Day Ten

Today I'll work on eliminating a limiting belief.  I always have this underlying feeling that I'm not good enough.  I believe it comes from not being validated as a child.  My parents divorced when I was a kid.  Once the divorce was final, my father forgot he had kids.  He didn't visit or pay child support and the only time he called was to ask me to find someone to get a driver's license in his name.  Love you too dad!  Anyway, being a 10 year old, I interpreted my father leaving and not even taking the time to even call us (my sister and I) as his not loving us.  My mother was always a very angry woman and after the divorce, her anger eventually became bitterness.  She is still a very bitter woman.  My father was very loving and expressive of his feelings, and that's what I learned from him.  After he left, that's something that stayed with me.  My bedtime ritual had always been to hug and kiss my parents or cuddle before going to sleep.  Just because my father wasn't around didn't mean I couldn't keep doing that.  I remember going to my mother to tell her that I loved her and to kiss her good night and she told me to get out of her face.  Even though I was very young, her pushing me away made me realize that my mother never said "I love you" unless I said it to her first.  At that moment I decided I wasn't going to say it anymore....and I've never heard "I love you" from my mother since.  That was 30 years ago.  Yeah she buys me birthday cards that skirt around being "loving" but that just isn't the same.  Later in my life when I was a teen, my mother allowed three of her brothers to live with us.  Two of them were awesome and I'm happy to have had the experience.  The third brother was delusional.  When I was 12, this uncle was an addict but my mother would have him stay with us to help with child care.  He would tell me stories about murders he committed and how feared he was in NYC.  My uncle started planting seeds in my head that I wasn't my mother's birth child.  I already had doubts that I was her child, even though I look like her...that was how I justified my mother's rejection of me. He confirmed what I already felt.  Fast forward to 16.  This same uncle moved in with us again.  He started up with the murder stories again...but he was different toward me than he had been.  He seemed to think we were lovers.  In his mind, I was madly in love with him and wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.  He ended up raping me multiple times and I became pregnant.  That experience stripped any shred of self-worth I had left.  I was 16 years old and lost my virginity to rape. Not only was I raped but it was by a family member who was an addict and regularly slept with prostitutes.  On top of that, I was pregnant.  I was a loser...used goods...and no one could possibly love me.  I ended up having an abortion....I could not imagine giving birth to that child.  My uncle tormented me calling me a baby killer and telling me how I ruined "our family" by murdering his baby.  I went to my mother and asked her to ask her brother to move out.  She immediately became hostile and started yelling.  My brother will leave when he is good and ready.  Blood is thicker than water, if anybody is leaving, it will be you.  Wow! I decided not to tell my mother what happened.

Eventually, I ended up telling my mother what happened.  After my uncle moved out on his own, he married a woman with three kids.  He was doing to her son what he had been doing to me.  When her son told his mother what happened, my uncle shot her and then himself.  She lived, he died.  At about 3 in the morning, someone was frantically knocking on my door.  I knew it was my mother because she had been calling me but I ignored her calls.  We had a huge fight and I didn't want to speak with her.  She told me about my uncle being flown up to DC and she wanted me to go with her to see him before he was taken off life support.  I told her I wasn't interested and was going back to bed.  My uncle died later that day.  I didn't meet with my family when his funeral was being planned.  Didn't go to his wake.  Didn't go to his funeral.  I was glad he was dead.  After the dust settled, I told my mother about what her brother did to me.  She called me a liar.  She told me that I would do anything for attention.  She said if those are the types of things I was going to say about her family, then I was no longer a part of her family.  At that moment, I no longer had a mother....I was on my own.  It's been that way ever since.


Even though my heart knows that I'm good enough and worthy of whatever my heart desires...there's a nagging little voice in the back of my head telling me 'you're not good enough', 'you have to keep your life a secret because you aren't like everyone else', 'it's OK to be different but you're different in the wrong ways'.  I AM good enough.  I am not defined by the things that happened to me and I need to stop telling myself that I don't deserve the best life has to offer.