The Price of Questing
Submitted by Lioness on Tue, 2015-01-20 15:10.
I stared angrily at the scale. Where had all my hard work gone?
Four years ago I started an exercise program to get my body back in shape. Two years of steady, constant exercising later, I was feeling fit and fine -- so fit, my subconcious deemed me able to handle a huge heap of repressed childhood horror. The next two years were taken up with nothing but repairing damages done to my mind and my soul. The work was so intense I could do nothing else. Some days just making it out of bed was all I could manage. In the process I've lost all the fitness progress I made over the previous two years. My weight is back up and my stamina is nonexistant. Physically I'm right back where I started. I've got all this psychological stuff seen to but -- I know the metaphor of life being a great big spiral but I don't need it to play out so literally, darn it.
At least there's nothing else hidden in the recesses of my mind. There are still things I have trouble talking about, and one thing I can't out of respect for the privacy of another, but I doubt there's any more long-repressed unpleasantness waiting to erupt.
Unfortunately it wasn't just my body that suffered. It was also two years out of my relationship with my children. Now I have to sync up with them and repair that. That hurts. Even the parts of it that aren't difficult still hurt.
Quests of self-discovery have a higher price tag at my age.
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Repairs
I started female bodybuilding when I was in my late teens. Becoming muscular made me strong. Becoming muscular and fit made me feel... better about myself. Back then, I had physical strength and control of myself. (Having this control over rapists was important to me.)
Then I had kids.
No where in parenting or adoption books did I find anything for adoptees like me in need of repairing broken relationships, recovering from many lies, and what it takes to make one fit to love like a mother should: unconditionally... without question.
For some strange reason, I have a very good relationship with all 4 of my children. But it hasn't been easy, especially after my nervous breakdown -- when I found documents that were not really meant to be found by me.
What I did find from my kids is something amazing: they have the ability to forgive.
I won't lie. The stress of being everything my motherS could not be for me has taken a real toll on me.
I avoid the scale, and the mirror.... because truth be told, I may like the person I have become, inside. But my exterior? To this day I still don't like seeing what I see when I look at myself. I find my experience as an abused adoptee has led me to this conclusion about myself: I am ugly, and easily not wanted, or good enough for anything of real importance or value. Yep.... that's what my adoptive family and "loved ones" have gifted me!