I have such great admiration for the choreography of the Universe, how it manages to give to you the right and perfect set up to heal your wounded self.
In my quest for wholeness, the main theme has been feeling and seeing. As a child of abuse, I had separated myself from my body, and what I need most is to bring up those emotions, to feel them and greet them with understanding, and they recede on their own, once I ‘get it’.
The message.
What I was able to feel and see is beyond what I can hope to put into words.
It gave to me the access of feelings that I feared I had lost.
It brought forth a visual so brightly displayed for me to witness the dance of luring and grooming of an innocent girl.
Delivering to me, the need of the perpetrator over shining the care this innocence needed.
Showing how innocence the friendship begins and its ultimate conclusion, where the courtship is long and subtle, their needs small at first and how they build, how we start simple and grow into a complex adult scenario long before our time.
How we are changed slowly and you don’t see yourself change, how you gradually succumb to the tiny wishes, one at a time, trusting and going along, until one day you wake up and your no longer there, in its place is another woman.
It showed me how a mother should respond and how a mother did respond.
My daughter found herself in a relationship with a married man, the man she was babysitting for, a man whose children she cared for, tended to like a second mother for many years, since the time she was just a girl herself. To see her in the role of being the other woman, to see her self so changed, broke my heart.
To see her lost of her inner self worth shattering.
The overall picture of seeing my young and innocent daughter being courted by such a knowing man, brought me back to the way my abuse played out for me, but with a different ending.
The dual lesson that my daughter and I danced through leaves me breathless and to feel past overlapping onto the present, the weight of the legacy and it’s vine stretching into the next generation and feeling and seeing my abuse from all angles left my mind whirling.
I had to first feel the devastation as a mother seeing my innocent daughter in a friendship with a man who single-handedly soiled her fine reputation, without blinking an eye.
To feel my worthlessness in undoing what was already done.
To then see the dance and the lure and the friendship and its ‘friendly like’ image have such a dirty ugly affect on the girl, left me shattered and broken as I clearly saw what she failed to see.
And to be the one to shatter her dreams and love and to flood him in a new light, but then to also put the image on to her self and to see what she ‘allowed’ her self to be. By showing her what the other woman does.
I was able to see what my mother couldn’t see.
I was able to do what my mother couldn’t do.
We both, my daughter and I, were able to stand taller and stronger in truth, than either of would be able to do in lies.
It was an incredible and heart breaking 24 hours.
My daughter feels she carries the shame of being the other woman, I feel she carries the experience of being abused.
I can see how we carry forth from abuse, that we were at fault, that we allowed it, we dance too, but there usually is One with more power, more experience, more everything, that leads the dance to lowering our self worth in their blind desire for their needs being fulfilled.
The fail to see how it affects us.
My daughter’s reputation was damaged while his remained unchanged.
She approached the friendship as innocent.
A young girl who didn’t realize when you knowingly do what you feel is wrong but do it anyway, you are giving away your self worth.
We do it for many reasons, to be liked, to please, to get attention, to feel good, and what we all fail to realize, is this feeling is fleeting, it is like a drug, we are forever needing more.
A habit of pleasing another for our high of feeling good, while our sense of self gets depleted.
The subtle disappearing self in the dance of friendship that has a greedy needy thirst on one side and the other willingly feeding the supply is a train wreck waiting to happen.
How grateful am I, that my daughter was able to see and feel her sense of self being lowered, being changed, how she became a stranger to herself.
Yet when this happens as child, we don’t even have a self established to see disappear, it is gone before we knew it.
The lessons I was able to experience while she experienced it first hand is like a mirror image of me as a child.
I can see how my mother’s reaction affected how I was unable to see myself. For my mother’s affection and allegiance was to my father. She didn’t see my change within; she didn’t see my self worth leave.
I can see how my husband reacted, how she had a loving space to show her the difference between what is a loving friendship and what lowers you.
There are a million ways this has opened my eyes and hers, how it shows us both, our own boundaries of self love matter most before any request outside.
Some may see her as the other woman and call her awful names, judge and criticize her actions, view her as the home wrecker etc. I will see her as a victim of
Abuse.
Her babysitting children’s father took advantage of her.
The lack of self worth on his part lent itself to overstep his boundaries. He took liberties that were not his to take.
He tried to make an adult friendship and press it further with someone who was way out of his league.
Her innocence was no equal match for him. It was like taking candy from a baby.
I will see his strengths and her blindness and trust, see her having to lower who she was to become his friend.
Friendships like that we don’t need.
Friendship and love will raise you up, not lower you down.
What a great lesson to learn as such a young age.
The reason I was having such a hard time seeing her as the ‘other woman’ was that she was just a girl.
An innocent girl being swept away in an adult world of lies and secrets, of being chosen for the role of ‘other woman’.
It wasn’t that she auditioned for the part, that she was out seeking this; it came in while she was babysitting.
The contrast to the label he put on her back and the girl who sleeps on the top bunk in our home is a world apart.
They don’t even come close to matching.
Imagine, she still shares a room with her sisters.
She occupies the top bunk. How can the other woman be the girl who sleeps on the top bunk?
I feel so fortunate that we have her on the top bunk to have her in our home, to have this wonderful loving, kind and gentle girl in our home.
What a close call.
She now knows that when a ‘friendship’ lowers who you are, it isn’t a friendship, you are being abused.
It is not the other woman on my top bunk, it is my little girl.
My little wounded girl, who we will love back to her bright sunshiny self.
We will love her as we always have, for this family didn’t believe, was shocked to the core that our innocent girl was put in the role of ‘other woman’.
It is abuse, no matter the age.
A man abusing a woman.
I M Perfect lady 