finally growing up?

It feels like I’ve spent an amazing amount of time working through old, unfinished business from childhood – developmental stages, which kept accumulating and snowballing throughout my life as more new ‘stuff’ accreted on top of the old.

This latest – venture? with R feels like I’m somehow checking off an item on the list, I think maybe from my early teen years? He would have been my high school sweetie if I’d ever had one – it has some flavor to it that I can’t quite define, a kind of innocence, maybe.

Also the Dear-diary-ness of it all. Reading it is a little embarrassing, really – like I’m fourteen. Only I never really got to *be* 14, when I actually was. Sentimentality was discouraged in our family, dad saw it as a sign of weakness. Not to be tolerated. Something to be scorned and mocked and teased into embarrassed, shameful silence. To remain hidden ever after for fear of having that which one held most dear and precious torn to tiny, miniscule little shreds.

Sigh. How could such a seemingly mild-mannered man do so much emotional damage?

He’d lay about him, lay waste with his verbal bludgeon, bull-in-the-china-shop-like. Mom called it ‘tactless’, but really, it was quite brutal. My brothers feared bringing anyone home to meet him because he was a master at mortifying his offspring. He seemed impervious to the reactions of others, nothing seemed to penetrate his rhino-like skin.

Except of course me outdoing him at something, which he *always* took very personally.