Drifting

 “The further you drift from shore, the more likely you are to be lost at sea.”

No truer words could be said.  They imbody exactly what I've felt like and have been doing for years on end...drifting and drifting away from shore.  It's felt like the more I tried to swim back to shore, the more the current took me further from the shore.

From the time I was 16, when my mother was killed in a vehicular accident and throughout most of my adult years, life took me in the direction of not only being a wife and mother, but taught me about the struggle to survive through poverty, abusive husbands, and eventually...lifethrew me the hardest curveballs of all: a nervous breadown and the arrest/coviction of my oldest son for murder.  What small steps I had taken in my recovery were slippery at best...for every few steps I took, I seemed to slide backwards at least half of them.

Somehow, somewhere over the years, I had lost a part of myself...the part that is me.  My daughter has told me time and time again that she wants her "old mom" back...the one prior to the breakdown.  My response is, I don't know how to get that person back because I am no longer that person...but she doesn't understand.  I tell her that I am struggling to find out who it is that I am...and that I am finding myself...but it takes time.  She doesn't understand that I am not the person that can take things at face value, but have to dig deeper, understand those various facets that make up me; why they are there, where they came from and how do I accept and promote these pieces of me that comprise the whole.