I M Perfect lady

Author: bjukuri

  • Cold without a Heart

    “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.”
    ~Confucius

    Going forward with your whole heart is heart breaking, for you are wrenching your heart out from all the people you gave it to.

    What I failed to understand that it isn’t so much as finding new steps, new friends, new routines, new traditions or even getting used to the new me, but rather the yanking and pulling on my heart as I leave.

    For it is impossible to head out ‘half hearted’ and fully embrace life, with pieces of your heart dragging along getting snagged on old memories.

    Even the good old memories feel tainted with fresh paint of recent events, their red marks slashing over familiar “remember when…”

    I saw myself in past Christmases, the gifts made, the parties held, the efforts bestowed, the carols sung, the decorations hung, gathering everything I could to drape a happy Christmas upon so many. It began when I was very little.

    Many holiday memories hold parts where I used to be, for them and for me.

    The years of the oldest shopping for the youngest began when there was just two oldest…and a lot of youngest.

    The years spent making and creating a new ornament for each.

    The years of opening my house, giving of my time, until nothing was left to give.

    My heart emptied itself into them, little by little, child by child, I poured myself into their lives, and now they are all gone.

    It feels that I am ripping my heart to pull it back inside, gathering it from places far and wide, in events, tucked in memories, sewed into projects, knitted into scarves, pulled from lives…

    You can’t take your heart back without ruining the old memories, when you take your heart back; they fall in a discarded heap.

    Heartless.

    The memories turn cold without a heart.

  • Tiny Little Wave that Arrives.

    The hardest thing to do is relax in the midst of what feels like a rough day, and it is if you clump it all together, but if you can break it apart into little tiny moments, of just doing this moment, stay with this breath in time, it works out much better.

    As I walk into the Post Office and survey the mounds of mail and packages, it seems overwhelming. And then add on the weather, the fluffy blowing piling up snow, plus dressing for the winter beauty, and then moving around all that mail, I could sit down and sob.

    Each second of time by itself isn’t overwhelming, but if you try to live all the seconds at once it is.

    When I get ahead of myself, when I am sorting and worrying about the roads, if this driveway will be accessible, will they all fit in the jeep, will I find it when I need it, will I finishing sorting in time, will my body take another tray of mail…and on it goes.

    But if I stand with the one letter I have, and find its place…If I stand with this one mailbox, this one package, this tiny part of my day, I am successful and its being successful a million times a day, that my day is complete or a success.

    I even have piled up all the days between now and Christmas into one big ocean, instead of staying with this wave in time.

    “I can do this second” is what I have to remind myself, and to stay with it, that if for some reason I can’t, it is then that I can start to worry, but not a second before.

    And maybe I am successful at failing to deliver!

    What I have learned most is that when I get ahead of where I am, I feel overwhelmed, if I stay in the present I am okay.

    Breathe and do what needs to be done in this second.
    And when the next second comes, live that one.

    Life isn’t one big ocean of time, it is this tiny little wave that arrives!

  • Yoga is the Winner this year.

    I began this year with a promise to do 60 days of yoga in a row, and I did. I then decided to do another 60 days in a row and I did, I believe I did 4 back-to-back 60-day challenges before my streak began developing holes.

    Today I am down 20 for the year.

    As I approached the mat today my body was stiff and weak and just not in the mood.

    Each posture I did my best, but my best looked like a beginners effort. I felt I was being asked to perform something far beyond my level of effort.

    What continues to surprise me is that the pain in my joints, my hips and lower back still persist.

    And along with the pain come the tears.

    You wonder how much a body can hold.

    What I wanted most was to be wrapped in a cotton blanket and swaddled in a quilt with a fluffy pillow and suck my thumb…to not move to make another joint scream.

    It still surprises me that I go to the mat for this torture, for the blanky option is available each day as well.

    I am not stopping on December 31st I will continue to yoga along, in hopes that one day I will come to the end of the body’s pain.

    339 days have passed by and I have tossed my blanket aside and stood on the torture mat for 319 times.

    He says, you can either suffer for 90 minutes or 90 years, pick one.

    Yoga is the winner this year.

  • Actions towards Self.

    On facebook as we all add cartoon characters to our profile to stand against child abuse, we are just nudging the tip of the iceberg and the action steps needed are not for the faint of heart.

    I watched my father travel through the system that society has in place to ‘deal’ with the perpetrators, and I watched him exit the other end, a free man.

    After 40 years of abusing little girls, he was ‘tried’ on one reduce criminal offense. That is the court system in action. Believe it or not people were paid to act as a detective, act as a judge, act as defense attorney, and their actions all benefited my criminal dad.

    I watched my mother and her response to all this, how she visited him in jail, how she drove him (after he was set free) to her daughter’s house. Her actions enabled him til the bitter end.

    I watched my siblings, most who had been abused by him, act in accordance to their upbringing, using their definitions of conditional love do what they needed to do.

    Keeping the family together, knitting back after the hole that was ripped in its fabric, holding on tightly unknowing what they are holding on to.

    Actions of dysfunctional love.

    I watched actions and there were plenty of them, all the actions are supporting the pedophile, all.

    Not one supported the child.

    To support the child, the family falls apart.
    To support the child, the love is shown to be abuse.
    To support the child, the court systems not be a tunnel to pass through, but the end of the road.

    The child carries the weight of evidence.

    The child’s actions have to stronger than the judge, the detective, the family, and society at large.

    The abused child has to topple it all.

    The only hero I see is a brave abused child saying who abused her, and after telling nothing was done.

    Everyone failed her… one by one they fall.

    Somehow we feel if we can only get the child to speak of it, if we can teach them what to do.

    Guess what the child is the only one who is doing this right.

    We need to teach the judges, the lawyers, the families, the mothers, wives, daughters, and sons.

    We need to stop focusing on good touch bad touch, and focus on the actions and what they are really really doing.

    I am incensed by all of the folks who knew and did nothing well nothing would be nice.

    Who knew and then made their action step one that was for the good of the man who raped me.

    Like mad puppets, they responded like robots, pulling strings to see him free.

    Actions. Be wary of your actions.
    Who do they serve and what is their message.
    Who are you standing near?
    What chorus are you singing with?

    Actions.

    Actions are what I watched in total disheartening disbelief.

    I watched as once again, just as it was when I was but a little girl, all hands, deeds and actions moved to cover him.

    While I was displayed with my underwear down, my abuse showing, no one tended to my wounds.

    The detective pleaded that I wouldn’t allow this to change my relationship with my dad.

    My mother says, “forgive and forget and move along, we have wasted five years, now six” pull up your underwear and get back to the family tree. She is back where she once began.

    With all the actions, nothing changed.

    At the end of the scene all roles remain firmly in place, all except one.

    Mine. This required me to change me.

    Be the change you want to see in the world, it begins with you.

    I agree with Buddha.

    I couldn’t change the world, so I changed me.

    Actions towards self.

  • Love Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

    In the children’s book, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C. J. Lewis, the youngest child during a game of hide and seek, looks into a wardrobe and discovers a portal to a mysterious world of Narnia.

    This is how I see the land of disassociation disorder.

    Where you have the ability to slip into a portal that takes you out of this world, into a pretend place where life is beautiful all the time.

    Escape, until it is safe to return, failing to record the happenings while we hid in the closet of our minds.

    This gives us a blackout affect or an on and off again visual of reality’s time line. What happed as we slipped through the portal?

    The past 6 years I have been dealing with all the stuff that went on while I was frolicking in my far away land, trying to go back through feelings and emotions.

    This reminds me of what I heard, “Emotions are time travelers.” So I use them as my vehicle to transport me back in time.

    Mostly it is to see what I missed, what spaces I left out, where I built myself without these crucial points.

    It’s like I had sculpted a life based on the land I escaped to.

    A very overbright rendition.

    Now I am bringing into my magical space all the stuff I ran from.

    Adding the dark patches and smashing the sunshine pretend images of love and kindness.

    It’s to find myself standing in the portal between both worlds, the dark and the overbright and re-creating what is real.

    On this pinhead in time, I have to sort everything from both sides holding them up to reality’s discerning eye, leaving behind my ability to turn straw into gold, and weaving the most plausible story.

    I am now without a magical closet where I can leave things on the shelf untouched.

    In the portal, the space or second between the two worlds, I live there now minus all magic.

    A convergence of both into one.

    Combinations of old fantasies and stark bare reality.

    The fantasies allowed me to survive, but in the end they were still fantasies.

    I now see the land, the brightness, and the fluffy white clouds of escape and thank it for welcoming me in as a child, for protecting me when I couldn’t protect myself.

    A space of refuge in a storm, I lived there for 46 years.

    6 years ago to this day, my magic closet stopped working, the darkness flooded my bright world, shattering all the fantasies in its wake.

    Flinging me into reality and slamming the portal shut, locking me out of the closet naked and terrified.

    Alone in the cold truth, everything I ever ran from came home to roost in that one second in time.

    All my fears were realized, all my feelings were validated, my mind’s disassociations clashed into one bang, fantasy met reality, and it was all wrong.

    Horrified I died as me.

    Dead but alive, another wonderful oxymoron!

    In order for me to live, I had to rewire and unravel and re-write the history of me, dissolving fantasy after fantasy, to find the me I had run from.

    I had to begin the long walk back to me.

    Uncovering and unwrapping the entire pretty pretend fantasies and sit with reality.

    Some pieces were harder to unwrap and see.

    Knocking on each door in my fantasy only to hear,

    “Love doesn’t live here anymore.”

  • Rejoin myself as One.

    How did I not know that disassociation was having two separate images that never touched each other?

    That you can literally section off pieces or roles and visit each, just not have a group session.

    I am the most surprised that I can see and feel them separated instead of in one chunk.

    Which is why writing even to my mother had me so unsettled and split.

    How fear and empowerment juggled to be felt, that I could literally feel both.

    What an oxymoron to be afraid and empowered!

    If you don’t bring both side together for a reunion you will always see them in a disassociated way, where their sins live separated from the one who clothed and fed you.

    My mother dressed in high morals was the incapable of turning away from sin, in my mind.

    My father, who worked hard to ensure we were clothed and fed, was incapable of hurting us, in my mind.

    The dance that they shared openly in public didn’t match my experience, and if I spoke and pointed out the fact that nothing matched, the oxymoron would have risen into view.

    Where the extreme opposites join and become one.

    One view, one reality, one person.

    Stripped of the separating eyes, a trick mirror that keeps both lives running smoothly, together but unseen.

    Disassociating two sides of one life.

    Running on separated tracks, two truths never meeting at one station of time.

    Incredible to witness how the affects works inside.
    Where there is almost two of me experiencing the world.

    Where I am split down the middle, one eye on a hurtful reality and one eye on a vanilla one, not willing or able to stay on either side, I flop from side to side.

    Staying disassociated always from one half.

    These past 6 years have been to rejoin myself as one.

  • A pocket of Unreality.

    What I think I have been doing in an odd way is by only looking at the criminal, I spared my ‘dad’.

    By focusing so much on the criminal aspects, I negated joining them with my father. I left the father part pushed far away, in a spot where crimes can’t touch him.

    I didn’t want my criminal to intertwine with my dad.

    I didn’t want the combo, the molesting dad.
    I wanted the criminal called Ray.

    This is a reverse of what I did as a child.

    The time has come to join the two together and make them one, a criminal dad.

    Then I become the daughter that he hurt.

    Not just a random girl, and he not a random man.

    The two parts merge as one; the disassociation now associates with both sides of the same mirror, no more trickery.

    I didn’t know that I had slipped the dad in a special spot, and only focused on the criminal, that I had still kept them separated inside.
    In my heart of hearts, in the fiber of my being I had separated them and never spoke of dad crime, just Ray crime.

    This is incredible to me that I had flipped and exchanged into my mental hiding spot, a dad.

    I hadn’t brought them together inside of me for reconciliation.

    Which is why in order to write a letter they will become one.

    A criminal dad.

    Even resorting to his given name or using the word father, removing the familiar comfortable name while addressing his crimes kept the dad safe inside.

    I would not have known that I was hanging on to a dad inside, that I immediately changed his name when the crime came in, yet there is no way to quickly alter the mind’s beliefs and thoughts attached to him.

    Now the time has come to drop the divider and let them hook up together.

    A little girl sits with a criminal dad; there is no separation or pretend space he can sit in, nor I.

    The restraining letter should have been addressed to my mom accomplice.

    What I failed to realize is I was separating them inside by addressing them by their given names, so that I wasn’t saying my mom did this or my dad did that…I was making my familiar into strangers for the crimes.

    This is unreal to me that I protected the child in me by not joining the two together, reversed from my childhood days, but nonetheless kept them separated.

    Perhaps a letter addressed to Mom and Dad is what is needed, to speak my peace now standing in a spot where there is no veil between the roles of mom and dad and criminal and accomplice.

    I never knew that you could do reverse disassociation, switching the good for bad or the bad for good, that the mechanism worked both ways.

    A pocket of unreality. Where real could hide and not be seen by me.

  • Die in peace.

    A horrifying thought flittered across my mind, “ I need to write a letter to my father,” and it is like a thorn that won’t leave me alone, a bug, a thought I can’t swipe away, or flick back to where it came.

    It arrived like an unwanted guest and refuses to leave until I entertain the idea.

    I am not sure I will send the letter or if I can write it, but it seems that just as I silently left my mother, I also stopped cold any interactions with my father on December 4, 2004.

    My letter to my mother had to inspire this thought.

    My body trembled in terror back then and I haven’t addressed this man in any way, other than honoring the feelings of wanting to remain far far away.

    I haven’t explored in writing the dynamics between him and I, instead letting the words abuse and rape gloss over and suffice.

    Just not sitting down in the middle of what that feels like to a little girl.

    What will I say?
    What needs to be said?
    What thread needs to be followed through to its completion?

    What is odd to me, is that I have never once thought of writing a letter to him, yet in the past I had a few letters started to my mother, but never ever have I begun one to him or even considered one, until today.

    And I even thought to the point of sending it and finding the address to my sister’s house where he lives.

    I am sure this is the natural progression that follows the one I sent my mother, although perhaps this could be one to both of them, the final good-bye, a swan song to my parents.

    Part of me is afraid to write this.
    There is a part of me that is afraid not to write it as well, for a gift may get left there unopened.

    Many years ago I began a letter but it so enraged me I had to
    stop.

    Is there something I feel needs to be said to give me peace?

    I wonder if the swan sings to die in peace?

  • Hand and Hand.

    All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. ~Anatole France

    Somehow I missed the melancholy of change, the loss, the death of one life, in order to be in a new life.

    And felt that I was doing change wrong, for I was sad as I changed.

    Leaving behind myself I had known for 46 years, I grieved losing that part of me, as I embraced a change that would become the new me.

    In the case of divorcing my parents, I had to the let the daughter in me die. There now stands a hole where daughter use to be.

    My daughter role is no more.

    You forget to remember the old you is gone, like a phantom limb it takes awhile to feel the new normal, and there is a grieving period, where sorrow can arise in odd places, unannounced sadness pours out.

    That view of self is unrecognizable for a while, you feel strange to yourself inside, and your movements are awkward for you don’t really know what it is the new you will do.

    Even when change is for the better, for a healthier you, you still have to let go and let die the old you.
    For some reason I kept forcing my thoughts to look towards the good things, and felt like I was a failure when I looked back and grieved.

    Now I know that grieving is a natural part of change.

    And with the overwhelming amount of change I have experienced in the last 5, well almost 6 years, it is no wonder that there has been lots to grieve.

    Who knew change and grieving go hand and hand…

  • In My Mother’s Eyes

    Being in this moment of time and healing my childhood wounds requires me to make changes now what I was incapable of doing back then.

    It is like living in two places at once, or being a grown woman and a little girl at the same time, my past is brought to the present to be healed or the presence goes back to the past to feel, heal and deal.

    What I failed to understand about the term, “healing your childhood wounds”, was that you literally are bringing forward the stuck emotions.

    Meaning you are made to revisit emotions that are stuck on, or places you are stuck and not free.

    Where you carry fear that is unreasonable as a mature woman.

    It is incredible to be a big lady in her own home, feeling feelings of being a ‘bad’ little girl, disappointing or displeasing, hurting her mother.

    How I don’t have this right. This option is not available.

    How the fear of her reaction seems to overshadow my independence and freedom.

    Yet, if I capitulated to the fears, I get stuck in the place emotionally being afraid of my mother’s reaction.

    It is her reaction that I fear.

    This is a very strong iron clad idea that I am not to upset my mother’s world, but what I also didn’t want to see is her reaction.

    It is twofold.

    That there is an unspoken rule, “thou shall not displease thy mother, for there will be a consequence IF you do.”

    It is perhaps the consequence… of what will happen or what do I not want to know?

    There seems to be more than just fear of her reacting badly, but rather seeing what’s beneath.

    In a dysfunctional home, I bet we know that the depth of love for us is very shallow, that we can’t push them very far and we will fall off the ledge of love.

    For in a dysfunctional home, the love of child seems to be last, the very last, in the furthest reaches, out beyond selfish needs, addictions and desires, and what we don’t want to know for sure is that this is true.

    That it is true we are barely seen.

    That we come behind a long list of things that matter more, that even with all the physical evidence to the contrary, we just don’t want to know, our well being comes second, third, or tenth on the list.

    Speaking up, making my wishes known, is to go against our usual dance.

    I am putting down my co-dependent wand.

    My greatest fear is that when I stand and offer to her that my well-being come before hers, that I will be seen as useless to her.

    That my value drops to zero.

    In My Mother’s eyes.