I M Perfect lady

Tag: dysfunction

  • I was Missing?

    One theme of fear that has nagged at me in the past six years is; I don’t belong.

    I don’t match, I don’t fit in, I am different, I am at odds with those around me. I stand out; I walked away, leaving behind many.

    I see them fitting together and me fitting out.

    I see a flock of people being in life in harmony and then me, singing off tune.

    The feeling inside was one of separation, loneliness, not belonging, forever standing on the fringe.

    What I failed to do was take one more step back and see the completed picture.

    My focus has been on the group, not on me, my view is from this odd angle of group mentality.

    Understandably so, for I was raised to be a group member, but not an individual and I excelled at this.

    I was a superior group member, outstanding in blending in, merging my life into the group, that I simply disappeared.

    Each time I felt the separation I felt lonely and not whole and grew smaller and smaller.

    I seemed to disappear from their life while my own life seemed to loom larger and larger.

    If you could see me from both views, you would see me growing fainter in their light but if you stood on my side you could see me growing bigger and brighter.

    My success or failure depends on where you are standing.

    If you are expecting me to return and become a group member, you will see me fading, growing weaker and farther away.

    And if you jump over to the side of individual your view will totally change.

    You will see a person standing up for her own feelings, her own passions and truths, a separated soul finding its own self worth.

    I too fall victim to the group view, to see me in their eyes and each time I do, I feel less.

    However, when I stand inside myself and witnessed my life from the inside out, I feel my uniqueness and my independence of free will.

    A group no longer owns me.

    As a child I was taught to give up my body, my feelings, my life and my individual stakes for a group called family, which was governed by religion and undermined by abuse.

    They took ownership of me piece by piece.

    Or I gave them pieces of me little by little, believing the more I gave the more I would become.

    I gave til I was gone.

    It has taken me a long while to remove the sense of self from the views of a group and see myself within my self, to feel my self as self.

    To weigh and measure myself by my own ruler, to no longer feel my value is defined by the Ruler of the group.

    This separated wholeness I see of me outside the group is to see and feel something I am not familiar with, a self beyond the group.
    My favorite image or saying is, “I am going to go find myself, and I don’t know who I am or even that I am missing…”

    I had no idea who I was separated from a group.

    I had no individual view of self.

    I was nothing out side alone.

    My whole composition of self was defined by their needs of me.

    My fear of being alone was that alone I am nothing.

    I recall being scared spit less to the point of frozen immobility, to be naked without a group.

    The group I had woken up in was filled with filth, untruths, lies and cover-ups, forgiveness of sins, a mess.

    It was me!

    The group looked liked me, talked like me, walked like me, it was a direct reflection, a bird with the same feathers.

    There was no dividing line between it and me.

    I found me, lost, brainwashed, blind, abused, broken, confused, mental…I was upside down and tilted away from reality.

    It’s denial and mine were equal.

    My long walk back to find myself and see myself in reality has not been an easy road, but one that has set me free to stand alone belonging to me.

    Isn’t it funny I found myself exactly as I felt, Lost but not knowing I was missing?

  • I feel Solo

    As I look at my self in my life today, I am so much freer than I would have ever dreamed possible.

    While I live in the same house, married to the same man, and still have four children with me, I am no longer chained by their behavior…well okay, I still get stuck for a half hour or so, but I can usually set myself free.

    Dr. Berman spoke of the triangle affect, where relationships get stuck when couples move from one corner to the next exchanging roles and manipulating feelings.

    I lived on that triangle for years and years, and I was the master at being a hero and dabbled in the victim villain roles pretty often as well.

    On the triangle you are never in control of your feelings, somebody owns yours and you own anothers, we forever go around making other people feel and feeling how other people make us…never free to feel by yourself.

    If your not moving feelings around, there is the spot of hero, where you literally take over the responsibility of another’s life, where you come in and save the day, allowing them to miss a lesson to grow and learn by experience.

    This triangle is dysfunction and it leaves you separated from your feelings, where you are forever at the mercy of another.

    My past six years have been unlearning the triangle reflexes of blaming the other, and instead look inside to see where I gave up power.

    Looking for the power leak, where I lost control of my own power.

    Any time I say, “you disappoint me” or “ you make me feel sad” I am back on the triangle as a victim.

    Instead if I say, “I am sad or I am hurt” I am in control of my feelings and I get to explore why.

    What actions did I do to wind up feeling this way?

    What can I do now to make me feel better?

    It leaves the other person out of my feelings; it frees them up to be in charge of their own.

    The co-dependency triangle leaves you so tangled up and out of control, where you never can be assured that your peace, love and joy will stick around, that soon something or somebody will come along and steal it away.

    What I love love love, is that you are the only one who can give that away. It isn’t stolen, you literally hand it over in a victim like drama way with great words and feelings.

    When I learned that my love, my joy and my peace were mine and I had right and obligation to protect them, life was much easier, I walked away from the triangle.

    Standing authentic with your feelings isn’t always easy, but always empowering.

    I no longer disappoint my feelings or cover them up or speak down to them or pretend them to be different than what they are.

    I stand up with them no matter what.

    My feelings empower me.

    The Spirit of me is alive in feelings.

    I am as I feel or I feel as I am.

    I blame no one for how I feel.

    I feel solo.

  • Thank you.

    As I sit here on Thanksgiving morning, I look back at this year and find so many moments of gratitude, it seems I had a year full.

    My moments of gratitude are interrupted with moments of sheer pain, frustration, sorrow, confusion and tangled thoughts; it is only when I truly see the whole picture that I am overwhelmed with gratitude, knowing I was spared.

    Spared a lifetime stuck in that thought pattern, or held prisoner by that belief, to be forever at the mercy of another, while never seeing me.

    It isn’t so much that they didn’t see me, but I didn’t see me.

    Seeing and feeling me, learning how to respond that is respectful of me, what honors my soul, bringing forth a new version of me, one that is authentic and uniquely me, one that brings me to life.

    Gratitude of such magnitude, there isn’t a word that adequately expresses this freedom; it is like breathing or not breathing, love or fear, living or being dead in your life.

    To not be dead in my life is beyond what words can hold, to be alive in each moment, aware that I am connected to the Universe, that there are no mistakes, just opportunities to expand further and further, that even the darkest of the darkest moments are bringing me back to myself.

    The Universe only wants the grandest version of me; it doesn’t want a replica of someone else’s dreams.

    This past year I have been shown all the places I was still stuck, lost in the dark, and each time I become aware, I bring peace in to me.

    In peace I am overwhelmed in gratitude.

    I am thankful on this Thanksgiving Day for all the moments of pain, the untangled thoughts, the dark stuck places, and sorrow of what isn’t, for they all came bearing gifts.

    They all delivered a part of me that wasn’t free.

    Hell doesn’t seem like hell when it comes bearing gifts.

    I am grateful for my pain and for my suffering, for it was grieving the loss of me.

    It was telling me where I wasn’t present.

    In the darkness I mourned the loss of me.

    It was in the dark that I found me.

    On this Thanksgiving day, I thank you.

  • 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.

     

     

     

     

  • The Silent Aunt who disappeared….

    “He couldn’t not know what he knew; he couldn’t not see once he saw.”   Patti Digh

     

    It hit me today in yoga, that what I am witnessing in my great niece is Me.

     

    Me as a newborn baby girl arriving and going with the flow of the family I was born into.

     

    She appears on a stage of an already in motion drama, a play in progress, roles clearly defined, the scenes are set, the dialogue is memorized, and from there her role is carved.

     

    She begins with a supporting role, and will learn that in order to maintain favor, her lines will reflect those of the Main Characters, her parents and grandparents.

     

    It is the expectation of her elders to follow their roles, and someday take over top billing.

     

    I may be her future self and she is my beginning – we are linked with the thread of legacy.

     

    My mother’s sister who was estranged from her family has come into my thoughts yet again.  How nice it would have been to have her view of my mother’s family. 

     

    What made her leave the stage she was born upon?

     

    I feel that I am my Aunt, but a generation behind her.

    I have access to the Internet and have ways to communicate that she wasn’t able to.

     

    My mother is close to her brothers and has always been, while my Aunt chose to stay away, two totally different perspectives of one family.

     

    The last words my mother said to me was, “we have two different perspectives!”  Remarkably wise, she knew we didn’t match.

     

    My mother never spoke of the sister that ran away, never.  She had another one who also was estranged from the family but lived near the family; she, I was told was cold and bitter. My mother had very limited exchanges with this sister. 

     

    She also had a brother who committed suicide.

     

    My Uncle (my mother’s brother) molested my brother and sister, and another Uncle molested my mother when she was a young girl, yet she remains close to her family and holds them in high regard, visiting them regularly.

     

    There are two distinctly different reactions on the stage of abuse; we either keep the normal dialogue going or we get off the stage!

     

    If you stay on the stage, you continue with the same play and drama and accept new characters as they are born upon this stage.

     

    When you get off, you get off alone and you are segregated and an outcast, but the abuse stops.

     

    It stops only along your family branch, but the rest of the tree continues to flourish as long as the other branches go along with the original dialogue of abuse. 

     

    Roles continue unchecked, words flow the same, abuse lays in the wings waiting, forever near, cycles spiral again and again, repeating itself like a broken record.

     

    On my new stage I have to learn or maybe unlearn the first 40 years.

     

    I am no longer a newborn without a voice or a choice.

     

    I now am able to discern what I feel and what I know, what is healthy and what isn’t healthy and I have the right to act freely and use dialogue that goes against the original family play.

     

    It is with the greatest compassion that I look back upon my old stage and see my family still stuck in the roles they were born into.

     

    If I can be a voice that hollers from off the stage, a disgruntled watcher of their play, if my jeers can put a seed of doubt, a drop of fear, a whisper of truth, if I can lure but one player away, I feel my life’s journey will not be for naught.

     

    I will not be the silent Aunt who disappeared….

     

     

  • Freedom in Healing.

    Yesterday I felt the sorrow of not going back, of being forever outside, being stuck in a new life upon which there is no return.

     

    That my inner truths and feelings will not change, and I don’t have the magic to make it happen, they sit there rock solid unmoving, unshakeable.

     

    I felt like I was riding shotgun to these feelings, like I am riding along behind them and have to act accordingly.

     

    Even if my inner wishes and desires are to go against them, I am weak where they are strong.

     

    These truths are not of my making, I didn’t dream them up to make my life difficult, to stay away from weddings, and forgo all family activities.

     

    The makings of these truths came in ways not many care to know or acknowledge; they forget that I am not the maker of these truths, but the carrier of them.

     

    It is like I am carrying a disease that I didn’t invent, but yet seen as the magician and the creator. 

     

    That I am the one who started this whole thing and now that I have had my ‘fun’ with it, just get rid of it and be ‘normal’ again.

     

    It still catches me unaware that they still think it is me that is the real trouble, that if only I would just stop sprouting this garbage than a normal family I would have.

     

    Then once again I could rejoin them in celebrations instead of wanting to be in exile.

     

    That I am the one who wants to stay away, NOT that there is actually something to stay away from.

     

    That I am enjoying this new role, this new life, the knower of my unchangeable truths, that I prefer to live estranged, that I decided this is a new me choice for me.

     

    If only that were true, that one day I simply decided that my old life didn’t work anymore and I set out to find a new me.

     

    What they fail to appreciate is the fact that I was unaware and blind to the abuse in our home, that I built a life upon a false foundation. 

     

    When the foundation crumbled, so did I, I had a break down of me.

     

    In the million pieces of me that lay shattered, I had to find a way to make a new me.

     

    The last five years isn’t an experiment or fad, it isn’t a temper tantrum or something I can set aside for a wedding, it is the way I healed.

     

    I healed inside by setting up boundaries.

    I healed by acknowledging my abuse, my abuser, and those who support abuse by not standing against it.

     

    I healed myself putting myself in exile.

     

    And exiled from this family I will stay, it is the choice of being healed or abused.

     

    I felt the sadness of this exile, the aloneness, the being seen as different and difficult, and it is.

     

    Yet I no more can go back into abuse than I can let go of the freedom in healing.

     

    "I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be."
      ~ Einstein

     

  • My Walled Garden.

     

     

    More from Iron John, by Robert Bly.

     

    “If a man or woman has been sexually abused in childhood, or has lived in any form of a ‘dysfunctional family,’ he or she will need sooner or later a ‘heaven haven.’  The story says that each of us needs it.

     

    The walled garden is a shelter from the world, and a place to recover your broken trust…..A walled garden also is a place to develop introversion.”

     

    Rilke says:

     

    I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough

        to make every moment holy.

    I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough

    just to lie before you like a thing,

      shrewd and secretive.

    I want my own will, and I want simply to be with

       my will,

    as it goes towards action,

    and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times

    when something is coming near,

    I want to be with those who know secret things

    or else alone.

     

    “We could say that in the walled garden, as in the alchemical vessel, new metals get formed and the old ones melt.  The lead of depression melts and becomes grief. The drive of success, an insistence tin, joins with Aphrodite’s copper, and makes bronze, which is good to make shields and images of gods.  The enclosed garden then suggests cultivation as opposed to rawness, boundaries as opposed to unbounded sociability, soul concerns as growth for the soul desire opposed to obsession with a generalized greed for things……

     

    In the garden the soul and nature marry.  When we love cultivation more than excitement we are ready to start a garden.  In the garden we cultivate yearning and longing – those strangely un-American feelings – and notice tiny desires.  Paying attention to tiny hardly noticeable feelings is the garden way.  That’s the way lovers behave.

     

    The enclosed garden is a right place for lovers…..

     

    Garden work may begin unexpectedly.  An illness that confines the sufferer to a room for weeks may be his enclosed garden. An accident may bring it on.  Thoreau, on the other hand, chose to live for some months in a cabin he built himself, and he and his cabin and Walden Pond were his garden.  He knew very well that he had become a lover, and said, “A match has been found for me at last: I have fallen in love with a shrub oak.”

     

    Some men entering the garden begin by getting up at 5am, and keeping an hour for themselves each morning before work.  A father, in order to do that, may have to resist his own insistence that life belongs to his work, his children and his marriage.

     

    Making a garden, and living in it, means attention to boundaries, and sometimes we need the boundaries to prevent caretaking from coming in and occupying our time.

     

    I am too tiny in this world and not tiny enough

    Just to lie before you and be a thing.

     

    Addiction to perfecting, as Mariann Woodman reminds us, amounts to having no garden. The anxiety to be perfect withers the vegetation.  Shame keeps us from cultivating the garden.  Men and women deeply caught in shame will, when they tend their garden, pull out both weeds and flowers because so many of their own feelings seem defective and soiled.

     

    What do we love so much that we want to protect it from strangers?  That is a good question for garden makers.

     

    No matter how deeply I go down into myself

    My God is dark, and like a webbing made

    Of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.

         Rainer Maria Rilke

     

    I love the analogy of being in a walled garden.

     

    I love that when we seek to know ourselves we have to put up a wall and cultivate ourselves.

     

    I truly lived in a walled garden and mended my wounds, my sorrows and tears fell there and helped grow a new me.

     

    To put up boundaries and to lean into yourself, going deeply into the dark places to find answers and then to sit with those answers awhile. 

     

    In your own world you will find ways to have garden time.

    I was blessed to be at home, alone.

    My house was my garden and it expanded to the road along the river.  It became my sanctuary, my walled garden.

     

     

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  • Equal In My Eyes.

     

     

     

     129

     

    What is the difference between hollering and verbal abuse?

     

    What is verbal abuse? 

     

    Well I looked up the definition of Verbal Abuse.

     

    Psychology A form of emotional abuse consisting of the use of abusive and demeaning language with a spouse, child, or elder, often by a caregiver or other person in a position of power.

     

    So hollering becomes abuse when the one doing the hollering is in the position of power or caregiver, hence parents.

     

    I know for a fact that what I used to call ‘hollering’ was verbal abuse, I was the person of power.

     

    I looked up the word ‘demeaning’ to see if what I was hollering about was ‘demeaning’.

    Demeaning. Humiliate and degrade: to reduce somebody to    a much lower status in a humiliating way.

    To reduce someone to a lower status, wow hollering makes him or her lower.  I also felt the guilt, but this puts a name on the feeling.  I was lowering their sense of status in our home, by hollering for them to do their jobs.

     

    We could split hairs and say, hollering at them to clean up isn’t demeaning, but what we fail to notice is that they are our equals.

     

    We have neither right nor power to subjugate them to feeling less then us.

     

    What I came to learn was that by making them equal I gave them back their responsibility.

     

    Yesterday, I had a prime example of this interaction.  My daughter who is in college now, but living at home, wanted to just study all day.  What a sassy child you are all thinking, but what we expect from each, is not only to do well in that part of their world, but also to contribute to living here.

     

    So, we had a conversation, each of us stating their side.  I truly commended her on doing her life so well, but that she forgot to leave time for contributing for her living.  She suggested that I do all the work, since she was so busy and I had a day off.

     

    She has homework time, boyfriend time, but no “taking care of her living” area time.  Time management was her issue; she forgot to include cleaning up house time.

     

    We have offered to accept money instead of time, but they all decided time was cheaper to give. 

     

    I addressed the issue of her noncontributing, that it was to raise her up to my level, not to keep her beneath.  To show her that there is more to living than just schoolwork and a boyfriend, but to also be responsible of her living space.

     

    I stated, “I could do your part, but that isn’t fair to you, you need to feel that you are a contributing part in this house, and it surely isn’t fair to me to carry your weight.  It is abuse in the opposite direction to make you useless.”

     

    It is sad to know that so many of the hollering mom’s believe that they are hollering to make the children be more, yet what they are doing is bringing them down. 

     

    Whittling away at the Bright Spirit that they arrived as.  We ironically whittle them down to our own dysfunctional size.

     

    Lowering their status, keeping the scales unbalanced, keeping them feeling less and less, neither of us feeling good when the hollering is done.  We both are losers, we both feel less.

     

    But what we fail to realize or have the tools to implement, is that we must  bring our children up to our equals.

     

    How often do you see someone holler at his or her equal? 

     

    How do you feel after you have been hollered at?

    Does it raise your sense of wholeness, your brightness, and your rightness?

     

    Hollering is sugar coated verbal abuse.

    Hollering makes it seem less to the hollering person.

    Call it what you will, but in the end, it lowers the status.

     

    It is our job or responsibility as parents to raise our children, not lower them.

     

    What I knew was that this abuse had to stop, and I had to be the one to stop it.  It was up to me to save my kids from me!

     

    I had to be the change. 

     

    I had to focus on raising them and to do that, I had to raise the bar, raise the consequences, and make them an equal in my eyes.

     

     

  • ….walked as you.

    My sister sent a request on facebook a few days ago, a ‘friend request’ and I accepted it with some trepidation.

     

    I am not sure why she is stepping into my world after 4 years and I asked her that.  I also asked if she still holds on the to views of her last letter.

     

    So far there hasn’t been a response, perhaps my request is not one she is willing to answer.

     

    In life we are asked many requests and in the past I would jump in without first asking a few questions or testing the waters, if you asked, I jumped and usually asked how high!

     

    Now, I am much wiser and hold my heart in a place of value, I just don’t go walking into places that will hurt me.

     

    Her silence could mean many things, yet I am surprised that her eagerness to have me back seems to be on pause.

     

    What stopped her?  What made her stop her advancement?  What has her retreating or re-thinking….and she could be asking the same of me.

     

    I know why I am not eagerly walking forward to embrace this woman, my experience of her still rings in my ears. 

     

    I invited her to read my blog as a way to find out if our ideals match, to see if she still wanted to be my friend. 

     

    Where can the two of us meet, what common ground is there for us to stand upon?  Why does she now feel that she wants to be part of my life, and which part?

     

    What part of my life do you want to enter into?   You suggested that you love me, so which part?  And that you have hopes of all the sisters reuniting, what will we reunite?

     

    How can I unite with you, we seem such opposites.

     

    I have always felt that if a brother or sister walked towards me I would meet them half way and not turn around.

     

    I am standing here facing you, asking what it is you feel inside about me.  It is a fair request.

    What do you see in me?

     

    In order to love me, you have to know me.  You can’t just love what you dream of me to be.

     

    I am not a thought in your head about what a sister should do, could do, or would do; I am a live walking talking moving person.

     

    Do you know me outside of your dreams?

     

    If you want to enter into a relationship with me, I ask just for your truth, show me who you are.

     

    If you are reading the blog, go back to the beginning and read along, it will open your eyes as to who I am, and I will understand if you withdraw your request.

     

    It seems that I became the enemy, the other side, and I know that you will have to forsake all you have ever known to walk along with me.

     

    It is way too much to ask.

    It is and will always be up to you to be with me.

     

    I understand your silence.

    I am the monster you fear the most.

    I am reality.

     

    I am reality walking and doing free of dysfunction, an enemy of your mind, your thoughts and your beliefs, your love and your security.  I am the opposite of all you have even been.

     

    Your silence will be a signal that you are not wanting to be with me.  I understand.

     

    I know where you are sitting…. I sat there.

    I know what you are thinking, I thought there.

    I know where your loyalties lie, I was loyal too.

    I know you for I know me.

     

    I wish you peace with this decision.
    I wish you strength and courage.

     

    I walked free….so I know you can too.

    You are much braver than me!

     

    A sister, one who walked as you.

     

     

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  • 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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