Dealing with the Past

"There are two ways of meeting difficulties; you alter the difficulties, or you alter yourself to meet them."-Phyllis Bottome
There is something puzzling me about this quote and I can't quite put my finger on it. I have had a slap of reality this weekend. To give you some background, my oldest daughter, Adrianna is 15 and we haven't heard from her real father in 12 years. When I was with him he was extremely abusive. I have osteoarthritis in my back due to him hitting me with a baseball bat for trying to keep him from killing my daughters puppy. He had already pulled her little teeth out and I didn't want him to hurt her anymore so I hit him in the back of the head to get him to stop. He wouldn't listen to my screams. He turned around and punched me square in the jaw and I remember him throwing me on the bed and not much more after that. I was on the bed for the next couple of days because I couldn't move. This type of abuse seems extreme when I look back on it but it was a constant daily routine for 5 years of my life. This man was very brutal and I was lucky to get me and my daughter out alive. When the whole thing was done I had moved here to Kansas and had a restraining order on him, he decided to sign away his parental rights so that he would not be financially responsible for her and left about 6 months later, as far as I know to Washington state where I had met him. Lately I have been dealing with my daughters teenage angst and her resentments toward my past using and my mother dying. OK so she is mad at me for Mom dying and has enough on her plate, I already have two strikes against me with my past using and my not being my Mom or being able to cure cancer, whatever. Well we had a wonderful Christmas and as I said before it was very magical, recently Adrianna has been asking about her father, if we could send him a letter you know she wants to know who he is, and I never told her how bad he was or talked bad about him in front of her. I didn't want her to think she was a mistake from my past. I even have a couple of pictures of her with him in the park when she was little and they are very sweet, I wanted her to have good memories of him. Well maybe that was a bad idea. On the Friday following Christmas, my sister and her family brought over some presents for our gift exchange and she said she had found something special for me that she was going to bring. It was Adrianna's old baby book and I had actually filled it out real good, her father even wrote in it. This book had her captivated for most of the visit, about 30 minutes she was just reading about herself and it was cool. On Saturday I was going to the store with her when my sister called my cell phone so I asked Adrianna to answer the phone while I was driving, she gave me the phone, it was my sister and she was frantic so I asked her what was wrong. She is very loud on the phone and doesn't know it she says how long has it been since you heard from Adrianna's father? I said I don't know about 12 years why, well he sent a letter. So I said I can't deal with it now I have a dance to go to. We can look at it tomorrow, she was coming over for Haley's 3rd birthday. Well she came over and gave me the letter, I didn't show Adrianna because I needed to look at it first, call my sponsor, soak it all in and then I was going to take it to her counselor so we could read it together. I didn't realize that she knew about the letter. When we were all here talking she just took off to her room crying. So I went to ask her what was wrong and she said I know my Dad wrote me a letter. No he wrote me a letter but it was none of her business at that point and I told her that it was for me to deal with and she was not going to make me give it to her with emotional blackmail. She just asked what did it say and I told her no. I was very angry and I left the room. "you alter yourself or alter the difficulty" you know I still don't quite understand the quote. You know how do I proceed, first let me tell you about the letter. It had nothing to do with Adrianna, the son of a bitch didn't even mention her. It said something like " I am writeing this letter in hopes of finding someone I losset a long time ago." Yes he spelled those simple words wrong, this is Captain Stupid we are talking about here and it went on to say "please fore give me I will do everything in my power to make it up to you just give me another chance. Please give me another chance." And he left his address to write him back. After 12 years and this is the best he can do!!! Now let's first deal with my girl, we went to the counselor yesterday and I brought the letter. I had cut out the address on the envelope and in the letter. Then I asked to speak to the counselor first. I spent 30 minutes of her hour in there giving a brief synapsis of my relationship with him to the counselor and gave her the letter to read. Needless to say I was a blubbering puddle of goo by the time I was done trying to explain this to her. She told me I was suffering from a classic case of PTSD I did not understand what she was talking about is has been 12 years for christ sake. So I told her I needed to let Adrianna read the letter because I am really working on repairing my relationship with her and we have a trust issue. She doesn't trust me. I knew she had built up this wonderful picture of her father and was obssessed with knowing what was in the letter. I didn't want to hurt her but I knew if I didn't show her the letter she would not believe me if I just told her it wasn't about her so we called her in and she read the letter. Needless to say she was less than pleased, she sat there crying and told the doctor that she has wanted him all this time and all he wants is me, I took away his baby from him and he still wants me. So this is all still fresh and raw and she has not spoken a word to me since Sunday. The counselor is meeting with her next week and told her to write her father a letter and they would go over it because this was not something she was just going to stuff for the next 15 years we were going to deal with it. There's a lot more to this but I think I need to process for a minute I will pray and call my sponsor this will be continued... thanks for reading