Before I left though, the conversation turned a bit more serious. We began to talk once more about the time when Doc was around (I know I've talked about him before in this journal ~ I'll have to find that entry.) It all started with my mom telling me that the whole situation still bothered her to which I said, "Why? It doesn't bother me anymore." That's when she told me once again that she felt guilty about the whole thing and that she should have done more which led into the "we can't do anything about it so we may as well let it go and forget about it" spiel. The only difference is that she sort of sounded as if she wants to do something about it ~ without actually dealing with it. I said something to her that I would have never dreamed of saying before, "Well, the only person who can work through this is you. I'm not saying that I don't want to you to talk to me about it, but only you can do the work."

That is one curious side effect I've noticed about all the work I've done on myself ~ I say something like that to someone like my mom and it is as if I had committed heresy...then again, I suppose it hasn't been that long since it would been heresy. We've come to odds so many times on this subject ~ she says, "Let's let God take care of it" and I always reply, "I don't want to wait that long."

Another thing she said was that she considered herself to be a survivor. Again, all I could say was, "Why?!" The answer I got was that she felt like a suvivor after all the crap we've been through. That surprised me ~ I know that she is always saying, "Well, we survived that!" but I never understood why. Her thinking is that we survived one tornado (never mind that I've had close calls with 3 more since); my dad's parents, her mother, sexual abuse from Doc and god knows what else. She is stuck on just surviving. I've tried to explain my thinking on the subject ~ yes, shit happens but being a survivor is just a small part of the whole experience. Labeling yourself a survivor binds you to the situation and you are never ever to deal with it and let go until you stop using that label...and until you deal with it, you aren't truly living.

I can see the transformation as I talk about it ~ the walls go up and she doesn't want to tell me that she thinks that I am pretty close to blasphemy. I wish that she wouldn't take it so personally sometimes about my own self but what can I do? The answer is nothing except to work on my own responses. As I said, she's the only person who can do the work on herself.