CHAPTER 37
After the telephone call regarding the death of my sister, I felt that my world had truly come to an end. My sister lived several hundred miles away from us so a long drive awaited me. I gathered my things &, leaving Denis in charge, left to spend some time with my sister’s family.
The time spent way from one another helped both Denis & I clear our minds. I recognized that I was sinking into a depression & that I could no longer continue caring for Mona AND be the mother I wanted to be to my other children. I had meant well but failed. As for my beloved husband, he also realized that if Mona stayed with us, our family, as we had known it to be, would never be again. He feared for my health & my sanity as well.
Towards the end of the week, Den called me at my sister’s home to tell me that he had called the Family Services & a social worker was coming to make arrangements for Mona to be transferred to a group home. Mona would, in fact, be gone when I got back home. It was such a great relief to hear him say that. My nightmare was coming to an end. Ironically, it was very much like getting out of the frying pan & jumping into the fire. The nightmare may have come to an end but the feelings of guilt, shame, inadequacy flared up & literally engulfed me causing me to become more & more depressed.
My husband, although I will not speak for him, suffered much the same way I did. He was & still is such a good man. He is kind, considerate, caring, compassionate, gentle & forgiving. Mona was gone when I returned but there were still papers to sign that made me react in anger and I lashed out at him. Mona had been with us for 5 years. The longest 5 years of my life. All that time, all that energy.... only to end in what the agency called an Adoption Breakdown. Such is life. Such was now our shattered lives.
We sought counselling & tried to put the pieces of our lives back together. Den had gone to Teacher’s College in 1991 & now sought a job as a teacher. The total lack of teaching positions in & around the area where we lived forced us to consider moving to southern Ontario.
In 1992, one of my sons became a father. Our second grandchild was born. Two months later, my father died. A month or so later, we moved. This was indeed a mixed blessing. As difficult as it was to leave our friends & relatives in the area, starting afresh was perhaps what we really needed after all.
The love of my husband & of some of my children is what kept me going. The wonders of medical science also helped me to eventually put things in their proper perspective. To a certain extend, my faith also helped but although I never stopped believing & trusting in God... I have no use whatsoever for any organized religion. That is all I care to say about that at this time.
It is now time to come full circle... 36 chapters ago, I told you of a book that I had started to write after my first husband died. I had entitled that book, Label Me Loved & dedicated it to all my beautiful children. That book was complete, with dates, addresses, full names & all the details one usually finds in a book. Depressions make people do awful things. One day, while feeling extremely depressed, I took the binder and one page at a time began tearing the typed or handwritten pages that I had spent hundreds of hours writing. Then, as the tears started to totally obscure my sight, I grabbed hands full of pages & ripped & shredded all those memories & thoughts & feelings. In my mind, I had no right to say that I was a loving mother because I wasn’t. I was an awful, despicable person who promised a child a forever family & then let her down. Label Me Loved? What a laugh! What a farce! The book needed to be destroyed because it was, like me, a lie. There was nothing loving about either one of us.
That, my friend, was 17 years ago. In my heart & mind, a lot of it still feels like last week. The anger, bitterness, shame & guilt, however, are now gone. In a sense there are regrets but again, extremely important lessons have been learned & for those I remain grateful.
It is difficult to write about certain things without having to explain where these thoughts, ideas... come from. Now, when I write about blindness, adoption & adoption breakdown & racial issues & ..... NOW, you’ll know EXACTLY where it’s coming from. When I decided to write blogs that contained ‘meaningful sharing’ I really didn’t think that it would go on for this long!
And, I’ve come to the realization that the title of my book is still applicable to my writings. Only this time, the ME is not intended to represent my children but instead, it represents ME, Eve. It took me a very long time (the best part of those 17 years) for me to learn to forgive myself & learn to love myself once again. No, I am not a beast, a hypocrite, a bad mother, an awful wife.... I am a person who dared to walk the unbeaten path and, as we all know, unmarked roads can be treacherous!
If it had not been for the OVERWHELMING responses that followed every blog, I maybe would have stopped writing a long time ago. But my beautiful NOTH friends from near & far who wrote to comment, question, & encourage made me want to continue & I did. For you all I am MOST grateful. I’ve referred to you as ‘my fan club’ but I do not say that lightly. Without the fans there no great books or movies... only words on paper & pictures on filmdvd.... Without your eyes to read my words & your hearts to feel those words... my blogs would have been worthless.
In the future, my blogs will not be posted in the bulletin section anymore. I did that at the end to make it easier for some of you to find me. The blogs will also no longer be Chapters but they’ll have their own titles.
These last few Chapters have been difficult for me to write & they’ve caused me several restless nights. I look forward to a good restful night now & I wish you all the same.
Good night. Thank you! Merci! &nb sp; La Fin The End
Eve
