where to start?

There's a new day every day, and though it is indeed a new one we take to it piles of things from the day before.  Sometimes stress from a job, the elation of an exciting new relationship, an injury to your foot because you spent too much time in heels the day before, the high from a great workout session....in fact we take things with us from the weeks and years before.  So is a day a new beginning, or just a new day?  I mean what's really so new about it?  The sun just hung out on the other side of the world for a while, and sure enough came back again.  People use events to signal or mark personal transformations.  While this can work fine for marking when you are going to start your new workout, new diet or some resolutions, personal discovery and growth lives by other boundaries.  Setting deadlines for these things will just lead to  a false sense of contentment, happiness....you may well be fooling yourself.

Coming to terms with emotional trauma requires time. Period.  Time for introspection and self analysis.  Time for coming to terms with what happened.  Time to understand the events themselves and why they happened, but also to understand yourself right now and why you are where you are emotionally.  It requires an honesty with yourself that many find uncomfortable, even within the privacy of your own brain.

I.....DAISY....thought of killing myself and leaving my children to grow up with who I thought was a rotten person (not just a rotten Dad, but a rotten person) because I could not handle the ordeal.  I was that selfish.  This is one of the many things I had a hard time coming to terms with.  It was easy to explain and make excuses for, but I hadn't accepted it....I hadn't come to terms with what I had contemplated.  I stopped thinking about it, but it didn't go away.

Skip ahead a year or so:

I.....DAISY.... enjoyed the feeling of POWER when the sheriff came to get my ex off the front porch.  They were on my side!  I was powerful...more powerful than him!  I liked that feeling......and was sickened by the fact that I liked it.  What had I become?  Did he not like power?  His reasons for liking power are not excusable, but mine are?  I convinced myself that it was just because my children were safer this way.  It was not the only reason....my deep inner self knew it and it was troubled.

I owe my ex a lot.  It would surprise many to know we are friends.  Not the friends in quotation marks, but the real friends.  I have not made excuses for him, but I understand him.  He understands himself, and has sought counseling and has grown....but it was not all his fault.  We smile real smiles together and I hope you'll come to see why...

Daisy