Broken Dreams

            Dreams, is what we do when we sleep or think of something we would like to do, go or have. Dreams are good, their normal and in life it’s something that keeps us going, thriving to reach what we are on a path towards. Dreams are goals that we set at one point or another in hopes that we will make it to what we have always wished for. A new car, getting married, a special trip or surviving a past that has changed your life and taken away most of the dreams I had.

Broken dreams are something that I and many other survivors of Child Abuse live with almost everyday of their lives. Many times my depression has stepped in the way of spending time family and friends and because of this I have missed out on a lot of my children’s special moments. Lately they don’t even ask anymore because more times then not they know what the answer will be, and I don’t know if they know how hurt I am because I am not the father that I have always dreamed I would be. Many times the struggles of life alone would have me working longer hours and even weekends but when someone begins

 to relive a past the struggles that stood in the way become trivial and forgotten because of the new problem that settled in. I guess this is one reason I understand why my children make the comments they do when they say them, even if they are made in anger, after all I know they harbor some anger towards me and if its not really anger it can be called disappointment. They don’t mean to have these feelings and yet they can’t understand when someone who used to be someone they knew as a close father to a father who spends most his time depressed and sleeping. My daughter once wanted to marry me when she was very young and also said the song that says “Daddy’s hands were like steel when she was wrong, but still had the softest hands” reminded her of me. Now, she is lucky to get me out to take her driving and will tell me that she will drive and that I will be okay. I will be okay, my sixteen year old daughter is there to hold my hand when a daddy is suppose to be the one to protect her, and no it’s not due to the change of the times.

            Sometime ago my daughter said to me that her growing up she really did not get to know me all like she would have liked to and that she was kind of jealous of the younger kids because once I am over all this they will truly get to know a father like she never knew. All the needles in the world could not inflict the pain in a man’s heart hearing that from the first daughter whom I love so very much. And the whole problem is that sixteen years ago when we brought her home for the first time I could not change her diaper because of my past and this was the first time things started to surface. As a father, I was robbed of many things a father normally would do with their growing children. I have never given my children a bath, never seen them nude, and never changed a diaper unless I was the only person there and there was no waiting and never was able to watch some of the things that a father would share in memories with their wife or children. I started counseling back then and after a year work and other commitments started to get in the way and I stopped going, even though I never really started to touch on my full past because I did not know too much about it.

            The current job that I have I have used a lot of sick days in the years I have been there, it was not until I went out sick back in February 12^th that I realized that all those times were really related to my past. It was the procedure that caused me to cross over the edge in what you have heard me refer to as the volcano when all the memories that I could have came flowing forward through flashbacks, nightmares, and triggers from places that I would have never expected. It was not until I was admitted to the second hospital because of my depression and suicidal ideation that the word disassociation would come out from the doctor which I had to see on a daily basis for my eighteen day stay. A lot of things started to make sense about things that happened throughout my life but it was not until my third hospital stay in Baltimore where the Disassociation Identity Disorder came into play and that explained a whole lot more of my life. For once in my life I could understand the reason I had done things the way that I did, the way that I act and most of all the feelings that I carry. All along the path of my life the dreams that I had, the dreams that I carried and those I made for my future were all dictated by my family and a past that I would carry inside for everyday of my life.

            So now I am on this long road to recovery to try and come to terms with my past and to continue to heal. There are a lot that I need to continue doing what I have learned such as grounding and containment, there is many tools that I have yet to learn and will soon be putting those into motion on my road and how funny that the first step to healing turns out to be making goals, or in other words Dreams. And once I am able to reach all my dreams only then, can I go back and pick up the pieces of my broken dreams. Until Next Time…..