Twenty-One

            Melissa smiled, grateful for such a caring friend as Jan whose actions spoke louder than words.  Stopping by unexpectantly was so like her.  Jan always said what she appreciated most about their forty years of friendship was they never tried to change one another. Her thoughts wandered through kind paths of fellowship where the two of them had walked over the years. She felt blessed.

            Which by comparison contradicted the trite hodge-podge of emotions that flooded her soul when she thought of her mother. But it was a needed flood and not trite, she reminded herself.  For it meant the victim shovel was doing its work of unburying emotions.  A season for exposed emotion upon emotion just as God revealed things line upon line.

            “I am a captive set free!”  Melissa spontaneously declared.  “Restored to health that I might live an abundant life!”

            “What?”  Ed hollered from the kitchen, “You want something?”

            “No!” she grinned and yelled back, “Just talking to myself!”

            She heard him grumble. Smart man that he was, knew to leave well enough alone as to what he’d mumbled. He’d probably shook his head, thinking it best to take his coffee to the garage and lay low for a while. “Smart man,” she said as the door shut with a thud!

            Melissa laughed as she shuffled and sorted papers.  She was determined to make a dent in the pile that had built up on her desk.  Several things need to be pitched and another pile formed to be filed. There was always the miscellaneous pile that seemed to have a life of its own.  As usual, those papers were at the bottom, some had been there awhile.

            She stopped short when at the very bottom was a copy of the letter, she’d written to her mother the year before.  Of all the days to come across it; her mother’s birthday. 

            “Wow,” she whispered then slowly read it. 

Mother,

          I want you to know what I mean by “I am done.”

I will not answer your phone calls or call you.

I will delete your texts without reading them and I will not text you.

I will not open or read any cards or letters you send and I will not be sending you any cards or letters.

I will block you on Facebook and Instagram as well as any family or friends that could tell you what they see on my pages.

I will not visit you when I come to Arizona.

I want to be removed as your emergency contact information.

I want my name removed as the beneficiary on your life insurance policy.

Anne will now be the family member you turn to and depend on for help.  She will be responsible for having you cremated and ashes scattered.

These are not threat’s they are facts and I will not change my mind once you move.

This is what I mean by “I am done” if you “feel” you need to choose to be “independent and gypsy” rather than a relationship with your “dearest children.”

Melissa

            A flood of memories and emotions overwhelmed her heart and mind.  From the outside looking in the tone could be mistaken as harsh and unforgiving. Her emotions had been raw and ragged. Her mother heard it as hateful and mean, others agreed with her. They even told Melissa she’d given her mother ammunition to react and think that way about her because of the letter.

            She remembered the sleepless hours spent wracked with guilt that perhaps they were right.  When asked why she’d written such a letter, she explained it was an attempt to put the brakes on her mother’s foolish need to move, again.  She had to try something unexpected and never done before, define to her mother consequences for her actions.  The simple definition of insanity was trying the same thing and expecting different results. Melissa had to try something radically different, hoping for the impossible of shocking her mother into listening for once.

Hard to believe a year and a half had passed since she’d last seen or talked to her.  A year ago, she’d been immersed in battling the throes of depression because of her mother.  Ed had pressured her to seek counseling.  She’d resisted thinking, this too will pass. It hadn’t, but only got worse.  Finally, she’d sought counseling and ever so grateful for having done so.  It scared her to think if she’d waited any longer, she probably would have crossed that one more point on the depression scale into clinical depression.  She never ever wanted to be in such a dark place again.

Now she understood her depression had been the result of living a lifetime of tolerating the intolerable. The time had finally come to cease tolerating being forced to accept emotional betrayal and abandonment; just because that’s the way mother had and always would be. As the obedient, eldest, golden child it had been her duty to honor a narcissist mother regardless of her actions and cover her oh so many sins with love and acceptance.  It was a good Christian thing to do.

“If only it were that simple,” Melissa whispered.  She read the letter again, hearing what others could or would not.  It was a letter of desperation.  Desperate for a mother’s unconditional love.  Desperate that maybe, just maybe, she would choose her child over her own desires.  Pure desperation for what she’d always longed for, a mom.

It had taken months of counseling to realize she had no need to feel guilty.  Her mother’s choices were not her responsibility.  It was ok to be done.  To define what that meant.  The letter had been the catalyst for unleashing a lifetime of suppressed anger at having been abandoned and betrayed time and again.  A child’s desperate anger that cried out with a voice longing to finally be heard, unfortunately, that did not happened. 

            The circumstances surrounding her mother’s move had become a chaotic mess.  Looking back Melissa recognized if things hadn’t happened, the way they had, and despite the letter she would in all likely hood still be in contact with her mother.  For reasons beyond her control that was not the case. 

Melissa stared out the window pondering whether to recall the events of that time.  Would it act as a trigger leading to a depressive state?  Or was she ready to honestly remember and embrace it as a wound receiving its scar? Could she handle the emotions it unburied? Lord is it time? She silently asked.

Avoid the avoiders, Naomi had told her.  Avoidance was Melissa’s go to when confronted with undefined buried emotions.  What was she feeling in this moment?  She reached for her journal, found the emotion paper and discovered the words that best described what she felt.  Disconnected and ruffled. Why? She wondered with a frown.  Because she was afraid of what she’d feel if she acknowledged that desperate child who wrote the letter.

She’d never thought of the letter that way, an expression of desperation.  It had been birthed out of an anger and level of frustration she’d never given way to before.  Even her brother Sam had said he’d never heard her that angry, and when he’d asked why she couldn’t find words to explain why.  There had been a pure rawness to the rip she’d felt in her soul when her mother had decided to move behind her back. Then think it was okay to give her a letter to explain her reasons and for her to read it to Sam and Jen rather than tell them herself.  A searing pierced and ripped her heart asunder in that unforgettable moment frozen in time. 

A heart that didn’t know how to ask for what it needed. But reacted with a lifetime of pent up anger, some might call rage.  Perhaps that’s what she needed to acknowledge to herself was the degree of rage her mother’s betrayal had finally revealed.  A rage of desperation and longing that she had never allowed herself to feel, nor had others allowed her to.  Afterall it was her responsibility to be the stable one, be the rudder, maintain the illusion of stability and peace. 

It ruffled her to think others misunderstood and thought so little of her as to believe the narrative or lies her mother told about what happened. She felt judged. So, she had disconnected her emotions thinking, once again, she was protecting herself.  Afterall it’s what she’d always done. But this time it hadn’t worked. Instead depression had become an insidious taskmaster demanding she submit and rely on its darkness to protect her emotions.  What a liar!

Thankfully she was learning how to recognize and not believe the lies.  God’s lovingkindness supplied what she needed in those moments.  She’d chosen to seek the truth which prevailed over the lies.  Truth to set her captive emotions free.  Give herself permission to be misunderstood as she wrestled with her undefined simmering buried rage.

It reminded her of how Alaska’s summer’s forest fires had been explained.  The spring had been dry, with unseasonably low rain falls, record breaking heat and extreme winds stirred the fire into a frenzy.  The tundra’s duff had been exceedingly dry because of lack of permafrost.  As a result, the fire pierced to a foot deep and simmered just waiting for the right conditions to create a fire that burned not only above ground but deep into the roots.  A fire difficult to fight and bring under control. 

Only experienced professional fire fighters had been successful in managing the fire before conditions cooperated and allowed them to contain it.  There was still the threat in the following spring that with the right conditions the fire had simmered in the duff all winter and would flare up again. 

Melissa didn’t want to be like that fire.  With professional help she wanted to contain her rage and learn how to manage it when it flared.  Then and only then could she know she’d put it out for good.  But she didn’t want to ignore its potential either.  Fire was good for healing a forest and making way for new growth.  God said His fire burned away life’s dross. So too, her personal fires were to be a time of healing and new growth.

She had never expected her mother’s narcissism to be the catalyst that unleashed a fire to burn the dross of tolerating the intolerable. Only God in Heaven knew why at sixty-two years old it was time for such drastic measures to set her free.  Her mother was eighty and seemingly in need of her children to care for her as the mind slipped into dementia and body succumbed to aging.

Yet God used the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. Not being there for her mother seemed oh so foolish.  But Melissa knew that she knew her mother was in God’s very capable hands of making sure her needs would be met.  She may not trust her mother, but more importantly she trusted God to do as He’d promised. 

Melissa raised the letter and remembered the circumstances which caused her to write it.  There were no regrets, only a sadness for having felt the need to write it.  She couldn’t help but indulge in a few, if only this had been said or done differently than… But in all reality, it would have been an effort in futility and she’d been stuck in the intolerable for the rest of her life, even after her mother passed. 

            One thing she did know, she would not know the why of the purpose of this mess until she stood face to face with her Father in Heaven.  For now, she was to be obedient and not sacrifice herself to what others expected of her concerning mother.  The ache in her soul that longed for the touch of a nurturing mother’s love cried out with an indescribable pain.  A forgotten child’s buried wound of desperation in need of a scar.