March 2017. Letter to me, the child, written to therapy - it was hard for me to forgive myself because I did not let my father leave. For a long time I was convinced that it was not my fault that we all had a quieter life.
I have learned that forgiveness often does not bring you peace, as everyone says, but only the power to maintain good communication, at least stable, with the people who have hurt you. Along with him and with the help of the other constant in my life, depression, I learned to understand my parents. I know that my father's faults are the result of suffering that turned him into a depressed man unable to admit his injuries. He just feels them, so alcohol is a bandage for him, and violence is an outpouring.
I understood that my mother was not strong enough to get out of a relationship that hurt us all because for almost 30 years she was abused and convinced that there is no life after her first husband. I understood that I was just a child and "my father's baby" when I clung to his neck and begged him not to leave and that I was not to blame for my mother's suffering, which continued for years. She continues today, even if he doesn't hit her anymore.
I understood Andrei, whom I had last heard towards the end of last year, when I woke up sweaty and with all my wounds open. I called him then and asked him crying if he ever loved me and if he regretted how he treated me. I told him that in two days I would marry Sergiu and that I didn't know what it was like to get some answers that I hadn't missed in the last six years. He told me he was sorry, but he immediately apologized in a ridiculous way. He said, for example, that he changed his behavior only in our last year together, being convinced that I was going to go to college and leave him. He then told me that it took him years to look at his future wife and not think about me. And I know, since then, that in his reality alandala loved me, but that I still carry the burden of the women in our village, all whores.
Today I am 26 years old, I am married to Sergiu, and at the last meeting I got this: a happy childhood in the first half, as long as I was cruel enough to forgive and forget quickly, and traumatic in the second, followed of an adolescence in which I was physically and mentally abused by my parents and the first man I loved. After that, I lived a year and a bit of meaningless searching, then four and a half with a good man. By the way, three years of forced introspection through depression - a struggle I still have with myself and everything I've gathered.
Even so, in all these years, only my last seems to be the one in which I started to treat my depression and anxiety and to understand who I am after all the abuses I have experienced, but also my mother and father. It is a legacy that still hangs heavily and that I plan to carry as long as it will be needed, with the help of therapy and Sergiu. I want to have children, but first I want to break the legacy of inherited pain. I know what kind of parent I want to be and I know that before I bring my children into a world that moans in pain anyway, I have to cleanse myself of all the suffering I could leave them.
