April 5, 2007

This is Caroline. Today I went to see our therapist-- we got to have an extra session this week, because we have a couple of days off for Easter vacation, and I'm so grateful. I meant to go in and talk , for once, about myself and the things going on with me, but as usual, over half the session ended up being about everyone inside and how we can help the girls and the kids....

I finally just stopped myself and said, "I'm going to stop talking about them now." So we switched gears, and I took the last 20 minutes to talk about the stress I'm under and trying to live up to the expectations everyone has of me.
Anyway, it helped a little. Later on I went to a massage. Its one of the best ways to get me to relax.
No one else decided to take over, as tired as I was. I started to fall asleep a few times-- I would start to feel vulnerable though and I don’t care for that, so I would make sure I was awake again. Not feeling so safe today I think, a little exposed from our session this afternoon. Before the massage lady came in, I gave the kids a HUGE lecture, because I just really, really wanted them to behave for 90 minutes. I had to slip into teacher mode and refer to myself in 3rd person: We are NOT going to bother Caroline tonight.. WE are going to let Caroline have some peace and quiet. .We HAVE to chill out because all this stress is making ALL OF US SICK -- and its not fun to be sick IS IT? Do you LIKE being stuck laying on the couch? We are NOT going to argue, we are not going to fight, we are not going to interrupt with 20 questions a minute. I don’t want to hear you call my name every 34 seconds. I want to close my eyes and not have someone else open them a minute later. We are not going to be all wiggly (the kids always are). We are not going to suddenly get “itchy” (Pilgrim's clothes always bother her-tags and seams, so she’s always itchy). We are not going to all of a sudden start playing Godzilla Boy or have a discussion about ‘ would Godzilla or Megazilla do a better job at delivering eggs than the Easter Bunny?’ We’re going to let Caroline BREATHE. DO.YOU.UNDERSTAND.? Etcetera.
So things were ok… only a few problems and although I heard quite a few voices there were also a lot of “Shh!!! Don’t BOTHER her!” ha ha. At least there was an attempt.
Me, I still couldn’t shut my mind off. I was trying to picture myself in calm, peaceful places (Bahamas, by a waterfall, in a field of flowers), and then after a few seconds I’d go back to thinking about work or about the girls or trying to figure out what to do, or thinking about what you and I talked about today. My brain just doesn’t slow down. I thought about some things that happened to the girls when they were younger, and I thought about how sometimes I just really can’t stand myself, how I hate the way I talk.
Anyway- that kind of thinking doesn’t get me very far.
I feel like I have all these rules I have to follow:
1. Everyting in my life MUST revolve around everyone inside.
2. I must appear happy all the time.
3. I must always be helpful.
4. I must always be a good role model.
5. I am not allowed to do anything for myself.
6. Nothing can be about me…. I can’t talk about just myself, I can’t ask people to ask questions about me, I can’t talk about things that I want, can’t have the things I want.
7. My job is to WORK. I feel guilty if I try to do anything non-work… because there is always something else that needs to be getting done. SO much: bills, chores, work,kids,laundry,errands,everything.

Its not that I’m complaining… I’m just wondering, how long am I going to last like this? But I HAVE TO. I mean, don’t I? Who else is going to do it? What if I didn’t?
It seems that everyone is trying to be themselves-- which is good, I want them to. Its really important. I wish they didn’t have to hide the 99% of the time that they do. In a perfect world, all the inside kids and the girls would all get to be themselves all the time, and be accepted for who they are (1st we’d have to get a 300 hour long day.) What if I tried to be myself? Who am I anyway? Is that ALL I’m ever going to do is take care of everyone? Tonight I had a little container of frozen yogurt… not because I really wanted it, but because the kids wanted it, and I was trying to show them that its OK to eat something at night, I’m trying to show them “you won’t get fat if you eat a cup of yogurt at night.” (Even though I’m sitting here thinking to myself, maybe I shouldn’t be eating this, I don’t even really want it in the 1st place, what if I AM fat like the girls think THEY are?)
Maybe someday… once everyone else inside is a little more calmed down… maybe I could actually come talk to you about myself and not the kids. I wish I had someone to talk to. I need so much advice. I need some direction to go to think about all these things. Everyone wants me to fix things, but honestly, I’m just pulling things out of a hat so much of the time… that’s one of the reasons I’m so afraid of everyting crashing down. All I know is what I read about. The bad things that the girls had happen to them didn’t happen to me, but I didn’t exactly learn anything from our parents either. I don’t know if what I’m doing is right. I’m not a therapist, and honestly I’m probably just as naïve as the rest of the girls. I know the kids think that “TEACHERS” are the top of the heap as far as people go, but just because I am one doesn’t mean I know everything…. They put me up on a pedestal where I don’t deserve to be at all. I took this role because SOMEBODY HAD TO or we wouldn’t have survived. . That was all.
Caroline.

Posted by pilgrim at 8:27 PM | Comments (6)

April 6, 2007

I just want to scream because I am so frustrated.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a107/EveryoneInside/iscream.jpg

its like nothing i say to people matters.
i am so lonely and i have no real friends, no one who knows anything about me. Caroline is the one that everyone likes, that everyone gets along with, that everyone sees.
i can't do anything to help anyone.
my sister is the most beautiful person in the world and she's miserable and i'm helpless to do anything about it and that makes me feel like shit.
i miss my old friends. I talked about them in therapy the other day. my therapist is convinced that the things that happened with them, one in particular, were not completely my fault. since she knew that group of friends, I'm sure she's probably telling the truth, but I still feel like everything IS/WAS my fault. And no matter who's fault it was, either way I am lonely and miss them. Funny how you can miss people that you hate so much now. I hate the people who left Mae and hurt her so much. They probably have no idea how bad they hurt her, and they probably were clueless that they even did. there were the "friends" too who called us demon posessed and insisted that Mae was a demon, and the one who promised to be friends forever and that they'd always be there for us.... nobody is left. Some people have said to me that "it says more about them" than it does about us. I don't know. It feels like everything is all my fault.

Posted by pilgrim at 8:35 PM | Comments (6)

April 8, 2007

what a stupid ridiculous day and i handled it REALLY BADLY.

my husband works at church in the choir so he is always gone. so today i woke up and he was gone, but had left out a basket for the kids, he had hidden eggs for mae to find, which was nice.. We also got a little white iCat speaker for our iPod, we liked that.

On the way to church, cried about how much we miss our family, how lonely we are, just wish we had a friend, someone to sit with at church (Hubby is in the choir, stands up front). Logically we know that God loves us-- he loves everybody a lot, or else he wouldn't have sent Jesus to die on the cross for everyone's sins--so okay, we KNOW that intellectually. BUT I feel like God doesn't love me, why would he, I'm a social loser and a freak with DID and I can't talk to anyone and I don't have any friends and I'm so lonely and I'm terrified of people, and if God loves me then why doesn't he bring me just ONE friend, why is that so hard? Especially when I try SO hard to keep friends, when I go out of my way to be good to the acquaintances I know, I do everything I can, and yet, I'm still alone all the time, no one asks me to go places with them, no one calls me, my sister is always too busy for me now too, I have to do everything by myself, and the only person that listens to me is my therapist-- who I pay to.

Then in church we're singing this song about God's grace--- "You're grace is enough for me"-- and I feel like crap, because I know that's SUPPOSED to be enough, but you know what, I'm selfish and I want MORE-- I WANT A FRIEND. Yes, God should be enough for me... but God doesn't go grocery shopping with me, God won't call me up and see if I want to go try on makeup or go to Six Flags with him. And I need that so bad. So in church and on the way home, I cry about that.

My husband got home from church and we went out to his brother's house an hour away. We were supposed to go for lunch. So, I tried to be okay with it even though I didn't want to go in the 1st place. But I wanted to go for my husband-- he has to put up with my crazy family sometimes, so fair is fair. And his family is nice, so I need to just GO. But I am still so scared to go. Eating=scary; eating in front of people=terrifying. Talking to people=horrible.
So we got there, and turns out, they are planning to go to alcoholic friend down the road's house for DINNER, not LUNCH. Now I really started to panic.
1. I have a huge issue with anyone who drinks because of the people in my family I was subjected to around ages 3,4 and 5. BAD BAD BAD things went on that I don't even talk about with my therapist. Drinking makes ordinary people do very bad things, and I don't EVEN want to talk about it. And some of the people in my family were jerks BEFORE they started drinking.
2. I haven't been to this neighbor's house before. Strange house--scary. Sensory overload, and there were like 20 people there I didn't know. I can't handle talking to the people I DO know. Now I have to eat in front of THEM, to? My brain started shorting out.
3. Turns out they weren't even going to start cooking for another 3 hours.... we found this out after we'd been hanging out for an hour or so. I hadn't eaten yet today. For someone who's normal, this MIGHT have been okay... for someone who is attempting to recovery from an eating disorder, even on a bad day I cannot let myself go this long inbetween eating. It sets me up for a binge and for stomach aches and dizziness among other things. I started to panic more.
I was completely panicked and terrified. I didn't know what to say or do. I wanted to go up to my sister and law and ask how things are going. Or...something. What am I supposed to say? She was already having a conversation with her best friend and her sister (I think it was her sister.)
I wish so much I could hang out with my sister. I wish so much I had a best friend. How do people know what to talk about?
The talking in my head was so loud. Mae, Jo, and I kept switching like in a revolving door, and my thoughts kept getting mixed up, I was trying to cover my eyes, and I was also exhausted from not eating and from being really really cold in their house.
I officially name this day from hell at that point. I was trying so hard not to cry out loud. I needed to get out of there. I needed to scream. I wanted to cut so bad. I needed to go throw up. I needed to go bang my head into a wall.

FINALLY, thank GOD, my husband must have taken pity on me at some point, or else just gotten hungry himself, because he decided we could leave and we just went to McDonalds and headed for home.
We didn't get home til 7:00, and now its too late to do the things I had planned for us today (coloring, artwork, clean the house, laundry, stuff for school, work on my class webpage for a few hours [have to do it a few hours at a time to do it well... for us at least], give Mae some time to play, etc)

WHAT A STUPID STUPID DAY. Mostly because of me and my totally inept social skills and total inability to speak or make conversation.

So much for a celebration of Jesus rising from the grave.

Posted by pilgrim at 5:25 PM | Comments (9)

April 14, 2007

This is just me, up late and babbling.

Its really late, and I should have gone to bed hours ago, but I took a long nap this afternoon. Also, I'm afraid to go to bed, partly because Mae has been wandering around inside my head all day saying "Mommy?" like she did 15 years ago when I was in college, when I first really started hearing voices and thought I was schizophrenic. I don't know why she's doing it, its sort of this echo-y sound, and it sort of creeps me out.
I did some community service this morning-- volunteered, which was a good thing for me, to get out for a few hours and focus on something besides myself. Came home and took a nap. Went out to dinner. Got a new book to read-- the "last" (so they say) book in the Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins & Tim LeHaye, which I started reading like 12 years ago, and they keep stringing me along with a new book every year. Which of course, I HAVE to read so I know what's going to happen. So I read the whole book tonight, and now its the middle of the night and I'm up by myself, afraid to go to bed, afraid of nightmares, and really lonely.
I'm going to head to bed now. But tomorrow (hopefully) I will write about what has been going on this week:
1. Missy talking to our T in therapy the other day.
2. My husband and I talking about adoption.
3. My work evaluation & the new child I'm getting and how I (hopefully) helped his mom.

I better just suck it up now and go to bed.

Posted by pilgrim at 11:33 PM | Comments (2)

April 16, 2007

It is so strange to be in the place that I am in at the end of this school year.
Several years ago I was in a school that I hated with bosses that I couldn't stand.
Now I am in a school that I love, that I would like to stay at forever, with bosses that are incredible. I plan to stay at this school until I retire, as long as it remains under a good administration.
I also just had an article in a national newsletter written about me... it came out today. Its so strange to see my name at the top, and to have someone write such positive things about me. Part of me would like to have it "accidently" sent to my old bosses... along with my excellent appraisal, just to rub it in. That would be really bad and immature of me, but it would also sort of be fun, don't you think?
My job has been really hard lately and I've been pretty exhausted. I'm counting down the days to summer. But to have this article come out today about me was really nice and good timing.
Caroline

Posted by pilgrim at 3:09 PM | Comments (2)

April 17, 2007

Agh.

Mae screwed up tonight. All of us adults screwed up tonight. Everything in the world is our fault, we can't do anything right. THat about sums up our evening in therapy.
Its been a long day.
Everything sucks, no one's going to like us until we can get ourselves together. Caroline says that people should like you and accept you for who you are... but you know what? In the real world, thats a fucking bunch of bullshit. In the world I live in, no ones going to like us or love us until we are all working together and perfect and doing everything exactly right.
Meanwhile, Caroline got more accolades at work and people absolutely LOVE her.
I don't think we can post the article...we'd like to. But too many people have probably read it (thousands) , and it would be very hard to hide enough details to keep our privacy. Sorry though. People would probably see it here and someone might think, "gosh that sounds awfully familiar..." and go track down our name and place of work in the article.
Some days its just not worth it to chew through the restraints.

Posted by pilgrim at 6:15 PM | Comments (3)

April 19, 2007

So we are trying to figure this out. Who are we to each other? What do we call each other?

big problems in therapy on Tuesday, something that is really an ongoing problem.
Basically, we get scared/anxious/too nervous, the adults (most of the time) go away/ disappear, leaving one of the kids (many times its Mae) alone to deal with a situation . But a 5 year old doesn't need to be left alone.
HOWEVER. Mae would rather be left alone. She doesn't WANT any "grown ups" or "big people" staying with her and telling her what to do. She wants to do things on her own, so she'll get big and learn how to do things by herself. But its not always approriate for her to be alone.
So even if we (adults) disappear, and then realize we shouldn't have and try to front again, a lot of the time, Mae makes it impossible. Its hard to explain... with us the person in front is the person who has the most energy at the time I guess... :think their energy makes them "bigger" somehow (internally taking up more space, somehow) and that way they can get in front of everyone and not let anyone else take over. Does that make any sense? That's not quite explaining it right, but its something like that.

Anyway. Mae gets left alone. Not ok. But she doesn't want us there. T says Mae NEEDS a parent there... a real 5 year old would have an adult with them all the time (not when I was growing up, but okay....). However Mae doesn't want a mom. She wants HER mom, not US. She doesn't want US at all, in fact. She says that we are NOT the boss of her.
Eh.
We need to come up with another word for us that Mae would like that isn't "parents" "sisters" or "teachers".
What do you all call yourselves to each other? What are your relationships?
We looked up words in a thesaurus, like companion, buddy, ally, colleague, helper, guide, advisor, etc. But none of those are quite what we're looking for.
Don't know what else we could use.
Any ideas?

Posted by pilgrim at 7:14 PM | Comments (4)

April 22, 2007

This is Caroline.
You know that saying, "Make new friends, but keep the old"? Well, we certainly have a problem with that one. Both making new friends AND keeping the old are just about impossible for us.
A lot of times, we get ourselves into huge boughts of loneliness that make us really, really depressed. We miss our old friends. We have a couple of old best friends that we miss especially hard sometimes, and wish they were here, wish we could see them, wish we could do the same old things together. It was like that last night for a little while. We talk about it inside quite a lot. About who misses who and why, why not to, who was friends with certain people in the 1st place. Some people really weren't real friends in the 1st place probably. Not if they were so willing to dismiss us so easily. Not if they were going to call us "demon-posessed". Not if they were going to disappear out of our lives when we needed them the most, and allow us to think they were dead for over a year, which was one of the most terrifying things that ever happened.
Its hard now to have any good memories of the people we were friends with in the past 10 years.
Mostly, we just want to forget everything. We just want to block out every memory we have with an entire group of "friends" we had. It causes too much pain. Some of us inside pretend that those former people just do not exist any more. It is easier than being angry or having any other feelings about those people.
We are in such a different place now. Our friends are other teachers at work. You know what? We have SO much fun with other teachers. Its so nice being around people who are emotionally stable (*ahem*....relatively so... after all, a lot of the time we talk is after we've been facing a classroom of wild children all day.) Every conversation doesn't leave us emotionally drained. We don't have to worry about accidently saying something that will permanently damage their psyche or that will make them go home and cut. They're not borderline or severly depressed or anorexic or bulimic. The people we are friends with now are older-- our age instead of younger like all our friends were before-- and understand about how in life you have responsibilities. They understand that you have to save your money for things like paying your mortgage and paying bills, instead of wasting it on expensive diet pills and new clothes every week. We send flowers and cards and talk about it when something sad happens. We laugh and tease each other. We give each other a hard time (seeing other teachers in the hall way a lot "do you EVER go to your classroom and actually TEACH?" " you do WORK here, right?") but no one stops and CRIES over it. Its much more freeing than the relationships we had before.
It is hard on the kids. There isn't the affection side of it any longer-- teachers don't hug or hold hands, like we did years ago with our old friends. That is very, very hard on Pilgrim, Jo, and the other kids. Its terribly hard because they're deprived of that now and they need it so badly. Its nice to get together with people who can sit down and have a meal and laugh and talk. I'm able to do that, but then if Pilgrim or Jo switches in, they're not able to. It presents a challenge for the right person to stay present at the right now. They consider our teacher friends "Caroline's Friends" and they want their own.
What we really hope to do is find a friend or who we will eventually (someday, probably a long way off) be able to tell about everyone inside... who will accept everyone. A person who would be friends with everyone inside. That is probably a long time coming and we're going to have to get our minds together and in shape and mentally healthy a good deal more, but that would be really great. We've come a long long way in the past couple of years... it really is too bad that our last best friend didn't hang in there a little while longer. Its her loss now. Some day I hope we will have a friend that even Mae, the kids, and Jo and Pilgrim will consider their friend too, all of us.

Posted by pilgrim at 9:33 AM | Comments (0)

This is jo.
Caroline wrote a lot in that last entry about friends, but what she didn't say was how much responsibility WE have.
Our therapist says otherwise, but i just know that somehow, everything that happened with the old friends had to have been all our fault.

We still beat ourselves up over trying to figure out when and where everything went wrong. There were a lot of blackouts back then. A lot of lost time. Most of the time, we didn't know what each other was doing. If someone said something that upset us, we'd go cut or purge or not eat for the rest of the day. Who wants to be friends with someone so... upsettable?

The new friends, all the teachers at school, have NO CLUE that we are a "we". They have no idea about DID, or about the eating disorder, or cutting. We still do the same things sometimes (cutting, purging, not eating) if we get upset, but its FAR less often. The thing is, we used to be open about it. Sometimes our friends would find out. Now we don't tell anybody. We've gotten much better about hiding it, even from our therapist. No one knows anymore.
We don't trust people anymore. The last best friend we had anymore, we had made the decision to trust, I feel like a fool for that.. After what happened with that, we decided its just better to not trust people anymore. Its just not safe for people to know who we are.

You know that whole "people should just be able to accept you for who you are"? thing.
That is only okay if you are a normal, happy, non-freak person to begin with. If you are a cutting, DID, asperbergers', anorexic person like us, then the whole idea needs to be thrown out the window. If we want to have friends, we have to hide who we really are so people will like us.

Posted by pilgrim at 12:02 PM | Comments (1)

April 24, 2007

I haven't been doing okay at all for a few days.

Right now i am falling apart again... spacing out really bad too. sorry if this doesnt make any sense,./ the past few days have been really hard. and i was trying to hold on today just to make it to my therapy appointment, and this afternoon at work my therapist called and cancelled on me because of bad weather. that made evferyting even harder to deal with. i am pretty sure that God hates me right now and has given up on me. Every single thing i need just gets taken away. i think God's trying to teach me a lesson to not be so selfish and bad.

yesterday i stayed home from work... it was a very terrible day. self- destruct mode. swtiching too much and too often to function, couldn't think clear. would have been worthless at work.

T called us yesterday aftenoon..i'm sorry, i'm spelling things wrong. my stomach hurts, anxiety attack is big right now. i apologize./ i need someone to talk to so bad.

Something happened..., and got bad news about something. Then, we all spaced out a lot. Then, Missy wrote something to ex-best friend, which I think was really trying to stick up for me, although I'm not quite sure what it said, but in Missy's style I'm sure it came off bitchy. So then ex-friend wrote back saying how she doesn't need someone like me in her life, how I am "crazy in every sense of the word."

(Because, you know, she's THE authority on crazy, given that she used to cut herself and bleed into containers to measure out how many ounces of blood she lost... and her psychologist diagnosed her as borderline.. and she spent tons of money on diet pills even though they were killer her.. Obviously she is COMPLETELY sane) <--- see, i have a different view than jo does.... this is someone that i used to just love. i didn't care that she did those things. i cared about her anyway. i THOUGHT she cared too... i thought we were best friends, although looking back, i realize that it was mostly all a lie. and i think that i was too much of a pain to be around, even though being her friend was hard because of the things she was going through, i think that i was hard to be friends with too because of what i was going through. i think that the switching was too much for her to handle, even though she SAID it wasn't a problem. but i think it was still just too much. i think that even though she was cutting and had an eating disorder, the fact that i was cutting and had an eating disorder... well i should have just kept that a secret. i should have never asked her to come over when i needed company. i should have never asked her for things. i should have just... pretended everything was fine, or something.... something. i dont know. and now its too late to go fix it.... i just have to move on, and try not to keep making the same mistakes.
so now i don't let anyone in, and i don't tell anyone anything. its just better, if no one gets to know me. obviously, once they// get to know me, they're going to leave me.

i am pretty sure that i am supposed to be perfect, and good-- VERY good-- if i want a frriend. not one of CAROLINES friend... i want one of my own. i want one so bad. Caroline has lots of friends, because she is smart and she makes people laugh really hard and she gets all kinds of accolades for teaching, and she is popular at work and has articles written about her, and the bosses just love her, she is a great teacher. i am nobody. i just want someone to go to a movie with or a walk with, thats all. i want so much to have a friend.

Posted by pilgrim at 3:00 PM | Comments (6)

April 26, 2007

Some people, especially people who are total jerks, are just not worth my time.

This includes bitchy crazy ex friends, lying jealous coworkers, snarky commenters, and people who think that I care when all they have are bad things to say in the 1st place.
They can all go to hell.
Yall have a good day.
Missy

Posted by pilgrim at 6:15 PM | Comments (1)

April 28, 2007

Well this has certainly been an interesting week, to say the least. It started out all tragical, of course, having ex-friend say we're crazy in every sense of the word. That was until we talked to a few people and they all mentioned that people who call others crazy are more likely to be feeling crazy and out of control themselves, and that it says more about THEM than about me. Also, I think that her calling us crazy was helpful in one way also-- some of the girls, like Mae and Pilgrim, were having trouble getting over her-- missing her too much, not wanting to let her go. Loved her too much, reminisced too much about the "old days" when this friend was around. Now they have completely let go, and want to forget all about her. Everything that used to remind us of her has disappeared from the house. I think that this situation will help them move on.
We talked to our therapist extra this week, on the phone, got a few e-mails, plus our session this week, and that was so helpful. Also talked to some friends.
A situation occurred at work with finding out someone's been spreading rumors about us for at least a year. That was devastating at 1st too, til we realized that it says more about the person doing it, who obviously doesn't have enough to do, is probably jealous of all our success at work (and she gets worse the more praise we get), and we went to the boss, who has been very very helpful. This woman at work has been trying to undermine everything I do all year as well, and these stupid rumors she's spreading are just the last straw. We are currently reading How to Talk so People Will Listen and How to Deal with Annoying People, which are both really helping too. Meanwhile, I'm sure that said jerk at work will continue to be unethical and annoying, but I'm going to keep being nice to her and just try to put up with her for one more month til summer vacation starts.

Also, we managed to break some old rules... which was interesting. Asked people for help, and actually got help. Stated how we felt, and got positive feedback (instead of cutting, and getting in trouble for it inside). Been talking with people about the situation with our co-worker and with ex-friend, talking things out, and people have been so supportive. We've been eating, and not self-injurying.

I am still full of stress. I have a LOT to do in the last month of school. The girls inside are still having a rough time but we are doing better about working inside. Also, we have started working on a book called Pilgrim's Journey, which has our artwork and some posts from this blog in it.

Posted by pilgrim at 11:18 PM | Comments (3)

April 29, 2007

I found this tonight. It was given to us by our nutritionist several years ago.
Its probably passed around from therapist to therapist as some inspirational recovery story.

The Butterfly Story.....

Butterfly (A True Story)

A family in my neighborhood once brought in two cocoons that were just about to hatch. They watched as the 1st once began to open and the butterfly inside squeezed very slowly and painfully through a tiny hole that it chewed in 1 end of the cocoon. After lying exhausted for about 10 minutes following its agonizing emergence, the butterfly finally flew out the window on its beautiful wings.

The family decided to help the 2nd butterfly so that it would not have to go through such an excruciating ordeal. So, as it began to emerge, they carefull sliced open the cocoon with a razor blade, doing the equivalent of a cesarean section. The 2nd butterfly never did sprout wings and in about 10 minutes, instead of flying away, it quietly died.

The family asked a biologist friend to explain what happened. The scientist said that the difficult struggly to emerge from the small hole actually pushes the liquids from depp inside the butterfly's body into the tiny capillaries in in the wings, where they harden to complete the health and beauty of the adult butterfly.
Without the struggle, there are no wings.

Posted by pilgrim at 5:28 PM | Comments (7)