If truth were a pill you should get a patent

Dear Growing Together,


If truth were a pill you should get a patent

and sell it for huge bucks a pop.

Secrets are way over rated.


This is not an apology or "letter of repentance"


I just sent this one to the "one in charge" and I feel better.

Dear Brother:

Just wanted you to know what I just did.


We were fine. We were twitter-paited.

We had something most older folks don't find in a winter marriage.

We had each other, we had passion and we had fun.

Then he said, "Let's be more active in our church"

I said, "we are very happy, why not leave things they way we are;

I slept less than 4 hours a night,

spun into a psychotic manic episode unparreled

by any I have been aware of in a life time of bipolar,

nothing like my new husband of less than three years had ever seen;

even with heavy medication it was hard to come down;

for a month on medication and sleeping pills

I was still sleeping only 3 - four hours a night and vomiting

and coughing up heavy green speutum evey morning;

All the symptoms of swine flu appeared plus some.

Except I didn't have it.

I stopped the hypocritical pretence;

The morning headaches were reduced;

the vomiting has stopped and the antibiotics have been allowed to work.

The mood stabalizers are doing their thing,

and I can go to sleep at night and wake up later

to take the sleeping pills which get me through the rest of the night.

I was going to put this on a pretend blog,

but I started vomiting and coughing again,

realizing how manipulative that would be,

and how deceitful it would be.

I'm tired of deceit and manipulation.

That is all I have gotten from you "leaders" and others since started

to try tp be like you want me to be.

That won't happen again.


We were happy.

We were enfatuated.

I didn't care about my husband's strange habits.

I do care about his hypocracy and his holier than thou attitude

since he has decided to follow your advice.

From:
To:
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 5:48 AM
Subject: Re:

My dearest brother

Thank you so much for not passing judgment.

After all when I land my plane;

hopefully without anymore damage

(I've been fired as a substitute,

fired from my chiropractor;

fired by my family doctor,

on suspension or possibly expelled from my university,

quit the church,

nearly divorced my husband,

and nearly busted my back digging and hauling huge rocks)

maybe I can be sane for a little while then be

depressed again for the winter like always and crawl back into

my little Algernon hole.



Thank you for being my brother.

I know you had no say in the matter,

but at least you've stuck with it and haven't disowned me.



I've been trying to clean my yard and the one next door.

I plant my extra grass and flowers over there

so it will look better from here and be safer for the little kids that live there.

I called the home teacher and his companion to task on it

and called Housing and reported the dangerous conditions,

maybe someone will help me.

The little kids worked hours over the week end

picking and digging sticker weeds and fox tail grass.





Dear Sister,

Since you have sent this to me, I have to take it you want me to know about it.

I find myself unable to give you any words of advise or consolation.

Some people are really "with-it" for their church.

Some people PRETEND to be really "with-it" for their church.

Some people want to be just somewhat affiliated with their church

-- you know -- me over here and the church over there.

Some people can't stand any church.

Many, many people can't stand those who PRETEND to be all churchy,

and use this for power or gain like Gadianton robbers.

Maybe someone could start up a "church of sorta-saints" with just

five Commandments (each member chooses which five)

and five percent tithing when you feel like it and shortened scriptures

(five chapters of Genesis plus

any five Psalms plus any five chapters from the

Book of Romans) and just five meetings a year.

Only that would not cover the real problem.

In my proposed sorta-church, you would still have people saying,

"You are worse than me, therefore I am better than you.

Stay worse, because it makes me look better."

One of my Sergeants in the Army said in my hearing,

"Why does my belly start to hurt when I get here in the morning

and keep hurting until I leave in the afternoon?"

And the Army is not even a church!

Your (Blood) Brother


Dear brother;
My second husband wanted to start the "First church of Non Believers"

when we were married.


My dear sister,

Years back you did me the great service of putting me on to

my manic-depressive disorder, lithium carbonate and

Dr. Cassanova to put it all together.

Since then, I have been at times like

I am able to leap tall buildings at a single bound,

and times when I felt like my feet were in buckets of concrete

that I could barely drag around.

But I have had an idea what was going on.

Dad never knew that.

In a manner of speaking, that time when you blew up in my face,

in my house, was a great favor to me,

because it has enabled me to understand

a little of what is going on in my own mind.

Knowing that I am seriously mentall ill

(and you taught it to me!)

has made it possible to sort of allow for it,

as when walking in a high wind, one leans into the wind.

Usually I can put on a fair imitation of

someone who is NOT seriously mentally ill --

or at leaset make myself scarce during the worst times.

I am like the man who crawled under his porch

to try to get away from the voices in his head.

An officer of the law shined a flashlight down there and asked,

"Fred. What are you doing?" He was able to get away with saying,

"Just checking for termites and termite damage, Officer.

Thank you."

Love, your Big Brother





Dear Brother;

Good, I guess I haven't been able to "fake til you make it",

but I do try, and I'm so sorry for blowing up at you,

really don't even remember, though.

I am really sick now.

this university thing has put me over the edge.

I see my shrink tomorrow. Hopefully he can help get me back down.

I was almost there when I got the suspension notice

which was based on no warning, no notice and no facts.

I have contacted the national president and am

attempting to get a disability attorney or

heaven forbid Civil liberties attorney.

Where is Paul when he is actually needed.

A light in a dark corner

April 21, 2009
Dear LoLyn,

Your recent posts have encouraged me to forgive

and offer possible help to my own mother.

Thank you for the light you have shed on these corners of darkness in our lives.


Tis is the letter I was inspired to write my own mother:

Dear Mother


I love you very much.

I have many happy memories of my childhood

and my young motherhood with you there at my side

On the other hand there are painful flash backs

that haunt me constantly and create in me a lack of peace,

a post traumatic nightmare state that causes me a great deal of pain.

I know you know exactly what I mean because

you have the same type of flashbacks from post traumatic stress.

For thirty years I’ve been trying to share with you what I learn about myself,

hoping to both help myself and you to have more peaceful lives.

I know first hand how difficult it is to live with the

tapes in our heads of abuse and grief;

your actual events were so much more tragic than any of mine;

I can’t even stand to think of how much grief and pain you have born.

But you carried the resilient gene and in doing so,

I now have figured out, you were able to dissociate

from the pain of abuse in early childhood, in elementary school,

high school and marriage.

Dissociation used to be described as having a double personality.

You actually perceive yourself drifting away from your body to avoid the pain;

some even have memory lapse or time loss to avoid the painful moments

or hours of their lives when the pain was unbearable.

You still do that to avoid the pain of your childhood rather than facing it.

Just telling me to “rip up that chapter”

that described your abuse, and telling me “that secret will go to my grave.”

That 90 years later trying to cover a secret shame.

The shame that you should not even own. You did nothing wrong.

You are not to blame for your step mother’s insane behaviors;

for your fathers negligence or ignorance of the facts.

Really, how could he NOT know about it.

But that would shatter your perfect image of him,

and drop him from his celestial pedestal.

They are probably not to blame either; as they were

probably as much victims as were you, and I.

Mother. The abuse was not your fault.

Your Father probably loved and adored you as you remember,

but it was a different era. He did not know what to do to protect you.

Leaving on trips and avoiding confrontation with the bitch

was all he knew how to do to protect himself.

You did nothing wrong.

You did not deserve to be treated the way they treated you.

You deserved to be treated like a princess, a priestess,

a goddess that you were created to be;

a child of your Heavenly Father who loves you beyond all your ability to recognize.


You can rumple this up, light a match and burn it;

but it will do no good.

You have read it.


It is in your mind now, and if you will allow it to dwell there,

you will have some modicum of peace for the rest of your days.

That’s all I want for you.

I’m not trying to torture you or hurt you.

Dear LoLyn
Thank you for sharing your clients story so explicitly on the connections of her mother's abuse and your client's post traumatic stress. Not many are so courageours and so brave and so literate as to be able to express these connections.

I am like a wall of dominoes spilling across a room as twists and turns in memories and feelings fall into place after reading your blogs.

Please keep writing.

The honesty is overwhelming and the pain it brings is cleansing and healing.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Grateful.

Dear Grateful, Thank you for the validation. Pay it forward.