The Snowflake Chronicles

December Thoughts

13 Qawl 163 B.E. – December 5, 2006

December is always a mixed blessing for me. It is my birth month. I was born on December 24. It is the month with the shortest day. Sometimes I suspect I might have a touch of S.A.D., because this is when I seem to have a tendency to become depressed. It’s possible that I’m depressed because of my birthday or it could be the short days. It could be anything. It could be my self-talk.

December is the end of the Gregorian year and I grew up in a culture that followed that calendar. I followed that calendar for a long time myself. For years my day begin at midnight and ended at midnight. Now I follow a solar calendar, my day begins at sunset and ends at sunset.

For years, I celebrated Christmas, put up a Christmas tree, decorated it and watched the lights flicker and blink. I don’t celebrate Christmas anymore. My gift giving time is the Ayyam-i-Ha, the days of February 26 to March 1. I still celebrate my birthday. Actually, I’m looking forward to my next birthday. I’m looking forward to my birthday with joy this year.

Perhaps I’ve let go of the hurt that I felt on my birthday growing up. When I was a child, my brothers and sister always got to open one of their Christmas present when I opened my birthday present. That is a traumatic experience for a child, especially a child raised in the America culture in a family celebrating Christmas. I had many traumatic experiences as a child and growing up. Not life threatening experiences, but they were traumatic.

It isn’t that I didn’t have live threatening experiences or rather one. When I was young, probably between the ages of three and six, I shut myself in a refrigerator. I think I’ve mentioned this before. I was playing hide-and-seek at a cousin’s farm and there was an old frig on their back porch. I thought that it would be a nice place to hide, so I opened it and went in. The door closed behind me and the next thing I remember is my Grandpa Newland, standing in the door taking me out.

What other traumatic experiences have I had? My parents were divorced. That effects the way a child thinks and acts, especially if the rest of her classmates have both parents in the home and she never sees her father again. I found out about my father’s death a few years ago, when I found his obituary through an internet search for his name. That had an effect on me. Even though I was an adult, it still hurt. I’ll always miss my father. Even though the father figure in my life was my Grandpa Newland, I still miss my father.

Then there was J.S. the man who molested me when I was growing up. He came into my mother’s life, to our lives several years after my parent’s divorce. He moved us out of Blackwell to Shawnee. He molested both my sister and me. He took us away from our Grandparents, from our Grandpa the only one my sister and I had to protect us.

So why am I writing this now and posting it in my writing.com blog? I haven’t written about being molested before; not specifically anyway. Something is happening to me, something is changing in my life (not THE CHANGE, I went through that a while back). I feel as if I’m beginning a new phase of my life. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing about the traumatic incidents now. I can’t begin the new life stage holding onto the past. I need to let it go and the only way I know how to let something go is to write about it, to get it down on paper.

I suppose I could not post this entry or I could keep it private, for my eyes only. I’ll not do that, I’m not sure I could do that. I realized long ago that what ever happens in a person’s life can’t be kept secret permanently. Anything that a person tries to keep secret is usually found out, even if the person doesn’t say anything about it to anyone, people know when a secret is being kept. Most people won’t say anything, but they know. The universe has a way of revealing the hidden. Besides keeping secrets doesn’t help the healing process.

Secrets become infected wounds. They ooze infection. They poison the soul. The longer a person secret keeps the more the individual hates it and hates herself for keeping the secret. Human beings weren’t meant to hate, a person can’t hate herself and love God any more than a person can hate another human being and love God at the same time. Love and hate can’t dwell in the same container. Eventually the hate poisons everything in the container. As the poison spread, fear takes control.

I let go, I release, I write. There is no other way for me to do this. I let go, I release, I write, and now I post.