One of the blogging groups I am in is having a blog hop, we are calling it “Blog Tag…You’re It.” For those of you who don’t know what a blog hop is, let me explain. It is several different bloggers blogging on their own blog all about the same topic but done in their own unique ways. Phew! Say that 3 times fast. LOL This specific hop will feature 28 bloggers from around the globe. The essence of what World Wide Web stands for if you ask me. We each will have our own day to post about the topic ‘Sometimes I Wish…’ During this time, one blogger thanks the previous blogger for the introduction to their post and then writes a mini introduction for the blogger who follows them.
So here goes…
A very big thank you to Brenda, who writes at Passionate Pusuits. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you and sharing the blogosphere world with you. Here’s to many more blog hops, posts, and getting to know a variety of bloggers inside and outside the group. You can click here to see her blog hop post on this subject.
Now for the introduction I am to give for our next blogger in line:
Say hello to Sili, who writes at My Mamihood. She writes about her life and the non-stop misadventures of her “Frog Princess”, which is the adorable nickname she uses for her young daughter.
Please take some time (after finishing my post of course) to visit both of these ladies.
Sometimes I Wish…
For somebody, aka me, to publicly acknowledge my wishes, I would first have to believe in them. But, I don’t believe in wishes or wishing for that matter. However, I did…once; a very long time ago when I was an impressionable youngster, back before I knew any better, back before the reality of what my life was hit me like a ton of bricks. It was during a time when wishes and dreams were what young children would thrive on, that is, until they realized either as teenagers or adults that wishes just don’t come true, no matter how much you wish on them or pray for them, beg, scream, plead, cry, or fuss about them, no matter how many times the people at Disney tell you they do… They just don’t come true!
I was approximately 5-years-old when I would lay in bed and stare at the night sky, wishing on the bright stars that illuminated my room. I was just as much a raging insomniac back then as I am now. (No doubt due to the volatile lifestyle I lived from a super-young age.) I even tossed several wishes to the man in the moon for good measure, then patiently awaited the entire night for somebody/anybody to magically swoop in and rescue me. I have yet to stop staring at the night sky (or learned how to fall asleep when the rest of the world does) but, I have stopped sending wishes out there, and I have most certainly stopped waiting for someone to ride in on their white horse and rescue me.
- I wish my daddy and mommy didn’t fight so much.
- I wish my daddy loved me.
- I wish that “they” hadn’t touched me like that.
- I wish those touching’s would stop happening.
- I wish I could stay out of the principal’s office for fighting.
- I wish people would just leave me alone.
- I wish people would stop touching me. Why do they keep touching me?
- I wish my mommy would come and pick me up more often.
- I wish I could play outside with the other kids and not have to be in bed while the sun is still out.
- I wish I didn’t have to sit in the corner so long every day.
- I wish my step-mom loved me.
- I wish I wasn’t hated so much by my daddy and step-mom.
- I wish my mommy hadn’t moved so far away. Does she hate me now too?
- I wish I didn’t have to sit behind furniture when we visited with family and friends.
- I wish I could play with my cousins.
- I wish my grandma didn’t get drunk and push my grandfather into the bookcase.
- I wish my daddy didn’t get drunk and pass out in the truck.
- I wish I didn’t know about alcoholism and its effects.
- I wish my step-mom didn’t take out her insecurities about my mommy on me.
- I wish my daddy would stop talking bad about my mommy.
- I wish my step-mom didn’t talk badly about my mommy.
- I wish I wasn’t talked about badly to my face.
- I wish I could be loved like my little sister.
- I wish my daddy didn’t move us so far away when my mommy moved back to town.
- I wish I could see my baby brother every day.
- I wish I didn’t have to see a school counselor for “my problems.”
- I wish my step-mom didn’t take away things my mommy and grandma bought for me.
- I wish I didn’t cry so hard every time I came back home to my daddy’s house.
- I wish I didn’t get punished for vomiting after I cried so hard.
- I wish I didn’t know what soap tastes like.
- I wish my daddy and step-mom didn’t use a thick wooden paddle with holes drilled in it on me.
- I wish I could sit down.
- I wish I didn’t have to show the friend of the court my butt and all the still purple welts that hadn’t yet gone away after several weeks.
- I wish somebody would help me.
- I wish somebody would listen.
- I wish the counselor would stop asking other types of social workers, guidance people, therapists, and groups to talk to me. Every time they give me a card or tell me how my life should be I am punished more severely.
- I wish my school counselor didn’t call my step-mom and tell her everything I had confided in her.
- I wish I didn’t get punished so much.
- I wish I could go to friends’ houses and not always be grounded.
- I wish I had friends who I could talk to.
- I wish my “big sisters” in the sister program would do more with me.
- I wish my “big sister” didn’t move away.
- I wish I didn’t cry myself to sleep every night.
- I wish I could fall asleep.
- I wish I could stay asleep.
- I wish I didn’t hear and see things in the dark.
- I wish I wasn’t called crazy for seeing dead people.
- I wish my step-mom didn’t force me to stand in a red ant hill while she yelled at me.
- I wish the pain would go away.
- I wish my grandfather who protected me as best as he could didn’t die.
- I wish I died.
- I wish I didn’t know what pain is.
- I wish I didn’t bleed all over my clothes.
- I wish my belongings didn’t get take away.
- I wish someone would stand up for me.
- I wish someone would save me.
- I wish my sister would stop doing things that I get punished for.
- I wish I didn’t have to come home.
- I wish I didn’t go to school.
- I wish I didn’t live in a small town.
- I wish people would understand me.
- I wish they’d all stop making fun of me.
- I wish I could have long hair.
- I wish I could wear new girl’s clothes.
- I wish I wasn’t such a disappointment.
- I wish I knew what I did wrong.
- I wish I knew why I was born.
- I wish I were never born.
- I wish my mommy would come and pick us up on her weeks.
- I wish my daddy didn’t tell me he doesn’t think I am his.
- I wish he’d stop throwing things at my head.
- I wish he’d stop hitting me.
- I wish they’d stop touching me.
- I wish I could get out of here.
- I wish I had somewhere to go.
- I wish someone would see the truth.
- I wish they’d stop lying and calling me the liar.
- I wish I wasn’t “a good for nothing whore, like your mother.”
- I wish I knew what a whore was.
- I wish they’d stop humiliating me.
- I wish they’d stop degrading me.
- I wish they’d stop strip searching me.
- I WISH THEY’D STOP TOUCHING ME!
- I wish I had money.
- I wish my money from my job would be mine.
- I wish I didn’t have to drive such an ugly car.
- I wish I could drive when I wanted to.
- I wish I didn’t have to go to the vocational school they chose.
- I wish I didn’t have to be what they wanted.
- I wish I knew how to make it all stop.
- I wish my mind could rest.
- I wish I could concentrate.
- I wish I wasn’t scared.
- I wish there was an end in sight.
- I wish I had a better life.
- I wish I could run away and never come back.
- I wish they’d just finish me off and kill me once and for all already.
- I wish someone else would stand up for me besides just me alone.
- I wish they’d stop pretending that they are good and decent people.
- I wish I didn’t have to send mean letters to my mom on behalf of my daddy and step-mom’s feelings.
- I wish I didn’t have to have someone read my letters before I could read them.
- I wish I didn’t have to start another diary again and again and again because my step-mom reads it and can’t face the truth so she takes it away and rips them up.
- I wish I didn’t have gifts other people gave me taken away and given to my sister or thrown away.
- I wish I didn’t have to be responsible.
- I wish I didn’t have to be the oldest.
- I wish my daddy didn’t spank me so hard that I flew from the living room into the kitchen.
- I wish I could be a child.
- I wish I didn’t have to stand in the corner for hours on end with my arms straight in the air.
- I wish I knew how to get to my mommy’s house when daddy yelled and told me “if you want your mother walk to her house.”
- I wish I didn’t get left on the front porch in the trailer park at 5 years old all by myself while my daddy and step-mom and sister went to visit with friends, because I didn’t know the way to mommy’s house.
- I wish I could remember what my real name is. I haven’t heard it in so long.
- I wish my life wasn’t so dysfunctional.
- I wish there were no more secrets.
- I wish I knew what love is.
- I wish I knew what it feels like to be unconditionally loved.
- I wish I were someone else, anyone but me.
- I wish I could forget.
- I wish I wasn’t permanently scarred and disfigured.
- I wish I didn’t torture myself as much as they torture me.
- I wish they’d stop forcing me to kiss and hug them good night and stop forcing me to tell them I love them after everything they did that day.
- I wish I could stop hurting.
- I wish there was a God.
- I wish I didn’t live in Hell.
- I wish someone could see what is happening.
- I wish I could have chosen to give away my virginity.
- I wish an apology was enough.
- I wish I wasn’t “troubled.”
- I wish I could stop crying.
- I wish I could forgive.
- I wish I understood why they say they forgive but keep bringing old things up.
- I wish they’d get a different punching bag.
- I wish it would end.
- I wish I were intelligent.
- I wish those who weren’t there would stop acting like they know.
- I wish I could forget as easily as they all do.
- I wish they didn’t control me.
- I wish I could be me.
- I wish being myself was enough.
- I wish I were free.
- I wish… I wish… I wish… I wish… I wish… I wish…
- I wish I didn’t need to wish anymore…
14 years’ worth of child wishes and countless more things that had been wished and were never fulfilled, never answered, never my salvation. Star wishes, birthday wishes, prayers to God, pleas to anyone who had the power to do something… all fell on deaf ears and ignored by blind eyes. A child who wished for death because it was the only way that she knew of, that would make it all end. A child who cut her wrists at 12-years-old because she didn’t know how she was going to go on after the death of her grandfather, her rock, her only love. The only one who could see the truth, her truth. A child who clearly grew up long before a child should ever have to.
It would be another 16 years after her 14 year sentence in Hell, before that child/adult would figure out that making wishes, dreaming, praying, and asking for help were all an enormous waste of her time. One thing she had learned all to well, was that nobody could undo what had been done and even if they could nobody would be willing to switch places with her and take on what she had.
Those 16 additional years they had stolen from her, enslaving her within her own mind. When she wasn’t trying to shield herself and her children from their newest ongoing attacks via telephone, she was visualizing moment after moment in her head, replaying them in her dreams, like a never-ending horror movie, secretly hoping for a different ending, a happy ending. Trying to fill in the cracks whilst new ones were continuously added. Attempting to raise her two children differently than she had been raised, giving them everything she never had. Protecting her children from the vicious spiteful words that the so-called family were trying to pass down to them as if it were the family Bible. Hoping that the man she married who held a strong character resemblance to her father, would not pick up where her father and step-mom left off and continue to violate her tortured and nearly broken spirit. Several times in her life, wishes could have been the way to go, but her mind was so infected by the past she didn’t even consider wishing for her children not to suffer along with their mother. (Or a million other things that the Universe relentlessly pummeled her and her children with.) It never even entered her mind, not because she didn’t believe in wishes anymore (which she didn’t) but, because she was fighting a life vs. death battle inside. Deep inside herself, where there was only going to be one survivor and one alone. Would she come out alive and capable of being a competent mother, wife, human being? Or would she remain trapped inside herself, waiting for that final blow that would finish her off for good?
Then surprisingly without any warning whatsoever, the inconceivable happened and she lost her younger sister to cancer. She was no stranger to death or to cancer for that matter but, losing her sister suddenly did something that no other death could do. It was at that precise moment when the prison door she had been locked behind for most of her life, swung wide open and she walked out of the solitary confinement where she had awaited her death sentence. A light as bright and warm as the sun encased her and she was finally free…free of them, their actions, their words, their evilness, their lies, their prejudices. But wait… she was the one who had allowed them to torture her for over 30 years, even though they had not been a part of her physical life in more than half that time. They only had power over her because she allowed them to have it and use it as they wished. She had allowed the past to be her focus, which held her stagnant in a place where she couldn’t move towards the future let alone appreciate the now. So, she took back the control and freed herself; she freed her past, she freed her mind, she freed her spirit, she freed her future, and she flew away freely with the knowledge and tools that would never allow her to be imprisoned by anyone ever again!
✓ “I wish it would end.”
✓ “I wish I was intelligent.”
✓ “I wish they didn’t control me.”
✓ “I wish I could be me.”
✓ “I wish being myself was enough.”
✓ “I wish I were free.”
✓ “I wish I didn’t need to wish anymore…”
So ok… maybe some times wishes do come true. However, simply wishing for something to happen isn’t going to make it happen. Time, actions, and choices make things happen not the “magical powers” of the wish itself. I don’t need to wish anymore because I’m living in the present. I don’t want to change my past, for if my wishes had come true at that precise moment that I had wished them I wouldn’t be who I am today. I don’t know about you but, I like the person I am today, and I know I will continue to like me even more as time goes by. Something that the young me couldn’t, wouldn’t, and didn’t do. So thank you for rejecting my wishes so I could be a strong fighter and survivor, outspoken and an activist, a better person than I or anyone else could have dreamed of. Thank you for allowing me to find my path in my own time that ultimately broke the cycle of abuse, violence, and neglect that plagued my entire family for generations upon generations. Thank you for teaching me lessons that can never be unlearned. All of which allowed me to be here right now telling showing you… becoming the living proof that anyone can overcome their past and transform into something more than they could have imagined. Wishing is short-sighted, if your wishes came true you wouldn’t learn anything. You wouldn’t be able to keep the knowledge you were taught. You wouldn’t have lived fully. You wouldn’t be able to grow and you most certainly wouldn’t be free. So give your life the time, chance, and education that it needs to grow into something miraculous.