Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour...

I had a day with some peace.  It doesn't say much more than my gratitude at that.  I was able to do more than a few things that might have been beyond me for the last few years.  I played hockey with my son in the driveway, not once but twice.  I paid attention to my very tried, sleepover at the neighbors exhausted daughters.  I was sweet and kind to my wife.  

I am grateful to no end for that.   

I attended a meeting tonight and I shared much more personally than I ever have.  I talked about growing up in the very center of chaos.  No parents, crazy and violent siblings and just the level of depravity and insanity.   Then, one day when I was 10, my mother just not being there ever again when I came home from school.  The splintering of my family, the isolation, the abandonment.   I shared some of that, of what made me who I am, this hot mess of dysfunction and depression.  I feel lost in self-pity at times, or maybe more than I'd ever like to think I do, OK, maybe all the time, but my story is one that denotes first a horror of the cumulative and immediate effects of trauma, but second and more so every day in this new chapter, a survival.   My T never ceases to express amazement that I am still standing.  I always look at her askew when she earnestly says that, as my last T did as well.  I know not the context of what they see, so I shrug it off.  

I am grateful for one day, one day of peace, or at least the first day of the ceasefire.