Breaking The Ice

Bullshit

TJ's POV

I stared at the trees through the tiny window in front of me, the old dusty curtains blowing softly in the wind as I let the sound of the tiny creek next to me take me back to a time where things were much simpler. I hadn't necessarily planned to end up there after seeing my mother, but I'd gotten into the car and just found myself driving there, somehow knowing it was the only place that I knew I'd be able to sort through my mind before facing the aftermath of it all.

I knew I was gonna have to face Harry and Brielle knowing that what they'd been through was due to their connection to me, that my mother had just used them as pawns in her sick games as a way to hurt me. I knew it would more than likely make front page news and everyone would be quick to share their opinion, which would only increase the eyes on me and my team mates. I knew I would have to face my brothers knowing that they were about to lose their mother because she'd chosen to punish me instead of loving them enough to just let me go.

But somehow as I sat there, I seemed to have accepted that there was nothing I could do about any of it.

I felt a sense of peace that I wasn't sure I'd ever felt before. It was like I felt nothing, numb to any feeling about it, but in a good way. Something shifted inside of me when I walked away from my mother, from the house that I'd always dreaded walking into, knowing I would never have to go back. I suddenly no longer cared what would happen to her, or what everyone else would think, not a single ounce of guilt for where she might end up was present in any cell of my body.

I suppose that may have been it, that familiar sense of guilt I always carried with me even though I wasn't always exactly sure what I felt guilty about, seemed to have disappeared. I didn't feel bad that my brothers were about to lose their mother, knowing they were better off without her. I didn't care that none of us might never see her again, and I certainly didn't care that she was probably going to spend the majority of the rest of her life in a cell.

Because I knew it wasn't my fault.

For the first time since I could remember, I didn't take a single hint of responsibility for what she'd done or how it had affected anyone, I just accepted it for exactly what it was.

The longer I sat there thinking about it, the more I realized just how big of an effect it had all had on me. I think we grow up knowing that our parents influence who we become and the beliefs that we carry with us, but I don't think most of us really analyze just how much of it we take with us every day. It's in our behavior and our relationships with others, weaved into our daily routines that we never really notice because we don't know any better.

The way our parents raise us manifests itself into everything we do, the things we say, the choices we make, and the way we feel about ourselves. It's like their voice becomes our inner voice, and no matter what we do we're always guided by that. We've never known any different, certain things are normal to us in the way we see ourselves and others, and we never bother to question it because it never occurs to us that it might be different. We can go out into the world and learn new things, spend time with people that are different from us and expand our way of thinking, but those lessons that are taught to us early in life are solely the responsibility of our parents, and that somehow becomes the core belief we have for ourselves whether we want it to or not.

It was almost like I had been born a piece of clay, and my mother had shaped and moulded me into who I became. It was hard to determine if it had been her intention all along to have me turn out the way I did, or if it had just been a side effect of the way she'd chosen to treat me my whole life, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that no matter how hard she'd tried, there was something inside of me that she never seemed to be able to control. I'd always fought back in my own way.