To my older sibling: 

I DID NOT "KILL" THE FAMILY DOG. I made the choice to have him put to sleep because he was old and suffering. The way you talk about it behind my back, you make it sound like I poisoned his food and cackled like an evil witch while he passed away in agony. I made sure his passing was painless and gentle. You're just mad because I didn't ask permission to do it. 

To my younger sibling: 

STOP TELLING ME WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING BEHIND MY BACK. You don't try to correct them or come to my defense, you just listen and then tell me later, which does not help me in any way. I've asked you before to stop, but you don't. 

To my youngest sibling: 

I'm worried you and your fiancé won't work out because you are  both too young to be engaged and the way you treated me growing up shows you don't have much respect for women. You are a chucklehead (trying to keep my language clean) and haven't really proven otherwise. 

To my mom: 

STAND UP FOR ME. I know that everything I told you about your ex-husband was awful to learn about, but you really need to stand up for me more. I get it, my siblings and I are all adults, even the youngest (technically), but you could shut them down once in a while when they get nasty. 

To my Abuser: 
Get bent. 

In therapy my T has got me trying to work on the "Trauma Egg" - it's pretty easy to find info on it if you look it up. They warned me that a side effect of working on it could be a return of hypervigilance and stronger reactions to triggers that haven't been bothering me as much lately. Boy howdy were they right about both. 

My husband and I had to go to the store, we needed a bunch of stuff and because the was an issue with his bank, he got his paycheck almost a full week late. We needed to go today or we wouldn't have anything for lunches and dinners next week, which would be a problem.

Grocery stores are hard for me in general. They are bright, loud, and full of people who seem to throw their emotions at you. I pick up on tension and anger from others really strongly, and I can get overwhelmed by the emotions of others really easily. I've been able to shut off whatever lets those emotions in for the most part, but working on the dang trauma egg has made it harder to do that for the last week or so. I've also been doing my best to not give in to the hypervigilance, but got thrown for a loop today. We were discussing what soda to get and some very rowdy young guys came into the aisle right behind me. They were a bit oblivious to the others in the aisle - it's a game day today and a college town, so lots of excitement, I guess. One of them came very close up behind me, I could feel him brush against my purse, and he reached up over my head to grab a bottle of something. 

One of my biggest triggers is a male presence looming behind and above me.

I am not very tall, the shortest of my siblings, and most guys have a good bit of height on me. This guy was at least 6'6". 

It was like I felt my brain slam the door shut. I immediately forgot what I was saying, forgot what was on the mental grocery list I had, and froze in place until I felt my husband nudging me away from where the guys had moved over to, still joking with each other and totally unaware of other people in the aisle. I followed my husband on autopilot, feeling numb and spaced out. We still had things we needed, and I was trying to pull myself back into my body, so hubby resorted to leading me to the craft aisle and let me stand with my back to the shelf and the cart in front of me so I could breathe for a second. I had to work very hard not to immediately burst into tears right then and there. After I calmed down a bit, he told me to grab a few skeins of yarn because he knew I needed something to focus on to ground myself. 

We got the rest of what we needed, but then had to head over to a second store because the first one is good to get drinks but not really for food, and the second has a good bulk section. I kept catching myself trying not to leave my back exposed, and my husband made an effort to step between me and more groups of rowdy guys a couple of times. At one point I was walking so close to my husband that I kept bumping into him so I could avoid what looked like a group of frat bros. My husband would say something and I would have to ask him to repeat himself because I wasn't processing things right. I kept forgetting what we needed, and I can guarantee that if I had written down the list, it would have been a shredded mess because I worry at things with my hands when I am upset. By the time we were done I was shutting down hard, and hubby mentioned he could see I was starting to disassociate and we needed to get to the car quick. The whole way home I was in an awful mood, but trying hard not to crash out so we could get the groceries inside and then I could melt into an unhappy puddle of goo and eat ice cream. 

My brain feels numb, and there are traces of the start of a panic attack racing through my system. I haven't had one in months. It took about 3 times longer to write this out than it normally would. I can see how disjointed this looks, but I can't fix it. My brain is not ok right now.

The 9 year old that hides under the bed in my mind is currently in the pilots seat, and she is not having a good day. 

I hate this. I know that therapy can be hard and healing takes a lot of time and sometimes goes opposite the way you expect. But boy does this suck. 

My relationship with him was already really rocky, and I hadn't actually seen him face-to-face since 2011, shortly before my mom divorced him for a myriad of reasons, the biggest one at the time being his alcoholism. His abuse towards me did not come to light until years later, and I was already limited contact with him out of sheer frustration. As I got older, I got more and more angry with him and didn't really understand why, and was also trying very hard to pretend that I was not terrified of him. At the time, I had no concrete reason for the depth of my fear, so I think it mutated into a deep resentment that only worsened anytime he disappointed my siblings or myself. I hate to admit that the very worst examples of times I have lost my temper to an alarming degree were linked directly to him. I broke a window once and still have small scars as a reminder on each hand. 

I was never close with him, would never consider myself a daddies girl or anything even near that description. Like any child, I did desperately want his approval and attention, but also learned very early on that he was not a stable person. I had to learn to tell if he was drunk, which was nearly all the time, the man could not function without alcohol and I'm honestly not sure how often I saw him truly sober. He was not a consistent drunk, either. He could be stupid and giggly, or sleep like he was in a coma, or he could get mean. He wasn't usually violent, mostly just loud and angry, but I do know that a few of my weird "unexplained" childhood injuries were because of him. I don't think he did anything to my siblings, but I would get in the way or distract them away from him, so he may have tried and I managed to stop it or took it myself. 

Long story short, we did not get along.

I do not like him. He is a selfish, boorish, slob of a man who absolutely sucked at being a parent and foisted most of his parental duties onto me while threatening me into staying silent about his abuse. He hid behind my grandmother when I finally told people about what he did, and she threatened to sue me for speaking up against him. I found out not too long ago that she admitted to my sister that she believed that I had indeed been abused, just not by him. He's a coward and I don't want or need him in my life. My husband agrees wholeheartedly. He will never come near our future kids and I will fight like a demon to keep him away if I have to.

So why the heck do I miss him sometimes? 

Logically, I do understand that part of me is grieving the loss of what I wanted in a parent. I would have liked to have someone I call "dad" with the fondness my husband has for his. My FIL is wonderful, and I am trying to figure out my relationship with him even as my heart aches for the dad I never really had. Of course I get sad or wistful when I think about the fact that my kids will not have a "Grandpa Bio-dad". 

But tonight, I was cleaning up after dinner. I had made homemade spaghetti sauce, something my FIL taught me, and a dish I am very proud of. I learned the basics from my FIL, and tweaked it into something very personal that both my husband and I love. I was putting the leftovers away, and the smell washed over me as I did so. I use a lot of fennel seeds in my sauce, so it's a very specific smell. 

And I was suddenly thinking about making it for....him.... 

Showing off my cooking skills, sharing a meal, and making up for lost time. It hit so strong and so sudden that I felt my body rock back with the force of it. Almost instantly after, I felt a bit sick. Almost like heartburn but at the back of my throat. I felt panicked, and my vision went fuzzy for a moment. I wanted to take my head off and shake it like an etch-a-sketch, so I could erase that momentary feeling of warmth and the very vague fondness that wormed it's way up from the depths. 

I don't ever want him near me again. I don't want to see his face, hear his voice, feel his presence behind me, nothing. I tell people he's dead if they can't take the hint that I don't want to talk about him.  I would rather walk through lava than spend time with him. 

So what the heck was that? Where did that come from? 

Why do I miss someone who hurt me so badly? 

He was miserable and our vet agreed it was time. We had tried putting him on anxiety meds, and all they really seemed to do was make him sleepy. I tried sticking to a careful routine, made sure not to walk him too much, and did my best to give him attention when he wanted it. This all stopped working. On walks, I had to constantly be on alert because he would try to leap into the road at random, and he couldn't hear cars coming so that was really scary. I had him dangling from his harness once because he jumped out in front of an oncoming truck and I had to yank him back with all my might so he didn't get hit. I was exhausted and stressed and felt really bad seeing him deteriorate. He was my mom's dog, but once she retired we took him in because she was moving and couldn't take him with. 

My older sister stopped talking me after he passed. She yelled at me in our family chat right after coming home from the vet without him because I didn't consult with her first and let her make the decision herself. I didn't think this was fair as she lives in another country and I wasn't going to keep him suffering because she wanted control. She ignores me if I DM her, completely skipped my birthday earlier this month, and only started to sort of respond to me in the family chat after I badgered her for a few days because I had money for her - I know, I know..... Before this all went down I agreed to sell some stuff she made at my booth at the farmers market I attend. I am not petty enough to keep that money from her. She now doesn't outright ignore me in the family chat, but she won't outright address me either. Our younger sister has noticed, but doesn't want to get involved because she has also faced some amount of wrath from the oldest. 

I tried yesterday, after leaving her alone for over a month, to engage her in our FB DMs again. Nothing. The last 3 messages in that chat are all from me. Not a single response from her. We used to be really close. She's always been a bit bossy, but as the oldest I think that's normal, for the most part. I don't know why she's letting this be what ends our sisterhood. I've confided so much in her over the years, telling her things before I told anyone else. I've given her advice, talked her through a difficult period with a friend, and tried to help her when she's been stuck at an airport by hacking into our mom's email for info (mom was at work and couldn't do anything).

But over the last few years, she's shown a few times that we're not as close as I thought we were. She refused to call my at-the-time fiancé by his name, instead referring to him as "some rando", until I had to threaten not to talk to her anymore. She informed me after meeting him, a very sweet, stand up guy, that she just assumed he would be some jerk of a guy. I never said anything about him that would lead her to believe that, and he's the only person I ever dated seriously. I don't have a history of dating jerks, she just decided he was one for some reason beyond either of us. Looking back, she also has a history of belittling me in weird ways. I would mention some little piece of trivia, and she would immediately try to tell me I was wrong and didn't know what I was talking about. She would be a bit sullen when I proved her wrong.                                              If I brought up a show, movie, or book that I liked and thought she would like as well, she would brush me off and say it sounded dumb. Then a few months later, would "discover" said show, movie, or book and be upset at me for "not telling her about it if I was watching/reading it already". This happened so often I just gave up trying to introduce her to things, and would just talk about it with her when she eventually stumbled on it herself. 

I don't know if I'm ever going to be on good terms with her again. I don't really know what that would look anymore, it's pretty clear that no matter what, our previous relationship is dying or has already died. It makes me so sad that yet another family member seems to be drifting out of reach. Because of the abuse from my biological father, I had to cut out or was cut off by a huge portion of my paternal family. I am on good terms with my mom's side, but her side is significantly smaller. I have had to put up boundaries with my mom and siblings, and now I might be losing my older sister entirely and I can't fix it. 

It's so hard right now. I value family deeply, and mine is crumbling apart at the seams.