I have decided to try to make things better with people whom I have hurt/might have hurt by my emotional withdrawal in times of stress/pain/hurt. I hate the thought of hurting people, even if it is unintentional. Its time that I get over this emotional running away, get over this crappy legacy of being abused as a child.

To that end, I attempted to offer an olive branch to the friend I adore, and had the big falling out in December. I hope he can read between the lines of fear and insecurity and realize that I was really trying to say that I miss him and want things to be better, if possible.

Tomorrow I will tackle someone in my husband's family, whom I used to talk to every day, and stopped talking to when my marriage got so bad back when Billy was a freshman. I will simply tell her the truth -- I love you, miss you, and sorry I disappeared on you. When things got so bad with Dan, I was afraid to talk to people in his family. I didn't want to complain about him, or make him lose face in any way. I hope that she can understand that.

The worst will be my sisters, and I do not know what to say to them. My mother was mentally ill, and she emotionally, physically, and sexually abused me. There has been a point or two as my children grow, and are at an age when she did something to me, and I just remember it and fall apart. I just cry and shake. My sisters are all older than I am, the oldest was in college when I was in kindergarten. I do not know if they knew what was going on when I was a kid or not. But when mother died, I found these horrible papers with her things. I knew she was crazy -- she not only abused me, but was horrible emotionally abusive to Dad. She killed small pets. Once she tried to run down a little stranger kid with her car. But those papers were so bad -- I honestly believe she wasn't just crazy, she was literally evil. I think it is a miracle that she didn't commit murder -- that's how bad those papers are. Yet, my oldest sister in particular loves Mom. So I feel weird even talking to her. She will say things like Mom and Dad are together now and happy, and my soul just shudders when I think of what their reality was like. I hope that in death Mom has been healed -- and that perhaps she is happy. God knows, she never spent a happy day on this earth, and did her best to make everyone in her life as miserably unhappy as she was. But what do you tell someone who loves somebody, and that person was...evil? My reality, and my sister's realities are on completely different plains, in different universes on this. I don't want to hurt her by telling her what Mom was actually like. So I have stayed away, and that makes my sister so angry and frustrated, which makes me withdraw even more, and it became this really ugly cycle -- and it got much worse after Dad died last year, and I did my usual deep grief retreat.

Anyway, I am going to try, even though it scares me to death to do this. I honestly don't know what to do about my sisters, though. That one could bring more harm than good when I explain the circumstances.