Ghost from the Past

I teach teenagers, which up until this year had not been a problem for me.

When I was a child, I was abused by my dad’s friend who was a young adult. He was an unclean slender druggie with greasy, stringy dirty blond hair, an acne-scarred face, and a scraggly beard.  He is the man I had nightmares about for decades.

Although he is now an old man and with any luck, dead, I swear he walked into my classroom in the body of a one of my students.  He is a druggie in trouble with the law who looks like my former perpetrator – complete with acne scars and scraggly beard. He is a student who requires more time than all the other students because he doesn’t know how to behave. He does all he can to disrupt class and to do absolutely nothing.

I knew when he walked into the room that this would be hard for me, but I couldn’t go to the counselors and say, “This kid gives me flashbacks; can you move him?”

So I did what I always do when I have a hard kid; I prayed because I know Heavenly Father knows what this kid needs. I tried to help him feel like he was part of the class, yet every time I looked at him, I felt revulsion. I knew it was not his fault that I felt this way, so I prayed harder to be able to see the good in him. Every day he came to class and every day I dreaded seeing him come to class. My anxiety was off the charts. Yet, he was making progress. He began participating (at times) in productive ways.  

But I still wanted to quit my job so that I wouldn’t have to see him and be reminded of the horrors of the past. Instead, I kept praying.

One day he didn’t come to class. When I recorded attendance after school, he was no longer on my roll. I put my head on the desk and cried because I was so happy. I offered up a prayer of thanks because God knew that although I did what I could as a teacher, parts of me could not handle this child.

I found out later that one of his partners in crime was in the same class, so they had to move him. He was furious and didn’t want to be moved, so at least he could not tell how badly he affected me. I am glad for that because I would never want to make a child feel poorly about themselves - even a child with problems, or I should say, especially a child with problems.

Grief, I think I'm doing it wrong, or this only makes sense to me.

Grief. . . grief . . . grief. . . It just goes on and on, but I am feeling things that only make sense to me. I probably need to go talk to a counselor, but I don't because that would simply take too much energy, time, and money, so I will talk it out with my blog.

I worry that my grief will spill over onto others, and I don't want that to happen. I don't want my family members who are also suffering from the effects of grief to be burdened by my grief.

I worry that I don't have the right to feel as bad as feel. I mean, I am only the aunt not the mom, so I worry that by feeling this rotten at month four, I am somehow taking away from my sister's grief (she who is the mom). I know this doesn't make any sense - at all, but this is how I feel. Only in my head is grief only for mothers, and in reality I don't understand how my grief would make my sister feel badly, yet I worry that she will feel like my grief should not be this deep. I use the word deep because grief is a deep gaping hole that nothing seems to fill.

I worry that I will go over to her house and not be able to stop crying if anyone talks about my sweet niece, thus spilling my grief all over their house when maybe they were having a pretty decent day until I got there and effed it up. I put on a brave face for them, but if one of them needs to cry about it, I am more than griefy (because happy just doesn't fit here) to cry with them.

Grief would be a lot easier if I didn't care about any of these people and could dissociate from grief.

Grief - the kryptonite of DID superpowers.