Timelines and Trauma: Part Deux

 

         Trauma Dump.

           Let's do this.

 

They say anger is only the initial reaction. The first most obvious feeling. Underneath that anger is hurt, pain, sadness. All the secondary emotions that lie dormant. The secondary emotions wear their cloak of anger to avoid being addressed. It's just too difficult sometimes. A lot of the time. 

So let's see where all my anger was/is coming from. Maybe it will help me to figure out just how much pain I am in.  

 

1. My junior year of high school my mother got pneumonia and spent the next nine months in ICU. I got my drivers license and was able to go to school, work at a grocery store, and visit her at Mercy Hospital throughout those months. Silver linings.

2. The summer going into my Senior year of high school my Mom got well enough to come home from the hospital. We had a live in nurse to take care of her.

3. A month later my Mom had a massive heart attack in the parking lot of Eat n' Park. She didn't even get to eat. She died in front of all my friends that worked at the Eat n' Park. To this day I picture my Dad standing alone and in shock until all the strangers left and all the lights went out for the night. I just picture him alone. Starved because he didn't get to eat either. 

4. I became problems. 

5. I didn't graduate high school. All the whispers had begun from the 'adults' began behind my back. I was labeled 'a ticking time bomb'. So that's what I did. I became a time bomb. 

6. Tick Tick Tick

7. I moved out when I was eighteen. Bobby was already dating someone new. I hated living in an empty haunted house. I met my first boyfriend that following summer. 

8. When I was twenty-two that relationship ended. It ended horribly. I had to move back in with Bobby. His relationship had ended as well. 

9. My sister died from epilepsy shortly after I moved into the old haunted house. She was only thirty-six. 

10. Tick Tick Tick.

11. That same year Bobby's oldest brother, my Uncle Boomer died. 

12. That same year I lost my first pet. Zeus.

13. That same year Bobby's youngest brother, my other favorite Uncle, lost his youngest son. He disappeared before the holidays. The coast guard found him in the river ten days before Christmas. It was deemed a suicide. I deemed it a never ending heartbreak. 

14. Tick Tick Tick. 

15. My arrogant and absentee brother (only by blood) moved out when I was thirteen and never came back. His self-centered, spoiled, stupid wife decided a year after all these tragedies, she wanted to get married. Fun!

16. Boom. 

That was the end of the beginning for me. I started a new time bomb. 'Luce Cannons'. 

17. I was addicted to Vicodin in the middle of my twenties. It helped with my depression. It helped with everything. Vicodin became my new lover. It would generously give me the label 'addict' for the rest of my life. 

18. I was a bartender. Everything was wheeling and dealing. I was good at it. My family hated it. The whispers continued. Tick. Tick. Tick.

19. My boy Ian died of an overdose when I was thirty, he was only 27. It was the first person my friends and I loved and lost to an overdose. I cried in my car alone that day. It wasn't the first time and it certainly wouldn't be the last.

20. I ran into my childhood friend, Megan, at a local bar. She had been at a wedding that day. I had been at a separate wedding that day. I had not seen her in so long. It was like seeing my sister. The next morning by the time I got to work and opened the bar at noon, Megan was dead. She had a brain aneurysm. She was only 30.  

19. Luckily, I got knocked up at thirty-two by a guy from Boston. Matt. He was so cute. So cute. We both had issues with the pills. I had no idea how deeply troubled he was by this addiction disease. He left back to Boston after I got pregnant. I got off the opiates. I was pregnant, alone, and scared. For the first time in my life: I felt scared. 

20. I was left to stay with Bobby and lean on him for the next ten years. He was controlling, emotionally immature, financially explosive, and a blabbermouth. Any privacy and independence I had was over in more ways than one. But I wasn't alone. I wasn't alone anymore.  

21. My son was born. He is my greatest accomplishment. I still say having a child, planned or not, is still as traumatic as losing someone you love. Now your heart was out and about walking around this volatile world. There is nothing to prepare you for that. 

22. Jude's father was in and out of jail for the first five years of my son's life. I must have had seventeen different number saved in my phone from him calling from so many different places. Jails, sober houses, random cell phones. I answered every single call he ever made.

23. While Matt was getting himself better I started dating Eric. I had known him for a long time.  He was more of a best friend than a lover to me. I needed someone and so did he. 

24. Matt, Jude's biological father finally got clean and we started to develop a relationship between him and his son and I. Eric wasn't a big fan of this, but we made it work. I was proud of Matt. 

25. TICK TICK TICK.  

 

This sounds like a pretty happy ending for such a long trauma timeline. But, I was still ticking. I'm not done. 

My life, luckily, did not end at 2018. 

I need a break. I'll finish the timeline in the next post. 

We connect from sharing intimate, hurt, and pain. In a healthy way, in a healthy outlet. I'm trying. 

This is me...trying to not tick.