By Debbie Dippel

When considering Carla and my relationship, I think it may be helpful to look back at the relationship between myself and my Mom and the impact that my upbringing had on my belief system.

I was the youngest of 6 children. My mother was widowed when she was 38 and I was 6 years old. She re-married shortly after and that marriage ended in divorce. She had a difficult life and very poor health. At a young age I felt like her caretaker. She didn’t have the energy to invest in my life. I was given free reign, never had a curfew and wasn’t questioned much about my comings and goings.  I pitied my mother and carried a sense of guilt when I left her alone. I had fears that I would become like her, especially regarding her illness.  Her fears were passed on to me, the fear of being alone and single very intensely.  There were positive interactions between us as well. I always knew I could talk with her and share my fears. She would listen. She once answered my question regarding my feelings of guilt with, “You are a child. You should be carefree.” Those words lifted my guilt and I came away relieved. This caused me to realize how much impact words can have on a child. She died 2 months after I was married. I loved my mother but her illness, emotional and physical, prevented us from having a healthy relationship. I would have liked to know her the way she was created to be as a healthy and emotionally whole person.

I had a strong desire to be married, have children and be in a happy and stable family. I had opinions on how children should be raised which I learned from my older siblings. I believed that as long as my children were raised properly, with love and discipline, everything would work out well. I wanted my daughter and me to be close, and enjoy each other’s company. I wanted her to be happy, well behaved, popular, have a good self esteem and know that she was loved.  I didn’t want her to struggle with the same fears that I did. I wanted her to be a Christian and belong to a church where she felt a sense of belonging. I wanted her to have a good relationship with her Dad and brother. I envisioned her doing well in school, graduating, having friends, learning music, getting married and having a family. The main goal I envisioned for her was that she find a good man to marry. Therefore, I worried over her appearance. I watched her weight, encouraged her to wear makeup and do her hair, and socialize as much as possible.

I saw myself as being her confidante,  role model, and encourager. I always looked down the road and thought that whatever actions I took now would affect her as an adult. I also believed that my husband and I needed to be a loving couple who modeled real love to their children. But this was not something I could do on my own.

~Debbie~

“Though our childhood abuse left us feeling someone ought to make reparation to us, if we wait a lifetime for that, we may never receive what we need. We choose instead to face the idea that from now on, we are going to take responsibility for caring for ourselves.” Beyond Survival by Maureen Brady

Today on Mother’s day, I acknowledge myself ~ that I in the last 4-5 years I have been the mother to myself that I have needed.

When I finally drew the line with my mother, she walked away from me. Although I know that my mother had a very difficult childhood, and a tough life herself, I couldn’t let her take it out on me anymore. She had the same chance that I did to get help. She chose not to have a relationship with me because I told her that I would not carry the burden of the relationship anymore. I would not let talk to me in an abusive way or blame me for the abuse that I suffered at the hands of her boyfriend.  Though I wish only the best for my Mom ~ on this Mother’s day, I celebrate that I no longer allow other people to devalue me or define me, and that I am an example of victory over a difficult past.

Even as an adult with children of my own, I could relate to feeling like I wanted to be justified. I wanted to be validated and told that the abuse was not in my imagination. I wanted someone to apologize to me. I wanted someone to tell me that I had not deserved to be regarded with such little value. I wanted to be assured that I was loveable, that I had not done anything wrong, that it was not my fault and that I wasn’t crazy or selfish for feeling like no one cared about me.

I was told I was a story teller, the little girl that cried wolf, I was taught to doubt my memories and was not always sure what things had happened to me and what were things that I might have dreamed up. Things were murky for me and I had learned to disconnect from my body where it was even harder to remember the real from the imagined.

But in adulthood, after years of living in a world of dissociation, depression and struggle, and within the safety of therapy I began to look at my upbringing from a different angle. I began to see what really happened and where they were wrong and I began to rebuild myself.

I still longed to be recognized and validated, especially by my parents. I thought that if my Mother would just come to me and say that she realized the harm she had done to me by not believing me and not protecting me, and if she admitted that she put me in very dangerous positions, and if she told me how sorry that she was, EVEN if she had to say “but I was so sick”… I thought that it would change everything, and that my life would just be all better.

Several things happened. First of all I learned to validate myself. I learned to believe in me and my own my truth and to know that I did not imagine what happened to me. I began to repair the false beliefs; I took them apart and I looked at them as though I was seeing through a new lens.  I started to see the core person; the real me and acknowledge who I really was inside and started to like myself.

When I look at this process today, I realize that if my mother had made a grand effort to make it up to me and apologized for her part in the messed up upbringing that I had and for all the lies about myself that I had believed all those years and if my father had realized that he neglected me; that he had never been interested in me as a person and if he came to me with a sincere understanding of how that affected me, I know today that not much would have changed. The old beliefs I learned as a child would still be alive at the depth of my core. The false belief system that I developed which lay at the root of all my difficulties would have still been intact. I would have been happy for about a month or so, and then the old depression would have come creeping back; the voices whispering that I am an imposter, would have still been there, the identity issues and the insecurities would not have healed. All of this helps me to understand that the re-wiring I did with the help of my therapist really had to take place for me to become ME!

Happy Mother’s Day ~ to all our Mom readers and to those of us who parent ourselves! (That includes you Men too!)

Darlene Ouimet

Next years mother’s day post has been published~ “Mother’s Day and Dysfunctional Mother Daughter Relationships”

Let go of the Reins

Why do adult children find it so hard to ignore the opinion of a parent?

When I was pregnant with my third child, my husband and I went over to his parents to tell them our exciting news but my father in law was not excited for us. He was angry. He didn’t say anything positive; in fact he stayed strangely quiet. My mother in law didn’t say too much either but I got the feeling that it had something to do with her husband’s reaction.

The next day, my father in law dropped by to see us and said that his wife had told him that his reaction to our news was not fair to us and that he should apologize. He launched into his “I’m sorry but it’s just that …” and then he proceeded to tell us all his judgements about us having a third child, and why this was such a terrible idea. He didn’t bother to hide his opinion that it was my fault and entirely my decision; as though my husband was a victim of a surprise pregnancy or as though he was not a participant in the event that got me pregnant!  Even though I was 36 years old at the time and both my husband and I were excited about this new child coming and we had never made the decision to stop at two children, we didn’t stand up to my father in law. We pretty much both just sat there and took it. We didn’t say that it was none of his business. It didn’t occur to us that he was actually insinuating that we were not smart enough, mature enough or responsible enough to decide on our own how many children we could or should have and that as always, he was reminding my husband that he should never make a decision without his father’s approval.

The bottom line is that it was not his decision, nor was it his place to give his opinion of why we should stop having children, but at some level we thought it would be disrespectful to go against him. The thing is though, what was our alternative? I was pregnant. We were in a no win situation. We were having a baby with or without his approval. The whole thing just hurt.

So again, why do adult children find it so hard to ignore the opinion of a parent? Why didn’t my husband tell his father to mind his own business about how many babies we were going to have? Why did we just sit there and listen to him go on and on? Why did we let him communicate to us that we were not smart enough to decide on our own how many kids we could or should have? Well for one thing our definition of respect was skewed.

The only reason he didn’t want us to have any more kids was because it interfered with his plans for my husband. My husband was his father’s hired man even though we had our own farm. Having children interfered with my husband’s work hours. So who was it really “best” for if we didn’t have any more kids? It had nothing to do with my husband and I. Growing up, our parents had not empowered us to transition from child to independent adult.  We had rarely been validated in our decisions. We were never approved of and were caught in the spin of always seeking approval; always trying to please. Therefore when we got a lecture about why we should not have another baby, we were well conditioned to accept judgement and reprimand. We have a different definition of respect today and we strive not to pass the old family systems on to our children.

Just another truth I discovered along the journey.

Darlene Ouimet

Darlene and Bodie

In my recovery it has been important for me to realize how my parents did not have a sense of their own value and therefore did not know how to help me to see my own value. I think that when we are adult children and we struggle with self esteem, we have some funky and skewed systems in place, causing us to believe that the road to wholeness and freedom is on a path that it isn’t on at all. It can get really confusing if at the heart of it we believe that someone else can restore our value, or that we can be the source of defining value for another. If you have not read my last post “The Beginning of Broken ~ Family Foundations”, please read it first as it gives more context for this post.

Somewhere along the way my mother thought that her children would restore her value.  I think this is what so often happens. Parents try to get their value restored through their children. Children can’t accomplish that; nobody can restore value for another person. But I really wanted my mother to be okay, and thought that if only I could love her enough, that she would love me too and I tried harder and harder but I failed her. Her disappointment became blame which seeped out unto me and became a part of the way that I viewed myself.

When my oldest son was 12 he began to roll his eyes at me, speaking to me and looking at me like I was a little crazy. Since I had struggled with depression for many years, deep down I thought maybe I was crazy. My greatest joy and most important work in life up till then had been raising these 3 kids but I had this feeling that I was failing. Pretty much  my only goal in life had been not to do what my mother did to me, but it was all going wrong and I was seriously considering giving up. I thought the kids might be better off without me, and that my husband might be able to do a better job on his own. I sought help as a last resort.

I was very sure that I could do things better with my own kids. I had a few ideas about where my parents failed me, but I didn’t often consider that my self esteem got stunted because their self esteem was stunted. When my parents didn’t succeed in showing me my value, and although I worked hard in many different ways to find my value, I failed, mostly because I looked for evidence of value in the wrong places. I didn’t have anywhere to start from. The foundation was never laid, so I looked for my worth in my work, through other people, through my talents and things like that.

When I had my own children, deep down I thought that I would do better with raising them and that in succeeding in doing better, in successfully raising my own kids, that THEY would be the proof of my value. I thought successful parenting would “define” me and prove that I was a valuable person. I started to have increasing mental health breakdowns as I realized that I was not having the success that I dreamed of, nor was my value being established. I had to throw all my old ideas out the window and learn a new way of looking at things in order to heal from the illnesses that I struggled with. I had to think outside the confines of the box that was passed down to me in order to find freedom and wholeness on this side of broken.

What are your thoughts on these ideas? As always I welcome your comments, as your views only enhance the effectiveness of my purpose.

Bright Blessings,

Darlene Ouimet

This post has been inspired by Sarah who left a compelling comment on my last post. I have copied and italicized her comments and answer them point by point.

~Sarah~ “What if you are an adult child of someone who was abused as a child who never sought professional help?  My parent was depressed and put us through so much as a children yet I don’t feel I can call it abuse as we weren’t sexually abused or physically.” 

~ Darlene~ Abuse is not just physical or sexual. Having said that, the word we use to describe our situation past or present is not nearly as important as it is to get help and shine some light on the situation.  I try to use terms such as emotionally unavailable, or emotional abandonment but it all comes down to not having had a sense of value instilled in us.  I was well fed, and well clothed.  On the outside I imagine that we looked like the perfect family, yet my first major depression was at the age of 10. It may have been easier for me to blame sexual abuse for all my problems, but I have met so many others who share my story of struggle and depression who had never had either sexual OR physical abuse, that I began to realize that my problems went deeper then the type of abuse. I think emotional abuse is extremely hard to cope with no matter what you call it. How does a child understand the things that you are describing here Sarah?

~Sarah~ “this parent uses their abuse as an excuse for why they weren’t emotionally present and as a reason for all the irresponsible choices they made for us as children.  As an adult I’m dealing with anger towards them for the way they treated us and the poor decisions they made. This parent is still focusing so much on their childhood and is seeking sympathy from their children for what they missed out on.  This parent fails to see how much we missed out on when they didn’t seek help.”

~Darlene~ my mother constantly told me that I had it so much better then she’d had it. And that was true. My mother was a better mother then her mother was to her. The quality of my life was at least 10 times better then the way that she grew up. It never occurred to me to say “SO???” Does the fact that her life was worse than mine justify that she didn’t take proper care of me?

I was taught my whole life that I was responsible for my own feelings, and I found this a difficult concept to grasp. I didn’t think I had the right to be angry with my parents. I sought help via support groups in my early twenties and it was drilled into my head that my feelings were my choice, that I was responsible for who I was as an adult, that I could not blame my past for my present. I believed all those things and I tried positive thinking, affirmation, self help books etc. Many of these things helped for a little while, but they were more like a Band-Aid for a critical wound.  I was shocked when my last therapist told me that there was such a thing as “justifiable anger” I had never once thought of that in relation to my parents OR to my past.

~Sarah~ “The (adult) children are afraid of confronting the parent about their behavior out of fear they will be really upset.”

~Darlene~ The most important thing for me to say on this point is that the fear I had about standing up to my mother, was a fear left over from childhood and I didn’t realize that fact. I was so afraid that my mother would abandon me, or reject me if I told her how much she had hurt me.  In my therapy process I realized that as a child, rejection and abandonment means death. As an adult it just hurts. As a child, my mother’s love, attention, acceptance was the most important thing in the world and I tried very hard to get it. As an adult I was still trying very hard to get it.

~Sarah~ I’m contemplating seeking therapy as I’m at a point in my life where I have no idea how to deal with this situation. 

~Darlene~ It was in therapy that I learned my value. It was in therapy that untangled the mess at the center of my soul and realized the truth. In the end, I had to learn how to re-parent myself. In the end, I was able to find the real me, the individual that I was born to be and move forward with my life. I left depression and dissociation behind me for what I believe to be forever.

It isn’t that I blame my parents for the struggle that I have had. Realizing where they had failed me was only a pathway on the journey to wholeness and freedom.  What I’m trying to get at in this blog is that in order to get to the bottom of my depressions, and mental health issues, I had to see where I was squished, where I was invalidated and unsupported and where my emotional growth was stunted. I had to acknowledge those things before I could get to the “me” that was hiding underneath the confusion and emerge into wholeness and freedom.

~Darlene Ouimet

Continued from my previous post, “The Beginning~Emerging from Broken“

Once I began to realize the beliefs that were at the core of my belief system, I was able to start to understand that they were not actual truth. Once I realized this, I was able to take a look at why they were not true, (or at least not true anymore) and then I was able to start the replacement process. Replacing the lies with the actual truth is a fairly long process, because in my case there were so many lies I believed about myself and each new thing I encountered on the other side of the fog, was something that I had to look at through my new lens of truth.

Take this blog for instance. I had another blog several years ago. I wrote about the same message that I write about in this blog but I did not do anything to publicise it. I didn’t post my links on Facebook. I didn’t use key words or tag the posts so that I might be found by search engines. I was afraid that someone would actually read it! I put the URL in my email signature and I deleted it before I sent each email. I had little confidence in myself, and I certainly was afraid to own my message. This is a common problem for those of us who have a faulty belief system; our self esteem and confidence is compromised as we are told in so many ways that we or our feelings are wrong, and in many ways told that we don’t really know ourselves.

I was also afraid that my parents would read the blog and get mad at me. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings but deep down my fear was more about the fear of losing them. It was as though I had to pick between my truth and having them in my life. Somehow I believed that I could not live without them if they rejected me. I think that belief comes from childhood where it is in fact true and we carry that false truth with us well into adulthood. Another reason that I was afraid my Mother would read the blog was because she had threatened to take legal action if I wrote a book. (Why she thought that my book would be about her in the first place is an interesting observation in itself, although that is another story for another day.) Deep down I was afraid that my new truth was somehow wrong and on a slight level still believed that the way I was treated and devalued as a child was my own fault, that I was indeed still valueless and that I was a high maintenance and emotionally unstable person.  All these things kept me from sharing that other blog with anyone except for a few close friends.

I could not own my message because I still believed that I was not really as valuable as I thought I might be. My old belief system was still operating in that department. I was sure that others would think me vain if I were to write with such conviction. I was sure that they would sneer at me and say “who does she think she is, with that crazy message? It’s ridiculous.” Although on a conscious level I knew that my message of wholeness and freedom was valid, important and exactly what people wanted to hear, on a subconscious level, where my belief system operated, I thought it wasn’t valid. Below the surface of my mind there was a war going on!

I kept pursuing wholeness and freedom from the false truths in my belief system and I kept working on replacing the lies in my mind with the truth. When I started speaking in mental health seminars, and realized the impact that I was having on the people in those seminars, it helped me to accept that there were a lot of people who really liked my message and welcomed hearing it. Eventually I was able to unveil the war going on inside of me, and start to set it straight.

Fight the fog! Love Darlene

Same Girl ~ Different Day

I would like to thank Cindy Leigh for her comments on my post “Punk Goth Rock Star Faces Society. My response back got so long that I decided to make it a whole post. If you have not read the post you can find it here, as well as the comments from Cindy Leigh.

 I think there are a lot of parents, grandparents and people in general with this same fear about clothing style. First of all I think that kids dress to express themselves in many different ways and for many different reasons. For some it is creativity, even art. For others the clothing is the wall they put up to kind of steer people away from looking inside of them, beyond the clothing; the clothing or the style is the defense or the protection and it serves a worthy purpose. Sometimes the way that a teenager dresses is even a cry for help or a cry to be seen as in need of help. For many it is simply the way they want to look. But this is not what I was getting at.

I try not to decide why kids dress the way they do and try not to pre-judge them for it because I have come to realize that other people defined me with their judgments and that did an incredible amount of damage. I had to learn how to think for myself and even what to think about myself when I was in my forties! I strive to meet people where they are at, and try to accept them however they present themselves. I find that this is empowering for teenagers, and they seem to trust me easily.

 I myself used to be pretty “gothic” but I was nothing like my daughter. I dressed in a lot of black because I felt black. I felt hopeless. Black helped me hide. Black was a feeling for me.  I was depressed, and my daughter isn’t. She is bright and happy. We have had a few conversations about these posts the past few days and she said that if she had to “label herself” which she never would, she would say that she is Punk with Emo influences. She corrected me that she is not Gothic at all. (oops) She is very clear that this is her clothing style and that she dresses the way she feels comfortable dressing. So you see even calling her Punk/Emo is a no no, because even that is labeling ~ which is defining! It gets complicated!

In our society, we good people talk so much about “reaching out with love…” but what does that mean? If we have already decided what is right and what is wrong, then we can actually do more damage when we reach out to others if we intend to eventually share our judgment. We react to “the looks” of people out of fear, but think about where that fear comes from. Think about where our judgments come from. They have their basis in fear, a fear that we have been taught.

My post was really not about Goth, Punk or Emo clothing. My post was really about acceptance. It was about letting my daughter be who she is, instead of who I think she should be or how I think she will be happier and safer if she looked different, because when I tell her that, I am actually telling her that her looks are wrong and bad, she feels like I am telling her SHE is wrong and bad.

My post was about trust and love and remembering what all the judgment that I lived with did to me.  It was about how I came out from under the oppression of being told how to live, how to think and who to be, when no one ever looked at who I was or appreciated ME for me and how I had to learn all that as a grown woman with children of my own and how much of my life passed me by. My post was about trusting my children, and trusting myself as a parent and it was about empowering others to be who they are and celebrating the individuality that each of us has to offer the world.

Today I embrace my individuality, I celebrate who I am and know what my gifts are. I would like to pass this freedom and wholeness on so I celebrate each of my three children’s individuality and try to encourage them to find and embrace their gifts and their uniqueness.

And at the end of the day, we all like each other.

Darlene Ouimet

Do you ever wonder how we arrive at a place where we don’t trust ourselves? Why do we doubt ourselves? Why do we think that someone else must know better than we do, what is best for us even when we are grown up? And before we get to that place what happens that causes children to so easily accept that they deserve to be treated badly?

This is a story that I hear every day in the lives of others who struggle for freedom and wholeness. This is just one example of how I learned to doubt myself. I guess you could say that I was encouraged to doubt myself from a very young age by the way that I was raised.

I was a very quiet, compliant and sweet kid. I never caused trouble or got into trouble. But for some reason I was completely ready to believe that I was indeed a problem and I carried this belief with me into adulthood and into every relationship I ever had.  When I was in grade 5, which would have been when I was 10 years old, I had a teacher who hated me. I don’t remember thinking that she hated me back then, I was too busy trying to please her.

This teacher humiliated me in front of the whole class. She regularly threatened to cut my long braids off if I so much as touched them. When my homework was correct, she told the class that my father must have done it. She said that she didn’t know why I was so slow. I disgusted her! She said a lot of horrible devaluing things that damaged my self esteem and I was deathly afraid of her. She seemed to just spit her venom out at me.

When I told my parents, I was told that I must be exaggerating; that I should respect my teacher. They accused me of lying! There was no protection OR validation to be found from my parents. I didn’t try very hard to get them to listen to me. They had been telling me for years that I was overly dramatic and that I liked to talk to hear myself talk, so I knew that I was wasting my time. Furthermore, I was willing to accept that it must be my fault. Somehow I had done something to make this teacher hate me. I was causing her stress somehow. I believed it.

I was taught to respect my elders by being told that I was lying, that I was exaggerating, that I was dramatic. Worse yet, these statements were made by my parents in smiling gentle tones so I could be told that I misunderstood those reprimands.  Respect came to mean that everyone else is right; I am wrong. I believed that I was less valuable then others because I was not heard. I was dismissed. There was no equality. I didn’t even get a say. These things defined me, they became about who I was; a liar, dramatic, an attention seeker.

I got very sick that year. I suppose the stress affected me physically, but there were some things about my illness that caused the paediatrician to gently pry into my emotional life. He asked my parents to leave the room and I remember that he talked to me; he wanted to know about me and he listened to me and it came out about my teacher. I don’t remember all the details, but it resulted in him ordering them to take me out of the class that I was in. He said that if they didn’t, or if the school would not co-operate he would get a lawyer. The teacher was what psychology degree students would classify as emotionally and psychologically abusing me.

 I felt guilty that he stuck up for me. I felt unworthy. Deep down I was pretty sure that I was the one that was causing the problem and that now I’d caused my parents embarrassment; they would have to go to the school and get me out of that class. This was a horrific time for me and my dissociation took a different turn that year. I can still remember the internal fight, I constantly questioned myself about whether or not I had made the whole thing up and then in the same breath consoled myself with the fact that my parents told me the teacher confessed everything in a meeting.  

I learned to doubt myself way before this teacher abuse thing. I had learned to doubt when I was being abused and where the blame lay by the actions, reactions and teachings of the adults in my life.

Darlene Ouimet        

My daughter dresses in interesting clothing. Her style would be classified as part punk and part goth. She wears heavy black eyeliner and has her hair cut in a very long mohawk, generously highlighted with greenish blue streaks. (The picture here is not current in fact it is about 2 years old; you can imagine the progression….=) She likes to wear Harley Davidson boots, but she also wears Chucks (high top runners) and Vans (slip on runners). She wears safety pins and colored paper clips in her ears. She has several pairs of black pants inlaid with over 20 zippers each. She often wears black fingerless gloves even when it is warm out. It is common for little kids to point at her and say things like “Mommy, look, a rock star!” Typically, the mothers will grab these little kids to kind of discourage them from approaching my daughter any closer… but as soon as her eyes connect with the eyes of a child, her smile melts any hesitation on the part of the parent and she gives those kids a thrilling moment in their lives ~ conversation with a rock star! She empowers them, she encourages them and she models to them that not everyone that looks different is BAD

I know that clothing often does express a bad attitude; it is often used as a wall, to keep others away, but this is not the case with my daughter, and I have always known that.

My daughter has homeschooled since grade 6, but this year in grade 11, she decided to go back to traditional school in a neighbouring town instead of going back to our local K-12 school. I was pretty nervous about the way that she looks and how she would be perceived. She is really academic and I know that not many academic kids in small towns look like her. I tried to encourage her to tone down her appearance. About 6n weeks before she started in the new school I made her stop shaving the sides of her hair. I tried to convince her to change the colors in her hair. I forbid her to wear her knee high lace up platform boots. I warned her that she would suffer rejection and that kids can be so mean, and assured her that I was just looking out for her.

I forgot that when she was 4 years old I started teaching her to be who she is and not try to be someone else. I forgot that by the time she was 7 that the biggest goal that I had with her was to empower her to be who she is and walk away from the kids who rejected her because she was not who they wanted her to be. I forgot that I myself had spent thousands of dollars in therapy to get out of the tight box I was in, the conformity box of meeting other people’s expectations. I forgot that my dissociated identity disorder was rooted in trying to be all things to all people and that so much of the money I spent on therapy was to learn who I really was! I forgot that her clothing doesn’t define her; it doesn’t make her who she is; Clothing ~ like wrapping paper, doesn’t always give a clue as to what the present is inside. I forgot my own mantra because I was afraid that she would get hurt.

So she went to school. No one in her classes talked to her. She phoned me at lunch time from the safety of her truck the first few days. My heart hurt for her.

But she met other people and she learned some great truths. I think I learned (and re-learned) even more then she did. Her appearance turned out to be a great screening process. She made friends with people who are willing to look beyond her style and were willing to get to know the person inside. She grew in her confidence because she chose to be herself and she knows that her value has nothing to do with her appearance. She is a bright light in an often otherwise dark world. Does it get any better than that?

As for me, I learned that my old belief system still creeps up on me all the time. Oh I could write pages and pages more on this… and rest assured… I will. =)

~Darlene Ouimet