Day 15 - Full Moon Monday

What scares you?  I know that's a loaded question but we seem all seem to have a few things that scare us.  For me, top of my list right now is spiders.  Not that I am afraid of being bit or eaten by them, although that could happen since I react to bug bite venom differently...takes me forever to heal from bug bites.  Chigger bites can take up to 2 months to heal.  It kind of stinks, but I digress.

My fear about spiders is more them getting on me, me getting too close.  They are creepy, in a magnificent way.  "Wait, what?: you ask.  Yes, I said that.  I love to look at them, love to photograph them, however I have to walk away at times and shake uncontrollably to get the heebie-jeebies out of me.  This also happens with other bugs, I'm not a fan of any of them really, but spiders take top of my list for icky things I fear.

I am sure if I sat here and thought about it I could list a few other things that scare me.  Severe heights, not really...clowns, no they are just icky...being bit by a shark when swimming in an ocean, nope.  I have fears of things but what I try not to let happen, is my fears stopping me from living.

I think my greatest fear now is being so afraid of things that living, growing, doing things stops and I hide in fear.  I spent many years doing this exact thing, in a sense.  No, I didn't hide in my house and refuse to go outside.  I was going to work, raising my children, paying my bills, doing the daily tasks that I was required to do.  I was even taking my children on vacations and making sure they were happy and enjoying their childhood.  I hid inside myself, not allowing the true me out again for fear I would not survive another pain like I had when I was 28 again.  I went numb.

Let me explain a bit deeper here as I am sure you are scratching your head wondering what side road  have ventured onto.  My childhood sucked to say the least.  Being raised by an abusive alcoholic for a mother and a father that was too busy being single and making a good life for himself to have children, I ended up raising my two siblings and trying to take the brunt of the physical abuse from our mother.  From the tender age of 6 to about 15, I fell into the category of an abused child.

Since abuse was normal, marrying someone who was just like her was not a stretch. From what I have read and learned over the years, this is pretty common.  So enter abused spouse from 20 - 28.  The little break in between was when I was homeless and living with my soon to be abusive spouse, before I knew about who he really was.  Life had not been easy but I didn't really know anything different.  I survived.

When he passed away, however, I moved into a new category - widow, a stage that was foreign to me. This was a category that I only knew my grandmother and others much older to be in.  That was not something a young mother should be in but there I was.  I shut down anything resembling a heart and went on auto-pilot.

OK...dove a bit deeper into that than planned.  Let's see if I can steer this ship back on course a bit.  In the many years since that happened, I tried dating.  I tried being in relationships.  I wanted to "love" again.  I even had those 3 little words leave my lips but something always seemed to be missing, to not be whole.  Fear of loving again with the main fear being hurt again.  After all, for me, love equaled pain. I know, not all love is like that, but what had been ingrained in mind from such a young age was just that.  It has taken many years of soul searching and the deep thought to make me realize that what I was trained to recognize as love was nothing like it should have been.

So a few years ago, I learned the true meaning of love, and the person I learned to love was me.  I found that in order to truly love another, I would first have to learn to love who I am, be comfortable with who I am, then and only then would I be able to feel and understand real love.  Now, finally, I understand.  Finally, I can love another and really feel the love back.  Not through a fist or an angry word, but that warm, touch your heart deep inside type of feeling that surrounds you like a blanket.

Love, painful no longer.