These eyes, …

The recent events in Egypt have struck me in a strange way.

I was driving along the road this week listening to NPR and I find I am reacting emotionally to the news of the dictator Mubarak — like I did to my father’s treatment growing up.

The fear and the almost frantic way in which the people of Egypt stayed in Freedom Square — the fear of a vicious dictator. I know that feeling.

This is something I wrote in 2007. I am so, so grateful that most of these emotions are not still with me today.

These eyes, …

What you see there in my eyes is pain.  All the things I try to push away in order to do — this — day.  Yes, I was yelled at, raged at almost daily growing up when he wasn’t working or traveling for more than eighteen years. Oh, she was so sad — always sinking into the pretext of being sick so that she wouldn’t have to face the fact that he was yelling, rebuking, bullying.  Making his children shrink into a ball of tears and fear.  Stunted, unable to process the world around.  Yes, she drank, and drank, until a week before he died; she was burying herself in a bottle of Vodka.  Yes, he died, his brain slowly crumbling around him.  Yes, that melancholy that has followed me — sometimes chased me — through my life.  It comes in and intends to stay.  Until I rise up and scream,  NOoooooooo!  You are not welcome!  These are the demons that come and sometimes I can’t make them go away.  I just crawl up into a ball and let the waves of pain wash over me.

I did that.  But today these eyes, which have been trying to tell the world what he did and how it feels, today these eyes are saying it hurts, but I am strong.

I am not going to repeat history. 

I am going to be someone who can stop the rage, listen to my fears, process my pain, and I will NOT, above all, take it out on my beautiful husband and children.

These eyes are saying, I am strong.