I have never known a person not broken somehow. No one that has gone their whole life without a hurt of some kind.
I have known those who wear the mask of perfection, the ones that advise those real enough to ask for help and then go home and drown their sorrow in what ever their choice of drowning might be. I can spot the hidden broken in a crowd because I was once one of them.
I am a Oklahoman with a splash of Coloradoan. I call it Colokian. I was raised to be buttoned up. To hide the hurt and the crazy that went on behind our closed-door. I was good at it. I think I could smile through a bullet wound. We never let on that our home was a scary place to be. I remember standing at my front door praying that God would let my dad be in a good mood, the nerves and the fear threatening to surface as my friends would pass by waving and laughing. As I grew from child to a young adult I became the best I knew at keeping the mask of perfection on through anything that came my way. Those around me always seemed to have a crack here and there, bless their hearts. It wasn’t until I got married and realized that the mask only made it hard for him to really know me and whats worse how to love me. We had way too many downs caused by my mask to keep it on. Learning how to take off that mask and allow him to see my brokenness was oddly freeing. Being broken together only made us stronger together. Just when we thought we had healed our broken, we added our shattered ones.
Our daughter came to us as a broken swan, she had been made to feel like a little duck that didn’t quite fit in. Those around her would whisper their concerns to me and look around to make sure the little duckling didn’t hear. “She is very manipulative and likes to play mom and dad against each other.” They would whisper across the table. “Why are we whispering?” I would ask. The answer, so she didn’t feel judged by them or get upset by them talking about her struggles. I never liked it. I didn’t know how to help her heal if I couldn’t talk to them about her behavior in front of her. It became obvious that I needed to do just that when we were driving home from school and out of the blue she began to brag about how good of an actress she was. I asked how so and she answered that she could make her friends feel sorry for her and make them do anything she wanted them to just by crying. “Nope, that’s called being manipulative.” We had a good talk about what that meant and how easy it is for girls especially to manipulate and how nobody really likes to be treated that way. Then she said something that made it clear to me that the only way I could help her was to be real and transparent, to help her take off the mask even if it hurt her or made her upset. After I told her she had become manipulative not a grand actress, she looked at me confused and said, “hmm, no one has ever told me that before.” It was time to learn how to get real. The journey has not been easy, she still hates to say what is really going on in her mind, but she is learning. Just when she really began to grasp the art of how to be real, and I was admitting how her behaviors struck a nerve in my own masks that I had thought I had removed, her new siblings came in all their fractured glory. Then suddenly we are seeing where we are still very broken. The truth of this journey is that it is constantly pointing out your own hurts, fears, struggles, and brokenness.
This is why it is so hard.
You have to admit you are so angered by the smallest of lies because your reality as a child was always stretched.
You finally see that you hang on to the control because it was absent in your youth.
All of these masks you have learned to wear perfectly become a heavy burden making it impossible to deal with the day-to-day behaviors of the newly broken children that come into your life. There are not very many options on this path. Throw your hands up and scream “I quit!”, fight with all you have to help them heal dropping their mask and learn to drop yours in the process, or hide under more masks and more stress that others might see through the cracks. We chose to fight and heal as a family. Now, if I told you we have succeeded and are all better it would be a lie. I have to repeat to myself on a daily basis “WAIT, or Why Am I Talking” I have to remind myself that control is not always needed, I have seen that their behaviors are not the behaviors of the ones that have hurt me in the past, that their lies are their only way to feel safe in this world that screwed them over, and I have to give myself grace for losing it more often than I should. That’s the thing about life though, we never really have a time in it that we are not having to work on the broken that it brings. Just when we help out little ones heal from the past, their future will hand them their new masks and so I write……….
soshewritesweb 