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I went visiting around on Borderline Personality Disorder (my mother = extremely abusive Borderline) blogs this afternoon.  I got the sense that many readers and posters are probably at a completely different stage of their lives than I am.  What do I remember of my own years of being a mother with young children in my home?  What do I remember, really, of being a much younger adult than I am today?

I decided to randomly pick one of my journals from the many I have written over the years of my adulthood and have never again opened since the day I wrote them.  I ran my fingers over the journals, picked one, pulled it out an opened it.  It turns out that it was written when I was exactly half of my lifetime younger than I am today.

I went through my 7-week alcoholism treatment program in October and November of 1980.  This journal’s first entry is from February 17, 1981, just 3 months after my completion of treatment and entry into the new-found world of my first steps into ‘recovery’.

I had left my children in the care of their father, my husband, and left on a 30-day Greyhound bus trip by myself.  The pages in the following link were written during that trip.  I returned to see my first husband’s parents on this trip.  I returned to the ocean where I met and fell in love with their son when I was 18.  I returned to the town on the beach where our daughter was conceived.  I was trying to heal the hole in my heart that relationship gave me.

I went to see my sister and her family, and we talked about all kinds of things, including about being mothers.  We had not spent any time together as adults, and this was the first time I had confronted any of my feelings about my childhood.  In fact, I was brand new to the concept of feelings at all!  The Minnesota model of alcoholism treatment pioneered the idea that addictions are ‘feeling diseases’.  My journal writings on this 30-day journey show the new baby-feeling-Linda’s first steps into a world I should have been introduced into from the time I was born.

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*Age 29 – Greyhound bus trip started February 17, 1981 – Journal entries

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