*DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor, therapist, or health professional of any kind. I’m sharing things that I have been taught that have helped me (or not). This is my experience.

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Thursday, October 27, 2011

Why I Hate Roses

When I was a child we had a lilac bush in our front yard.  The scent would float through our home like a sweet perfume, dancing through the air.  To this day I find myself with a love for flowers.  While I hate the color purple, I am intoxicated by the scent of lilacs.  I have actually pinpointed the exact kind that are my favorite, beauty of moscow lilacs.  While I love almost all flowers, I have a distinct hatred for roses.

Our house was not the white picket fences and smiling, loving family home people dream of.  When I was young, I felt uncomfortable, but didn't know that my home life was different from anyone else's.  My parents' fighting was a constant occurrence.  Physical violence was the norm.  Even more common were the insults and just plain mean comments made not only between my parents, but between all of us.

My father was using a variety of drugs and cheating on my mother with a variety of women.  My mother was bitter and jealous, especially of me.  My father favored me, over my two brothers and over her (she believed).  He rarely disciplined me and when he did he made sure I knew that my mother was making him.  I was daddy's little girl.  While he never hit me, he beat my brothers and my mother.  They, in turn, hit me.

It seemed like every night that my mom worked and my father was home, I would hear my father coughing, choking even.  Several times I came downstairs, usually when my mother came home, saying how afraid I was that my father was going to die.  My parents insisted he was not going to die, and my mother would always be telling him he could not do...whatever he was doing, anymore.  It wasn't until one of the scarce times when I was allowed to have a friend spend the night that I finally began to process what was going on.  She said to me, a short time after, that she thought she smelled marijuana when she was over, but she knew it couldn't have been because she knew my family was "better than that".  Soon after that I found my father's pipe.  Once I even hid it from him, thinking I could get him to stop.  He went as far as to ask me if I had seen his "thing".  My mind was finally wrapped around the idea that my father was doing drugs when I overheard my mother on the phone with a friend.  She said that my father had passed his drug test with everything clean but "dope".  Her next comment was that she couldn't talk about it any further because her daughter (me) was sitting in front of her.

I remember being in elementary school and the teacher asking me about a large bruise on my arm.   The whole classroom was coloring or practicing our writing or something.  It was perfectly quiet when she asked me where it came from.  In my memory of this, her voice is so loud, and my pause just a little too long.  I could feel everyone looking at me.  I remember that I smiled awkwardly and said simply, "My brother hit me," almost laughingly.  I honestly couldn't remember who hit me, but I instinctively knew that if I said that I didn't know where it came from there would be more questions.  I figured siblings get in fights, they roughhouse, etc.  I thought everyone's siblings hit them.  Even though I thought what was going on at home was normal, I felt afraid of anyone knowing what it was really like.

When my father's stepmother was reaching over my head for who knows what when I was a kid, I flinched.  She started saying that she would never hit me when I saw the look on her face.  She looked so upset and worried.  It took until I was in high school to fully understand that look.  My computer class teacher was standing behind me, answering a question about what was on my computer screen when he went to put his hand on my shoulder.  I flinched.  I pulled away.  It had nothing to do with the teacher.  He was a nice guy, not the creepy kind of teacher that hits on his students.  He was just leaning in for a closer look at my computer screen.  And my body reacted as though he was going to hit me.

When I was nine years old my father started staying with a friend for periods of time.  It was becoming very obvious that my parents didn't love each other anymore, or maybe never did.  During one of his stays away from home I found our dog in my parents room chewing on something.  It was on the bed and as I took it away from him I realized it was a single rose.  This is why I hate roses.  My father left several more roses on my mom's pillow until they finally divorced.

The sight and smell of roses brings me back to that horrible time in my life.  It doesn't matter who they're from or the intention of that person, it ruins my day.  I love my father and I continue to believe that my mother should have helped him through his diagnosis instead of shunning him for having a mental illness.  This is why I hate roses.