I M Perfect lady

Tag: life

  • Dream it differently.

    It seems like life can be broken down into two categories; those who are dream weavers about reality and those who walk right down the middle of reality.  

    I have lived both ways…and know that the dream weavers are not aware that they are not in reality or that their dream isn't real.  They have been sucked into the dream from the time they were very little and all their love and security lies within the dream…and reality is harsh and bitter, cold and uncomfortable, if leaves no room for dreams.

    Did you know that only those of us who have been abused or NOT allowed to live naturally and organically as a Spiritual Being on a human journey, build dreams. 

    Only those of us with a harsh reality build a dream above it.

    We live there NOT because we are dreamers, but because it hurts too much to live in reality.  The deeper the dream…the harsher reality.

    As a child it would have been too painful to know that my father hurt me and my mother didn't care.  I had to paint a better picture, and I did….and then I got so lost from reality, that I lived the picture instead.

    It isn't a Conscious thought, it is the natural survival mechanism…to go into your mind to escape reality.  

    I lived there for 46 years in a picture about reality and then one day a little girl spoke my truth and I heard it.  

    I heard that voice say what I recognized and it didn't match the picture I had in my mind, but it matched the feelings in my body.

    I was then catapulted out of the picture and was immediately immersed in a life that was full of strangeness and horror, but it felt completely right.

    There is no point in arguing with folks who are living their lives in the dream state, who find it too painful to step into reality…you literally can't reach them.  

    They don't want us to be part of the dream. And in fact we will awaken them to the dream they are living.  I believe their minds are quick to shut us down and toss us out, the quicker the better, for you are ruining their dreams.

    It was extremely painful and exhilarating to awaken from the dream I had created, and be doused with reality's icy cold awareness, but it clearly saved my soul.

    I believe that my picture shell was cracking prior to the big shatter; that I had begun to get disenfranchised by it all, I was no longer totally believing in the dream…yet not ready or totally comfortable about leaving the picture behind.  In fact, I had wondered how I would be able to do that which I longed for.

    I had started to doubt the church and wondered how to get out.

    I had started to resent my mother more and more.

    I had yearned to be free to just be me…a different me, a Lighter me, a me that wasn't so bogged down by others.  Yet I had no clue how to do it.  Where to begin???

    I had backed up from church and even being involved fully in family. Even if I arrived at the functions, I had begun to look at things differently.

    I was ripe for the change when the drama hit.  I was perfectly cured to popping out.  I had had it.  I was tired of the life I was living, it no longer inspired me…it instead felt completely draining.  It was hard to live as me.  I was done.  I just didn't know how to live diferently, what I wanted or even how or where to begin.

    And like the magic of the Universe and the stars all lined up.  I was ready to leave and the opportunity arose…when the truth knocked this time, I answered the door.

    It was no accident in my life, no tragedy, but a longed for escape…a doorway to the truth.

    What I didn't understand at the time, was that I was waking up in my life.

    I wasn't tired of living, of was tired of not living my truth.  My picture making energies were quickly drying up…I was exhausted.

    I wonder if depression really is losing the ability to keep a picture going?

    It seems totally and utterly implausible to believe that you can paint a pretty picture and fully and completely believe in it….but I did.

    However, once it begins to crack and fall apart, you will have to paint even harder to keep the picture going.  I literally lost all my power to create something out of nothing.  When my father's crimes came around once again…I didn't try to dream it differently.

     

  • Wishing is a train out of Reality.

    Forceful kindness is a phrase I had used to describe how some may take your power, how they keep pushing kindness to make you believe or feel something…it isn't just kindness, it is kindness with an agenda.

    Kindness that is trying to change your mind.

    Kindness that runs over your feelings.

    Kindness that sounds one way but feels completely different.

    Kindness that wants something.

    Kindness with an abusive attitude, for it is trying too hard to convince you…it is kind.

    I have been given many aspects of my mother appearing and reappearing time and time again, showing me OR rather allowing me to see that which I thought was one thing, was literally the opposite, and I am getting wiser and catching the lessons, grabbing on to the falsehood and forced kindness in order for me to 'do something'.

    The manipulation and delivery sounds so nice, empathetic, understanding, with a 'reason' behind it.

    My latest delivery came in the form of "I am going to help you"…which actually boiled down to….I am helping myself.

    My boss said she was bringing in 'help' for me after a long Monday, by the time I was ready to bundle the mail and head out on Tuesday the help turned into a person who was there to make sure I didn't go into overtime for the week.  And since it appeared that my hours would balance out, all help was removed.

    The daily struggle on very heavy package days don't matter, unless it happens to be a Friday, and it looks like I am on the verge of overtime.

    What I told her is that don't pretend to 'help' me, when all you really are focused on is your spread sheet of hours.  I understand and I get it.  Your main job is to see that we don't go over hours.  You can't be empathetic or helpful, you have to manage hours.  Just say it.  Just be forthright and say it.  Don't call it 'helping me' when you are actually helping your self.

    I truly get it and accept, that the Post Office can't offer help, it has to watch its bottom line.  I am not upset about that.

    I am upset with the way my boss tried to sell me help, when it was really for herself.

    If someone is going to help you, it will feel like help.  It didn't feel like she was helping me, but helping herself and I told her so.

    She wanted to appear, helpful and empathetic, when the Post Office doesn't allow for it.  I wasn't going to appear helped when it didn't help me.

    I believed the first night she indeed could help me.  I was relieved.  I was disappointed on the second day, when she changed the type of help she could give me.  And in the passing hours felt the help totally disappear…and felt it, and expressed it quite expressively.

    Some may challenge me and say it was being insubordinate, but what I was actually doing was calling her on her false delivery.

    I told her, "For me, please don't say you are going to do something and then not do it, make promises you can't deliver or are even capable of doing.  Don't make it seem like you are going to help me, when you can't.  I would prefer you say Nothing UNTIL you can.  If it isn't possible, I get it.  Just call it saving overtime and not help."

    I am way okay with the reality of how things are.  I am way not okay with someone playing in front of them trying to make me believe that which isn't possible.

    I understood that I too wanted to believe in help that wasn't possible.

    I own my part, my believing and wanting it…so I grabbed on.

    We both took a day and a half ride on Make Belief….and in the end I was disappointed.

    I was disappointed I believed in that which wasn't possible…a train ride out of reality and I was let down.  Let down right where I started, overwhelmed with the work at hand….wishing for help.

    Wishing is a place that isn't reality…

    Wishing is what comprised my whole childhood.

    Wishing things were different…

    It took me a whole day to get back to acceptance.

    Accepting what is…accepting that I will be overwhelmed for the next two weeks, and that no help will be coming.  I am okay, once I get back to reality and let the wishing go…

    Wishing is a train out of reality.

     

     

     

     

  • Knows you can….

    We believe that courage and fearlessness will arrive before we do something; that it is an actual muscle like thing that comes crawling into our body and boom, we now have courage.

    But courage isn't like that, nor is being fearless. 

    Courage is knowing you are in fear and shaking and trembling and feeling like a small child could push you over, and you keep going.

    Courage and strength doesn't arrive first. It actually settles into you after you faced your biggest fears, said what you thought you could never say, do what you felt was impossible to happen.  It comes After.

    Which seems like that is backwards, but courage comes afterward, for you look back at what you actually did. What you said and how you didn't die….or faint or whatever, You did it. 

    It is the act of doing what you don't feel you have the strength or the courage to do…But you do it anyway….that's when you see this psyche muscle there…courage.

    It isn't like love….it arrives after you need it.  It is like a cheerleader waiting on the other side of the river of turmoil and waiting to embrace you….it doesn't carry you across.

    I am thinking codependency carries….courage waits and cheers, beckoning you to be brave, to walk with shaky legs, to talk through tears and sobs….that is courage.

    Courage doesn't look like we may have it pictured, like it is strong and calm and wise and cool looking, and all put together.

    For me, courage was swear words and jagged sobs, it was putting up hands when my mother came to hug, after being silently away for 5 months after her husband was exposed as being a pedophile.

    Courage was saying no.

    Courage for me was walking into her home, reigning in my rage to the point of ONLY hollering and not pummeling her.  Courage was saying what I had to say to ears that were unable to hear or be empathetic.

    Courage had me walking out, knowing that she couldn't mother me…courage was mothering me myself.

    Courage was sitting on a path not knowing where it led, but going anyway.  Courage was to be without a plan and being okay.

    Courage was accepting what is, when it turned my belly into heaving sobs.

    Courage wasn't pretty or perfect, it wasn't calm and peaceful, but raw ugliness at times…that looking back were beautifully represented in their honesty.

    Courage is doing what you have never done before to get to a place you have no idea that you need to go.

    Courage is blindly living on a pinhead of time, where nothing is familiar and no one is ahead of you…it is you and the time ticking in your life.

    Courage is surrendering the pattern you have followed to strike out on your own, creating as you go; one shakey step at a time.

    Courage beckons and you say yes…in the exact condition you are in. It like God, and only accepts originality.  It only wants you just as you are in this moment of time.  You are perfectly perfect….it waits…go toward it…it is on the other side of what ever you feel is impossible…just head in and know you are not alone. Courage is watching, cheering and knows you can.

     

  • All it wants is truth.

    Last night I woke up a few times with very strong feelings between Character and the Situation.
    That most often we blame the situation rather than blame our selves and the lack or the choice of action we took in each situation.
    There seems to be this wide separation in our thought patterns that has us victims of circumstances rather than participants in our lives.
    We don't arrive with Character, but rather over time and through the valleys and mountains in our lives we begin to layer who we are by what we do.
    Oddly enough, we somehow tend to NOT believe who others are, we keep blaming the circumstance rather than the character.
    The circumstance is often times the accumulation of past events coming home to roost, it is not just a wild card that happened into our lives…
    The Universe is the perfect score keeper and it never lets us get away with anything, the 'karma' deal is right on.  We do indeed reap what we sow and the longer we put off harvesting, the bigger the crop we have to tend to when we finally get around to seeing what we planted.
    What I am here to tell you is you can't plant denial and pull up honesty.
    You can't spread seeds of bullying and come up with people who don't fear you.
    How you move in the world echoes back your own energy.  
    Each moment of today is laying the carpet of tomorrow.
    There is no vengeful God or evil Universe, there is just you tossing the ball against the wall of the Universe, you will get back what you put out.
    There are no mistakes. 
    Truth will reflect back truth.
    Deceit will conjure up relationships minus the truth.
    It all begins with you.
    You are the common denominator in all things.  The world truly does revolve around you.
    There are a billion places you can find people behaving badly but all that truly matters in your life is you.
    Victims focus on what others need to do in order for them to find peace.
    You will know you are no longer a victim when you can find peace in the midst of others behaving badly.  
    If my happiness depended upon my mother and father healing, I would be a victim of their lives.  Instead, I put my wellness in my own hands.  I looked in my own life and saw combinations of their dysfunction littered everywhere, and that is where I began.
    In each moment of time, I looked at what I was believing or thinking, and then how I acted….did they match or was I a walking contradiction like them; partly truth and partly fiction?
    Character can survive any situation if all it wants is truth.

  • Living on the Blocks.

    Week 9, The Artist Way…Julia Cameron writes,

    “We’re more comfortable being a victim of artist’s block than risking having to consistently be productive and healthy.

    “An artistic U-Turn arrives on a sudden wave of indifference. We greet our newly minted product or our delightful process with “Aw, what does it matter anyhow?  It’s just a start.  Everybody else is so much further ahead…”

    “Yes, and they will stay that way if we stop working. The point is we have traveled light-years from where we were when we were blocked. We are now on the road, and the road is scary.  We begin to be distracted by roadside attractions or detoured by the bumps.”

    And here are a few sentences from the exercises at the end of the chapter.

    “Your choice to block is a creative U-Turn – we turn back on ourselves.  Like water forced to stand still, we turn stagnant.”   Julia

    These blocks are in Life and in Art. And we use them as an excuse as to why we can’t live a better life or create art. 

    And it is only ourselves that turn us around and heads us back to our old vices and excuses or fears.  We keep turning our backs on our truths, our desires, what we love, what brings us peace, our joy…in the good energy flow. 

    I see my life as a river where others lives are rocks cropping up or interests that are not crucial to my pathway, and instead of floating on by, I stop.  I stop my own flow in life.

    We each have specific rocks that stop us and then there are bends in the river, opportunities that float by, but we are too afraid to slip into the flow…or we are so busy doing things that are not important and they go by unnoticed. 

    It is just so interesting that Artist Blocks or Blocks of Addictions keep us from creativity…and they are all our choices.

    It is up to us to stop clinging to things that don’t serve us, that keeps us from living. 

    One big boulder in my life is ‘Responsibility’ and getting my work done first. 

    I focus on cleaning up my space instead of using that time to create.  I put so many rocks ahead of my flow, that my life seems heavy and hard. 

    I never looked at it this way…even though I lived it more often than not.  In fact slipping into the flow of life and playing in the currents and relaxing and letting the river take me, without saying no…is not very common in my life. 

    Most of my life has been spent on heavy rocks and in other people’s responsibility.  Getting used to flowing in my life will take some effort and will mean turning my back on ‘work’.  Who knew that work is a blockage in your life.

    Today, my one day off, and again I am working on cleaning up our house, the sewing machine sits…however, I did make a date with my husband for later on.

    In time, I will be able to discern how much free flowing time I have had and how much I have spent on the rocks, for I will feel its heaviness and know I got lost again living on the blocks.

    "Saying No can be the ultimate self-care."  Claudia Black

     

     

  • I am Lens Free

    When you write your story on a blog you are offering up the opportunity for others to plunge themselves into your story, to come in and walk awhile in your life.

    It is amazing the types of responses you get from others when you display your life on a blog.

    Some come in and bare some of our pain, add bits of wisdom and cheer us on.  These experienced travelers lend us their strength that helps us continue forward.  These cheerleaders are priceless. 

    And the other half or maybe three fourths are out to make our truth into lies by showing us their side.

    What is a lie to one side seems to be the truth to the other.

    That is why there are two sides.

    And the truth stands alone.  However, depending upon which side you are standing on you will look upon it differently.  Very few will face the truth head on.

    What I didn’t know in the beginning is that the reader is made to explore their own lives and feel if what you say is true for them or not.

    That half of writing is reading.

    The reading part I wasn’t paying attention to, for I was the writer part.  I didn’t know how the reader would feel reading what I wrote and I never paid attention to that and still won’t.

    I am not writing for the reader’s ease or comfort or even their understanding.  I am writing for me.  What I am doing is offering a view of my online journal to all who chose to read.

    It validates my life to put it in writing, for I am in a sea of known strangers who can’t seem to understand me, and if I didn’t have this space to connect to, sometimes I would feel like I am disconnected and floating in space.

    I need this connection to anchor me to me.

    You fail to realize how much your life gets anchored by others, until there is no place to hook into. 

    In the beginning it felt like I was the only one who was seeing reality with my view.  I was looking with eyes unshielded and others had these weird lenses that contorted even simple things into complex issues.

    They looked at reality through the lenses of family and religion, and if it didn’t fit that mold, it was reconfigured.

    I took off the glasses of family and religion, setting them aside, and life took on whole different view.

    For the first time I could see life outside of the frames of religion and family.  I could see independently.

    I no longer had to make reality fit into their rules and traditions; instead life got to flow free.

    It didn't have to work for family or for the religion, it just had to be.

    It was amazing and scary and horrific.  To now see what I hadn’t seen with the lenses on.

    I can tell when people read my story with the lenses on or with the lenses off. 

    I am writing without a lens…and can’t help how others see it.

    I just know that you can change my story to say something else if you are wearing the lenses of family or the lenses of the FALC.

    It matters and it will change how you view me.

    But what doesn’t change is how I view myself, for I am lens free! 

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Dark Space of Unknowing.

    Deepak Chopra writes in The Book of Secrets about the caterpillar changing into a butterfly.

    “Outside my window in winter I can usually spy at least one chrysalis dangling from a branch.  Inside it a caterpillar has turned into a pupa that will emerge in the spring as a butterfly. We are all familiar with this metamorphosis, having witnessed it as children (or by reading Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar).  But what goes on invisibly inside the chrysalis remains deeply mysterious. The caterpillar’s organs and tissues dissolve into an amorphous, soup like state, only to reconstitute in to a structure of a butterfly’s body that bears no resemblance to a caterpillar at all.”

    “Science has no idea why metamorphosis evolved.  It is almost impossible to imagine that insects hit on it by chance – the chemical complexity of turning into a butterfly is incredible; thousands of steps are minutely interconnected.  (It’s as if you dropped off a bicycle at the shop to be repaired, and when you came back the parts had become a Gulfstream Jet.)”

    “But we do have some idea about how this delicate chain of events is linked. Two hormones, one called juvenile hormone, and the other ecdysone, regulate the process, which looks to the naked eye like the caterpillar is dissolving into soup.  These two hormones make sure the cells moving from the larva to the butterfly know where they are going and how they are to change. Some cells are told to die; others digest themselves, while others turn into eyes, antennae, and wings. This implies a fragile (and miraculous) rhythm that must remain in precise balance between creation and destruction. That rhythm, it turns out, depends on day length, which in turn depends on the earth’s rotation around the sun. Therefore, a cosmic rhythm has been intimately connected to the birth of butterflies for millions of years.”  Deepak

     

    It came to me today, that blogging the way I do with total transparency is not going to need the same things as those who blog from the cocoon.

    Writing from a cocoon hides what is going on and this is not something I am familiar with.  So I can’t be the one to say what is best for anonymous bloggers.

    But I can speak from transparency. 

    When I began writing I did so with full disclosure, it wasn’t to hide stuff, it was to shed light and to enlighten me, to find answers to who I was, as well as to leave a path for anyone who wanted to know about me.

    I wrote about the dark corners within me that I didn’t know. 

    I asked questions of the white paper and it seemed answers came if I wrote long enough.

    I never felt I had the right to have a voice and writing opened up a space for me to let it out.

    Once I got the knack of it, it seemed that the only way for me to know me was to write it out. 

    The more I wrote the more I knew and the more I knew the more I wanted to know. And slowly I began to really really know me and what I began to learn about me, I didn’t want to cover up nor did I feel the need. 

    Whether it be my mixed up mind, my flipped around thoughts and beliefs or the multiple things I did incorrectly with my backwards mind, all of it became extremely exhilarating for it all was growing a new me.  I wasn’t ashamed of who I was nor who I was becoming to be.

    It was like I was the caterpillar and I was changing and I would grieve the caterpillar parts that were dying and had to grow comfortable with the new butterfly pieces that came in their place. 

    I left my old caterpillar ways…and had to learn how to maneuver life as a butterfly. 

    What I know for sure, for me, is that I need to see me in my past, see me in my present, see what inside of me needs transformation and what needs to totally die. 

    I couldn't hide and build a butterfly me.  I had to see. 

    I would have liked there to be an etiquette book on how to navigate the rough waters of exiting a dysfunctional family and knowing how it feels and what would happen as you go from the inside of a family to the outskirts.

    How to leave abuse, is how to leave a family…

    It isn’t comfortable and there is no cocoon.  You are in the open and vulnerable for pot shots that many aim at you trying to shut you up and protect the family’s dark legacy. 

    And even more importantly, I wanted proof or evidence of my sanity.  I wanted there to be a blueprint of undoing the affects of being abused.  With so many turning away or not agreeing with me, it was a place for me to have my say.  I didn’t keep parts hidden away; I shared all of me, for there wasn’t a part of me that was too dirty or shameful for me not to see.

    It is my humble belief, if you can’t bear to see your self, you will want to remain hidden from others. But, if you have the courage to really really look at yourself and all the cracks and crevices you will find a very interesting and intriguing life. 

    You will see how you took that path or formed that opinion or learned to believe this or that.  You will discover a life that you will never ever want to cover up again and go back to live in a small dark space of unknowing. 

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • To Be Fearless.

    Inside of me resides the shadows of a very mental woman; she lurks in the background of my life.  I have worked very hard to keep her back there and not let her come roaring to the front wreaking all havoc.

     

    When my children make choices that are not my choices, or what I would like for them, she is BEGGING loudly to get involved.

     

    She would love nothing more than to toss a few choice words around, belittle, berate, and demean them.  She loves to rant and rave and direct others to do things to make her happy or feel safe or right or in control… she is the queen of all bitches.

     

    My mind gets crammed full of what her desires are, she eclipses my present moment like a very dark cloud, her wants and desires are mostly her fears and they rain down within me.

     

    I have to wrestle inside of me to shut her up.  To not weaken and let her have her way in my world, for when she does, it doesn’t come out sounding sweet nor does it fall gently upon my children.

     

    For almost 7 years now, I have fought to gain a foothold in front of her, to shut my mouth and keep her inside, to face my fears of abandonment alone, to not let escape even one sentence of hers.

     

    If she speaks, it is only to control others for her own happiness; she steals their lives and makes them her own.

     

    My hardest walk ever is to be silent, to give my viewpoint and then let go.  To release each and every person, related or not, into their lives, no matter how their choices make me feel.

     

    If my happiness is found by their choices, I am dependent upon them for my happiness.

     

    It can’t matter a bit if I am sad, devastated, lonely, or unhappy.  My state of being is about me, not them.

     

    If they make choices with a gauge on how it makes me feel, I am teaching them to be a co-dependent, and that their choices should NOT hurt others or make others feel bad.

     

    That is how I raised my children until they were in their teens, and now I am teaching them the opposite. To do what they want, no matter how it makes me feel.

     

    Instead their decisions have to be what they want and they are to be gauged by their own happiness not mine.

     

    And the way I am teaching this is to let them make choices that fill me with fear, trepidation, anxiety, loss, etc.  I have to let them learn who people are by themselves.  I am unable to forbid them; I have to let them go.

     

    My childhood home reflected the ways of the church, that our lives were not our own to live.  Our lives had to please and conform to another’s happiness or fall into the category of what a good Christian does and what a good child does.

     

     

    When I sit with the thoughts still about how many are unable to move independently, I greatly understand, for I too used to live this way.  Frozen unable to move for the fear of wrath to go against the mainstream of how we were raised.

     

    Unable to go against them for we are seen as bad and we fear that if we are bad enough, they will push us out and away.

     

    How binding to live this way. To be too afraid to move knowing it is going against the ideals of people in charge.

     

    As you sit, you teach your children to sit.

    As you act to please others, you teach your children to give up their lives.

     

    I know how hard it is to find a voice and use it that doesn’t match what others want or need. 

     

    But the only way I began to live free of the mental woman inside of me was to go against all that I was raised to be.

     

    To say and do things that make others unhappy for my own peace of mind, for doing what was right for me.

    To speak of things I used to be silent about.

     

    It wasn’t that I wasn’t afraid.  I was terrified, but I did it anyway.  Being fearless is knowing you are afraid, but doing it anyway.

     

    As I see so many silently sitting and knowing…I wonder when they will decide independently, that now is the time to be fearless.

     

  • A dream for me.

    Some days are filled with contrasts that keep you from mulling anything, you go from event to situation to more incoming information, past, present and future…

    This ride at times seems to be moving at super fast speeds, going so quick it is hard to process one thing before the next hits. That was yesterday.

    I had a mission to talk to the Detective to help get a ball rolling, but he will not play catch with me.  I sit, holding my ball…while life seems to be passing so quickly.  Another week has gone by and he appears too busy to return my call.

    To him I may be more work or I am not as important as what he has going on…however he knows not what I know.  I feel myself bumping into a silent wall of rebuff.

    The information grows like a weed out of control and I am losing my faith or trust that even when alerted he will be unable to pull or eradicate this weed that is poisoning the innocent…it seems that the garden is getting overrun while no one is looking.

    I have to have faith that it is all perfectly perfect, that it is going at the pace it should, even if not my speed.

    While I can’t gain his attention, I seem to forever bump into people who I feel are feeding the weed.  It seems so exasperating, like a poor cosmic joke, to see them everywhere and the Detective is nowhere to be found.

    Oh and the normalcy is worn like a costume.

    Letting all that go, I attended a speech given by the Author of the book, The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls.  She lived her first 17 years in abject poverty, and went on to become a journalist living on Park Avenue in New York City, while her parents remained homeless.

    She spoke to the freshman class at Michigan Tech, and a few of us from off the street, eager to hear her speak.

    Her rough life taught her many lessons you can’t learn on easy street, and in writing it forced her to be with the reality of her life.  She learned about her self and respected herself more for telling her truth, than when she was hiding it from people around her.

    What I found that was different between us, is that as a child she could not hide her ‘shameful’ life situation.  In her town everyone knew they were the poorest family, her clothes and body odor too obvious to hide, and so she wore her label everywhere and was treated appallingly in high school.

    Her very dysfunctional poor lifestyle was hard to not see. 

    And in my case, my outward appearance wasn’t too bad, poor but we did have running water and flushing toilets, although no shower until I was in middle school…just a sauna lit twice a week.  And there was a dirt-poor girl who lived less than a mile from us, who was poorer.  A two room shack more or less…

    Anyway, Jeanette could not hide what shamed her, and I didn’t know the shame that followed me where every I went, I was ‘HIS daughter’ A story was spoken when I left the room or before I arrived, unbeknownst to me.

    I have often wondered what my childhood would have been like had I known that my father was a pedophile, how would I have walked into places and out of them, knowing who I truly was?

    I know that I was always treated like the daughter of a pedophile, yet I was spared because I didn’t know.  I felt I was just a girl from a poor large apostolic family.  I didn’t know that underneath me was incest, abuse…

    I walked with confidence and not with mortifying shame.

    The mortifying shame came when I was 46.  And then I knew what the people of the church knew and yet not one approached me even then.  But, then they started to overtly treat me like a pariah.

    It seemed odd to me that once my truth was out they then began to treat me differently.  It still puzzles me…we all know the truth and now they keep me at arms length, they turned down isles to escape me…

    The only thing changed is I openly walked my truth…and they now did not know what to do or how to talk to me.

    Isn’t it interesting that it was easier to be with me when I was not walking my truth, than it was for them when I was?

    Just yesterday it came to me that it is much easier to be with people who are walking step by step with their truth, than to be with folks who want to tuck a huge part of their lives under a rug.  I can’t be with a half person.

    So, Jeanette and I are the same, we both had rough childhoods, the difference is she knew it and I did not.

    Her father carried a dream of one day building them a glass castle, and she believed in his dream.

    My father never had a dream for me.

     

     

  • Without your truths.

    I sat with my old self yesterday and caught a glimpse of how I used to be, how if it weren’t for the truth exploding into our family, where I too would be caught.

     

    I saw her living in two worlds, locking up her truth before entering each side, so a part of her was always in the closet.

     

    And to me the part that gets locked away is the truth, for there will be a price to pay to let it out.  And the price is very large…huge in some cases, your whole family is on the line, if the truth slips out of the closet.

     

    She continues to walk into a church she no longer believes in, to keep her family believing she is there. And her family needs her to arrive so they too can pretend she is still the same girl.

     

    She knows if she doesn’t arrive, if she speaks her truth, her whole world will change.

     

    As I left her yesterday, a song was playing on the radio, and the words filled my jeep, “I am not ready to say good-bye…”

     

    In life we are often asked to pick between staying and not being truthful or leaving with the truth and all it curtails.

     

    When you are raised and believe in a religion that is based on pretending and false facts, and your whole world is comprised of this, you will lose your whole world.

     

    While greeting the truth, you have to say good-bye to your pretend family.  I say pretend, for you will know them by how they respond to your truth, until then, it is all pretend.

     

    In my family of origin, it was built primarily on false facts, the façade and truth hid in the closet.  All then acted, pretending there was no such storage for all the sins she blessed away.

     

    It wasn’t until one sin fell out that the rest came tumbling after and I was overrun with truth.

     

    I am not certain how the rest could just push it all back in and go on pretending, but they did and have.  Their capacity for hiding is much larger than mine. 

     

    While it may seem that they have once again locked the door, I believe that we all get to face our truths some day.

     

    I can’ t know when, nor can I force you to open your door and let them out, to live with them in harmony.

     

    Our truths don’t disappear, just because we fail to look upon them, instead what happens is you live a life without them, a pretend life.

     

    You get to have a pretend father and mother.

    You can have pretend sisters and brothers.

    You then get pretend security of being surrounded by folks who care.

     

    As I found out, if you open your closet of truth, your pretend family disappears.

     

    Most are not willing to say good-bye to pretend…while I thought they did not want to face the truth.  It isn’t the truth they fear, but the façade of pretend. They truly don’t want to know it is made of up fakeness.

     

    It is better to live in the comfort of fakeness than to live alone with your truth.

    Yet who are you without your truths?

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    “Every exit is an entrance somewhere else. “

    ~Tom Stoppard