platitudes of time

 Time heals all wounds...

So much anecdotal bullshit. Time doesn't heal wounds. People grow, but the wounds remain. We just learn to live with them. I am realizing that the trauma of all the things I have gone through in my life is like exploding paradoxes. They happen but there is no clear understanding of what I have just gone through and they blow up like fireworks. Almost instantaneous and with very little warning. I am thinking back to when the boys came into the world and how it was life-altering, but I did not know just how altering it would be. I knew I would love them but it is so much more than that. It is a paradigm shift. Like all of these exploding paradoxes, they are good and bad. Well, I am going through another. With my mother and her diagnosis. She is okay until she is not. When she is not it is world-shattering and I feel frozen with helplessness. So I ramp it up into overdrive. I go a million miles a minute in my mind doing all the things. This has always been the way I respond to these moments. When Jim was injured I washed walls and clean his apartment top to bottom. When my grandfather died I cleaned and cleaned. When mom first got diagnosed... I went into hyperdrive with action and purpose. It was a means of not thinking about what was happening. I have done it now, once again. My mother is struggling with something and I cannot give myself time to process it because time does not heal wounds, it heightens them. It allows my brain to contemplate the horrors and the struggles. The worst-case scenarios that I should not be thinking of, and yet, my mind focuses that way to plan and prepare for what could potentially be. Time is a hindrance. I don't want to contemplate all of these things, however, when I try to avoid them my brain in its slumber relives every gory horror it can come up with. I am paralyzed with the weight of it and yet there are moments in those dreams that I see my mother for who she is. She is a fighter that is for damn sure. She will not just take this. She won't. That is not her and I come by it honestly. I have never backed down from a challenge and neither will she. Time does not heal wounds... that is just not the case. These traumas are carried. Woven together like a cloak, covering every part. incapsulating me. I am forever changed and so no, they are not wounds... they are part of my DNA. They are integral to feel. As much as I may not want to, these will build me to be who I have yet to become. In the meantime, leave me to rage clean and work my shit out.