I M Perfect lady

Tag: legacy

  • Repeat that action

    Reconcilation: Healing the Inner Child by Thich Nhat Hanh

    Walking with Our Ancestors

    "When we were only four years old, we probaby thought; I'm only a four year old child, a son or daughter, a little brother or sister.  But in fact, we were already a mother, already a father. All past and future generations were there in our body.  When we take a step on the green grass of spring, we walk in such a way that allows all our ancestors to take a step with us.  The peace, joy and freedom in each step will penetrate each generation of our ancestors and descendants.  We walk with the energy of mindfulness, and with each step we see countless generations of ancestors and descendants walking with us."

    "When we take a breath, we are light, calm, at ease. We breathe in such a way that all generations of ancestors and descendants are breathing with us.  Only then are we breathing according to the highest teachings. We just need a little mindfulness, a little concentration, and then we can look deeply and see. At first we can use the method of visualization to see all our ancestors making a step with us. Gradually we don't need to visualize any more. With each step we take, we see it is the step of all people in the past and future."

    "When we are cooking a dish that we learne to make from our mother or father, a dish that has been handed down through generations of our family, we should look at our hands and smile because these hands are the hands of our grandmother. Those who have made this dish are making this dish now. When we're in the kitchen cooking we can be completely mindful; we don't have to go into a meditation hall to practice this."

    "In the past, did your grandfather play volleyball?  Did your grandmother go jogging every day?  Did she have the opportunity to practice dwelling in the present moment while she was walking or running?  When we are running we should allow our grandmother to run in us.  Your grandmother is in each cell of your body. You carry your ancestors in you when you're jogging, when you're doing walking meditation and when you're realizing the practice of dwelling happily in the present moment.  Maybe previous generations didn't ahve the opportunity to practice like this.  Now, whether we're practicing walking, running, or breathing mindfullly, we have the opportunity to bring happiness and joy to countless generations of ancestors."

    "When we agonize over questions like, Who am I? Where do I come from? Was I wanted? What is the meaning of Life? we suffer because we're caught in the idea of a separate self.  But if we look deeply, we can practice no-self. This is the realizationt that we're not a separate self, we're connected to our ancestors and to all living and non living beings."

    "Western psychotherapy aims at helping create a self that is stable and wholesome. But because psychotherapy in the West is still caught in the idea of self, it can bring about only a little transformation and a little healing; it can't go very far.  As long as we are caught in the idea of a separate self, ignorance is still in us. When we see the intimate relationship between what is self and what is not self, ignorance is healed and suffering, anger, jealousy and fear disappear.  If we can practice no-self, we'll be able to go beyond the questions that make people suffer so much."

    "We are a continuation of the stream of life. Maybe our parents weren't able to appreciate us but our grandparents and our ancestors wanted us to come to life. The truth is that our grandparents, our ancestors always wanted us to be their continuation.  If we can know this, we will not suffer so much because of our parent's behavior.  Sometimes our parents are full of love and sometimes they are full of anger. This love and anger comes not only from them, but from all previous generations. When we can see this we no longer blame our parents for our suffering."

    Habit Energy

    The purpose of meditation is to look at something deeply and see its roots. Whatever kind of action we take, if we look deeply into it we'll be able to recognize the seed of that action. That seed may come from our ancestors. Whatever action we take, our ancestors are taking it at the same time with us.  So father, grandfather, and great-grandfather are doing it with you; mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother are doing it with you.  Our ancestors are there in every cell of our body.  There are seeds that are planted during your lifetime but there are also seeds that were planted before you manifested as this body."

    "Sometimes we act without intention, but that is also action.  "Habit Energy" is pushing us; it pushes us to do things without our being aware. Sometimes we do something without knowing we're doing it. Even when we don't want to do something, we still do it.  Sometimes we say, "I didn't want to do it, but it's stronger than me, it pushed me." So that is a seed, a habit energy that may have come from many generations in the past."

    "We have inherited a lot.  With mindfulness, we can become aware of the habit energy that has been passed down to us. We might see that our parents or grandparents wer also very weak in ways similar to us.  We can be aware without judgment that our negative habits come from these ancestral roots.  We can smile at our shortcomings at our habit energy. With awareness, we have a choice; we can act another way. We can end the cycle of suffering right now."

    "Perhaps in the past when we've noticed ourselves doing something unintentional, something we may have inherited and we've blamed ourselves.  We saw ourselves as an individual isolated self, full of shortcomings. But with awareness, we can begin to transform and let go of these habit energies."

    "With the practice of mindfulness, we recognize that a habitual action has taken place. This is the first awareness that mindfulness brings.  Then, if we're interested mindfulness and concentration help us look and find the root of our action.  That action may have been inspired by something that happened yesterday, or it may be three hundred years old and have roots in one of our ancestors.  Once we become aware of our actions, we can decide whether or not it's beneficial and, if it's not we can decide not to repeat that action. If we're aware of the habit energies in us and can become more intentional in our thoughts, speech, and actions, then we can transform not only ourselves, but also our ancestors who planted the seeds. We are practicing for all our ancestors and descendants not just for ourselves; we're practicing for the whole world."

    "When we're able to smile at a provocation, we can be aware of our ability, appreciate it and continue in this way.  If we're able to do that, it means our ancestors are also able to smile at what is provoking them.  If one person keeps calm and smiles at a provocation, the whole world will have a better chance for peace.  The key is to be aware of what our actions are. Our mindfulness will help us understand where our actions are coming from."  Thich Nhat Hanh

    I truly felt the energies of my sisters of many generations back as well as the future sisters….as I changed my habit energies.  They are with us and are cheering us on as we try to achieve what their generatons were not able to do.  

    You never walk alone…for in your cells is the history of habits and if you are aware, than you will intentionally pass on habits. 

    Awareness brings intentions.  

    Awareness also carries the responsibility to respond with mindfulness.

    Some of us carry the seeds of being aware…it seems to me, you either know or you don't know.

    And once you know, you can't not know.

    Once you can see the root system and how it grows, you then have the choice to continue to plant what is growing in your family or not.

    In my family, I was able to clearly see the root system of abuse, of how it came to be, and what continued it to flourish.  What habit energies watered it.

    I then had the opportunity to act with intention…I had a choice to either continue knowingly with abuse or decide not to repeat that action.

     

  • Save your soul.

    The biggest hurdle in stopping abuse is stopping being a part of the family it is within. How easy to report abuse in another family but where it actually counts is when you see it and respond in kind within your own.

     

    To stop treating a father as a dad and see his actions of being a pedophile and putting him away and out of reach of other little girls.  My family failed at this big time.

     

    The authorities brought him to court, but the family set him free.

     

    I wish this was an anomaly but sadly, most will defend the father and not even let it get as far as ours did.

     

    There is this thing called, “Unconditional Love” that keeps this from happening, and another thing called, “Forgiveness of Sins” that does as well.

     

    We all think that the biggest thing we can do is report pedophiles to the authorities, but that is only a small portion of the job.

     

    The biggest deal is to take a family and rip it apart seeing who really does what, what are they doing, bringing and being, to bring in consciousness where before blindness lived.

     

    The key components a pedophile needs the most is your undying faith in them, your unconditional love and your willingness to continue to bless away his bad behaviors…for you to be relentless in this and NEVER changing.

     

    What most fail to realize it aren’t the authorities that are to blame but the families of these perpetrators.  Well, I believe the law of the land needs a big wake up call and to see that they are allowing dysfunctional families to call the shots…

     

    For as it stands now they are asking blind people to see and act clearly.

     

    Most often, and in my case it is true, that I wasn’t the first one abused, but rather just one of a long line of generations worth.

     

    This was normal behavior.  A mother who was unable to discern abuse for she herself never healed from her own abuse.  Her abused self worth and image attracted a man who operated at the same level.

     

    I am finding out that my brother and I are very much changelings within our family’s heritage, that every now and then one comes along and switches the family traditions, but in order to do so, you leave the family.

     

    What most want is to stop abuse, but what few will do is stop being part of a family.

     

    You will have to go against generations of folks, relatives in order to stop abuse.

     

    It isn’t a simple task, for 99% of the abuse is from someone you know and trust and of the 99%, 50% is from someone who is your blood relative.

     

    It is like turning against your own self…and is.

    You will have to take all you have ever known and begin yet again.

     

    I get so incensed with folks who tell me…I would never or I don’t stand with abuse, while they are still having relationships with people who abuse.

     

    It is insanity.  You are being just as abusive to the child by having a relationship with the person who hurts little children.  The child sees who you are aligned with and KNOWS you are not a safe person or one to help them.

     

    This matter is far more complex than it appears.

     

    Abuse is an infection that has spread through generations of families and will continue on unless you walk away. 

     

    You have to leave the infection called abuse… IT will not leave you.

     

    It will not one day change from hurtful abuse to wonderful love, stop pretending time will heal and change things.

     

    You have to leave it in order to be free of it…and then you have separated your self or isolated the infection to just you and then the real work starts.

     

    You have to see it in all your thoughts and beliefs and have to start working on each one to right it.

     

    To change your old definition of unconditional love to love that is free of abusive effects.

     

    You have to change your mind about a million things.

    You have to be willing to not know your self or those you ‘loved’.

     

    You have to be willing to walk a walk against family and ‘loved’ ones.

     

    I walked this walk…and while it was extremely tough, it is well worth the effort. 

     

    You will not walk alone; you will have the guidance of the Universe if you are a seeker of the truth.

     

    You will be changing your very DNA and the legacy you were born into.

     

    I will help anyone who has been chosen to walk this walk.

     

    So, go ahead and report, but mostly start the dialogue in how far would you go to stop abuse, would you go the whole way, would you forsake the world to save your soul?

     

  • Grace and Courage

    As Alice Miller’s book comes to a close, she encapsulates her thoughts.

    “In this book (The Body Never Lies) I express hope that , as psychological knowledge grows, the power of the Fourth Commandment will wane in favor of the appropriate respect for the vital biological needs of the body, including truth, loyalty to oneself and to one’s perceptions, feelings and insights. If I seek genuine expressions of my feelings in a genuine form of communication, everything that was built on lies and insincerity will fall away from me. Then I will no longer strive for a relationship in which I pretend to have feelings that I do not have, or suppress others that I do have. Love that excludes honesty does not deserve the name of love.

    The following points may serve to sum up these ideas.

    1. The “love” of formerly abused children for their parents is not love. It is an attachment fraught with expectations, illusions, and denials, and it exacts a high price from all those involved in it.

    2. The price of this attachment is paid primarily by the next generation of children, who grow up in a spirit of mendacity because their parents automatically inflict on them the thins they believe “did them good.” Young parents themselves also frequently pay for their denial with serious damage to their health because their “gratitude” stands in contradiction to the knowledge stored in their bodies.

    3. The frequent failure of therapy can be explained by the fact that most therapists are themselves caught up in the snare of traditional morality and attempt to drag their clients into the same kind of captivity because it is all they know. As soon as clients start to feel and become capable of roundly condemning the deeds, say, of an incestuous father, therapists will probably be assailed by fear of punishment at the hands of their own parents if they should dare to look their own truth in the face and express it for what it is. How else can we explain the fact that forgiveness is declared to be an instrument of healing? Therapists frequently propose this to reassure themselves, just as the parents did. But because it sounds very familiar to the messages communicated to them in childhood by their parents, albeit expressed in a more friendly way, some patients may need some time to see through the pedagogic angle of it. And even once they finally have recognized it, they can hardly leave their therapist, especially if a new toxic attachment has already formed, if for them, the therapist has become like a mother who has helped them to a new birth (because in this new relationship they have started to feel). So they may continue to expect salvation from the therapist instead of listening to their body and accepting the aid it signals represent.

    4. Once clients, accompanied by an enlightened witness, have lived through and understood their fear of their parents (or parental figures), they can gradually start to break off destructive attachments. The positive reaction of the body will not be long in coming: its communications will become more and more and more comprehensible; it will cease to express itself in mysterious symptoms. Then clients will realize that their therapists have deceived them (frequently involuntarily) because forgiveness actually prevents the formation of scar tissue over the old wound, not to speak of complete recovery. And it can never dispel the compulsion to repeat the same pattern over and over again. This is something we can all find out from our own experience.

    “In The Body Never Lies, I have tried to show that some widely held views have long since exploded by scientific research. Among them are the convictions that forgiveness has a salutary effect, that a commandment can produce genuine love, and that feigning feelings that we do not have is compatible with the demand for honesty. But my criticism of such misleading ideas is by not means to be equated with a refusal to recognize any moral standards or with a wholesale rejection of morality.”

    “On the contrary, Precisely because I staunchly uphold certain values – such as integrity, awareness, responsibility, or loyalty to oneself – I have difficulty with the denial of truths that I consider self-evident and have in fact been empirically substantiated.”

    “Inability to face up to the sufferings undergone in childhood can be observed both in the form of religious obedience and in cynicism, irony, and other forms of self-alienation frequently masquerading as philosophy or literature. But ultimately the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, nicotine, or medicine, it usually has the last word, because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind, particularly if the mind has been trained to function as an alienated self. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality.” Alice Miller

    What I find so affirming is are the major factors that Alice believes will help a person heal from abuse is what I discovered as well…

    Honoring thy Mother and thy Father…is no longer valid when they don’t honor you. This is a two way road and that love without honesty isn’t love.

    Secondly, the forgiveness to keep them ‘sin’ free…will not put scar tissue on our wound; it will not help heal us at all. In fact, we eventually will hurt our children, for we are still unhealed and hurt.

    From what I am hearing in my old church based upon the premise of forgiveness, this is self evident. If forgiveness worked, it would have stopped a long time ago. But when you hear that the grandparent was a perpetrator, the parent was perpetrator and now a child is, Forgiveness doesn’t stop abuse!

    And I love how she uses the body as a gauge for our barometer to our honesty. Your body simply does not know how to lie, it just responds in kind to the climate in which it is forced to live.

    How easily our world troubles could be solved if we all were brave enough to speak our truth and walk behind it with grace and courage…

    IMG_6085

  • A New Legacy to Begin.

    “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
    Soren Kierkegaard

    I did yoga today, only the second time this week, and I felt the stiffening up of my body, the tight joints and the way I seemed to have drifted away from the presence of me.

    I fall quickly into a world that has little of me in it…for without taking the time each day, I slip away unnoticed.

    My body pays the price; my essence gets left in the background and to the forefront arrives all kinds of reasons to leave it there.

    My weakening resolve plays with any lazy excuse and before I know it a week has passed and I have not spent any time with me just for me.

    What came to me in yoga today (which is another reason to do yoga, great insights) is that we are greeted into the world and then ‘told’ or highly suggested how this world operates and are then programmed to fit in. We learn life from the eyes and perceptions and actions of our parents.

    Imagine instead if we were left to explore on our own, to see freely and build ourselves from the inside out?

    Instead our insides desires and passions, questions and interests are put aside due to the ‘knowledge’ our parents have about life.

    Instead of us gulping up and witnessing the fresh look at life when babies arrive, we stifle it and bend it and hurt it so that the child’s view of life matches our own.

    How backwards and how growth stunting this is to take new fresh energy and make it look old and stiff.

    On my mail route I deliver mail to what we would call ultra conservative families, where the woman are dressed as they did on the wagon trails out west, bonnets and long flowing calico dresses.

    As this bonnet-wearing woman answers her door, there are children of each age at her legs, and I am amazed that she has gone along with this dress code and submissively is led to live as they did 100 years ago…yet what I know is that each generation before refused changes, refused to see progress and actually applauds the legacy that has held strong regardless of progress all around them.

    The youngest ones smile freer, the bit older ones look in awe but with a tinge of fear as they hang back, but the littlest ones meet your eyes and smile wildly for they react naturally untaught.

    Along the route are various degrees of ultra conservatives and what I see the most is the absence of children being children, for they are like young adults, doing adult jobs with adult responsibility.

    In Alice Miller’s books, her main trust is the lost child, how adults greet it with all their issues and steal away the innocence, the lack of pure enthusiasm, love, peace and joy, and fill it up with all things opposite.

    As I completed my yoga, I thought what most of us are craving and thirsty for is the freedom and innocence of babies, to be able to be set free from our parents legacy, to give back our ‘inheritance’ and go it alone.

    Imagine a world of grown up newborns…all living life from what they feel and experience instead of what is acceptable by their parents.

    The parents are our biggest detriment to society and yet they can also be the biggest factors in change…for by changing my attitude and by me seeing my children, my children will see theirs.

    The chain has to be broken in order for it to be fixed.

    You can’t fix things at the same level they were created at, says the wise man Einstein, and I agree.

    I told my daughter yesterday, I had to leave my family in order for the abuse to stop; I had to leave my family in order to save my children. I had to do what was best for the child, not the legacy of the family

    That old legacy had to end in order for a new legacy to begin.

  • 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.

  • Holistically I see me.

    I had images of myself yesterday, the woman I had become from being left untreated in abuse. How backwards I viewed life, myself and how I treated others was indicative coming from whence I came.

    Today while trying to write out the differences between living from love and living from fear, I stumbled upon a sentence that said, “Untreated abuse is abuse that isn’t seen”.

    Imagine all it takes to treat abuse is to see it.

    Just see it.

    I was able to crawl to the surface by one child echoing what I had felt about my father, she saw what I saw; we both saw or felt abuse.

    I am not sure how her treatment went from that point on, for when they treated her monster as a father, she was left confused. I lived in that confusion for 46 years.

    I find great peace in knowing that treatment for a child is seeing the abuse and acting in kind.

    All your actions from that day forth have to be indicative of dealing with a monster not a dad.

    I know, from my own Monster experience, that the key in killing what ruled me was to see it.

    To see the total make up of this monster, to see the triggers, the cause and the affect, to gain control over the monster that lived within me.

    This monster was created from Untreated abuse.

    Imagine.

    The word Holistic came to mind…and I looked up the meaning.

    1. analyzing whole system of beliefs: characterized by the view that a whole system of beliefs must be analyzed rather than simply its individual components
    2. considering all factors when treating illness: taking into account all of somebody’s physical, mental, and social conditions in the treatment of illness.

    When folks talk about holistic treatments for illness, they usually speak of natural substances to treat the affects, but rarely look at what the cause was.

    Holistic to me is to look at the whole person, to see the whole view of where they traveled and whom they traveled with, what they were taught and how that fits into reality.

    I am thinking that just like religion is learning about God and Spirituality is experiencing God, there is an equal space between trying to apply natural remedies upon an unnatural life.

    An unnatural life for me would be to live like I was never abused. A more natural life would be to live as an abused girl. And the holistic approach is to see all the aspects of abuse and to feel that there was no part of my life that it didn’t touch, it isn’t just a mole in my life, but my life.

    I love that I know two things now, that seeing abuse is treatment and to see all points of my life, is living holistically.

    I grew naturally into an unnatural person in the land of abuse.
    I was born right side up and was flipped and then tried to act normal from an unnormal place.

    Holistically I see me.

    IMG_5627

    This tree and me are one…I have such great love and compassion for how it grew and stands tall with its roots showing!

  • Meant to be.

    Motherhood begins in childhood, and womanhood starts there as well. The essence of who we are as a woman will directly relate to what kind of mother we are.

    There is no separation between woman and mother; the two are one.

    We don’t leave behind who we are as we take on the responsibility of a child, we simply add this to our ongoing relationships that are already in place.

    A child joins your relationships and will emulate them as he begins to create his own, he watches how you treat yourself and how you allow others to treat you, and it is from there that he learns self-care.

    My motherhood path began with me being a valiant co-dependent, a people pleaser and a whore for love and peace, there was very little of my life that was solely for me, most of it I lived for the benefit of others.

    All my decisions and choices were linked to someone’s happiness or love, I made choices based on whether I would lose their approval or not.

    When I stopped seeking approval and instead began living inside out doing what I loved, I began seeing a Me emerge, a separated unique individual, a self.

    As I grew into being more me, I no longer needed others to support me, and it set them all free to be them selves.

    My children were set free when I set myself free.

    My children’s lives returned to them and they too are now free to be what they want to be from the inside out.

    I am there to guide them to show they the lay of the land, but at the end of the day, they get to decide their fate depending upon the choices they make.

    It isn’t my life it is theirs.

    The freedom you give comes with self responsibility and that is what I believe the goal of each parent is, to make them ownership of their lives.

    To raise them to see the consequences from the choices they make, and to allow them to sit in the consequence is the learning of life.

    How we deal with all facets of life is how they learn to deal.

    How authentic we are, how loyal to self we are, where our integrity lies, all will be reflected back to us in our children’s lives.

    Mostly what we fail to notice is that our children’s lives will be lived as we live today, not our potential or what we plan to do, but as we do today.

    To raise independent children, be independent.
    To raise children who love themselves, love yourself.
    Who you are today is the pattern your child will follow, our footsteps are leading them into a life we have.

    We can’t do nothing and hope our children learn from our mistakes, we have to undo our mistakes.

    There are a few, a slight few, changelings of this rule, they are the exceptions not the rule, that will strike out on their own and redefine themselves leaving behind a family, I know this happens for I was one.

    I changed the family legacy by leaving instead of staying in the cycle of abuse/dysfunction and co-dependency; I had to walk out to save my self.
    Time will tell as my young adult children leave our home and set out on their own making choices, was there enough time spent with me to learn a new way of being or were their formative years to tightly ingrained.

    I sit here today aware that the woman who I was and the woman who I became, mothered the same children.

    How this will affect them remains to be seen, what pattern will they follow, how deeply were they affected by their formative years and how much of an impact has my freedom made?

    What I know for sure is that the more I remain honest with myself, the more I love myself, the brighter the second pattern is seen.

    To be the best mother ever is to be the best you can be with your self.

    Loving yourself enough to say no when you mean it.
    Loving you enough to put up boundaries to keep hurt out.
    Loving you to speak your truth always.
    Loving your self as you find your self in this moment, knowing you are a work in progress and be willing to do what it takes in each moment to stand with your self.

    You will then mother a child of strong courage to be who they were meant to be.

  • You Break the Chain

    Grand Traverse Women Magazine was asking about articles on Motherhood, and immediately I felt that I had a unique perspective in how my mothering changed as I unraveled my life of abuse.

    It is like my children had two different mothers without going through a divorce, the changes in how I mothered are totally opposite.

    The woman in motherhood is the key component, how she is built and operates, is how she will mother.

    Who I was as a woman is where I began mothering from and I brought to mothering, the skills I learned from my mother, a legacy that flows into us like breath.

    Mothering doesn’t change us; we bring to the child who we are.

    All of our past lands upon the child in the way we relate to them and how we expect them to relate to us, we began building a relationship.

    A relationship of dysfunction or one with healthy boundaries, and it all depends upon the adult.

    Whether this is motherhood or fatherhood, the adult is the operator of the relationship and how they conduct themselves is how healthy or unhealthy the child will grow.

    My father was a pedophile and I one of his victims. My mother stayed married to this man for 49 years, this is the pattern I had to follow.

    I mothered as she did, until at 46, I found out that my childhood of no memories was due to the fact I was abused, I then had to re-look at who I was and how I lived.

    An adult woman of abuse is very co-dependent, she expects her children to make her shine, to make her happy to live for her.
    A woman who is clear and separated from abuse knows her children are free to live and be themselves, and will monitor but not control their lives.

    The dysfunctional co-dependent way of mothering is hell to do and tragically damages children to the extent that they don’t know how to live a life separated from others, they are groomed to be parasites.

    Living off of what makes others happy.

    My children, all four, were set free the moment I knew I was abused and that I had serious work to do on getting me back to ‘normal’.

    I allowed them to be themselves and we worked on separating them from me and my demands and my wishes and my dreams.

    As I separated myself from my mother I then could allow my children to be separate from me.

    Mothering is to nurture and to love and respect WHO they are and not hijack their lives to become arm candy and self-esteem boosters.

    My children were an extension of me, not individuals.

    The more I became an individual the more I could allow them to be individuals too.

    Motherhood to me now isn’t so scary, for I would now allow them to enter onto this planet as wonderful curious loving souls and let them explore and learn to be who they were meant to be.

    My children experienced two kinds of mothers within one woman; the changes in our home are extreme.

    My rages and violent screaming rampages have disappeared and in its place a woman who seeks to find a peaceful solution, a way to co-habitat that honors all who live here.

    Motherhood is only as happy as our childhood…the legacy will repeat itself unless and until you break the chain.

  • My next move.

    As I walked along these past six years, I only ever had two choices, not three, not four but two, and I could only carry forward one.

    Just one, not two, only one!

    Two would have grown me into a multi personality.

    There would have been two aspects of me, two types of me, two sides of me, a multiple me.

    Each side leading totally different lives sailing between and over boundaries like mixing colored water from glass to glass, until I would have been colored murky, muddy undetectable, where you would not know who is the real me.

    This murky colored water is where I believe I sorted myself out from, I had to re-visit each relationship and see who the real me was.

    To see where I moved from glass to glass not paying attention to how it colored me.

    In each glass I had to see what it required of me to swim there, what side of me shone in that space and what side of me lay in the dark?

    It was literally like running around holding up the old side and the reality side looking for a match, seeing what had integrity that could stand test of truth.

    Time and time again, I was surprised and horrified that most of my life was for the darker side, the side of me that came forth from abuse.

    There was very little in my world that was the real deal.

    Those things left standing are few but precious.

    And it is my belief I will grow from here, gain from here, thrive from here, for I was dying in the murky darkness, unable to know me, find me, see me, be me.

    This personal that lived in the murkiness shone in other’s lives and dimmed in my own.

    Now I am a like a dim light bulb, a faint teeny glow to them, but very colorful and bright inside.

    I see my daughter heading into the murky waters, trying to blend herself in both glasses, trying to appease the truth and the dark, the love and the fear, I see how I lost myself as I watch her go.

    What do I say? Do I tell her to stay out of our glass so she is not confused, so she is just one way to her self?

    What did I need to hear back then?

    What was the key that would have stopped me from losing myself in both worlds?

    Is there a shorter path than what I took?

    A less painful one?

    As she loses her self in like/love she doesn’t see the murky waters swallowing her like quick sand…

    But I do. I see her going in where I just left.

    What I find deeply disturbing about all of this, is that while my mother didn’t seem me slip into the quick sand I do, I see her going deeper and deeper. It seems unfair for me to watch this play out.

    To see the innocence blend with deceit, lies, until all that is left standing is this murky sense of self, this dim light.

    Why do I need to see this?

    What is my lesson yet again?

    To see the power and the lack of control, the submissiveness, the equal partnership between abuser and abusee?

    Is it more right to see two folks dancing in the quagmire?

    Will they save themselves while tossing more dirt upon each other?

    Who will save them from themselves?

    It seems in my murkiness, one day I saw the whole scene, the whole dreadful scene of filth and dirt, the lies and the deceit, is that what flips you out?

    Do you have to go in and swim, taste and feel the darkness; you can’t know it from the shore?

    It is like just curing yourself from cancer and turning around and seeing all you tossed off has landed on your child.

    I am just not sure what my next move is.

    “When in doubt, don’t.” Don’t move, don’t speak, don’t act. Just don’t.
    Again, great Universe this is up to you…let me know my next move.

  • Rotting Tree

    We teach people how to treat us, we send out signals as to what is okay and what is not, we literally are teaching the friends and folks we want to hang with.

    They don’t know our boundaries we have to show them.

    When you do that, I tend to move away.

    When you your words and actions don’t match, I learn that you don’t follow what you say, I honor that.

    If I give you the freedom to act with your free will, than I get to react with mine.

    It isn’t a lopsided game of only one having more power; we each get our own set of power tools.

    My husband would teach our children a new thing, like putting on a new roof, and tell them, you have a new talent in our toolbox.

    This toolbox is yours; it is something that you carry with you where ever you go, a skill that makes you more self-sufficient.

    They also have another tool box, a self esteem or self worth tool box, and I wonder what skills and tools I gave them to erect boundaries, set limits, uphold values or define values, be ruled by morals, just what is in their own box when they leave this family.

    Will my values be theirs and should they be?

    Will our morals match?

    Is it possible that the apple does fall far from the tree and roll away?

    If you have done all you can do, if the fruit is ripe to fall, do you have any say as to where it goes and how it grows?

    Is there only so far a parent can take them and the rest they do on their own?

    Experience being their secondary teacher, do they travel onward being led by an inner feeling no matter the source?

    Is it possible that you can build the perfect emotional toolbox, one that resembles reality and truth, and they can kick it aside and set out on their own unlearning all of that?

    A rebel with a cause.

    The cause of doing it my way…
    While I concentrated on healing my limb of the family tree, I may have overlooked the fruits growing on the limb, to see the color changing…to see a new fruit growing.

    In reality I am seeing an orange from an apple tree.

    As she clings to this whole new lifestyle she leaves behind her family tree, just as I left mine.

    She doesn’t want to have to choose, but I am thinking it is pretty hard to mesh the two lives, the two selves, the old and the new into a new one…without see what truly is.

    You have to let go of who you are to become what you wish to be…

    In order to become a whole me, I had to leave the rotting tree…