better than to drop those clothes. Holding onto them like a fragile treasure, she kept them clean and safe while she was assaulted. It's just another gauntlet she would have to endure before she could get back to playing, she consoled herself.
     So why wouldn't she call the police, complain to someone? No one who witnessed it ever did. And there's another rule sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken, but clearly told to her when her brother got in trouble: "You need to come to court and tell them it was a mistake for you to call the police. It was a family matter and should have been kept in the family." I'm a rule breaker. I refused. Today I wonder if a court would even buy such a thing? I would hope not, for all our sakes and the sake of the children out there who might be at their mercy.
   And, in light of all this, why WOULDN"T such a girl grow up, bear children and drag them through her abusive relationships with her? At least to her knowledge and while under her protection, not a single one of her children suffered anything like it. And compared to such an upbringing, she could easily reason it away and exist in denial: these men she had chosen really weren't that bad to her.
     But there is a whole world out there that moves such mountains as a court that would buy it. There is a whole world out there that would never look the other way and allow this to happen to children. There is a whole world out there that would change laws and policies, there are teachers who would report it, there are big hearts who would help such a mother. And, God willing, this mother is going to bring that world and those hearts here for the sake of her children. She will do it openly as a light to others who want the same for themselves and their own children.