One Of The Things That He Has Of Mine Is A Cream And Sugar Set My Parents Got As A Wedding Present.

One of the things that he has of mine is a cream and sugar set my parents got as a wedding present.

I'm so angry about it right now I can't sleep.

I won’t say that I am ashamed that my heart strings still get pulled when I think of the things he suffered.  So much of what I’ve read makes me think that as a survivor I’m supposed to be as cold toward him as he was to me.

I can’t do that.  I loved this man, and the things that haunted him, haunted me.  And I can mourn for the life he may have had if things had been different.

The difference is, rereading these posts, my heart swells for him, but there is no longer the urge to run over and sweep him into a hug he’d probably reject. I won’t accept the shit he’s endured justifying what he did to me.  

That is progress.

Learned Behaviour

His dad was abusive. Violent. And his father before him.

Once he asked his dad for money for a field trip and his dad threw him into a wall so hard he went through the drywall and ended up in his sister’s closet.

He wasn’t born with these skills.

His mother told him when he was in highschool that regardless of what happened, she would always back her husband over him.

He wasn’t born cold.

I know exactly where he comes from.

In unrelated news:

Not to be That Person(TM) posting remarks about weather on your dash but there’s been a surge of climate change posts on mine.  And not to trivialize the seriousness of those with my anecdotal shitpost but goddamit it’s October and I live in CANADA:

Is it any wonder?

TW - self harm

When he was in his early teens, he confessed to his parents that he had urges to hurt himself.  He wanted to take one of his hunting knives and plunge it into his gut.

I’m not a mother, so maybe I don’t know, but if my kid came up to me and told me he was having a hard time not gutting himself, I’m pretty sure we’d be dropping everything and going to the hospital to get some professional help.

They took away his hunting knives.  That’s it.

Behold. My empire of scraps.

I can scrape a life together from ashes and crumbs.

Aftermath

I didn't stop talking to him immediately after that message he sent me.  Truth be told, he’d ‘cut me off’ a number of times prior to that. We actually had a set of boundaries and expectations in place for just these sorts of occasions.

The last time he'd insisted we cease speaking, after the initial shock and flood of texts I sent him, I stopped texting him altogether.  He messaged me after a few days of silence and accused me of getting over him. 

So for the next 6 weeks or so, I texted him every day. Here’s some highlights of my shame: