Reddish Musings

I've got a problem.

Well, to introduce the second step of making myself feel better, I must first explain that I am in the process of recovering from the Cold from Hell, accompanied by his brother, Possible Strep Throat.  The recovery included 5 days of antibiotics, missing class, and being in a haze while writing a paper that wasn't due until the week after because I mistakenly read the Old Syllabus.  

If today's weather is due, even in part, to Gustav, I guess that's just one good thing we can mark down from hurricanes and tropical storms, even if it's just to us inlanders. In short, today was beautiful.

It's a little more humid outside than it was this morning, but walking out the door was a treat today. The one thing I love more than anything else in the Fall and Winter seasons is being happy to leave my home when it's cool and cloudy. Summer and Spring don't bring joy with them, for me. They bring heat, sunburn, sweating and thus skin problems, also a bunch of allergies.

To be fair, Fall is pretty guilty on the allergy front, himself. Actually, more so than Spring, but he offsets it by bringing me happy things. And we can hope that allergies are a moot point soon, since I've been undergoing allergy treatments.

My skin has cleared up enormously since the shots began, and waking up with the sniffles has all ebut disappeared (except for very extreme allergen days, when I wheeze a little. Thanksgiving is the true test to see how well these shots are helping, though.

90% of my Thanksgivings have been spent wheezing and sniffling and being too congested to smell or taste the varieties of food people brought over. I'm tired of having to compliment the texture of my relatives' cooking styles instead of the flavors.

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Things have been kind of strange the past few days, but I think I understand why now. A week or so ago, I could just blame PMS and hormones on every little weepy session and be done with it. But things were emotionally strained and awkward yesterday and a bit of the day before.

I blame this book. A Private Family Matter by Victor Rivas Rivers has been captivating my attention basically since I started reading it (Sunday) and finished it (Wednesday).

Occasionally, in works of fiction, I will feel for characters that I've formed bonds to. I cried when Sirius Black died, though I stopped reading the series after book 5, so don't chalk me up as a fangirl. Harry Dresden's occasionally miserable life draws tears from me here and there. The absolute hopelessness of many characters in A Song of Ice and Fire can bring me to tears as well.

But these books don't ruin my day. They don't quietly worm their way into my heart and chew it up from the inside with the absolute helpless need to bring justice to a family who was shown none. They don't burn at my soul, consumed in the fire of hate for a man who could do these things to his family.

This was my first real dive into what abuse does. I've studied Psychology enough to know that abuse happens, and I've seen some of the side effects of it. But I've never just sat and listened to or read a person's full life's story, recounting in hideous detail all of the crimes committed against them...

Nor have I ever felt so absolutely incapable of helping.

But that's kind of the problem with abuse. Once it's done, you can only clean up the pieces. Prevention tactics are being started, but until they take hold and can teach men and women how to respect each other and their children, qualities that should be innate and not need teaching, these things will continue.

I'm honestly unsure of how to even begin talking about it, due to my lack of experience in the area. I come from a pretty harmless family, be it high-stress at times. My mother's father is obviously emotionally abusive, but not to the extent that some monsters are.

It's just taken a lot of processing, some that I wasn't even aware of. But reading this memoir made it impossible for my mind to rest until I knew what happened to him. How he survived, and how, if, he got away from everything and made his life work. How his family did the same. How his mother ended up. How his father, the bastard, finished his life.

You shouldn't speak ill of the dead, it's true, but someone who commits such heinous acts against his own flesh and blood will never truly die, not so long as their memories haunt and plague the survivors of their crimes.

But I finished the book, and I made a pie, and I think I'm better.

I've just never been affected so deeply by a book, so deep that I wasn't even aware of the what the problem with me was until I realized all I wanted to do was pore through it and finish it so I could wash the stories away from my own consciousness with the fact that he's okay now, as is his true family.

I can barely live with the knowledge of what was done to this man and others, I don't know how he did it.

But I'm glad he did.