I M Perfect lady

Author: bjukuri

  • All or None Religion.

    My mothering skills have huge pockets of All or Nothing options, accented with control and responsibility that is overly dramatic and leaves me with little options to manuver through issues that I find are out of my control. 

     

    While talking to my brother I was trying to figure out how this ‘all-or-none” works within dysfunction, like what how is it applied and why?

     

    How was I taught this and why do I still use that as my “go to tool” in conflict resolutions.

     

    Charles Whitfield in his book, “Healing the Child Within”, writes.

     

    “This is the ego defense that therapists call splitting. When we think or act this way, we do so at either one extreme or the other. For example, either we love something or we hate them.  There is no middle ground. We see the people around us either good or bad, and not the composite they really are.  We judge ourselves equally as harshly.  The more we use the all-or-nothing thinking, the more it opens us up to behaving in an all or nothing fashion.  Both of the actions tend to get us into trouble and to cause us to suffer unnecessarily.

     

    We may be attracted to others who think and behave in an all-or-none fashion.  But being around this kind of person tends to result in more trouble and suffering for us.

     

    Table 3 lists types of parental conditions associated with dynamics of AcoA’s, and adult children from other dysfunctional families.  While all-or-none thinking can occur in any of these parental conditions, it occurs especially often among fundamentalist religious parents. They are often rigid, punitive, judgmental, and perfectionists.  They are often in a shame-based system, which attempts to cover over and even destroy the True Self.

     

    All-or-nothing thinking is similar to active alcoholism, other chemical dependency, co-dependency or other active addictions and attachments, in that it sharply and unrealistically limits our possibilities and choices.  To be so limited makes us feel constricted and we are unable to be creative and to grow in our day-to-day lives. 

     

    In recovery, we begin to learn that most things in our life, including our recovery, are not all-or-none, not either-or.  Rather, they are both-and.  They have shades of gray, they are somewhere in the middle of a 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 and not either a 0 or a 10.” 

    Charles Whitfield.

     

    I am beginning to see how it is applied and why.

     

    It limits the possibilities and choices and covers up our true self. 

     

    That feels right. 

     

    Yet it feels dreadful that is what I am doing to my children, when I offer the all-or-none attitude.

     

    While all-or-none seems to be easy and cut and dried, it actually reduces the choices so small, it leaves little room for both-and.

     

    I than fail to see my child as good and bad, or energetic and lazy, that they swing and sway to both sides, depending upon what needs to be done.

     

    I write them off quickly, too quickly when my reality becomes overwhelming to me, when my fears rush in that I am being abused again by their lack of caring for my home, their dishes etc.

     

    This ideology is the corner stone of my being a huge foundation that I leaned upon and lived from.

     

    It is so much easier to manipulate others from there.  Manipulating others is a scary premise to raise children.  Manipulating them for my benefit…Instead of finding solutions with multiple choices. 

     

    I lived by the hard and fast rule, do it my way or leave.

     

    Or its cousin, do it my way or I leave.

     

    Each and every time I feel overwhelmed or out of control, I want to bring this dogma back into my world, to wield the cumbersome sword and dictate to clear my world of riff raff and true selves begging to be heard.

     

    It is so hard to wrestle yourself free from the ties that bind this to my way of thinking, to be open to others ideas and solutions, to bring them in and see if this is just my problem or a family problem.

     

    I will ride the mower with this thought, “attempts to cover up or even destroy the true self.”  And sadly we both suffer, no true self remains standing in the all-or-none religion.

     

     

  • My Rights Move Me.

    From the book, “Healing the Child Within, by Charles Whitfield. Personal Bill of Rights is compilation of rights that several groups have created.

     

    BILL OF RIGHTS

     

    1.     I have numerous choices in my life beyond mere survival.

    2.     I have the right to discover and know my Child within.

    3.     I have a right to grieve over what I didn’t get that I needed or what I got that I didn’t need or want.

    4.     I have a right to follow my own values and standards.

    5.     I have a right to recognize and accept my own value system as appropriate.

    6.     I have a right to say no to anything when I feel I am not ready, it is unsafe or violates my values.

    7.     I have a right to dignity and respect.

    8.     I have a right to make decisions.

    9.     I have a right to determine and honor my own priorities.

    10.    I have a right to have my needs and wants respected by others.

    11.    I have the right to terminate conversations with people who make me feel put down and humiliated.

    12.    I have the right not to be responsible for other’s behavior, actions, feelings or problems.

    13.    I have a right to make mistakes and not have to be perfect.

    14.    I have a right to expect honesty from others.

    15.    I have a right to all of my feelings.

    16.    I have a right to be angry at someone I love.

    17.    I have a right to be uniquely me, without feeling that I’m not good enough.

    18.    I have a right to feel scared and to say, “I am afraid.”

    19.    I have the right to experience and then let go of fear, guilt and shame.

    20.    I have a right to make decisions based on my feelings, my judgment or any reason that I chose.

    21.    I have a right to change my mind at any time.

    22.    I have the right to be happy.

    23.    I have a right to stability- roots and stable  healthy relationships of my choice.

    24.    I have the right to my own personal space and time needs.

    25.    There is no need to smile when I cry.

    26.    It is okay to be relaxed, playful and frivolous.

    27.    I have the right to be flexible and be comfortable with doing so.

    28.    I have the right to change and grow.

    29.    I have the right to be open to improve communication skills so that I may be understood.

    30.    I have the right to make friends and be comfortable around people.

    31.    I have a right to be in a non-abusive environment.

    32.    I can be healthier than those around me.

    33.    I can take care of myself, no matter what.

    34.    I have the right to grieve over actual or threatened losses.

    35.    I have the right to trust others who earn my trust.

    36.    I have the right to forgive others and to forgive myself.

    37.    I have the right to give and to receive unconditional love.

    You may wish to consider whether you have any of these rights.  My belief is that every human being has every one of these rights and more.

     

    As we transform, we begin to integrate our transformations into our lives.

                    Charles Whitfield.

     

    How interesting this was to read and to agree full heartedly that we do indeed have our own personal rights.

     

    I have the right to me, my body and my life, my choices and my feelings.  I also freely give the same rights to those who I engage with or even the folks who no longer want to engage with me.  I honor their choices; I honor their voices and their wishes.  For we all have the same rights.

     

    What I have come to see and know is that very few use these rights; instead another’s rights are using them.

     

    I was near 50 years old before I utilized my rights, before I even knew that I had a list of rights within me, that I had the option to say yes or no, to come or go, to speak my feelings, up and until then I was a robot moving by the rights of others.

     

    I am so grateful to have my own rights.

    I love my rights.

    I love that I am free to use my rights.

    I am the only one who can give up my rights; they can only be taken with my permission.

     

    It is my intention to live the next 50 years with my rights in hand!

     

    When you own your own rights, you are no longer co-dependent and being moved by another's rights.

     

    My rights move me!

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  • Follow an Impulse Fearlessly.

    “Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.  That is why we get heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognizes them as our own, as the tender shoots, which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.  Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.  We all derive from the same source.  There is no mystery about the origin of things.  We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.” 

     ~Henry Miller, Sexus

     

    Slaughtering our finest impulses…is what leads us to not doing what we feel inside.

     

    What stops us? 

     

    I am learning to follow the impulse, to listen to the voice inside, whether it be to steer away from things or to be drawn towards them.

     

    Our lives are lived from the tiny impulses that happen as we move along each day.

     

    Impulses to take a new path, to speak to a new friend, to call an old one, to send a card, to make a call, to say words we fear, to try a new idea, a new hobby; all are sparked by an impulse within.

     

    It isn’t so much that we don’t have impulses, but fear quickly comes between the impulse and us halting it from happening.

     

    To follow the lead of the impulse fearlessly, knowing you are in fear, but to feel the excitement of doing something new, daring to express or share a part of you that needs to be voiced, to be a playmate with the impulse. 

     

    Be a willing playmate, stop sitting on the sidelines of your life…get up and follow an impulse fearlessly. 

     

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  • My Lady’s Holiday…

    My friend and I spent the past few days on the shores of Lake Superior at a little beach house my In-Laws own. 

     

    Transported away from being a responsible mom and wife, allowing us to just be ourselves with ourselves and with a wonderful friend.

     

    We did yoga on the deck in the sunrise and I then took my chilly bath in the lake, followed by a healthy breakfast of yogurt and fresh berries.

     

    We then sat our chairs facing the water, soaking up rays and sharing our selves with each other, the books we read, the things we know, and the things we don’t know….

     

    From floating on inner tubes to paddling kayaks, our day and evenings slipped by.  By sharing and talking we come away more alike and less alone.

     

    It came to me that I would like to do this with all my Lady friends, all the wonderful woman that I am in contact with, old friends, new friends, young friends and old friends, a Lady’s get together, bringing together many Ladies in one place, all getting to know themselves and each other in a place filled with natures gifts.

     

    While talking to my friend we decided this should be an annual event.

     

    We talked and dreamed and schemed and planted the seeds for a “My Lady’s Holiday”.

     

    A weekend event that all you need to bring is your wonderful spirited lady within, to come and share, to come and meet, to come and play and be.

     

    My Lady’s Holiday has reconnected me to me, and has given me a gift of a deeper friendship.

     

    Take your Lady on a Holiday; take her for paddle on the Lake, a refreshing swim, lay on an inner tube, share an afternoon with a friend, do yoga stretching her body, open her up to the wonderful opportunities of a great friendship.

     

    Expand her horizons, learn new things, meet new people, learn new things about old people, sit and enjoy a lazy afternoon, bring your Lady on a Holiday from being so responsible in life, give her time to play with a friend.

     

    I look forward to many more “My Lady’s Holiday”.

     

     

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    My buddy….

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    The wonderful dinner she made…

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    and me by our Artful Fire Pit…

    Life is good!
     
     
     

  • A Caring Ear.

    “Healing the Wounded Child Within” by Charles L. Whitfield MD.  Story Telling as part of the healing process, he writes.

     

    “Telling our story is a powerful act in discovering and healing our Child Within.  It is a foundation of recovery in self-help groups, group therapy and individual psychotherapy and counseling. 

     

    Each of our stories when complete contains three basic parts: separation, initiation and return (Campbell, 1949).  Twelve-step self-help groups describe their stories as “What we were like,” “What happened,” and “What we are like now.”  People in group therapy may call it risking, sharing, participating, and ‘working’ in group.  In individual counseling or psychotherapy we may describe it by similar names and psychoanalysts may call it “free association, working through transference and through unsolved internal conflict.”  Among close friends, we may call it “baring our souls” or “having a heart-to-heart talk.”

     

    In sharing our story we can be aware that gossip and wallowing in our pain are usually counterproductive to healing.  This is in part because gossip tends to be attacking rather than self-disclosing and it is generally incomplete, following the victim stance or cycle.  Wallowing in our pain is continuing to express our suffering beyond a reasonable duration for healthy grieving.  There is a danger here that maybe observed in some self-help meetings: When a person tries to tell a painful story that has no apparent or immediate resolution, the other members may unknowingly label it as “self-pity” or a “pity party.”  In this case, while self-help meetings are generally safe and supportive, the bereaved may wish to look elsewhere to express their pain.

     

    Simos (1979) said, “Grief work must be shared.  In sharing however, there must be no impatience, censure or boredom with the repetition, because repetition is necessary for catharsis and internalization and eventual unconscious acceptance of the reality of loss.  The bereaved are sensitive to feelings of others and will not only refrain from revealing feelings to those they consider unequal to the burden of sharing the grief but may even try to comfort the helpers.

     

    Our story does not have to be a classical “drunkalog” or long in length.  In telling our story we talk about what is important, meaningful, confusing, conflicting, or painful in our life.  We risk, share, interact, discover and more.  And by doing so we heal ourselves.  While we can listen to stories of others, and they can listen to ours, perhaps the most healing feature is that we, the story teller, get to hear our own story.  While we may have an idea about what our story is whenever we tell it, it usually comes out different from what we initially thought.” 

                    Charles Whitfield

     

    My story telling began in journals to myself, and eventually I was daring enough to have a blog.

     

    I do know the ‘risk’ it takes to stand and speak about your journey, and also the benefits to being heard.

     

    The biggest part of the storytelling is to have compassionate, caring, listeners.

     

    My blog seems to be that.  It is always available for me to place another bout of confusion down, a new wave of understanding, a twisted and unraveled past hurt, a present moment of disbelief, my blog is my group therapy.

     

    I also love that I have some faithful group members that willingly share parts of themselves with me and give me feedback so that I know I am being heard.

     

    All it takes is one ear and you can begin to unload mountains of grief even if the ear is online and it changes from day to day.

     

    I want to thank all the faithful ears out there who read, comment and allow me to share my story as my life continues forward, as I learn about my past and how it still affects my nowadays.

     

    A storyteller with out a listener will not work.  We need the listener, we need to know another soul is hearing us, can see us, and understands.

     

    The healer is a caring ear…

     

     

  • Triumph….

    In Carolyn Jessop’s book, “Triumph, she writes about Mind Control.

     

    “I started studying mind control after I escaped.  I truly had had no idea that I’d been in a dangerous cult.  I’d seen the FLDS referred to online as “the largest polygamous cult” in the United States and dismissed that as ridiculous. But as I read and studied more, I realized that’s exactly what I was born into.

     

    One of the books I encountered early on was Robert Lay Lifton’s  “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalitarianism: A Study of Brainwashing in China.  It was a revelation.  Lifton articulated the most common criteria of mind control.  When I considered them in the context of the FLDS, I knew all of them applied.  Just as in a totalitarian system, the FLDS took steps to control our environment, demand purity, claim scientific and moral truth for the cult dogma, destroy personal boundaries, require confession, and insist on the supremacy of the group belief over individual thought.  Language was manipulated to keep everything in black and white.  We were to follow the teachings of our leader and no one else- least of all women, whose submission was essential for polygamy to thrive.

     

    Arbitrary limits are the horizons beyond which we cannot see.  Sometimes they are self-imposed, but in my life the FLDS controlled everything.  For years, I accepted the limits and assumptions without question.

     

    Keep Sweet!  It is a matter of life and death. You have had the teaching regarding what is required in order for us to survive the judgments, sufficient of the Holy Spirit of God that we can be lifted up and then set down when it is over.  That will be the remnant which will go to redeem Zion.  The wicked will be swept off the face of this land.  The wicked are they who come not unto Christ. There is only one people who comes unto Christ, and that is this people under His servant.    FLDS Profet Rulon Jeffs, Sandy Utah, December 4 1992

     

    This religious doctrine created and enforced the arbitrary limits that defined who I was.  With no genuine and sustained exposure to the outside world, I had no way to challenge my indoctrinations, which is how mind control thrives.  I believed I was being protected from the destruction of God and a dangerous, frightening world.  It never occurred to me that this ‘protection’ was in fact destroying me.”

     

    Further on she writes,

     

    “In the ‘keep sweet no matter what’ world of the FLDS forgiveness meant that you accepted what had been done to you, you weren’t angry, and you trusted the perpetrator not to do it again.  I’d no idea there was another way to forgive. But now I am learning it:  by letting go of anger, never trusting my abusers again, and by seeing them for who they truly were, I achieved genuine forgiveness.

     

    In the FLDS, if someone harmed you and you refused to have anything further to do with that person, you were the one committing a crime by holding on to bad feelings.  If you ever complained again, you were the offender.  This twisted logic created a kingdom of sociopaths, because no one was ever held responsible for harm except the victims.  The FLDS notion of forgiveness had been used in such hurtful and damaging ways that it became a way for an abuser to maximize the damage he or she could inflict without any consequences.  It certainly guaranteed that the victim would remain powerless. To forgive in the FLDS seemed to be masochistic.  Now I was wrapping my mind around a new reality:  forgiveness had nothing to do with trusting a person who’d injured you. It involved letting go of the anger you felt and making space for new emotional growth….  I wanted vengeance and vindication, which are driven by a craving for justice. But that craving had trapped me in an out of control cycle: I wouldn’t let go of my victim status until justice was done.

     

    I wanted Merrill to stop rationalizing cruelty as ‘necessary.’ I wanted him and the other wives, especially Barbara, to understand that there was absolutely not justification to their treating me, or anyone else, the way they did.  I wasn’t naïve enough to think that Merrill Jessop would ever apologize to me.  But I wanted some acknowledgement that what had happened to me was not my fault.  That fact that this was never, ever going to happen didn’t make me stop wanting it.  The truth, my insistence of justice in an unjust world was really holding me hostage.  Forgive? Me? I thought forgiveness might make me more vulnerable to my abusers because it might make me appear pliant.

     

    I was beginning to grasp that forgiveness is about breaking the chains that bind you to your captor.  Being in a relationship with someone that is dangerous is self-destructive. Holding on to your anger at someone is self-destructive. The only way to break free is to sever all the emotions you have toward that person.  For so long I had thought that unless justice was done, I could never heal.  But sometimes justice is impossible, so the choice becomes to remain unhealed or to let go of the anger that the lack of justice has aroused.  It came back to exercising the power I had: I couldn’t control whether justice would be done, but I could control my attitude toward the injustice.

     

    It’s been said that desiring revenge is like swallowing poison and waiting for someone to die.  I believe that.  It took discipline and work for me to release all the anger I felt toward Merrill. But nothing I’d ever felt compared to the relief of dumping one bad emotion after another. Go. Goodbye. Gone.  I had no more expectations.  I no longer had to fix anything…. 

     

    Let me be clear about the kind of forgiveness I’m talking about. Sometimes one forgives in order to remain in a relationship with someone she cares about, even if the person has caused her pain and anguish.  It’s not a blanket pardon; it’s the trade-off one is willing to make when preserving the relationship is more important than correcting justice.  Allowing people to be human and make mistakes, even thought those mistakes hurt you, is important.  You don’t want to eliminate that person from your life simply for hurting or disappointing you.  This kind of forgiveness is far more common than the kind I used to change my life.

     

    Forgiveness I practiced enabled me to move ahead and start making my life more about me. It renewed and deepened the strength I needed to deal with the challenges facing me.  Most dramatically it changed my need to remain in Merrill’s family. From that point on, I was no longer emotionally or psychologically engaged with them.  Justice was up to a higher power; my job was to discover a way to protect myself and my children. This meant, of course, that I’d eventually have to leave the FLDS."

                    Carolyn Jessop

  • Caught

    One last section from ‘Sickened’…by Julie Gregory.

     

    Spring thaws the farmhouse, and in front of the mirrors, my breasts begin to form. They get white, tigerlike stretch marks on their sides from a burst of growth.  My hipbones expand like a time-lapsed flower in bloom.  I grow like a girl in puberty. The pod I was stuffed into has perforated breaks in the skin, and I, ever so painfully, am unlacing myself from the tight shell.  I use my fingertips to tug and pull laces loose, unfurling myself from the cocoon I’ve been kept in, folding and falling, jutting the angles of crooked atrophied limbs out of its hold.

     

    I touch my face in the mirror, study it for hours.  I need to see what my face says.  What my expressions look like to others, what my eyes do, whether my face twitches, like hers.

     

    Away from the mirror, I do not register that I am pretty.  I cannot comprehend I have an attractive body.  Or that it holds in its untapped wisdom the potential to heal itself.  My instincts are wound tightly into a ball of fishing line, so tangled and knotted that it will take months of daily, delicate picking to see loops in the line and pull them free.

     

    I curl my body up in front of the mirror; skin and bones, the ribs of my back casting curved shadows over my thin skin.  I study tiny blue veins, fascinated by the light pulse that pushes blood through on its own; an affirmation that I am living.  I do not have to pump the blood myself; it is my heart that keeps me alive.

     

    I look at every part of myself through the mirror, wanting to see what anyone outside my skin would see.  My hands, they look so beautiful, I turn them around and around in the mirror mesmerized.  I look at my face again, soft and childlike, my body lean and lithe.  I step away from the mirror but nothing comes with me. The moment I lose contact with my reflection, I lose touch with what I see there.

     

    My mind is imprinted with images of a sickly reverberation of what I felt like inside and believed to be true of myself for all of my twenty-six years: That I am some bizarre, frail creature, destined to die early.  My mind’s eye sees me as a stooped and wasted, with dark greasy hair, a slaughterhouse horse’s long, sunken face, drooping bottom lip, absent eyes.  Since that is what I believe, that is how I feel. Since that is how I feel, that is how I act. And since that is how I act, that is how the world treats me.

     

    So I step back to the mirror and there she is again, that girl, that strange girl that everyone else sees.  I reach my fingers out to feel her face.  My eyes cannot get over it.  They peer at her suspiciously. Surely this is not me staring back?  Truth in my mind and truth in the mirror are completely opposites. And I am split down the middle, straddling the chasm between two worlds, flitting back and forth between the world I know and the one that exists in the glass.  It will take me three years of pacing between the two before I can finally bring them together.

                    Julie Gregory

     

    My mother had a magical mirror and words would allow her world to remain perfect, sins could be erased with the magical phrase, and it would erase all blemishes that may other wise appear, returning him always to be whiter than snow.

     

    It is horrifying and shocking to see the damage he was able to do, while she continued to stare dreamily into her cracked mirror of dreams.

     

    Behind the wall, lay many broken little girls whose wounds could not be erased so easily.

     

    There are no simple phrases that will return your world upright, restore trust and love and give you back faith.

     

    When we are taught that words can erase deeds, we are left in twisted place in our minds.

     

    In our minds a mirror appears that switches things around, but in reality nothing changes.  Nothing.

     

    It feels like the magic mirror was the release hatch my father needed, the escape door…. Her words allowed him to change magically into a kind man, always.

     

    Her catch and release program allowed another little girl to be caught.

     

     

  • Keeper of their Illusions.

    One more part that really stayed with me from Sickened by Julie Gregory.

     

    “I now feel ready to try and talk to a therapist again.  Most times I do not feel like a client, but an educator who pays to teach my therapist about MBP.  I answer her questions?  How did it slip past the doctors?  Why didn’t anybody notice? Didn’t you have neighbors?  Were you really sick?

     

    But still, in our sessions, I cry from the guilt of betraying my mother, for not keeping the shroud on her secrets when I held them locked in such trust.  And I feel terrible about my own secret.  I have been writing, writing about what it feels like to be cut open while your mother’s tight, thin smile mouths, “Doctor’s orders, honey.”  To be emptied and filled by your mother, just like the IV bag she’s arranged for you. And to believe you are genuinely ill because that is what everything in your world mirrors back to you.

     

    My therapist explains that my mother was cannibalistic.  That she wanted to ingest my living flesh, to tear chunks from my body. That the closest she could come to cannibalizing me was to lift me onto the serving platter for the men of the medical community to carve.  The longer I hold guilt for betraying her, the more I will keep climbing on the platter all by myself.

     

    And yet the hand that pushed me down was the hand that helped me up.  The one who beat me was the only one to save me from being beaten. The one who wanted to kill me was the one who would kill her self if I didn’t offer myself under the knife.  I was trained from the womb as an alibi for her innocence.  She would snuff out my life if I went against her, even in thought.  She brushed me this way as casually as you would slide a ling brush down a pair of slacks, to get all the grain running in the same direction.

     

    I still told myself that it was okay, it really wasn’t that bad.  A normal sacrifice for any child to make for her mother.  Words programmed into me as my own. Tangled in her web, if a doctor couldn’t decipher what she did, how could I?

     

    Until I turn thirty.  Then I see her almost as clearly as if I was standing on a windswept sea cliff and she was looking up from the sand below.  There is only one line that connects us, and it is wrapped around my waist; my hunger is tied to the most intimate, emotionally deep contact you can ever get: a mother’s touch.  Anything less that where she took me feels like not enough.

     

    And so it is for the people I bring into my life.  My relationships, like the one I had with my mother, turn immediately intense, sometimes violently invasive.  I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me.  Ah, yes, let me count your cracks.  Let’s see, one hundred, two…yes, you’ll do nicely.  A cracked companion makes me look whole, gives me something outside myself to care for.  When I’m with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks: the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.

     

    So I start over.  When I ruin something or when someone vines around me, I move on.  It is just another opportunity, another chance to interact with the outside world and not have it take me completely, utterly to the bone.”  Julie Gregory

     

    As much as her mother needed her sick, my mother needed me innocent.  We are the exact opposites.

     

    She was well and her mother needed her to be unwell.

    I was molested and not okay, and my mother needed me to be okay to hold her marriage, her life, and her world together.

     

    We both found out that what our mother’s needed had nothing to do with us, but rather we were the vehicles used to get her where she wanted to be.

     

    Perhaps we know what our unveiling will do to our mothers, we are wrecking purposefully her illusion, and we are no longer caring enough to sacrifice ourselves for their insanity.

     

    We know we are shattering their dreams to a million pieces… yet their dreams go on; someone takes our place to be the keeper of their illusions. 

     

     

     

  • Sickened

    Here is another few lines from “Sickened” by Julie Gregory.

     

    “I lived my life in a bubble. First it was her bubble. Then it was of my own making.  And now, freshly stripped of the delusion that had protectively swathed me for years, I was embryonic – too raw to interface directly with the world.  People aren’t just influential to me; a thin layer of them fuses onto me like hot cling wrap.  Their words become my words, their voice inflections merge seamlessly into my own, their opinions form a transparency over the faint etchings of my own developing ones.

     

    I look back through stacks of photographs of me after the fire.  In each picture, I hold the facial tics and expressions of whoever I am involved with at the time. My face adopts the characteristics of the other, their fine lines, the exact way the jaw muscles freeze or the flex within their smile. My face morphs to take on their identity.

     

    Then I look at a baby picture of myself at six months old, lying on my belly, a natural smile lightening up my face.  My own natural smile, unbroken, intact.  This is the only picture I have of my own face, not someone else’s.  I wonder am I destined to drag around the past like a discarded placenta?  I wonder how far do I boil back in order to reclaim my self?  I was how many pieces did I lose along the way?  Where do I find them? Can I put them back? How many times do you glue a broken vase before you toss it?

     

    I had been taken to the bone.  My mother had fingered into me like the hollow of a melon and scooped me out.  And now, years later, you could press belly to backbone.

     

    Books are my friends, where it’s okay to be silent….

     

    All my time is spent slipped silently between their pages, finding some truth to go with the mirrors. They are self-help gurus who parent me positively and show me how to believe in myself.  They suggest underlying spiritual philosophies:  That each soul chooses its parents and all its experiences in order to learn the lessons it needs to develop fully.  That if the soul’s human form knew what it was supposed to learn beforehand, the ego would short-circuit the process of discovery.  They tell me that, because of this double blind experiment, where you find yourself in this painful process is exactly where you need to be.

     

    That if you lived in a dark cave you’d need time to adjust to the light when the rock was rolled away.

     

    That Hawaii had to be a volcanic eruption of toxic goo and ash before it became so lush and beautiful.

     

    That if you watched the clothes in a washer, it would look like they’re getting dirtier as they slosh through filthy water.  But it’s only after this agitation cycle that you can pull out fresh, clean clothes.

     

    I bolster myself with platitudes: “We are who we are not despite adversity, but because of it” and “They say the truth hurts, but the only thing truth hurts, are illusions.” I sink the studs into soft dirt, and bank my new foundation.

     

    My books talk to me like the child I am and coax me into developing autonomously.  They metaphorically hang all the colored pictures I make on the fridge when I race home with them.  They never tell me: Lighten up, you think too much.  If anything, they say, Hey, you, with the frontal lobe, turn off the TV, stop the noise, and consider this deeply.  They never dismiss me with Get over it.  Or if I turn to my father: What are you talking about? My brother: I don’t remember anything. Or my mother when I squeak out that I was too young to be taking the gun out of her mouth: “Jesus Julie, where is a mother supposed to turn to for support if not to her own daughter?  You think the sun rises and sets on you, like you don’t have any problems?  I can think of a hundred times you…”

     

    I pile my books around me before I sleep and they are the psychic guardrails that keep me from falling out of bed at night.”   Julie Gregory

     

     

  • Inconvenient Truth

    Just finished reading “Sickened” by Julie Gregory, her story of living with a mother who needed her sick, Munchausen By Proxy.

     

    It is amazing that her mother could convince her she was sick, and to ‘act’ sick, and how her mother’s state depended upon her behavior.  And how she never knew this wasn’t her real self, that this was a self that her mother needed.

     

    She writes, “Truth is whatever your mind believes.  And beliefs are erected by those who raise us.  If someone shapes your mind into a distortion, you have to find something that can give you a straight answer.”

     

    She tried to tell her dad about the abuse, but he didn’t fully grasp the immense totality of it all…she goes on to say.

     

    “After that day with Dad, I knew that nobody could give me straight answers but me.  I used mirrors to step back and forth between trips out into the real world, trips back into the swirling black hole of my family, trips to new adventures outside the bubble, seeing how long I could walk away from the mirror before the old thoughts submerged the fresh ones.  Sometimes I’d only get to the kitchen or down a few steps of the porch.  Sometimes, I could make it a half-day before I’d have to rush back to see myself…

     

    With my freshly wired instincts, I inch farther and farther out of my incubator.  I stay longer in the real world and run back with less frenzy when waves begin crashing.  When I do slip under, I whip out a pen and write myself back to the surface, using whatever material I can snatch to capture the barrage; bar napkins, toilet paper, airline barf bags, my bare leg.  I scribble my thoughts; tweak them with words from my new vocabulary.  It talk myself out of paranoia and coax myself from ledges. I fill volumes of journal books with these moments; packed with crowed text, both sides scribbled and stuffed with snippets of paper smeary inked paper towels, feverishly written.

     

    My life now in triplicate: One life in the mirror, one in the world, and one balancing the two as oceans which must wax and wane in tandem until one replaces the other.” Julie Gregory

     

    She is right that your life is lived in triplicate until you can finally live fully in your truth.

     

    How you find yourself in a very awkward stance, knowing your past is incorrect, but not fully knowing what is, and then being the one to resurrect a you that you have never known.  How you have to go against all who stood with you in the secret.

     

    She writes about her younger brother.  “His memory, as mine once did, as opted for the starrier picture.  It was just last year, when Danny was twenty-four, that the only thing he wanted for Christmas was a tape of Mom’s singing, one of the few good things strained from our life with her.

     

    He still needs a mom and dad.  His psyche has draped sharp edges of detail in a thick drop cloth as he keeps his past at bay with workaholism and asthma attacks that coincide with Mom’s random phone calls to him…”

     

    It is like a curtain that shields the truth, a blind area where the parents are concerned, something that stops the truth from penetrating their worlds and upending their apple cart of loving parents, or at least ones that ‘tried their best’.

     

    To me it is facing the inconvenient truth.