I M Perfect lady

Tag: daughter

  • On the Fault Line.

    My mother turned 80 today, or so I was told.  I have lost track of her age, as well of her life.  She seems a mirage out on the far horizon, behind me…detached from daily emotions. But, I do know, if I were to be in her presence, a multitude of feelings would rush through my body.  Not the waterfall of love, light and comfort, but the opposite.  

    I wonder if I will ever be able to feel neutral, nothing, no ripple, to be 'social'.

    In the Fall, my middle daughter will marry….and she (my mother) is invited.  It is only for one day, a few hours, a fleeting moment in time, yet a special loving one for my daughter and our family.  Interesting to be part of a Mother/Daughter moment…one being the daughter and the other the mother….

    My daughter is free to invite whom she wants at her wedding…some of which will be hard for me to be around. Perhaps hard is not the accurate word…but difficult or challenging…

    I have a hard time seeing her role there.  I understand 'grandmother' is her title and right…and yet I don't see her as that.

    My daughter sees a grandmother, I see an accomplice…an active participant to abuse of many little girls.  I can't feel warm, fuzzy or ap-pathetic towards her or even neutral and social.  My vision of her, my memories are tainted, sordid…unkind. I don't feel her like a grandmother, a safe place, kind heart and comfort.  I feel her as painful, hurt, uncaring, not kind, psychotic.

    The contrast of emotions set forth for that day boggle my mind…how to anticipate, look forward to such contrasts of emotions…to be in the middle between my daughter and I and my mother and I?

    Harsh cold on one side and warm love on the other…

    I know my role is mother of the bride, not daughter.

    I am to place my estrangement with my mother off to the side.

    My estrangement with my siblings as some will find the need to attend.

    I am to keep facing the future and love.

    It is like a real life event of what goes on in our psyches…the negative energies begging to be on stage front and center…and loving kindness, peace, love and joy.

    Just as today, her birthday, I turn away from the past and lean into my life of estrangement but not to be overwhelmed with negative emotions.  Not to get caught up on the thoughts of her…and to see instead the wonder and beauty of this spring. To feel the peace in my home, to well up with emotions of love towards my husband and children…looking ahead, and not behind.

    Estrangement means you will sometimes be on the fault line…


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  • God’s Peace

     I was asked, "Do you love your mother?"  And this is how I feel.  I wrote this almost 3 years ago…

    “You are the mother you have been waiting for.  When you focus on the mother, you become motherless.”

                Byron Katie

     

    Happy Birthday Mom, I want to thank you for all you taught me.  All the pain you suffered so I could get it right.  I want to thank you for staying true to form, for staying the course, so I could see by your example where it would lead me.  I had you to show me the awful way it would turn out, if I was not strong, if I had no courage, if I had only fear.  

    It is your birthday, and I wish you well, I hold no resentments or anger.  I have lived as you and wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.  Your walk is hard it is not an easy one.  I know the trials on the way, the blindness, the unknowing, no memory, no path, the lost hopes, the dreams that never arrive, the pit of desperation, of false hopes, of others changing, endless roads to no where.  

    I know how it is to hurt unintentionally, to see but not see, to hear but not hear, to have children you can’t protect, to lose more than your heart can hold.

    Some how, by some miracle, I have been spared of lifetime of that.  I have been allowed to spring free, allowed to know a new me.  I was able to walk free of the prison that holds you so tight. 

    We don’t know why I was set free, why I walked away, why I could see what you never could, why I could hear reality.  All we know is that the two of us are the same, but different, for some reason you had to be left behind in a hole of a million sorrows. 

    I stand here outside in the brightness of day, with truth and honesty, reality and kindness. I know why you did what you did, for you didn’t have another way.

    If I had to wish a wish for you, it would be this, “I wish you love, peace and joy, a Heaven of bliss”.

    It is because of you, I am who I am. 

    Ironically we were both motherless yours died when you were two.

    You had no one to show you the way. 

     As a mother I know it would bring me great peace to know that my life was for naught.

    Yours was not, for you gave birth to me.

    If only I could return the favor and lead you out free, but it doesn’t seem to be the way of it for now.

    I leave you knowing where you are, and I wish you peace.

    God’s Peace.

     

     

     

  • Island of Love, Peace and Joy.

    Today while writing my Morning Pages, I wrote that I am feeling more like a self I recognize. A self who feels normal being estranged from her family, that I no longer feel so odd to myself, this new me feels like me now.

    That it is normal for me when it is Father’s Day to have no obligations or sentiments to deliver, nor do I feel the sinking feeling of sorrow…in its place is vast openness.

    No reservoirs of wishing and hoping, just space where a father used to live…there is acceptance of what is, minus the agony of it being so different than what I want.

    I am okay now.

    I am amazed at the journey out of denial or blindness to his truths and mine.

    In the first years of our estrangement I was riddled with grief and peace, hope and hopelessness, sorrow and fear and worry and wonder and angst of being a daughter with a living dad and not engaging with him in any way…I felt inadequate.

    I no longer feel less than… for his life.

    I no longer feel responsible for being a daughter with nothing to do on Father’s Day.

    I read on facebook some daughters feeling the loss of their dad; of missing him and wishing he was here. I feel none of that. Nor, am I one who is praising and send him accolades.

    I cannot relate to either of these kinds of daughters.

    The space I stand in is one of peace and I stand alone…okay and fine.

    It is not a land in between, but one of its own.

    This spot isn’t a place most would dream about and crave to be in, but a place that we land in order to heal from sexual abuse, child abuse or neglect, it’s the place we come to feel safe from our abusive parents, like an orphanage, but one where we are not looking to be adopted.

    Separation is key to our wellness and it is odd for others to phantom this concept, when it is their desire to remain close.

    We crave space, we desire no contact, we thrive in our silent relationship…this no relationship brings us peace. We are more alive in the absence of interactions, more authentic and feel our sense of who we were born to be come alive.

    This isn’t a purgatory state, or forgotten land, but rather a wonderful island of love, peace and joy.

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  • Kept this Pattern Going.

    Being a mother in the middle and having a generation before me and a generation below me puts me in a great place to witness the intricacies of how relationships are formed and how the legacy is passed on.

    Being aware of the legacy you are in while you are in it is near impossible…it takes stepping out to get a clear view.

    I leaped out of my childhood legacy when my mother’s moral tower displayed her husband of 49 years as a pedophile, it was then I knew the generation before me, and sadly I could also see the generation beneath me and how one man had touched two generations while my mother loved him.

    I saw him in his truth, her in her truth, and then me in mine.

    I saw the river that flowed beneath all of us and the only way to escape that river is to see what you are swimming in.

    Within me lay all the layers of teaching and years of treatment and formation, in horror I saw her in me…

    Within a few days I was able to see the structure of our family and how it all was flimsily held together and how each insane idea supported another insane concept, the maze was intricately held together by unquestioning authority.

    To see the shocking truth of a pedophile father and the undying “love” of his wife towards him, shatters the scaffolding that I had built called me.

    I saw my own insanity.

    I then saw how insanely I had treated my children based upon the morals and values of a woman who ‘loved and supported’ a pedophile.

    Stuck in the middle with an insane woman above me, mistreated children below me and me aware, I then had to unhitch myself from her teachings and long held beliefs while continuing to raise children but change everything.

    In the middle, I knew I couldn’t change my mother, but I had a chance at redoing me and then I had the hope that if I could, my children would then repattern themselves after the new me.

    What a tight spot to be in, yet with great freedom.

    I knew intuitively that they felt my every move.

    Where in the past I had blindly trampled upon their lives, I now knew that I could inflict pain or raise their soul.

    It has been my intentions, while not always successful, to see the children.

    To be very conscious of how my choices in life impacted theirs.

    For we are all strung on the same string, the string called family legacy.

    You simply can’t escape the line of your parents, but you can change the dance steps, the outcome, and the way you live your life.

    It takes great strength and courage to see the insanity of an abusive family and to see the traces poking out in you, to own your insane madness and to feel the rage of injustice, and the unknowingness of being a child and following along, with love, trust and faith.

    I found myself pretty much empty of good value, and had to start from scratch building my own tower of morals and values, and I started with the foundation of truth.

    I began building a whole new structure using the pieces of insanity, for its denial is what has kept this pattern going.

  • Until she can find her own.

    The hardest part of being a mom is when your child takes an exit that you didn’t see coming and they seem to disappear from the usual landscape and it leaves you separated.

    And I am not even sure what exit she took, where she is or what her intentions are, just that she has left the lane of what was and is now heading down a road that neither of us are familiar with.

    As I continue to travel down my regular road, off to the side is this other lane of unfamiliar nagging at me, this road from my view is full of potholes and hairpin curves with disappearing drop-offs and my daughter seems blind to all its hazards.

    I am not certain if she is at a wayside unsure or if she is going forward with a full head of steam.

    I am not even sure what is making me uneasier, her being on that road or not knowing if she is sitting down in wonder or going further into its complicated bends.

    Our voices have been silenced. But all that seems to be happening now is a silent movie, where the drama continues, but I can’t hear the words.

    The not knowing is far worse, I believe than knowing.

    In the knowing, I know and can deal.

    It is like her life has slipped from my view.

    This almost seems like the far end of a spectrum, one being you are doing too much in a child’s life, overtaking it and this is the complete opposite, where you are completely taken out.

    In the middle of the spectrum are two people who allow the other their lives, we share and explore and understand their individual journeys.

    I am wondering how to hook our roads back up, how to join them together in a way that honors and gives space, in a way that respects our differences, but allows us to trust each other.

    Is there a way two people can be together on two different roads?

    As women we have lots in common and I am sure it is harder when I have more experience and I have been her superior as her mother for all these years, but is there a bridge that we can stand upon and share our views?

    I will have to let go of my fears and my ‘know it all’ attitude and let her show me the landscape of her new world, I will have to be a visitor to a foreign land.

    It truly feels like two distinct worlds.

    Yet I believe and feel that I have traveled the world she is going into, so it isn’t that foreign to me, perhaps it is only new and exciting to her, she is the foreigner not I.

    What is so perplexing is that you never leave reality, this is an inward journey, you are traveling away from your essential self.

    Away from your morals, your values, your worth, your self esteem, your dreams, your passions, your soul. Into a world of secrets, lies and deceit…heading towards a self that is unfamiliar, foreign.

    It is the road to no you.

    You are being lured down this road by a friendly face that is the façade of negative energies, manipulating you with false promises and pretty lies.

    If she were to travel this road alone, He would be her only guide.

    What I want is to walk with the two of them and give the real story, like Paul Harvey’s ‘the rest of the story’.

    Yet he knows and perhaps she knows too, that I will be the story wrecker, I will unveil the pretty lies and unravel the promises and make them as they are empty.

    So what scares me the most is that my familiar voice will be drowned out by his, that she will tune me out and turn a deaf ear to my words and cling to his.

    Her life in its innocence doesn’t have a voice of her own.

    I am sure she feels the pull between him and I, both of us wanting her. And what I want the most is for her to have a separate voice from both of us, but I don’t feel she has one for her self as yet. I see her as a girl who confused and twisted and wants to have love and attention but it comes with such a price tag, her self worth.

    I can almost understand the twist between what he says and how she feels.

    His promise land is a secret place and it can’t reach the light of day.

    In order for her to travel down his road, she lies to me.

    What I want most is for the lies to stop.

    Lies to herself and lies to me, both are taking a toll on her.

    It is so telling to see what lies can do to your spirit, you can literally see her growing darker.

    The truth will set your Spirit free!

    The two roads I see in my minds eye is the road of lies and the road of truth. One road darkens and leads you away from self and the other will support and Lighten who you are.

    You wonder what makes some travel into the darkness and what makes others travel towards the Light. What decides this and can they make a U-Turn?

    I will do as any good mother or women who see another descending into the darkness will do. I will give her my voice until she can find her own.

  • 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.

  • Fear Moves Me Away From You…

    My mother and I had lunch at the Pilgrim River yesterday.  Unscheduled, unplanned and unseen.

     

    Five years have passed since I laid eyes upon her and she looks the same, dresses the same, and seemed her old self, not at all how I envisioned her to be.

     

    Not sure what had me look in that direction, but I caught the side of her face from behind, and immediately I felt it was her, it had to be, and then she disappeared from view.

     

    A ghost from my past…a shocking sight.

     

    My body immediately responded, without a thought in my head, it needed no direction from me.

     

    The friend who was with me knew something big was going on, for all my emotions rushed to my face, our conversation evaporated, she could tell something was dreadfully wrong.

     

    We each spoke at once, her asking and me telling.

     

    What I told her matched my emotions.

     

    Mother and fear.

     

    When I knew she was exiting the dinner and not staying for lunch, I felt much better, my tight chest relaxed, the heart slowed down, the nausea settled, and the lump felt like it had been bruised, squeezed and twisted. 

     

    This visceral fear that my body displays leaves me shaky and vulnerable, as well as embarrassed that it responds this way, that I appear as a frightened child instead of the adult that I am.

     

    My body and soul were wanting nothing more than to disappear, there was not one teeny part of me that wanted to holler and run out to reconnect with her, not one. 

     

    I was pushed into my seat, caught like a rabbit in a snare.

     

    In less than a minute she reappeared outside in front of our window where a pane of glass now separated us, I in the shadows and her in plain view.

     

    Her chatting and smiling, reaching and touching this stranger, not knowing her estranged daughter looked on.

     

    It was odd to see her there, like I was now a ghost in her life watching and her unaware.

     

    It was only a few minutes and she and her friend parted and she was gone. 

     

    As I started to feel my body relax, she once again came into view.  Driving by in her van and slowly make a u-turn in front of me.  My last view was of her driving away hand to cheek, and then she was gone. 

     

    What is so enthralling to me, is how my body responds just being in the room with her.  How it isn’t a thought in the head or a mind full of reasons and excuses, for before I could gather my thoughts, my body was in full fledge panic mode.

     

    It has its own visceral reaction far ahead of me, and I scramble to catch up.

     

    How to explain this? 

     

    What I know to be certain is that my body language speaks for itself, there wasn’t a word I needed to say to my friend, she knew by the look in my face how I Felt about my mother.

     

    It isn’t anger, it isn’t resentment, it isn’t judgment, it isn’t a myriad of things I have been accused of, IT is fear and sheer panic.

     

    I fear my mother.

     

    I don’t like the way my body feels in her presence.

     

    I feel like an addict in a meeting, putting this out on paper…”I fear My Mother.”

     

    I fear what she stands for.

     

    I fear what she supports.

     

    I fear what she loves

     

    I fear her weakness.

     

    I fear her strengths.

     

    I fear her religion.

     

    I fear her forgiveness. 

     

    I fear what she fails to remember, but remembers to forget.

     

    I fear her.

     

    And my body agrees. 

     

    Perhaps fear is like love, you don’t get to decide, it happens to you don’t get to choose, it is chosen for you, you just get to ride along. 

     

    I don’t think I started out fearing my mother, it happened instant by instant and over time, I grew to fear my mother.

     

    Somehow it feels like a weakness that I fear her, that I want to stay away.

     

    That it has her in a higher spot, that she has control over me, that I am powerless.

     

    Powerless to me is being without  the power to get out of the way.

     

    Powerless is not moving away when you fear.

     

    Fear moves me away from you…

     

     

     

     

     

  • 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. 

     

     

     

  • Fashioner

    In a split second, you can go from being a little girl to being a mom. It happens so fast, I am not sure we even have the time to think about it. It happens to some and I believe others missed the portal. But the portals open up each day and in many situations.

    As life moves along, we can have children, but that doesn’t make us a mom. The saying “anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad”, should also be true of mothers. Moms are not a given.

    Little girls do not grow up dreaming of being a bad mom, especially if they have been victims of one. Yet some how the pattern is laid out we follow almost like robots without a choice. Born into a legacy, we either follow or get out. It is in the little seconds, the little moments that we can correct the legacy. It is little by little we become a mom. And if we string enough of the mom moments together, we become more a mom than a mother.

    It takes time, it takes patience, it takes learning, growing, unlearning, undoing. Taking family traditions that have been handed down generation to generation. We are literally trying to turn lifetimes of patterns and bringing in new at the same time. It is best not to think out long and far and to look too long behind you, but instead just be in this moment, with this choice, with this child, on this day, in this hour, facing this minute.

    You are the Fashioner of a new life pattern.

    In this now moment, give space, stop and see, ask and not react, drop the preconceived ideas of the outcome. And here’s a good one, “think before you speak” or in my case stop before you holler! In each split second, you and you alone get to decide which will I be here, the child or the mom.

    I learned I had all I could handle  was just focusing on being a mom. It was a really hard job. They got to be the kids, and I played the mom. I would speak it out loud. “I am the mom, the consequence person, you be you and I will deal.” I literally had to turn myself into a mom. One choice, one minute at time. And I am still not done. I think it takes a lifetime to become a mom.

    The greatest news is that I stepped out alone, daring to walk out of the legacy and into a new place. Here we are free, no rules, no patterns, free space to be. I love not knowing how to do it right! For if this felt comfortable, I would be back in the legacy of my youth. So the more you need to change, the more uncomfortable you will feel, it is a good thing in a bad way!

    It was like throwing the old mom out, and to be truthful, I hated being her too, and now I get to be a new mom. My oldest daughter has said, “it is like getting a new mom without a divorce” and that is literally the truth.

    Most people try and change the outside to correct the inside. That is like asking the child to make you a better mom, and we do it, over and over again.

    Byron Katie says, “There are only three types of business, yours, mine and Gods. If you are in my business, who is in yours?

    Being in my business is a full time job! One I gladly suffer, for I was out this job for a long long time. I am happy to be employed full time. I am elated to just doing me. That is simply all I am responsible for!

    An imperfect mother now and forever, for my past I cannot change, but my future is mine to design. Oh what shall I be?  The what fills me with potential, with hope, for you see, it wasn't that long ago I had no choice.  I am grateful beyond measure to have walked free, to dream the impossible dream. A mom, a loving mom, can it be?  Oh simply just watch me….piece by piece, inch by inch, and one day we will both be surprised how this ends.  It is up to me, I am the Fashioner of my life.

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