It's been a while (and other trade secrets)

Handsome is troubled too.
It's the piece that is most overlooked in our trauma saga.
Because, well...
I'm the one.
I mean, I'm the one.
I'm the broken one.

I'm the one who gets triggered by the act of laying down on a bed at night. Yeah. the act of LAYING DOWN triggers anxiety that wakes me up and keeps me awake. I can be falling asleep sitting up, but if I lay down. I'm suddenly wracked with anxiety and wide awake.

I'm the one who's body twitches and jerks to phantom memories my brain has either hidden or never recorded to begin with.

I'm the broken one.

I'm the one who has beaten my face with a metal power strip and then choked myself in it's chord. Because of... because of compulsions. Desperate compulsions to have some concrete memory.

I'm the one who's childhood was hijacked by some real life 50 shades of grey or it's pedophilic alter ego. It's not sexy IRL.

I'm the one.  The volatile one. The hypersensitive one. The one who's brain is both hiding and seeking a true measure of cruelty within which to place the smorgasbord of my post traumatic symptoms and trauma's. That's actually not redundant, by the way.

But... Handsome.  Quiet, contemplative, neurotically logical Handsome, with his perfectly timed sardonic humor, compulsive humility and loving supportive family. The straight man to my... well whatever the fuck this mess(me) is. He's no perfect specimen (close, but...). He comes with his own near misses and wild innapropriations (yeah, well. It SHOULD be a word).

Sometimes the very goodness of his family blinds him to their dysfunctions and shortcomings (because, as I feel compelled to state in defense of their very real loving supportiveness, even great families and parents have their dysfunctions and shortcomings). Although, perhaps to say he is blinded to their pitfalls isn't quite the right phrasing. It is not that he can not see them, it is that he can not or will not reflect on or own the impact of their mistakes on his past and current psychosocial make-up. His hangups are simply character flaws. He struggles to/perhaps refuses to acknowledge the negative impacts his childhood, upbringing and family culture have had on him. Certainly his parents were good enough. More than.  And to him, that's generally the whole picture (it's not).

The truth is, having a super fucked up family history, as horrible as it is, can sometimes be a get out of jail free card. Of course I need to examine the ways in which my childhood, my parents and their partners in crime have impacted my development, sense of self, mental and physical well-being. I mean, they literally fucked me. It's harder, when they did a pretty good job, to see the value in this type of exploration. It seems to feel like passing the buck or playing the blame game to Handsome, at best unproductive, at worst hurtful to his loving family members.

The problem is that such a refusal to examine the origins of one's make-up, under the assumption of over-arching good-enough-ness, leaves you vulnerable to repeating those same mistakes in a never-ending cycle rather than improving upon them in the current generation, and unable to make significant changes in one's own problematic behaviors.

Of course, I recognize this is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. But here's the thing, often as not,  they really are, both black. And whether it's the pot or the chef pointing it out doesn't have much bearing on the reality of the blackness involved. After all, as my parents (the good one's) are fond of pointing out, couples generally pair up with someone of similar intelligence and comparable emotional baggage. Comparable meaning similar in scope not necessarily in nature.

All this is to say that while we have the potential to compliment each other in all the best of ways, and often do, when our combined traumas come head to head (most often in relation to the children) it can be really devastating for everyone involved. Re-traumatizing to me and Handsome, and far worse, traumatic for Brown Eyes and Tousled. More on that later (probably). In the meantime, here's to fervently hoping reparations, acknowledgement, on-going treatment and unconditional love can help our sweet boys make out okay, in spite of it all...