I believe in diaries and journals – as they helped me keep my sanity! When I was 12 years old, my stepfather said I had to “make it up” to him for the fact that my mother didn’t love him, so it was my responsibility to replace her in his affections. I learned to never be alone with him and how to manipulate situations, but I didn’t tell my mother. I instinctively knew the pain it would cause her, and I wanted to protect her from it. My father had died when I was two years old, and she was left on a farm with my two older brothers, her mother and her father-in-law to support. She had so many worries and burdens for the rest of her life, so I learned how to survive without adding to her burden. (Well, there were the teen-age years when I argued with her about everything!) I didn’t blame her for remarrying when I was six years old. In those days, women were expected to have a husband. My stepfather was a widower neighbor 13 years older than she, and he told her my father had asked him to take care of his family if anything happened to him. My mother didn’t realize for a while that she was taking on another burden, and, when she did realize he was a vain, self-absorbed man with no capacity to care about anyone but himself, it was too late, and she didn’t believe in divorce. When he divorced her about 36 years of marriage because he didn’t want her to inherit anything when he died, I told her the truth about my early years. By then, I was married to a vain, self-absorbed man myself, and I had not taken the time to really get to know my mother. I had avoided visiting home often for the years after I was old enough to leave home because of my dislike of my stepfather, so my mother and I weren’t close. However, when my own marriage seemed doomed for failure, a psychologist told me to journal, so I filled several journals with my pent-up bitterness. I decided to help my mother through her pain, and we became very close before she died, and I told her as often as possible that I loved her. I told her that my brothers and I (my stepfather verbally abused them, but they never knew about his treatment of me until I told my mother) never blamed her for her choices, as it only made us stronger, and we learned to take life without excuses to make the best of whatever came our way. We accepted that life is never perfect and all of us established our own businesses, raised our families with love, and tried to learn from the past. I still journal, and I believe it is still saving my sanity.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Marlys. Glad to know journals (and therapy) helped you through it, and to some kind of resolution with your mother. My own mother believed very strongly in both.
By: Doug Block, on May 07, 2007