April 3rd. It's been a year long hiatus from blogging for me. This was not an intentional absence but also not exactly a forced one. It just happened... sort of. Life events prevent a blogger who is not dedicated from posting anything new. Sometimes the coherent thoughts, and the words to express them, don't emerge.
Yes, I suppose I am one of those bloggers in the sense that I struggle with what to write about and have allowed several life events in the past to stop the flow. Often it's simply that indecision and fear of putting myself out there. One big one was renovation upheaval. More recently there was another major life event where, for a time, I was unable to even think, really. You see, my only daughter ran away from home and for 3 months I had no concrete knowledge on where she was, though I had a pretty good idea who she was with. At the time, I had no clue how we had all come to the place we were at. She wasn't a young child or even dependent teen, so she could technically do as she pleased and live her life in whatever manner suited her during any given moment of fancy. And she did...
Despite the fact that she's been "back" for a solid 6 months, life is settling down, and I am extremely grateful that we are no longer in the place we were in a few short months ago, there has been so much damage to the family relationships that could take more than a lifetime to heal if they continue the way things have been. It's a very sad experience for us because we did our best to raise our daughter well. However, no one is perfect and it would appear we failed at our mission. Perhaps someday hindsight will reveal a different picture but for now, it is what it is. Failure.
Failure is an ugly word. Most people these days don't like to think that they might have actually failed at something. It's not a politically correct notion. I have thought a lot about it though and it was definitely a fail. That's not to say that we did everything wrong, which is frequently implied by the word but simply that the accumulative outcome was such.
Issues began with the journey into puberty when friends' opinions became more important than those of parents and siblings. This is a natural thing but it's sad that the hormones of puberty can overwhelm the senses and make untrue things become true in the undisciplined teenage mind. Then unwillingness to work through issues, in spite of the discomfort involved, clearly drives a deeper wedge between family members that should be close, that should trust, that should love beyond all else. What should be... isn't.
People say it will come. They say we have to just give it time... much time. Maturity needs to be developed. In the meantime, there are many uncomfortable pauses in conversation that shouldn't be. In the meantime, there are raging emotions that ebb and flow, threatening to overtake me. In the meantime, it just hurts.
Dee..
