The Middle Years

Growing up different was difficult enough but making it through adulthood was no easy task either. My first husband thought I was “weird” and just ignored me. After a tumultuous three year marriage full of physical and verbal abuse, I divorced, leaving me with a daughter to raise as a single mother. The life I had known as just difficult had now become even harder. My second husband was more accepting and didn’t ignore or laugh at me. Though he never quite understood my “gifts”, he never interfered. The night he was killed, I remember warning him not to leave, to wait until morning. He was going fishing with a group of friends and I had “a strong feeling” so I warned him not to go. I begged him not to go. He didn’t listen. He just smiled, gave me a kiss goodbye and said not to worry, he’d be alright. We had been married less than a year, and just like that, I had been made a widow. I fell into a state of grief that was more shock than anything else. In the course of my daze, I married my third husband. A spur of the moment decision that I would live to regret. My third husband was physically abusive as my first husband had been. My “gifts” were almost non existent and for a time it seemed he had literally knocked them completely out of my soul with each physical blow. I managed to survive the abuse for a year and then I had to walk away. I couldn’t take it anymore. I filed for divorce and moved away taking my children with me. My eldest daughter from my first husband, my son from my second husband, and a daughter from my third husband.

I picked up the pieces of my life in a new place to what I had hoped would be a fresh start. And just as I was starting to succeed, my “gifts” returned with a vengeance. The night I felt that oh too familiar “pull”, a feeling of foreboding, I just knew something was wrong. The next morning I received word that my mother had passed away. I had to return to the place I had left behind and go through the motions as best as I could. After the funeral, father went to live with my stepbrother. I returned to my new home to pick up the pieces of my shattered life once again. And so it happened not one year later, I received word of my father’s passing. This time my stepbrother handled all the arrangements, all I had to do was show up and pay my respects. Once it was all over, I returned to this new place I had chosen and try to make sense of my life again. My parents death had left a deep hollow abyss in the middle of my soul. I had to find a way to cope with this hollow feeling. So I turned to mother’s teachings. I started with meditations followed by prayer rituals followed by herbal tisane. I started to feel whole again. As if something had been missing from my life and now it was all coming together. The puzzle pieces were beginning to fit again.