I M Perfect lady

Tag: loveless

  • When She Writes It.

    I am at work, with a racking cough, aching bones and going through piles of mail, and come across my name and my mother's handwriting.  

    I put it in my slot. 

    What now, I wonder, what now…?  The added weight of the letter works on me as I continue to toss the mail.

    As I am bundling the mail to take on the route, I put mine in my purse, in case I decide I need to know what she has to say somewhere along my route.  I don't.  I feel the weight without even reading the words.

    I listen to a novel, moving along box to box, road to road, package to package….time passes, and she comes and goes along the route and I don't read it until I turn on my road.

    These words are spread out on stationary sheet, blue snowflakes around the border…plain white middle.

    Birthday/Christmas 2011

    Dearest Beth,

    You have been a great help and joy for many years.  You are my daughter and I have always loved you from Day 1.

    May God bless us all and give peace in 2012.

    A Mother's Love,

    Always and Forever,

    Mom

    I wonder what she is trying to accomplish by this letter.  What prompts her to send out these words?

    Stating a mother's love? Trying again to make me believe…

     A mother's love???  A mother who blessed her husband when he raped me.  Really, you loved me since day one.  I would beg to differ.  No matter how many times you write it, it still sounds hollow to me.  I don't feel the love.  Too many little girls lives were changed by how you loved me.

    She says I have been a great help and joy….And I certainly had been to abuse. She mentions nothing about my actions today, the present Beth, just the Beth of old.  She sees only her….refusing to acknowledge my changes, the new me.

    "May God Bless us all and give peace in 2012."  

    What is peace to her?  Would peace return to her life, If I would turn back into being a help and a joy for abuse?  Would peace then return, is that the Blessing she wants from her God?  

    Peace in dysfunction…an oxymoron for sure.

    Taken at a glance and just reading the words, it sounds like a lovely letter from a mother to her daughter; but the background experiences taint the words.

    Even the little girl in me feels the absence of her understanding as to where I am at.  I don't know if she can even fathom my path…our differences are so vast.

    While these notes may be comforting or helpful to her, they are not to me.  They come in blindly seeing only how she feels and what I brought….they fail to see how I felt or what I got back then.

    I asked myself, "what did I get from her…?"

    What is my response to her.  

    As a daughter of hers what can I possibly say?

    "Mommy Dearest…"  

    It seems when the hurt gets toughened up and put aside, she comes back in to peck at the cut.  I told her the kindest thing I have to offer her is silence.  No words.  Nothing.  Empty of retorts.

    As soon as I ponder what I would respond, it gets my blood pressure pumping.  I feel all the rage and wounds and resentment, hurt and pain.  Not only for me, but so many little girls, I get swallowed in the dark…I have no kind words to send back to her.

    I stop mentally writing a response…

    I just want her to remain silent.  To let it be.  To stop writing how much she loves me and how she will be my mother forever and always.

    Don't I know it.  Haven't I felt her brand of Love?  Was I not given another dose even today?  How can a mother who allowed such atrocities go on, write this letter to a Me?

    All she sees is how she loved me, not HOW she loved me.

    She misses all the places she wasn't aware…and I was abused.

    She misses all the things she overlooked that caused me pain.

    She misses all the mothering things she failed to accomplish when abuse walked through her door into her life, into her marriage and into her daughter.  She misses that.

    She only wants to see the joy and help.  She doesn't want to see the gaping wound of dysfunction.

    The wound that steered my life into flowing backwards and crooked.

    Seeing my Helping her and Joy for many years IS NOT what I need her to see. She doesn't need to see me that way.

    She needs to see me, a little child being hurt by her father. She needs to see that and then write letter about how she loved me so.

    Without mentioning my pain, her love stays golden.

    And without mentioning my pain… I would dissolve back into a land of dysfunction again.

    She keeps sending me letters expounding on her love…when a letter explaining how she couldn't have loved me would be more true to the nature of my experience.

    I don't want a love letter… I want a letter telling me how she abused me.  Isn't that odd.  We don't want our abusive parents to tell us how much they loved us for we carry scars of abuse…we want them to acknowledge what they did to us was not love.

    I could puke on the words of love she writes.

    Trying to give me her love…in words, when she failed in deeds.

    Once again, she didn't write the letter that will break my silence…

    She continues to hide behind a loving mother…when reality has shown me the opposite.  

     It is good for me to know what letter I am waiting for.  I always felt no need to respond, and now I know what words I am seeking…my truth, I will recognize it when she writes it.

     ‎"Truth can be Unrecognized, but it can't be changed." 

    David Hawkins  

     

     

  • Yoga Heals a Loveless Self

    “The purpose of yoga is to heal.

    Most people start practicing Bikram Yoga to flatten our stomachs, stretch our tight hamstrings, and/or to prevent future injuries. And yes it will do all of that, but those are the secondary benefits to practicing Bikram Yoga. The purpose of this yoga is TO HEAL and that healing takes place from the inside out. It works on a mental level (and spiritual level) to heal our minds. Only then can we begin to change our self on the outside.

    Bikram says, the yoga practice teaches us how to like our self and we start taking better take care of our self then we fall in LOVE with our self!”
    Karen Buckner

    What I didn’t know when I began this practice was how out of love I was with myself, and how my love of my self depended upon another.

    If they loved me, I was okay.

    I never loved me alone, by myself without doing for another.

    It is shocking how dependent we are taught to be on another’s good opinion, how we act/be/live/think/believe to be loved.
    To have another love us, yet we don’t stop and think what it would take for us to love us, alone.

    Doing was my self worth, which I mistook for love.

    I was worthless unless I was doing.

    Imagine this type of self-love where you give and give and give until there isn’t any energy left, until you are filled with resentment of the takers who are your love givers.

    Giving to get love?

    My damaged body is what drove me to doing yoga, with an arm hanging limply at my side, my upper shoulders and neck one huge knotted ball, I began to work on self.

    What I didn’t know was that I was actually filling up my empty tank inside and dumping out all the past beliefs about how to love, changing my inner beliefs of my self, one-second at a time, as I paid attention to my breath and body.

    Each day I brought my body to the mat, and focused on my breathing, as I twisted and bent this constricted body into unimaginable poses, I was changing deeply inside.
    It is a like strenuous physical magic, while I was concentrating so hard to change my body, my insides were healing, my sense of self blossomed, my inner strength to be me became strong, my mind sought clarity and the willingness to face what is…the list goes on and on.

    Yoga heals a loveless self.

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  • Annihilated in a Balloon!

    I could envision my self as a little girl and how she sits holding out her hands in shame again, for in them should be love and all she sees is fear.

     

    Fear and terror are in her hands.

     

    It feels like it is her responsibility to change that over to love, and no matter what she does or how hard she tries, what she tells her self, all that lay in her hands is fear.

     

    She is not good enough; she is unworthy, something is wrong with her, for she can’t get it right.

     

    Shame on you!

     

    I was totally confused and lost in the thoughts that fear and shame were tightly woven within me. 

     

    I was ashamed and in fear.

     

    When I pictured a young girl sitting there with fear in her hands and so shameful that she couldn’t change the feelings, it occurred to me, that ‘my little girl’ didn’t even have pictures in her head to know where the fear came from.

     

    She had feelings but no road map on how they got there.

     

    As thoughts came and went during the day yesterday, it came to me that my father changed my feelings I did not!

     

    A line in a song, “A little girl was waiting for her daddy one day…” came into my mind. 

     

    I was waiting for a daddy and who came was a man who hurt me. 

     

    He changed from being my daddy and so did my daddy feelings.

     

    In its place are bad man feelings and I can’t change them back.

     

    The tragedy is that I had love, trust and faith in my hands, and they quickly disappeared and terror took its place, a sleight of hand, a bad card trick, and I got left holding the terror card.

     

    I left the scene of the crime while the crime was taking place, but my body recorded the changes with feelings.

     

    Now as a little girl when she sees her ‘daddy’ and feels terror and she doesn’t understand why?

     

    Certainly something is so very wrong with her. 

    Shame on you!

     

    My whole body felt such utter relief to know that it wasn’t me who changed my feelings about my father, and it isn’t me that can change them back.

     

    It is up to him.

     

    My feelings will be stuck in fear unless and until he presents to me a man who acts like a dad.

     

    I am not responsible I didn’t do nothing wrong. 

     

    I was just a little girl who was waiting for her daddy that is all.  That is all…

     

    A little girl holding Love in her hands…that is all.

     

    There is no shame in that.

     

    I somehow felt I had to hide my fear; I was ashamed of my feelings.

     

    The near miss encounter with my mother, lunged me back into the feelings I had as a little girl, it brought me back to the feelings I had and still have today.  Nothing has changed within my body.  It is incredible that it registers the same.

     

    It is puzzling, how the feelings are similarly intense for her as with him.

     

    Somehow I felt shamed by her for my feelings I had for him.

     

    Disappointing her, her disproval reigned supreme as my number one thing I didn’t want to do. 

     

    Keeping her dream alive, “a longed for family” a father for her kids, I was guilty of not feeling the dream, yet I tried.

     

    Looking back at my life in this awkward review, I feel my life instead of see it; it was like I lived in a balloon that I carried.

     

    Up in the balloon I could pretend to feel what I didn’t feel.

     

    In the balloon, I lived annihilated from my true feelings.

     

    A life of pretend in a balloon, which never touched my body, for the string that held it away from me was called shame and fear.

     

    In order to get back to my body, I had to travel backwards and feel what I could bear to feel.

     

    That day in that dinner, without a balloon to protect me, I felt the electrical charge of fear wrapped around in a colorful ribbon of shame.

     

    With my big girl awareness and reality’s support, along with a friend named Ann, I felt what I needed to feel, the awkwardness of a child in fear sitting in shame.

     

    Shame is exposing your feelings of fear!

     

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    I had this quilt at the Gallery for sale and I took it back. For as I look at it, you can see  how she has to now live.  In the presence of her family she was made to live removed from her feelings….and if you see it from her view, she had to keep her real feelings away from her self, annihilated in a balloon!