Little Moments of Reward

I just got back from a four day camping trip with DH and the two DD's.  Dirty, disheveled and exhausted, we rolled back into home today and cleaned up the mess, watched a little television and then all declared it an early bed night.

I expected to be long asleep by now, but I keep thinking about these shining little moments that we had together and comparing them to the moments that I had with my FOO when I was about DD's ages...
What a difference. 

I try not to compare my childhood to my daughters', for a lot of reasons, but primarily because that type of comparsion is something that I've watched NM use over and over again against me.  Even in our most recent 'counseling' session, when I insisted that we speak about the truth of our relationship, which involves myriad forms of abuse toward me from them (NM and EF) beginning in my childhood, here was NM's response:

"I know what it is to have your childhood taken away from you Vanci!  I had mine stolen from me!"

Dumbfounded, I was.  Never an inkling in her Narc-y mnd that the difference between my 'stolen' childhood and hers is that she 'stole' mine.

So, yeah, I try not to compare my past too much with my daughters' present other than to do quick checks and balances (i.e. - am I being fair and consistent with my rules?  I know very well what unfair and inconsistent looks like, I'm not doing that am I?)

But it was hard not to compare on this camping trip, because I had been camping at this particular campground with the FOO when I was... oh, 12 or so.

I remember very little - funny how those defensive mechanisms work so efficiently sometimes - but the good times that I do remember involved pockets of freedom from the FOO.  I went for walks all by myself and thought whatever I wanted to, sometimes even out loud.  Somehow it happened that NM wasn't with us, so the trip consisted of EF, OS and her boyfriend, YB and his best friend... and me.  I don't know if I wasn't allowed to bring a friend or if I just didn't have any at the time.  One of the more damaging actions that the allegedly responsible adults in charge of my childhood made was to force our family to move every 9-14 months.  Really. 

I'm not talking moving houses within the neighborhood - these were big, life changing, landscape altering moves every time.  To pack up one life, move 400 or 2000 miles and start over even once is difficult.  To do so with such frequency in childhood that I never attended the same school two years in a row until high school was awful. 

At any rate, I had the awesome opportunity to watch on the camping trip this week and see the difference between my level of comfort in my own skin at 12 and my daughters' level of acceptance and joy.  One of the things I noticed over and over again was the way in which - with ipods, video games, cell phones, Facebook and all other tech tools unavailable - my girls would walk up to me or to DH and say, "Hey, I'm kind of bored... you want to go for a walk with me?"  At one point my 15 year old challenged her dad to a scooter race around the loop we were camping on.  Being a racing freak, he accepted and we all cheered and laughed as DH made the best of his quads on a child's Razor scooter through the middle of a crowded campsite.  Of course, she's fifteen years old and in far better shape than DH, so she smoked him.  And he congratulated her, then spent the rest of the week telling everyone he struck up a conversation with how she'd beat him. 

The first thing she did when we got home was to post her 'scooter times' on Facebook.  I just don't have memories like that, you know?  If there had been an interaction that I was allowed to fully participate in as a child, I certainly wouldn't have been allowed to win, to come out on top, to have a good time doing it. 
All my good memories in that campground have to do with getting away.  It seems that a lot of my DD's good memories in that campground have to do with sticking together. 

I am so, so grateful for that.  I'm so grateful to DH for being the husband and the father he is, and I'm so happy that my lovely DD's will have a much deeper pool of family memories to draw from than I do.  I know that this wouldn't be possible if the FOO was still lurking around, so I'm grateful that I've been able to hold the correct NC boundaries, too. 

Talk about rewards; what an awesome FOC I have!

Love,
Vanci