Hey Y’all! Welcome back to my Blog. First of all let me say that I am overwhelmed at all the private messages in response to my previous post. There are a lot of people out there that share similar life experiences. Some took years of therapy to overcome and some still don’t quite know how to put it behind them. I guess – no scratch that,  I KNOW that is part of the reason for sharing my story.

So let’s talk about Tolerance. That’s a really big word. There are many levels of tolerance. You hear people say “I have a really high tolerance for pain” or “I have zero tolerance for that person”. TOLERANCE: or toleration is the state of tolerating, or putting up with, conditionally.  That sounds like a pretty small definition but it spans into so many aspects of life – you can literally use it in every situation because of the word CONDITIONALLY (in a way that is subject to one or more conditions or requirements being met). So I believe tolerance can be a state of mind. You can decide for yourself what you are willing to tolerate or you can be forced into a situation where you have no choice but to tolerate the circumstances or the person. This was my situation.

So when I was around 6 or 7 we moved to Georgia. I CAN say that things did change because I believe certain influences were not present. I CAN’T say that the abuse stopped, but it was less frequent. The fear was still there because you never knew what would trigger an episode. The drinking was less frequent because he had a job that required responsibility. The physical abuse, the verbal and emotional abuse and the humiliation was still very much present in our lives. Oh don’t get me wrong we had food on the table and we had clothes to wear, we got presents for Christmas,  we had birthday parties, we went on vacations, we went to neighborhood picnics – everything other families did – we did. On the outside we looked like a normal family. I have since learned that “normal” is only a setting on the washing machine. What happened inside of our home when no one else was around is where the nightmare existed.

There are those people who say “just try not to dwell on the bad stuff – try to remember the good stuff”, “the past is behind you – let it go”. Yeah, that’s fine and dandy when you become an adult and believe me when I say that I  CHOOSE to reflect on the good things when my childhood comes to mind because there is no reason to dwell on the bad stuff because it is behind you. BUT when you are a child in the middle of the bad stuff – not so much. As a child you enjoy the good things when they are happening but when there is abuse, you become more aware of what happened to trigger that abuse, what did I do wrong this time, I promise I won’t do it again. You believe that you are the problem. That is a LIE straight from the devil. As an adult I am now aware of the past events in his life that led him to behave the way he did. But as a child I just hated him.  There was no love in my heart for him. I became tolerant of him because I had no choice. I became tolerant of his behaviour because I had no choice. I – just – hated – him.

So let’s jump ahead to the 4th grade. I had a teacher named Mrs. Charleston, her husband was a Baptist preacher. Mrs. Charleston read this thing called the Bible every morning before class began. She prayed for us and our families every day. She introduced me to Him. I was forced to say prayers every night before I went to bed but I was never taught about the person I was praying to – it was just a form of obedience to the man in control. There’s another big word – control. We will talk about that later. So I started learning about God but still didn’t really grasp the fact that God loved me and that I could talk to Him about my problems, because that kind of relationship was foreign to me (we will also address that subject later). A girl in my class invited me to Sunday school and I could not believe it when my parents agreed to let me go. They would drop me off and pick me up every Sunday and this went on for months until one Sunday I asked Jesus into my heart and got baptized. I didn’t tell my parents about it because I was afraid they would not let me go back.  I can’t remember ever talking about things as a family – we just obeyed and kept our mouths shut. Over the course of the next few years I was very involved in Church and went on numerous youth outings – but one thing that I never remember is anyone asking me how my home life was. They didn’t want to know about it because to acknowledge it would mean they would have a responsibility to get involved. I guess that generation was of the mindset that if you don’t talk about it then it doesn’t exist. Like the Miranda Lambert song – “Run and hide your crazy and start actin’ like a lady ‘Cause I raised you better, gotta keep it together Even when you fall apart”. The generation of silence and secrets. It was more prevalent than you think. Church was also my escape from the reality of home and it became my social outlet. A freedom I would come to crave more and more.