Category: Examples of an Imperfect woman

“The thing you are terrified of losing – you’ve already lost it. You may not have noticed that yet, and it may take you awhile to grieve, and then you may realize that there was never anything to lose.” Byron Katie

This paragraph popped out at me while reading last night. It will help explain how I felt. If we rewrite the paragraph replacing “thing” with the word love;

The Love you are terrified of losing – you’ve already lost it. You may not have noticed that yet, and it may take you a while to grieve, and then you may realize that there was never any LOVE to lose.

Here is the deal, I was terrified to lose the love I thought was there, and then I thought I would die when there was none there, and then I was glad that it wasn’t there, relieved that that ugliness was not my love, and then began the search for what love was.

I would walk each day, and I allowed myself to cry/grieve heading in one direction, but when I turned around I used that walk back to be of something good.

I would dream of a life away from here, the hellhole, I would ponder quilts to make, I would watch nature, the river and all it’s guests, I would talk to the clouds, sky and sun, and I would feel I was conversing with God. I had no idea of who I was, what I looked like or where I was going, lost with no real definition of love, but willing to learn.

I literally was a baby in a strange land looking at things for the first time. It seemed like a big world with lots of stuff to choose from. I could be the one to decide what meant love to me. My body and I would figure this out, and I had lived many years knowing what it wasn’t, so I did the opposite many times, when in doubt.

I have said, I have learned so much from so many people about what not to do. I had a few masters.

I recall clearly the day I was talking really loud at my husband, trying hard to convince him, “I don’t know who I am”….and I meant it, and it scared the hell out of me. Not him. He always just listened and maybe even felt I was overacting, again.

But to be a big ass lady, with kids, a mail route, etc, to not know who you are, is frightening to say the least. As I write this, what I was screaming was that without that old love inside, my inside was empty. And in order to redefine myself I had to go out and add love.

Now adding love would seem easy, but it takes time. And I had a lot of reconstruction with my relationships with those who lived with me. I had to learn how to do it differently.

I think backwards now and It is unclear how I did what I did, but it seems more like even I didn’t have a choice. Like there was a weird rulebook transcribed in me and when something happened, the book knew what to do….and I did it. My children had to be a certain way for me not to erupt. My children were ok as long as they were doing things my way. Oh, and the kids didn't have the same rulebook.

I am sure it is like living with a crazy volcano, you just never know what will send the sparks skyward, and then the children get covered in ash. I cannot change their early years, their formative years, nor even spend too much time back there, it pains me deeply that I did so much damage. However, they were Blessed with a wonderful father one who could quickly add salve to their burns. He was their saving Grace.

However, I have read and learned that I can begin new in each new situation and we learn together how a real relationship works.

Byron Katie is the teacher for me, she was the first book I clung to, “Loving What Is” She did not tell me to change anything, but just accept everything. You don’t even change your thoughts, but to question them.

I had to begin looking at my life, my world, my house, my kids, my friends, my old family, my job, everything. I had to look at all things like a quirky nature scene. And the greatest thing I had to do, was to give God back the control. For you see I thought it was up to me to direct, control, manipulate, holler, set right, tell you, a million and one things so YOU would get your life right.

I remember writing in shock that I would let God take care of others. I know it sounds mental, but let me tell you, it is wonderful not to have the pretend responsibility that you wholeheartedly believe is your job.

Little by little I was walking away and allowing others to be themselves, and if they choose to sink to the bottom, so be it. I let others make choices, and I restrained myself. I had to sometimes clamp my teeth hard, walk out of the room, or shout out what I would love to do, but it isn’t my job, and scream that I must get me right. For not only are you being presented with the perfect new lesson on giving love, you get to see what you had created without love.

You see the upside down thinking and it’s results, and my failure to have consequences. I found out my consequences were a leaky boat, wishy washy at best.

I found out as a mom, I am the consequence lady, and they are free to be themselves, and if they chose the action, I get to chose the consequence. As I became more and more into my business, they fell more in their own. Freedom to be themselves, what a gift to give your children, they get to decide who and how to be.

Love then is free. Love is being yourself, love is allowing, accepting, kindness, listening……

What else Byron Katie taught me, was the word NO! If you can’t say no, then your yes doesn’t mean anything. No is a Yes to you. My yes was to myself so I could begin filling me up with self- love!

I found the line between selfish and self- loving is slim, slight a sliver, but the ocean of difference is wide beyond measure.

Loving another should not hurt them or you. It should not require a sacrifice either way. Love sees the other. Love hears the other. Love feels the other. While still seeing, hearing, feeling you!

The dance of two…or if no one is around, it is a solo dance. A solo dance requires nothing from no one. You dance alone to the music in your heart and soul.

In our bathroom there is a plaque that says “When you Stumble, make it part of the dance.”

My dance is awkward at best, yet I am delighted to be dancing at all. So dance like no one is watching. And there are no wrong steps, as long as you are heading in the right direction.

The music you hear is the music of your soul.

Dance the solo dance of you.

When being molested my body felt fear, but my mind called it love. So my body says fear, then how in the hell does the mind come up with the word, Love?

It seems very weird again. Like there are two witnesses to the one event? Of course if there were two steering the same boat, or fighting over which one won, it makes sense that each would see it from their point of view.

In my case, my mind was eclipsed, and that is the one who was supposed to tell me that wasn’t love. But if it doesn’t see it so it can’t record it. So we have just one witness present, my body.

My body is the witness, and the mind ran away…where, I hope it was a pleasant space, a kind and loving space, I hope that God held me then. I always knew it was a Blessing and a Curse.

But, back to the unravel….If all I have is the body fearing and the mind not knowing, would I not then be able to correctly put together what molestation is? Certainly I would get it wrong.

Now we have to both recall that I am a child. I am a little girl with no big words, or even big thoughts and surely my future only stretched out to the next day. A ‘friendly’ mask approaches, plays, teases, interacts and leads me somewhere, I go, for I have no reason to not.

I come away with fear. And since it is someone I love, I have to chalk it up to love. How else do I get the mind believing love hurts? The body is in pain, the mind is saying he loves you….Madness!

I have been beating myself up for at least 400 years, trying to understand how in the hell could I first of all not remember, and then, how I still wanted to love him and have him love me. It is like hugging a cactus and then wanting more and more and more. What is even more tragic, if that is possible, I tried harder and harder to get more love from a man who hurts me! Something was wrong with me.

 Somehow I was not good enough, not cute enough, didn’t do enough, wasn’t kind enough, it was I with the major issues.

Would the same be true for those who remember but don’t have feelings? Say their mind remembers and tells them this wonderful mixed up not even close story and they believe it.

Remember when I said, “we were left alone in our minds without adult supervision” well I know that the mind is capable of doing just that. Jill Bolte Taylor’s book “My Stroke Of Insight” brought this to my attention. Words to follow my experience.

So you have a mind that is backwards and a body that doesn’t have feelings and you keep trying WITH your mind to love someone. You never use your body for love, it has no feelings, so “your always on my mind”, is a love song, if you can’t feel your body.

This just gets crazier and crazier or messier and messier! That book about the little bird searching for her mother is no different than us searching for love.

We know that those who SAY they love us hurt us. And we believe that in order to have love we have to hurt. Or we believe that we must convince our bodies to love. So in order to love we have to work at it, show them with our bodies! While being disconnected in our heads.

If this doesn’t sound crazy to you….I will be amazed, but let me tell you it makes perfect sense to me.

 What is even more perfect it explains the phrase, “I was lost, and I was going to find myself, I didn’t know I was missing or what I even looked like.”

The greatest news to one who is abused is that they don’t know how to love, yet it is the most tragic to feel, especially if you have a husband, and say a passel of kids. You look around and cringe.

If you don’t know love, what in the hell have you been passing out as love? I looked into my bucket, the one that spilled out on the ground, and all around it were Conditions. I had a bucket full of conditions and not one was for their best interest. You could even say it was a bucket full of selfishness.

What in the hell can I do with that in my bucket? I had to begin yet again. It was like my first day trying to hand out love. I was empty and puzzled. But I was willing to try. Willing to try and fail, for I did have even more left to lose. I had a whole other family my heart could not handle to lose again.

Once again I set forth, unsteady, shaky, bewildered and without confidence, that I wouldn’t hurt someone the first time I tried. I was the cactus, prickly and poking, painful for all involved. Little by little with patience and humor on both sides, we built up enough to get a grip an inch by inch we have moved along, and again, love is never done.

We learn each day, in each new situation what love would do here, and there, and over there, and under here….there are a million ways we can show love. A million ways it doesn’t hurt. To feel love, to tentatively show love, to be without pain is beyond what my mind can hold, and I truly think the body holds love like it held fear before. There is literally no way you can hand out hurt! I love that. I am an imperfectly perfect loving woman. I do it my way. My body and my mind agree. There is only one of me in here now, no room for fear. Fearlessly I walk on.

There is natural, whole and then substitutes, substitutes for whole and natural. Is that possible? Is that right? Can you really make up a natural thing?

Sugar has many substitutes, we don’t know why. I guess real sugar was bad for us, or was it that we were bad to sugar. Bad that we ate too much! So they made it so we didn’t have to change, they changed what we ate.

Love, now can you make a substitute for that? Peace, can you make a substitute for that? Truth? Joy? I wonder how many things have no substitute?

What would be the substitute for truth? Is it a lie? No, that is the opposite?

It seems to me, there are things that have no substitute I guess they would be the absolutes. Would an absolute and a substitute be the opposites? Is there an absolute you and a substitute you?

So then there could be two of you. A real one and a fake one, excuse me “a substitute”. How do you then tell the real from the not real in you?

That seems like it would be an easy one to answer, for you live in you, you walk around as you, you talk as you, as far as you know, there is only one of you.

In many instances, with many different people, they would slip and call me by a name that is similar but not mine. And each time, they used the same ‘substitute’ name. Let’s say it is Barb. I would jokingly say that Barb was the rebel, she was the one who was my “alter ego”.

Now if you don’t know there are two of you and you walk around as one, who gets to make the choices. Who is the real driver of this boat?

In my experience the substitute rules! But, in my case the substitute is the truth. And the poster is the lie.

Hard to follow….here is the deal.

In my past I was unaware of being molested, so I walked around like an unmolested girl. Unmolested is the substitute. Molested is the truth.

So I guess the answer is the absolute and the substitute are opposites. And it seems we are either driven by one or the other. Only one driver, in the case of two, wouldn’t you have multiple personality disorder.

Disorder, something is out of order. Out of order inside of us. I believe you can have the intentions correctly in your mind, but you don’t know how to execute the plan. I believe we are utterly in disbelief when the opposite happens.

Maybe we are one person in our heads and another driving the actions or emotions? Is that possible?

I am not a scientist, a doctor, just a woman who has lived this out.

Here is what I would do. My mind would say “love your father” but my body would say, I can’t, and not do it. It was like there were two masters and you could not please either one. One was driven by fear, my body…the other was driven by outward conformities.

I was in the middle being pulled this way and that. Isn’t there a children’s song, “did you every see a Lassy go this way and that way…” I just knew I had to stop the pull, that I would only listen to one.

I chose my body. It has never let me down. It is my Temple.

I have experienced life in pain, and now I will try the opposite, I will listen to my body and follow, with no resistance, without an agenda, no plans.

My body knows the way. It naturally does, once you get dysfunction out of the way. We do not teach babies to cry or laugh….even the smallest among us know how to be a human naturally.

The Body is the truth and the way. The Intelligence that is inside is my guide. My gut reaction and I will put no other before It. I walk alone, led by the Source of Intelligence.

It can’t be taught, It can only be experienced, and sometimes, you have to go to Hell to get It. And really, It isn’t in hell, but it gets you through it.

Isn’t there another child’s song, “you can’t go around it, you can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, you have to go right through it.” Through it doesn’t mean you have to get comfortable there, you are just a guest in Hell.

A Guest is not the owner of, but one who comes to visit!

In love with a Mask, that line stuck with me, and made my actions have words that match. I have words for my actions. It seems I am going backwards, paying more attention to the action, the feelings, and just leaving the words out of it.

Do Masks talk? Do Masks think? Is a mask really a filter that disguises the voice? Can you have a full body masks? Can it mask your actions, or does it mask your intentions, can it? Where does reality stand with the Masks?

 Are the Masks part of reality, the illusion, the play within a play? What is going On?

If I look back at my father’s trail, I would have to say, that there were two sides. One side, the Defense argued the side of the Mask. The other side was the Prosecutors and they argued the side of the man behind the mask. Who argued for the child? Did the judge? Did the Detective watch the child, who was watching the child?

This just gets weirder and weirder.

The greater part of the family loved the mask, and would then have to sit on the side of the Defense. They were defending the mask. You seem to defend what you love. But what happens to the children who don’t? Don’t what? In the beginning of the mask falling even, I intuitively knew, that you only got to pick one. Pick one. The mask or what lay beneath.

Now, wouldn’t it be cozier to pick the mask, but what happens if you feared the mask. What happens if when the mask fell, you knew it was perfect, now the feelings matched the man behind the mask? The mask did not hurt you, the mask did not scare you, the mask was warm cozy and your friend, the mask, oh my God that damn mask.

It was such a twisted father. There is song line “a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction” that refrain kept running through my mind. The contradiction is my world, without memory, the fear that raced through my body in his presence, seemed the traitor. The fear was not matching the mask. My body held back, not only a little, but always. Like it protected me when my mind tried very hard to change my actions. I couldn’t, so I became the failure, I became the cold-hearted daughter. I became the monster in the family, for I could not love the mask. I tried. I tried. Oh, my mind could pretend I did, my mind could do all kinds of tricks, but my body held fast.

This big ass body I like to say, remembered for 40 years the deeds done to it by a man behind the mask. What a terrific instrument this body is. I have read since that the body doesn’t lie. I didn’t need the book I was a living testament to that.

Even this blog, which I am not sure most of you have figured out, but this blog is the words to actions I have already done. Somehow the words on the paper have a way of validating my actions, of giving me a voice. This blog has taken a path of it’s own, I surely don’t know where we are going, but the truth is leading the way.

For this I know for sure, there is very little support for the girl who won’t love the mask, stands firm with her conviction that the man behind the mask is reality.

The detective came into my home, he asked me many questions. I had a few for him too. He asks “I hope this won’t affect the relationship you have with your father”….If that is his hope, then I knew it was hopeless.

A little girl sits. A little girl sits and watches. A little girl sits and watches the adults come in and waits to see what will happen. Will they too see a monster? Will they? Or will they too be fooled. There are two of us sitting.

The monster sits too. The monster waits too. The monster sits and waits to see if he has fooled them too. We both sit and we both wait. But in the end, the girl sits alone.

Alone, silent, wounded, unheard, unseen, confused, responsible, puzzled, she sits. She sits in a world that doesn’t make sense.

I asked Mr. Detective man, “Can you give me one common denominator between a father and a pedophile?” That was my question to Mr. Detective man and he was silent, I told Mr. Detective man, to call me when he had one. Just one. And so far no call.

Now I ask you, is there a common denominator, can you find one for me?

Somehow, the little girl feels responsible for tearing off the kind mask. It is our fault for making the monster roar. What did my do?

What did my do? I wrecked our family, I trashed our dreams, I brought the filth forth, I couldn’t pretend, couldn’t play games, for it was the games that started this whole mess.

Somebody started to pretend. Who and why? In fact it seems there are more pretending than being real.

The detective pretends to investigate, but his investigation leads to me…..why I asked, are you not talking to him? The Prosecutors pretends he can keep little girls safe, but he offers a deal to set him free. The Judge pretends he can be fair, Impossible this will never be fair.

When I watched my experience as I experienced it, the incredulousness of it all, became like a really bad comedy, with the truth indeed being stranger than fiction. Masks of Perfection….Masks pretending.

I however refused to wear one, nope, none. Not even for my sisters, my brothers, my mother, my father, my children, no one could make me, none.

You would think, that those who are standing alone, naked, with soiled underwear would be cheered it has not been my experience.

A few very brave souls walked in, friends with great courage.

Many want me to shush, to cover up, even me….for I didn’t want you to change your mind about me. I didn’t want you to think less of me, to not see me, to let me sit alone.

I had always wanted the book of proper etiquette for little girls who are standing naked, and I can only hope, that by my speaking out, little girls will not have to go through what I did.

I do not blame you all, I really don’t. I am just curious, confused and saddened. I know we are hard to look at, even if we appear normal. For you too can sense the presence behind my mask of normal. It is strong it is steady, it is reality, harsh, unkind, brutal, but real, mixed in with love and peace and hope.

I now know what a handicapped person feels….

Please don’t turn away.

See.

I am trying to re-create the process of how I discovered I was an imperfect woman and how I broke down each meaning.  

I pretty much looked up the meanings and checked myself to see where I was.

im·per·fect [ im púrfəkt] adjective : Definition: 1. faulty: having a fault or defect: 2. not complete: lacking a part.

per·fect (pûr f kt) adj. 1. Lacking nothing essential to the whole; complete of its nature or kind. 2. Being without defect or blemish: a perfect specimen.

When you read both of the meanings, they are talking about whole or incomplete.

In order to find out what a whole woman was, I had to know first of all what a woman was as defined by the dictionary.

Woman. n. An adult female. female, lady.

 Female – noun . 1. a person bearing two X chromosomes.

Now I was getting somewhere.  It seems that a perfect woman is an adult female of the Human Species. 

How in the world is it so hard to be a perfect woman?

I had lost all identity once, and it left me in a strange spot. I had no definitions anymore in my mind, I was just a body walking around, a female body.  What was also weird at that time, I went out looking for normal.  Normal can't be found.  What is normal and for whom? I had lost myself and I was out looking for myself in others. I know that this is hard for most to imagine….a blank mind, a mind with out a preconceived idea.  Even as I write that, " preconceived"…. it leads me to wonder what is conceived?

con·ceive (k n-s v) v. con·ceived, con·ceiv·ing, con·ceives. v. tr. 1. To become pregnant with (offspring). 2. To form or develop in the mind; devise: conceive a plan to …  

What preconceptions are in place in our minds, who put them there, and are they even true anymore as we sit here today? 

Now back to the definition of imperfect, it was lacking, not complete.   

Complete. adjective. lacking no component part; full; whole; entire; brought to a conclusion; ended; finished.

The conclusion or end or finished product of you, will be when you die.  So until then, you are imperfect, not complete yet, parts are missing, we are lacking.   We are lacking the rest of our lives!

Until we die, we are Imperfect.  I love that I am not a complete, that I am not a perfect woman, not whole, not over, not done yet!  Be imperfect until your last breath!  Walking in the land of imperfection there are no rules, nothing to strive for, you just get to be imperfectly you!  No one to follow, for we are all original works in progress!  

Go out today and look at all the wonderfully imperfect people, and release yourself from the idea of being perfect, for what you are really wishing for is to die!