Tonight I am feeling very unworthy. I called my daughter for her birthday and it hurt me. I felt as though I was a bad mother for not being there with her. She sounded glad to hear from me yet something in her voice sounded as though she did not want to talk to me. It was a very short call.

I feel I am losing my children. It is so sad to me yet it is something I had to do to survive. I love them very much and I tried so hard to be there and be a good mother for them even though it was hurting me. Maybe it does not matter and I am being selfish. I never meant to hurt them.

I never thought that my life would turn out the way it did. I thought that when I married it was for life and that he would make the bad all go away. That I would never remember the past because he was so perfect. I thought that I could be a mother, I did not know that it would be so hard.

I did not know that losing the only person in my life that I knew loved me would cause my heart to break and the walls to come crashing down and I would not be able to hold inside anymore everything I was hiding. That the memories that I had so perfectly put in place would seep out.

I tried to hide, to keep everything inside. But it would not stay. I thought if I just got help, everything would be okay. Yet, in getting that help--I lost everything. I hid even what this perfect man did and no one knew what was going on inside the walls of our home.

Getting help was wrong--for it was then that he took everything away. Receiving the divorce papers while in treatment with no way to defend myself--I lost everything including my children. This is something I feel they have never forgiven me of. And all I was doing was trying to get help from something that happened to me that everyone tells me was not my fault.

Yet, in that not being my fault, I lost. Not only my childhood, but it never stopped. I feel my children blame me. I was not allowed to tell them anything. So it looked like I left them. I had no choice but to sign them over to their father. He was going to use my past against me, something that I supposedly was not to blame for. But that is not what it seems.

All I wanted was to get help to get well. I never meant to hurt anyone, especially not my children. I would rather hurt myself. I did not mean to be sick, and I did the only thing I could do to survive my childhood. And I am doing the only thing to survive my life right now.

But I do love my children so much. But how do you give when you do not even know who you are yourself? When you are scared to be who you are? When trust and love are two things you do not really understand yourself? And touch itself hurts you?

I really thought I had it all tucked away in a place it would never come out. I was so wrong, but I never meant to hurt anyone.

cami