FBW: My Time of Survival by Andy

Please welcome back each of our calendar bloggers as they join us for another week as the featured blogger of the week (FBW). This time they are sharing stories of survival and photos of the strong women in their lives. If you want to know how you can be a part of the Blogger Body Calendar project, please click here.

Looking back, it had been a long time coming. I was bound to blow up. 27 or so years of holding it all in, the physical and emotional abuse, the never being good enough, the never existing except as a prop in someone else’s existence. It had to come out some time.

I had just started therapy a couple months before, not even to deal with these issues in particular, but mostly to deal with my stress at work because I was not balancing my life well. I never realized it would all be connected to one massive epicenter of emotion.

So by that night, I was already pretty tightly wound up. So ready, though not realizing just how ready I was, to let it all burst out. Like popping a cork off of my past.

I was driving to dance class, my one release where I could be completely happy and not think about anything, when she called, my mom that is.

Now, talking to my mom is a serious endeavor. Once that woman gets talking, there’s no stopping her. This is common knowledge; how she beat me down my entire life wasn’t.

So I grudgingly answered as I maneuvered my car into a spot on the street, knowing I had maybe ten minutes before class started. She dove right in, ready to lay into me for my political beliefs, I guess. See, an election was coming up and she did not approve how I planned to vote on the gay marriage issue. She had just called to tell me how wrong I was, how misguided, how sinful.

Now, this was not my first political debate with my mother. I knew how she felt about these things and I tried not to engage because it’s like a fist fight with a brick wall; only I would get hurt.

But as she just ranted on and on about it, I realized it wasn’t even about politics. It was about me. About how I’m always failing her, how I’m no ever living up to her perfect image of what I should be, about how I would never, ever be good enough.

She wasn’t attacking my politics. She was attacking ME.

Like she’d done countless times throughout my life, but I’d chosen to not hear it. Because I couldn’t.

I snapped.

I called her an insensitive bitch (and I’d never cussed in front of, let alone at, my mother) and I hung up. Or I said something like that. I don’t honestly remember my exact words. I do remember calling her a bitch. I doesn’t sound like much, but it was a powerful move. Felt for me the equivalent of walking out of an abusive relationship, though I couldn’t anticipate just how monumental at the time.

Then, I went to dance class and danced it out while crying, which my dance teacher was more than supportive of.

Oodles happened after that, my dad furious for how I treated my mother (irony?), memories and emotions pouring out of me at an incredible and uncontrollable pace, therapy becoming the best thing I ever did for myself.

And I never spoke to my mother again.

It’s been the happiest years of my life.

Andrea (Andy to her friends) blogs at Crazy with a Side of Awesomesauce, and Sprocket Ink. She can also be found sharing a little bit of her crazy on Twitter @andygirl and on Facebook.