Outpour My Soul

The old rules.

Like earlier today. Full body chill, like I’m about to be ill, from the back of my skull, prickling like lightning up over my head into my brow and down my spine, tingling at the base of it before slowly dissipating.

Fucking Hell

Had an underclassman repeat it to me with the added twist of it apparently being a rule from my “church’s mafia front” and B (her grademate from my assumed kin) also had issues sometimes with 1st instead of 2nd or 3rd person language. (Which was wild to me because The Church was where I got in the most trouble for not using ‘I, me, my, myself’ to reference myself- explosive outbursts, degrading comments, even got slapped for 3rd person once).

I don’t know how I feel. Almost like a double grief, but also so abjectly numb

This was the first family to tell me the way my father treated me was wrong. I told Buddy first- knew if anybody’d get it, he would- what with his monstrous story of escaping abuse himself

In her backyard and then again in her living room were the first times I told a breathing soul the extent of the things Daddy said and did when nobody was looking. Wept on her knee as I sat in her living room and she held up my chin and told me there was nothing I could have done to make it better because I was the child and it wasn’t my fault.

She was part of the reason I got into interdenominational hymns and all worship music being for god- which gave us the One coping skill and regulatory ability that was available to us in high school- not just selections from the brown and blue books and the occasional modern worship. Sure Mama had an eclectic musical taste, but Granny and the choir were the ones who had the breadth and depth about the hymns that gave me the hundreds of songs I could flip through and sing every single day as a teenager instead of sobbing and shaking for an hour every day.

She was also the first one to say that if I didn’t cry out for help when being assaulted in a public place then it was my fault too (I don’t know if she was directing that at me during that bible study, but it was heard none the less), and who called me a worker of Satan when I left.

We haven’t talked since she told me if I don’t ask Baba’s forgiveness for grieving him and destroying our family- a charge she laid blame with me- then I was the one still in sin.

And that complicates the final grief of her death.

I don’t want amends- there aren’t any to be made. I don’t want reconciliation or forgiveness

Maybe somewhere deep down I want another hug. But I want the hugs back then

With all the assurance they held.

She had her flaws. Nobody should have ever in a million years told anyone ever that they should honor and obey and be submissive to the husband who left marks on their family. It isn’t my place to judge the fact that she did with her own, with the terror and psychological abuse in the middle, but I can’t fathom repeating that as advice to others.

I’m not attending the funeral; I’m not visiting- haven’t done it not once in the last 5 years, won’t now. I’m not messaging the gratitude I still hold for those words she said when she grabbed my arm and shook me and held me while I sobbed at 14. I didn’t even attach a name or message to the donation towards end of life and funeral expenses, but I gave myself that acknowledgment of the love I once held for her, and allowed myself that one thing. That one final acknowledgment and gratitude for the place she once held in my life.

Talked about Granny in therapy today, and what keeps drawing me back to the idea of her, because even 6 years later, I still think about Granny a lot- multiple times a week. More than Red or Brother Brown or Baba or even my own mother some weeks, (most weeks?)