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.