Soul Mosaic

For most of my adult life, I was the warrior. Strong against him because I needed to be. I tried to get him to go for help. He wouldn’t. I was forced to draw a line in the sand to protect our kids.

But emotions are never so clear-cut, and life was always a pendulum between walking away and maintaining some kind of extended family relationship for our son’s sake, and… let’s be honest, mine, too. Because unless someone has no redeeming qualities — in which case it’s easy to walk away and never look back — if that person has also “done good things at times,” and used the powers of intermittent love and trauma bonding on you since infancy, it’s a lot more complicated.

I tried for “middle path” – allowing love, but standing guard. I was determined to be strong, and never again be that “trapped, weak, passive victim from the past,” nor let any one else be put in that same position. And yes, at that point I judged my younger self harshly and with no love.

But it all grew exhausting. As I got older and life had battered me over the decades, my husband noted that my self-portrait above bore a resemblance to a battle-weary soldier’s thousand-yard stare. I kept pushing me, but at the same time, a question I kept shoving to the back of my brain haunted me:”What happens when I am no longer strong?”