The shifting demographics in my neighborhood have made Hispanic folks less suspicious to the righteous white folks, but God help the black person walking down the sidewalk by himself.

I'm home! They let us go right in time for rush hour traffic. TCG is making me Trader Joe's mac & cheese and a cuppa for dinner.

Glad it went well and you're home and being fed, sj!

Ah, emotional issues. I'm still trying to dig out from under mine enough to figure out exactly what they all are. Triggers suck. I learned that if I'm in bed in the dark and I hear someone walk down the hall towards my room, I freak out. This is one reason I want to always have carpeted floors.

In so many ways, I am still frozen in time as an abandoned 3 year old.

Yeah, me too. That sad little kid is always going to be part of me. The more I look at my childhood from an adult perspective, the more appalled I am at the way my family behaved, not only towards me.

Aims, high five for dealing with a nasty trigger in a rational and adult manner!

In so many ways, I am still frozen in time as an abandoned 3 year old.

Oh sweetie. Come here, my frozen-in-time 10 year old self will tell you stories about finding keys to doors that lead to a magic kingdom where we can find the answers to fix our problems. And then I'll bake cookies.

At least I now recognize where some of my coping strategies come from?

Sending love and hugs to all. Glad you all are here and so sorry for what people had to deal with ( and still do )

In so many ways, I am still frozen in time as an abandoned 3 year old.

Oh sweetie. Come here, my frozen-in-time 10 year old self

And my default age, if I'm ever referring to myself disparagingly, is 12. Not like, "Hurr hurr, dick jokes, yeah I'm 12." But like "Part of my brain is stuck at 12, without the adult reasoning skills to realize that when your mother says she's a GREAT mother (without a trace of irony) because we have a roof over our heads and food to eat and she doesn't bring home men who beat us, maybe she's wrong about being GREAT."

Where did I learn the idea that I shouldn't ever expect to be treated well, or with any kind regard, that I should take whatever passes for "affection" and be grateful for that? Hmm. Let's think. Maybe the woman who thought that the bare minimum to keep CPS away was great parenting, and if I asked for any attention, I was being demanding and trying to ruin her life.

Parents, man. Philip Larkin was right: [link]

t nods

I was selfish. All the time. And jealous of my brother and sister because they were getting all of MY attention. Which is why I was so mean to them. I had pervasive, negative feelings of my brother and sister being treated differently than me and that's just not true.

And also? I still have these issues. So when I say something like, "Hey mom? How come there are only pictures of sister, BiL, brother, SiL, sister's best friend and boyfriend, and the grandchildren, but none of me and Joe at the cabin?" the response I get is, "Why do you always focus on what you don't have?" Or when I wonder out loud why it is that Sister and SiL had HUGE bridal showers - thrown by my mother - and mine was barely 15 people because she told me who I was allowed to have? Or that she visits them at least twice, three times a month and she comes to see me ... uh, almost never. But it's *MY* issue that I look at things and decide that I am being treated differently.

I wish I could send my mother around to all the buffistas with difficult parents and have her make them lasagna.

Yeah, me too. Actually, I could send my whole extended family around, and there are a lot of them. They can be loud and crazy and opinionated, but they're good people.

I essentially orphaned myself when my father died, because I was tired of trying to get my blood family to acknowledge me. A sadder, lonelier option, but it worked for me. I've always admired the people who actually speak to their families.