Since my mom died, I haven't lived one day without an intense pain. Today the pain has shifted to a dull ache. It's not necessarily painful, as I've grown accustomed to a certain amount of pain. I went after my body, to heal the damage to my brain and to my heart with vigor and enthusiasm.
Since I began practicing Self Love I learned to mend my vessel swiftly yet thoroughly. It's not something I need to think about much anymore. I love myself and since that's settled, other's love for me isn't such a driving force in my existence anymore. You do, in time, get used to others deciding they don't need to have to love to extend to you. It happens. But how it happens is different for each individual. The approaches to needing love and not feeling filled, much less depleted and emptied are as varied as we are. I asked someone who I love for help in a deep dark moment when I needed a lift up. Instead I was handing a bomb and blown up. When I took a moment to really look shamanically at what happened to me, the picture was perhaps more devastating than perhaps I was prepared for. I know that I'm being prepared to see things no others can see. I have understood this for a very long time, decades. So when I saw my heart in my daughter's hand... and I saw the look of angry, vile and fury as she hurled my broken and bleeding heart at my head.... and my heart exploded in a shower of sparks as it hit my head... left with two gaping holes in my existence and my blood on her hands... blood she tried to wash off but couldn't. Long ago I had taken down a manager who was stealing from the other employees and paying an employee who wasn't showing up to work. The day I "took him down" I couldn't seem to stop washing my hands. Like a macabre act straight out of MacBeth I washed my hands so relentlessly that I would need weeks of lotion therapy to heal from the experience. I can't imagine that my daughter feels any different than I did. I don't blame her. I probably ripped my own mother's heart out of her chest and hurled her heart at her head leaving her also thusly exposed and hollow. I imagine her healing being painful as she didn't posses any healing tools in her wheelhouse. The difference between my experience with my child and her experience with me is... My daughter infant bonded with me. Then my sons infant bonded with their sister. We all infant bonded as a circle. Dad included. I never infant bonded with my mother. I didn't infant bond with my father and I didn't infant bond with either of my brothers. There is a huge difference. And I trust this connection. I trust the energy and the vibrations between us. I am not my daughter's inner moral monitor. I'm her external support only to the decisions she makes. It's not my purpose to look at her life and cast judgement on what I think about her performance. Each of us is allowed to make our own judgements about our own behavior. It's part of the free will package our creator intended. I don't actually believe that daughters and mothers are supposed to be tied to one another so strongly that they cannot form significant bonds with other humans. It's essential to disconnect from the mother in order to connect with other worthy higher beings. It never means we don't love our mother. It simply means we recognize that connecting with her might not be in her best interest or even in our own. At the end I saw that it was best for her overall well being for me to stay home. I saw that loving her meant distance. Loving her meant praying for her while being a different room. And it also meant not judging her based on her path. She had choices that were much harder than mine. And she lack the strength needed to live with the kind of choices I face. Choices and decision I made based on my strength, which was greater than my mom's. My own daughter is stronger than I am. She proved it early, she proves it continually and I have zero doubts in her ability to out pace, out distance, out think and out feel me and all I've been able to experience. I'm already feeling an improvement in my head and my chest today as the lingering soreness of my brain and heart event heal. I did let my kids know what happened and just asked for peace. I've been asking for peace from people since 2006. It's really all I want. I'm not even asking for a place at the table. My table will remain set for those wish to come and sup with us. As this chapter winds down and the new one begins I'm grateful to have learned that Anger deserves a place at the table. The unforsaken deserve a place at the table. And grief will forever be served if it shows up.
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Two days ago something inside me exploded. I felt it happen. I had to go lay down when it happened and it didn't feel right. Even as I sit here writing, a recent story that I hope to link to in this blog entry explaining my position. But I felt something snap inside me, like a tiny explosion inside my chest and inside my head. Something blew up. I didn't know what it was. Last night I got a message from my sweet friend Candy. She said I sounded hollow and took a moment to look and see. I guess now that I take the shamanic head turn looking back I can see two large holes in my being. One is in my center, a liquid metal terminator style wound but with flesh and gore instead of shiny metal. The one is much smaller and harder to see. It's actually under my hair and barely perceptible but it's there. In my head. It missed my crown, my face, my eyes but it is still there beneath the hairline... Had I been bald it would be visible. So, what happened? I lost something. Something died. A part of me experienced a life altering event where I was powerless. A life event I was forced into having against my will. Like being force fed shit and expecting to swallow. Instead of swallowing my head and my heart exploded. I can only guess that I had a significant brain event. That something in my head was injured as a result of emotional brain trauma. How do I know? I felt it. I paid attention to it and myself while it was happening. I didn't cycle over and over again in the traumatic thing that happened. I simply did things that brought me the most pleasure in my daily activities. I did things that my hands were memorized to do. I showed up to my life and I soldiered on giving thanks for my food, my breath and my existence. I gave thanks for Pablo, for friends and even those who sent me harm, I sent Light. I laid down on a magic carpet I had crafted while first exploring the healing arts. It was a chakra alignment blanket I made for just such healing occasions. I laid out the reiki cot I'd purchased in anticipation of practicing reiki. I went instantly into the gods healing chambers and summoned my ancestors to counsel. I did not petition. or lobby. I simply showed up. I stood among the greats and saw the other ganja goddesses and knew once again that this was my time. I knew that I needed to face this mission an intact being and not war torn apart by a clay family that was dancing on strings. My strings had been cut. I felt them go. The strings that tie, the strings that bind, the strings that bring us over and over and over again to the same horrible conclusion. "They don't love me." And the heart is forever broken. Or, is it? Scientists have recently discovered that the act of heartbreak is a physical one. Breaking someone's heart has a lasting impact on their emotional wellbeing. A heart's strings, the strings that hold a heart together can literally burst and rupture. That's the pain we feel. In time, through diet, mental exercises and good nutrition plus a very healthy dose of regular demonstrable love heartstrings can regrow. They can. They don't actually stay broken. A heart, can be restored. It takes time to regrow a heart. Truly... no one can expect a star fish missing a leg to regrow one in a day. So I'm going to need a minute. You often hear the phrase "BARREN IS MY FIELD OF FUCKS" and that's code for "back off motherfucker, my heart is broken it's going to take me time to grow a new one". Heartbreak, whether it comes from a parent, a lover, a child or even a career can have devastating effects on people's physical and emotional health.
While I don't have all the answers on the how mend your broken heart, I can say that spending time in the counsel of noble and trustworthy beings has been essential to my recovery. No. My heart won't stay broken and I will regrow fresh heartstrings once more. For the very person who broke the last ones. But I'm trusting that her breaking and my rebuilding is making me stronger with each round. Each time I come back I have a little more mass and a little more muscle and the fibers are getting to the point where they are harder and harder to break. But they could still be broken and therefore they deserved to be broken and replaced with a much stronger model. We're going to need stronger hearts for the coming days. It's the only way our species will survive. We are lost without love and we are lost without each other. Take heart and don't give up hope for yourself. You're there, where you're supposed to be doing the do and showing up for the really hard stuff. You might not be getting all the dance moves right yet, but someone is giving you Grace. And you are learning. Keep learning and don't beat yourself up for things you didn't know yet. Remember Ecclesiastes 4. Seasons come and seasons go. This is the season for an echo chamber of a heart. So you can make room for the stronger one you're about to regrow. I love you. For anyone who's ever tried to make bread, we all know that the key ingredient is yeast. But what happens when we don't have yeast? What happens if we have it and simply forget to add it to the bread. Do you even know what happens? Certain recipes require exact and accurate measurements or specific ingredients or the baking project falls flat, never rises and never achieves the desired result. The opposite can happen if too much is added or too much time is allowed to pass before baking or punching back down. I once awoke to a completely full oven of expanded dough after either using too much yeast or waiting to long to bake. What a mess!
Family is no different. When a family fails to use Grace or operate in Grace with loved ones the family itself begins to fall flat. Neglecting familial relationships because of hurts, slights or perceived infractions can take an otherwise thriving family and just nose dive. Grace is the secret ingredient in life that allows us to forgive. It allows us to move forward without injury or slight. It helps us recognize the soul we're dealing with is human. That the soul in question is not ours to judge. The judgement is reserved for a more supreme being of light and magic and not one who is made of breakable clay and other delicate materials that shed tears and stomp off in heated anger. When we ask ourselves how we wish to be treated, most of us would ask first that we be treated fairly. Most of us would wish that we could be heard. And most of us grow up expecting that we'll have a spot at the table for the rest of eternity. We don't expect not to be heard. We don't expect that we will be forced from our families simply because we too have an emotional heated moment when the pressures of life (pandemic and a raging dumpster fire that is 2020) gets too be too much and we pop off. Do we really expect that we will be excused from our entire life simply because we had a bad moment and maybe didn't handle it with the dignity, class and grace that we might often always do? No we do not. We actually believed at some point that someone would hear us. Yet time after time Grace is completely absent from the recipe that is family. Family expects, no... demands we rise to every occasion in perfection. Family demands that there never be a tear. That there never be an injury. That it is always right and always perfect. And those who fail to live up to these lofty expectations of perfection with an imperfect recipe are excised and exiled from family and the reality they had grown to know. At some point during the pandemic my father called my daughter and suggested she commit fraud at work. At the same time this was happening, my daughter had just had a pretty bad car accident, also at work. My sweet Paul had a stroke and there was a world wide pandemic raging outside my door. I snapped. I couldn't take the treachery anymore and I was so done with all the noise of the bullshit my father continued to perpetuate on a family he was excluding from his life. My daughter couldn't see how excluded she was. She continually blamed herself and suggested it was all on her and all her fault for not being included in family occasions. Little did she know that over the years my parents had taken to communicating with a great number of folks, most of which they weren't related to. They talked on the phone, mailed packages, sent letters and cards. She couldn't see that they weren't communicating to her at all. That they had allowed the bulk and weight of their relationship fall completely on her. My experience with my own grandparents was vastly different than hers. My grandparents wrote, called and even arranged to visit on one occasion. There was no heavy lifting on my part, it was tandem. I gave, they gave. I wrote, they wrote. I called, they called. Yet now the burden has completely fallen to the youngest generation to hold the sinking ship together. Yet one by one the beams have been removed. Grace is a structural element to a family the way large beams were the back bone of old sailing vessels. Without the beams to hold the other planks in place the ship would have no stability in open or rough waters. It may casually hold it's shape for awhile in calm seas but the moment a large wave or god forbid a large storm come along the vessel will be blown apart by the water and wind. Grace is essential to the structure of the family. An absence of grace is an absence of structure. This is not to convince you but simply to inform you that without Grace a family cannot and will not survive. I don't know how to get the message of Grace across to these people. It's simply a concept that escapes even my daughter. She is content in her long windy speeches where she doesn't ask me questions or hear me out. She can send paragraph after paragraph telling me how utterly wrong I am and how could I expect them to treat me better than I have. How? HOW? Grace. That's how. But she's not listening. She's not involved. Without her seeing that it was her who came to me with the issue and when I in turn asked for her help said "I am not involved" while standing clearly in the middle, being way more involved than she can ever see. I don't have answer on the how. But I do know the what. I can only hope that in time she will see that she was missing something. In time perhaps she will ask what really happened. In time she will understand that without grace for her own mother she can never expect her own child to have grace for her. For Grace is a gift that we pass from generation to generation. It's a gift we mete to one another in times when we might be hurting so bad that we experiences a traumatic brain injury and aren't thinking the most clearly. When children, even adult ones, lash out in anger, pain and suffering there is always reason. And to fail to take a moment to look at the reason why and hear the other party out and make snap judgements at the wrong moments without allowing all the parties to weigh in is.... immaturity. Maturity is coming. Maturity will come. And when it does, hopefully Maturity will bring a fresh lesson of Grace. For grace first begins with ourselves and once we are full and have forgiven ourselves for the crimes we perceive we committed against others then and only then can we have grace for those we claim to love. Until then it will be my job to continue to hold space for grown children who won't hear me out. To have grace for the people who are blaming me for my own abuse. To have grace for the ones still willing to talk to even if they aren't yet talking with me. There will be a day too late when all becomes lost after failing to listen, hear and understand. We could do a lot by saying "I wonder why she reacted this way." instead of the popular "I can't believe you did that, you deserve to be treated badly." I'm here to tell you that no one deserves to be treated badly. No one. And to think otherwise, deserves Grace and a big fat lesson in Grace. My face is hot and my head hurts. I didn't feel this way when I woke up. But this is not an unfamiliar feeling. The last time I felt this way that I can intensely remember was walking home from the late bus. Today I was ripping out my old garden decorations and cleaning up outside for winter. Winter is coming. I'm not afraid of winter like the other kids.
See, what happened to me was, I wasn't picked up like the other kids. When it was snowy and like a blizzard, I was forgotten. They were on the phone or something, drinking after a long day and smoking talking to their best buds. While I stood in the frozen tundra that is Wisconsin waiting for rides that were never coming. The other parents would be there waiting in warm running cars for their kids. Not mine. Sometimes I would try to call for a ride and if I was lucky and no one was talking on the phone I might be able to snag a ride. This wasn't typical if they weren't waiting for me. There were times I caught a lucky break and Mom would be getting off work at the same time I got off the bus and she'd be waiting. One time it was really bad. It was too terrible to walk. I wasn't sturdy enough and I began to panic. I stood in a phone booth at the Cherryland Airport terrified and freezing, desperately calling and calling to get someone, anyone to come pick me up. It just didn't happen. And in a last ditch to not freeze to death I kept moving. I walked the frozen mile from that phone booth to my parents front door on Deer Trail. And when I got there, everyone was home. I walked in and nobody said a word to me. Nobody noticed me. Nobody said anything. I'd been cold before, having gotten stuck once when I was around 9 in high snow and remembered how they refused to hear how scared I had been. I was always told how good I had it. I was always told that I had so much better than such n such and so n so. It was a mantra to my mother to exclaim at any objection I had at anything. So as I wandered past my unconcerned family I retired for the evening to my room. My face was hot. I was tired and my head hurt. I remember having nightmares after that. Bad ones. The long cold walk would stay with me and from time to time it surfaces in my today through a feeling, like my face being hot after working outside on a cold day. I'm healing this today. My journey isn't meant to hurt anyone, least of all... me. I am aware that this healing is causing pain to those who might close to me. It is their choosing to stay gone and broken or come forward and be healed. It's not my choice to force healing on anyone who wishes to remain broken. Maybe I was arrogant to wish such goodness on such people. Maybe I was disillusioned. Whatever it was, I have and always will be prepared to admit my errors. Believe me I've been practicing apologies for decades. But unless it's backed up by changed behavior none of the apologies in the universe are sufficient to restore such a shattered family line. It will take cooperation and the putting aside of yesterday. Until that happens I can't stop healing. Harm was done. Painful harm that was passed along. Let's stop the harm. I'm calling for a truce to harm. I got sad over the size of my font today in email. I loved my Mom so much that at the end I had jacked the size of my font so she could read my messages. I had never changed it even as things deteriorated and I stopped hearing from her. It had to have been personally painful to her to realize what she had done to me as a child as she aged. She never could confess or be contrite about pulling my hair so hard that a normal child would have cried out. But I’d been burned by the stove. Burned by matches and hurt in so many other little ways that by the time it came time for her pull my hair… there was no pain in her actions. I remember how shocked she was when she realized it didn’t hurt me. It was the last time she would ever pull my hair again. Instead she had all my hair chopped off and I looked like a boy until my breasts finally moved in and took over my face.
I think back to the day she pulled my hair that hard. Now I wonder, did she take pleasure in it and when she learned that pulling hair didn’t hurt me, her pleasure in violently combing my hair was diminished since there was no real harm done? I recall my first edict upon becoming a White Witch was “Do No Harm”. It didn’t matter that her violent hair combing didn’t hurt me every time she perpetuated her wrath upon me. What mattered is that she took pleasure in the torture and abuse of a child. I was told that my faith was “radical” after I shaved my head. I learned recently that a Jewish tradition is to shave a bride’s head after her nuptials. I married Christ in an effort to get closer to her. To get closer to God. But I only succeeded in getting closer to myself. How radical I must have seemed in wanting to bring pleasure and joy to my children’s lives instead of pain. How traumatizing it must have been for her to witness the goodness I bestowed upon my kids while she chose malice and pain to bestow on hers. I can see why she needed Christ and hoped for a life of Joy. For it was not Joy she impressed upon me. It was something far more dark and sinister. And it began in Illinois. My first memories of being burned with a match and bullied over board games was in Illinois in 1971. My parents began abusing me at a very young age. It wouldn’t be until after I jumped from an airplane at the age of 50 that I would understand this truth. At first the questions came. I began asking questions. Did we really have a prison in our attic? Was I really locked up at age 16? Did my father really pick me up and hurl me at the wall and then pick me up and throw me down the hall over and over and over again until he threw me into my room? Did THAT really happen to me?
I wouldn’t move home until after I became strong enough to pick him up and throw him. In quality Scottish fashion, I had learned to throw stones during my absence. Absence doesn’t truly give the heart time to grow fonder. It gives the heart time to wander to discover fresh people to bully, control and abuse. Don’t think it hasn’t happened over the years as one year my children revealed their grandfather pinched them. The called him “the grandfather that pinches”. Just a week before my mother’s passing my daughter would refer to her as the “mean grandma”. My mother had been injured at the age of 5 with a rusty nail in her knee. She spoke of how her mother gathered her strength to remove the nail. She often spoke of the hospital visits by her father who brought Pears with him as gifts. But she also talked of horrible sibling rivalry. She spoke a younger sister named “Cricket” who stole every moment with her charm and her light. She also spoke or a horrific older sister who would push all of her beauty care items into the sink among other slights. She took these slights hard, as she was trapped at the age of 5 with that nail in her knee, never having healed from what harmed her. I became obsessed with healing my Mom. I studied the herbs, crystals and even her religion to exhaustion to discover the secret to healing. And I think I found it. I set out originally to find God. God lead my through my own being, to my center and to who I am truly am. I am not an abused child. I healed that long ago. My mom never healed hers. Therefore she couldn’t live the healed experience where we chose no longer to abuse ourselves and those we love. Where we learn to set boundaries, take time outs, clear our energy field and reset who we know ourselves to be. I’m not a nobody. I exist. Even if an entire family of humans on earth wants to pretend I was never born… though they still utter my name. Looks like it might be time to change my name for good. |
AuthorMarihemp is a Mystic Archives
January 2024
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