An Invincible Summer - A Woman's Journey

Warning....this could be a repeat...but I am getting old so my friends will tolerate it. When I was a very small girl I had a rather large "freckle" in a spot that stayed mostly hidden from the world. I must have been quite proud of it because, as the story goes, my non-driving mother, who frequented the RTD of Los Angeles, was extremely embarrassed one day when I decided that our bus driver needed a peek of it. I asked him if he wanted to see my big freckle and down went the drawers. I can remember what I was wearing but I cannot, for the life of me, remember what happened after that. The pride in that "freckle" waned as I was about to enter middle school, and as the threat of PE and getting naked in locker rooms neared, we had the family doc remove it. It was bad enough I had expose myself him but the young teen girl population of Sunland-Tujunga was simply not going to happen. One day, on our way to do some shopping, Mom and I hopped on the local bus when,...

I am going to readdress an issue that I have already written about, but it is so important that I must revisit it just to cement it in my brain. There was a light bulb above my head that suddenly glowed bright in that very moment when I realized the genesis of the shame and embarrassment I felt when it came to my marriage during the last few years. As my Secret Keeper slowly disintegrated into his mental illness and drug abuse, the feelings that I experienced were all the emotions one would expect and read about. Anger, hurt, fear, betrayal etc. One very strong feeling was shame; I felt like an idiot.  But why? Because it went on so long? Because it happened under my nose? Because I trusted him to do the right thing even in his depression? Perhaps a little of each of those but there was a bigger issue and it was all MINE. It seems that a fragile, unexamined part of my ego took a tremendous beating by having my marriage fail. I recall at an early age deciding that I was going ...