Wednesdays are complicated. Like a riddle, the spelling of the word itself doesn’t represent its sound. Positioned in the middle of the work week, Wednesdays bring us to a point of transformation from beginning to end, looking both at a time past and to the hopeful promise of freedom ahead.
I’m a woman in the middle of my life. I, too, am complicated. Born the second of three daughters, I’m a middle child who has transformed from the insecurity of my past and who now faces a future free from life’s fallacies. I identify with Wednesdays, with the middle, because like a game of tug-of-war this is where we find tension. With truth, we can change course in our life, and the middle is both uphill and downhill, effort before glide.
Life is much easier without fallacies. For forty-two years, I created an illusion of the family I wanted, overlooking the evidences of something amiss. Society tells us that good girls are nice girls, but I was cruel to myself for believing that I had no voice to use to defend myself, that I must say yes to every demand, that I must always, always put others first.
It didn’t work. Trauma was my blessing. It illuminated the trap of womanhood passed through generations of family trauma and a society who seeks to silence women. Until I faced my fears, it was disguised as my inherent weakness, as my fault, as the problem of the middle child.
Beauty comes from life’s disasters. I believe in the virtue of every person who aches inside for truth. It will come, I want to say, as soon as you allow it.
We all become trapped at one point or another: in fallacies, in ideals. Permission brings freedom. Allowing truth in my life catapulted me from a place of fear to healing, and my daughters now have a mother who models an authentic life. The truth of pain is excruciating and real, but emotions are our roadmap when we allow them space in reality instead of a made-up world. Strength lies in the truth-telling. When you trust your own version of the world over anyone else’s you can discern the entrapments that fail to serve you, and you will march onward because at this point on your climb to freedom, you have made it half-way.
BARBIE BEATON 