I have so many thoughts in response to your posts. I will digest, reflect and write back! Thank you for sharing with me YOUR writing and all of the directions it’s taking you in now! Writing is such a beautiful mystery!

First, thank you for writing and MOST OF ALL I want to say thanks for following your gut to share the space heater. That story warmed me. And isn’t that amazing how words and stories can be so deeply and down into the bone warming?
Thank you for taking the time to write, to share and let me know what resonated with you. While it’s not great to feel unsafe or weathered by weather – isn’t it good to know others are as well – and to affirm how deep that need for security remains? And we can validate each other for how the journey goes even if it’s not one easily understood by others. To me, that’s where and why and how SO MUCH HEALING happens.
The sharing, often of what is hard I think, at least for me, always gives me the room and space to them KNOW and feel the warmth and the goodness.
Thank you again!
Cissy

I found your blog via a link on another blog. What you have written here… wow. I am crying right now.

Everything in this post resonated with me, but especially this:
“It takes a while for my body to feel, know and believe I am safe while scared and rattled. Not because I’m stupid or can’t get over the past but because childhood lasted almost two decades. That marinade got cooked into the meat of my muscles and can’t be rinsed off under cold water. I was tenderized with shame and salted with pain. There’s no undo or going back to raw to try to cook up another version of the adult I would have become had things been different.”

…and this:
“The remnants of being unmothered and unfathered remain long after we forgive or outlive our actual mothers and fathers. It’s not that we long to return to the womb or the safety of childhood. It’s that we live in a world where that never existed. … The impact of abuse and neglect isn’t the scars that were left but the holes never filled. … I crave the blanket I never owned which would have warmed me against the cold. At least now I know I deserved that. … It is the absence of good not the presence of bad that makes adverse childhood experiences so brutally complex to recover from.”

YES. Sadly, very few people who grew up in a “normal” family can understand any of this. How many times have I been told that all I need to do is forgive and forget, stop living in the past, quit wallowing in my misery, count my blessings, stay in today, and then I will be fine? People who hand out that type of advice don’t seem to realize that their demand to “just get over” PTSD is no less ignorant and hurtful than it would be to berate a quadriplegic for her failure to get up, walk, clean her house and go to work, because the car crash that severed her spine happened decades ago, and perhaps her problem is that she hasn’t fully forgiven the drunk driver who caused the crash?

I live in New Mexico, where the winters are usually chilly, but rarely THIS cold. I feel as though Mother Nature has gone insane and turned in murderous rage against her children. Even inside our snug little house, I feel afraid. What if the electricity goes off, how would we keep from freezing? Would anyone help us if that happened? Would anyone care?

However, I know for a fact that goodness and kindness and even miracles do exist in the world. I know, because I was part of a small miracle back in January. I was taking the trash out one day when I saw an older disabled man who lives in a small travel trailer here in our town, drive by in his ancient rusted-out car. When I’m walking the dog and I see him in his yard, I usually stop to say hi and chat a bit, but other than that I don’t really know him. But this time when I saw him driving past, a thought came to me so strong that I could not ignore it. The thought was that I needed to flag him down and ask if the heater was working in his old travel trailer. The thought was too urgent for me to ignore, so I flagged him down and asked him about his heat. He told me the trailer’s furnace did not work and he had been keeping warm with an old space heater, which had stopped working recently. “But my two big dogs keep me warm at night,” the old man said.

I told him to wait right there, and I ran into our house and got our nice, almost new electric space heater and brought it out to him. He didn’t want to take it at first, but I insisted. I told him we weren’t using it and only had it as a spare, which was true. I showed him how to use it, which luckily wasn’t too complicated. Then… the very next night the temperature here went down to 4 degrees Fahrenheit, and the temperature did not rise above single digits for the next several days! I had not seen the weather forecast, because watching the news triggers me, so I had no idea that this terrible cold was about to hit our area. Prior to this, our temps were only going into the low 30s at night.

I believe David probably would not have survived that terrible cold spell, if I hadn’t listened to the strong prompting that seemed to come out of nowhere when I saw him drive by. It’s a cold cruel world – but with just enough warmth and kindness to give me hope, even in the darkest hour.