“Gia?”

“I hate myself.”

“Excuse me?”

Gia focused on the older woman in the chair across from her before licking her lips and speaking, “I hate myself.”

“Could you explain please?”

Taking a deep breath, the young girl forced back tears and held on to what little composure she had before starting to explain.

“I feel worthless, I feel completely unimportant.  I hate who I am.  I look in the mirror and I can’t stand this person looking back at me, and I honestly feel that if I didn’t exist anymore it wouldn’t matter.  When I was 12 my dad left my mother.  He walked out of my life and wasn’t around for a long time.  My mother spiraled into this deep depression and I found myself struggling to get it all to make sense.  I was 12.  My oldest sister had left when I was 9 because she and my mom didn’t get along at all, so she wasn’t around much.  That same summer my dad left was also the summer my middle sister, Megan, left for college.  Here I was, 12 years old, and I felt completely abandoned.”

She stopped to take a breath and wipe her eyes.  It felt good to get it out, but it hurt like hell to hear it said out loud.

“I learned to raise myself.  My mother was never there for me, she was too busy licking her own wounds.  I couldn’t feel bad for her though, because it was her fault my dad left.  She’d cheated on him more than once, and he tried to make it all work but it got to be too much.  So he left.  He tried to be a part of my life but it was hard, and I didn’t know how to handle the situation either.”

The memories were painful, real, and she could see it play out in front of her like it were happening right then.

“About three years after my dad left my mom started dating.  She lied about it, snuck around, and pretended nothing was going on.  But it was obvious.  The man she was dating was a softball coach so he was always going to tournaments and whatever, and she would go too.  I was 16 years old and left completely alone for weeks at a time.  My sister Megan tried to tell my mom I needed here there and her response was ‘just because I’m the parent that lives with her, doesn’t mean I need to take care of her. I need a life too.’  That was her answer, and I was devastated.  My own mother didn’t want to take care of me.”

Gia hiccupped and the therapist offered her a glass of water.  She sipped it slowly and gazed at the floor.  It was cathartic, this feeling, but she almost didn’t want to continue.  She wanted to keep it all buried and pretend it wasn’t there.  But she’d been doing that for the past 10 years, and it was time she learned to deal with these emotions so she could get over them.

“The new guy my mom was dating used to be my sister’s softball coach, it made me think that something had been going on for a long time, and it wouldn’t have surprised me.  He moved in when I was in high school, and then they got engaged, and then they got married.  She left me a note on my pillow telling me that they were married.  I wasn’t even invited to my mother’s wedding.  I confronted her about it and she blamed everyone but herself.  She blamed me, my dad…anything but take responsibility for herself.  That woman makes me feel worthless.  I mean, if my own mother can’t love me, who else can? 

            My father was dating someone too, and she has two kids.  He spends more time and money on them that he does me.  He tells me all the time how he wishes it were different, but he never tries to change.  I feel replaced, like I wasn’t good enough for my parents so they needed to find new families.”

She sobbed before clenching her jaw shut and trying to hold back the tears.  Gia had tried so hard to forget all of these things, to pretend that they hadn’t happened.  Talking about this was bringing back memories that she’d forgotten, and the pain was getting worse.

“I got to a point where I hated everyone in my family; hated them for abandoning me.  I wanted to scream at them ‘I’m still here!’ and make them realize that I needed a Mom and a Dad too, that I still needed them.  I tried too, but they never wanted to listen.  No one wanted to admit that they’d hurt me.  No one wanted to admit that they were being selfish and forgetting that they had a child to take care of.  I hated them, and I hated myself for thinking that.  They made me feel so horrible…they still do.”

For the first time through the session, the therapist spoke, her voice soft.  “It’s not wrong of you to feel angry at them, Gia.  They hurt you, and they weren’t parents to you.  You should feel upset.”

Gia nodded and sniffled.  “Can I be done for today? I…I need to get some air.”

The therapist smiled and nodded. “Sure, give me a call if you need anything, and I’ll see you next week.”

Gia didn’t say anything as she stood from the awful leather chair and exited through the door.  She felt drained.  She wanted to go back and crawl into bed with Frankie and sleep the afternoon away.  She knew that this was going to be hard, but she didn’t think that it would bring back so much pain.

For years she had held everything inside.  She’s gotten really involved in sports and theatre at school, anything to keep her busy.  She made it so that she was busy with something until late when she could come home and go straight to bed without having to spend time with her  mother or her mother’s husband.  Watching the woman that had given birth to her spend all her time with someone else and act as if she didn’t have a daughter was heartbreaking and Gia was already too broken.

She left her home as soon as she could.  She flew to the opposite side of the country and ended up at school in LA where she got her masters in Education.  She separated herself from her family as much as she could, wiped the slate clean, and started all over.

When she met Justin she’d been in LA for 5 years, just finished up her masters work.  He was the perfect diversion.  She started work and fell into a fairy tale life with a man she adored. 

At first he’d asked about her family a lot, wondering where she came from and what her family was like.  Gia did her best to answer with enough to assuage him but it was tough.  One upside was that she was still fairly close with her sister Megan, and they talked every week.  Gia told Justin she was calling home, which wasn’t much of a lie.  She also told him that it was too expensive to fly home a lot, or for them to fly to her.  He offered to help and she declined, and that was that.

Until a couple moths ago, when she had to fly home because her sister had lost her baby.  If it wasn’t enough to have to deal with the loss, he mother had made it a point to blame Gia for not being around.  It was obviously her fault for not being there to help her sister.  After that, everything came flooding back and she was unable to stop the depression from taking over.  Justin had figured it was about the baby for a while, but when Gia didn’t get any better, he knew it was bigger then the two of them.

Gia ran up the steps to her apartment building and rushed to unlock the door.  Frankie could be heard barking from his crate in the livingroom.

“Hey baby, Momma’s home.”  Gia opened the crate and a black ball of fur came darting out at her.  He was getting bigger by the week and was almost too heavy for her to pick up now.  “You need to go out, big buy?  Come on, let’s go pee.”

She headed out to the small lawn area that sat behind her building.  It wasn’t the best place, but it was good enough for Frankie.  If she wanted to get him exercise she took him to the park down the street.  It worked out well, and she was finally starting to find a routine that helped her keep her mind off of Justin.

The more time that passed, the more she felt capable of standing on her own.  She’d wanted to call Justin and let him know how well she was doing, how much she had progressed in the past two months, but she couldn’t.

She wasn’t sure what she was more afraid of, him caring or not caring.  If he cared it would make moving on from him harder.  It would make her not want to let him go.  If he didn’t care it would break her heart even more and she knew that she couldn’t handle that.

No, the best thing was to forget about him and move on with her life on her own.  Too bad the best thing didn’t always feel the greatest.

­Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.