When I was a kid, I rarely cried. Crying got me nothing but the comment, “Ya want me to give you something to really cry about?” This was followed quickly by the slithering sound of my dad’s belt racing out of its loops. No crying for me. It wasn’t worth the release.
I do remember crying once just for the sheer emotion of it all. I had come home from a church retreat where things had just felt magical-all love all peace-filled and strangely enough-not a lot of God-talk. I wept. Hard. I had been moved to a place I did not know existed. “Why couldn’t the “real” world feel this way?” Of course my mother told me I was being overly dramatic. Hell, I probably was-I was thirteen and sang the song “True Colors” by Cyndi Lauper for the rest of that summer in memory of that retreat and the sweet release it had given me.
A desire for my true colors to be seen AND loved has laid quietly in my soul since that summer long ago. Sometimes, my Beloved can tease them out. Sometimes he has to boldly remind me they even exist. Most of the time we are far to busy in life to see anything but a blur. My blur slowly has greyed.
Night four of sobriety, we snuggled with our wees and watched “Trolls” when my song came on. I stopped and really listened. I thought of the look in my Beloved’s eyes when I told him I have been drinking way too much (God! Half a fifth a night-what does my liver even look like right now?) for over a year. I needed help. I needed love.
I told him I was killing (drowning) every emotion I could surrounding my irritation and sheer annoyance with Three (one of our adopted daughters). I am an am amazing mom to my other four. What is it about Three I cannot quite get synced with?
I shook in that hot snot running way in his arms as I confessed the darkest most intense of feelings that I am horrified by, exhausted by and utterly confused by surrounding the utter nails-on-chalkboard visceral reaction I have toward Three. “What the FUCK is wrong with me?!?!” I screamed it. I snotted it, I sobbed it, I let it all out. It was gross. I felt gross. When it as all done, I felt cleaner. Grey, but cleaner.
He took it all in, pulled back and just looked at me…like he saw my true colors. I am not grey in my Beloved’s eyes.
The only thing at this moment I know is that I am determined to soberly unpacking all that is me surrounding the emotions I have about Three and why it is that since she has become part of the Crew, I have been drinking in ways that remind me of my own father.
Daring Truth 