The future's so bright...in the Light of Truth
This is a slightly revised (one pic was changed) post that ran on Dear Teen Me on 5/26/14. Dear Teen Me is a VERY COOL site that features YA authors writing to their teen selves. Check it out!
Dear Beth,
There’s two things I wish, before I begin writing this. First, I wish I literally could go back in time and speak to you, because I think the things I could tell you—knowing how things would turn out—would stop you from even considering getting your stepdad’s gun off the closet shelf and shooting yourself. I’m so glad you never picked up the gun.
And, I wish I had funny, light-hearted stories to share with you about your teen years, but I don’t. Sure, you laugh sometimes and, yes, you have fun, but there is a shadow hanging over everything you do. It’s a sense of shame and guilt that you will awaken with every morning of your life until you are in your late thirties, when you finally realize that the sense of having done something horrible and just not having paid the price for it yet does not belong to you. It belongs to your stepfather. I wish so much that I could take away that feeling for you now, because the way you try to deal with painful feelings now—by binge eating—is not working. It never will.
Not so long ago, I could not look at this picture without feeling sick. It’s not that Daniel and Angel, our puppy, are in it. I mean, Daniel’s your boyfriend—you’re already talking about getting married! Somehow, he sticks with you in high school, even though he is sometimes the target of your stepfather’s rage.
My eyes are drawn to the window behind you. It’s your bedroom window, and in that room, very bad things happened. The abuse that occurred at your stepdad’s hands. . . it’s colored every area of your life ever since. Doesn’t mean that you’re not incredibly strong and resilient. Just means. . .you became that way because you survived. You’ll need some help to heal from it, and you’ll get it, but it’ll take years to find a place in the sun.
I want you to know this: you’re going to make it out of that house in one piece. But you’re going to come out of it with some scars. You won’t trust people easily, and you’ll have a sometimes disconcerting ability to cut people out of your life when they hurt you. I believe the phrase is, “You’re dead to me.”
You’ll develop Binge Eating Disorder in high school and the fight with it will stay with you a lifetime. You’re eating like that to try not to FEEL, but it won’t work. It just trades one reason to feel like crap for another one. You’ll take a long time to make the connection, and put in a lot of hard work in therapy. But you’ll get there.
Normal, right? You look like everybody else, and you’re doing a damned fine job of covering up the way you’re coping with the circus of your stepdad’s alcoholism, verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse, and deliberate indifference to those things on the part of your mom. Your mom’s indifference multiplies the other stuff by a thousand. You’ll be coated in a feeling of worthlessness but, honey, you shouldn’t. Her inability to take care of you like a mom should is a reflection on HER, not YOU. It’s easy to say and hard to really feel into the marrow of your bones, but someday, you will. Just hang on.
As if your homelife wasn’t hard enough, before you meet Daniel and have seeing him to look forward to at school, it’s pretty much a daily walk through Hell. God, I wish you had the power to see the future, to see beyond those girls who spit a loogie in your hair. . . the ones who made fun of you because your shirt was tucked into your underwear and everybody could see your undies. . . when the boys in the co-ed gym class of 60 people all jumped up and down, making fun of your bouncy breasts when you did jumping jacks, and when you sat down and cried, the coach made you get up and keep going. . . that Homecoming, when the cheerleaders caught you decorating Brad B’s locker and made fun of you because, well, HOW DARE YOU even possibly consider yourself worthy to touch a football player’s locker?!?
{Yeah, yeah, cheerleaders: I now admit it: it was me. I decorated his locker. I lied at the time and told you it wasn’t me, and you all giggled and talked sh*t about me for considering myself your equal. I say this from the bottom of my heart, girls, er, I mean, ladies, because the sentiment is timeless: Suck it.}
. . . As wretched as what those people did was—when you felt like you wanted to check out rather than keep going through every day, those nasty children did something important: they revealed their true character. And, guess what? From what I can tell on Facebook, life has taken care of those Mean Girls (and Mean Boys) quite nicely.
And, your stepfather, who you frequently prayed would be sucked up by a tornado or at least make good on his threat to leave your mom if you ever told her what he was doing to you (he lied, by the way. You told and he didn’t leave). . . well, Teen Beth, he died when he fell off a ladder and hit his head.
Hang in there, Beth, because you are going to have a wonderful life. The dreams you have of being loved by someone who will never leave you come true. Daniel is an amazing husband (29 years now!) and father to your three beautiful daughters. You and Daniel succeed at the one big goal you make with each other: that your children will have different childhoods than you both had. Your girls are successful, educated, beautiful, and, most importantly, they live their lives in the Light of the Truth.
Steady on, Beth. Steady on.
Dear Beth,
There’s two things I wish, before I begin writing this. First, I wish I literally could go back in time and speak to you, because I think the things I could tell you—knowing how things would turn out—would stop you from even considering getting your stepdad’s gun off the closet shelf and shooting yourself. I’m so glad you never picked up the gun.
And, I wish I had funny, light-hearted stories to share with you about your teen years, but I don’t. Sure, you laugh sometimes and, yes, you have fun, but there is a shadow hanging over everything you do. It’s a sense of shame and guilt that you will awaken with every morning of your life until you are in your late thirties, when you finally realize that the sense of having done something horrible and just not having paid the price for it yet does not belong to you. It belongs to your stepfather. I wish so much that I could take away that feeling for you now, because the way you try to deal with painful feelings now—by binge eating—is not working. It never will.
Not so long ago, I could not look at this picture without feeling sick. It’s not that Daniel and Angel, our puppy, are in it. I mean, Daniel’s your boyfriend—you’re already talking about getting married! Somehow, he sticks with you in high school, even though he is sometimes the target of your stepfather’s rage.My eyes are drawn to the window behind you. It’s your bedroom window, and in that room, very bad things happened. The abuse that occurred at your stepdad’s hands. . . it’s colored every area of your life ever since. Doesn’t mean that you’re not incredibly strong and resilient. Just means. . .you became that way because you survived. You’ll need some help to heal from it, and you’ll get it, but it’ll take years to find a place in the sun.
I want you to know this: you’re going to make it out of that house in one piece. But you’re going to come out of it with some scars. You won’t trust people easily, and you’ll have a sometimes disconcerting ability to cut people out of your life when they hurt you. I believe the phrase is, “You’re dead to me.”
You’ll develop Binge Eating Disorder in high school and the fight with it will stay with you a lifetime. You’re eating like that to try not to FEEL, but it won’t work. It just trades one reason to feel like crap for another one. You’ll take a long time to make the connection, and put in a lot of hard work in therapy. But you’ll get there.
Normal, right? You look like everybody else, and you’re doing a damned fine job of covering up the way you’re coping with the circus of your stepdad’s alcoholism, verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse, and deliberate indifference to those things on the part of your mom. Your mom’s indifference multiplies the other stuff by a thousand. You’ll be coated in a feeling of worthlessness but, honey, you shouldn’t. Her inability to take care of you like a mom should is a reflection on HER, not YOU. It’s easy to say and hard to really feel into the marrow of your bones, but someday, you will. Just hang on. As if your homelife wasn’t hard enough, before you meet Daniel and have seeing him to look forward to at school, it’s pretty much a daily walk through Hell. God, I wish you had the power to see the future, to see beyond those girls who spit a loogie in your hair. . . the ones who made fun of you because your shirt was tucked into your underwear and everybody could see your undies. . . when the boys in the co-ed gym class of 60 people all jumped up and down, making fun of your bouncy breasts when you did jumping jacks, and when you sat down and cried, the coach made you get up and keep going. . . that Homecoming, when the cheerleaders caught you decorating Brad B’s locker and made fun of you because, well, HOW DARE YOU even possibly consider yourself worthy to touch a football player’s locker?!?
{Yeah, yeah, cheerleaders: I now admit it: it was me. I decorated his locker. I lied at the time and told you it wasn’t me, and you all giggled and talked sh*t about me for considering myself your equal. I say this from the bottom of my heart, girls, er, I mean, ladies, because the sentiment is timeless: Suck it.}
. . . As wretched as what those people did was—when you felt like you wanted to check out rather than keep going through every day, those nasty children did something important: they revealed their true character. And, guess what? From what I can tell on Facebook, life has taken care of those Mean Girls (and Mean Boys) quite nicely.
And, your stepfather, who you frequently prayed would be sucked up by a tornado or at least make good on his threat to leave your mom if you ever told her what he was doing to you (he lied, by the way. You told and he didn’t leave). . . well, Teen Beth, he died when he fell off a ladder and hit his head.
Hang in there, Beth, because you are going to have a wonderful life. The dreams you have of being loved by someone who will never leave you come true. Daniel is an amazing husband (29 years now!) and father to your three beautiful daughters. You and Daniel succeed at the one big goal you make with each other: that your children will have different childhoods than you both had. Your girls are successful, educated, beautiful, and, most importantly, they live their lives in the Light of the Truth. Steady on, Beth. Steady on.
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