I M Perfect lady

Tag: mother

  • Healing Won.

    I dropped the letter in the outgoing mail; it sat in the box for a few hours, with me working nearby.

    Every now and then, I wondered if I should take it back; pull it out and retreat back to silence.

    When the time approached for the first mail truck heading south, my confidence waned, my insecurities arose, at times it was like holding a yoga pose to not walk a few steps and take it back.

    It is amazing to be nervously anxious and brave in the same breath.

    In the outgoing mailbox lay my restraining letter to my mother; it’s bold statements clear and concise, there is no mistaking or misreading its intent.

    I recalled a few of the lines in my one page letter.

    “It is not healthy for me to be around you.”

    “My silence is the kindest thing I can give you.”

    “I need you to honor and respect the silence and space I need to heal and be whole.”

    “If you fail to honor our separation as it is, you are deliberately seeking to disrespect and hurt me; I will take it as such.”

    The letter was easy to write, harder to send, and leaves my emotions scared inside, even though I mean every word, it just seems too harsh to send.

    There is a part of me that is still loyal to the mother/daughter relationship that has long ago dissolved, a part that feels it just isn’t right to actually send. It is okay to feel these things, but it is certainly not right to speak to your elders this way.

    A part of me feels there will be dire consequences for my words, punishment for being so ballsy for speaking to a mother this way.

    Yet on the other hand the feelings of self-empowerment and self-love are being flooded with strength as I did what no daughter wants to do.

    Restrain her self from having a relationship with her mother.

    How unnatural to leave a mother and to set up firm boundaries that lock you out, cutting the ties that sever the lines of communication.

    Becoming an orphan on purpose.

    What I failed to notice is that it is me that was restraining me.

    Restraining me from leaving.

    Restraining me from staying.

    Inside is the battle of the dysfunctional daughter and the healing one; how grateful am I healing won.

  • Darkness is the Only Love She Knows

    (reposting this for my brother)

    “The more of our self we own, the less need for enemies to embody our disowned darkness. Everything is welcomed by the soul.” Pat B. Allen.

    People are carrying the dark parts of us? Who we call our enemies are really folks carrying our darkness, our disowned darkness. So if we OWN our own darkness, then we will no longer have enemies?

    Darkness what is darkness? They are carrying our darkness, what is that? How do you explain darkness to others, how can a child know what this darkness is?

    If you showed a child an enemy of yours what would they look like, speak like, act like? Here is my enemy?

    How odd this all seems that our enemies are here to bring us a piece of ourselves we lost or disowned. That seems like a good thing, yet why are we so opposed?

    Enemies are our friends. Then who are our friends? Enemies?

    “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.” Martin Luther King Jr.

    I think this is all interesting.

    Can it be that silent friends can become our worst enemies?

    “Enemies will embody our disowned darkness.”
    I wonder than what friends embody? What is their role?

    Disowned darkness is not that there isn’t darkness within us, there is, but we don’t want to own it and only our enemies are brave enough to show us where we are not!

    Doesn’t this make sense, for I know that there are many times that I didn’t want to point out to a friend a dark spot along the way. And I have also experienced losing them when I did.

    In the end I became the enemy that carried their darkness for them, I became dark and unfriendly, this is amazingly accurate when I look at it.

    You become the message not just the messenger.

    Within my family I became the dark sheep, hey is that where the term came from, anyway I became the darkness for speaking the truth of what is.

    If I was the enemy for speaking the truth, what were their friends telling them?

    I am way confused on what being friend is now, for it sure seems backwards to me.

    In my experience, being friendly AND being truthful isn’t seen as one and the same!

    I literally remember being thrown back when they didn’t want to hear what I had to say! I was startled when I found myself standing against them as their enemies for speaking of reality.

    It wasn’t that I was making up stories or telling them lies against what is, I was just standing in a spot and being a commentator of it. And I became worse then the actual crime.

    Can a crime be owned or disowned? It surely seems that way. But whether you own it or not will it still have happened?

    When I arrive in front of my family they see me as their enemy, I am the one who is the problem, me.

    I used to say, “how in the hell am I the problem, me the ‘little girl’ in the molestation, I am the one who has issues, surely this is not right!”

    I became the darkness, which is what so many little girls become. They become and are the ‘disowned darkness’.

    We become the enemies of an otherwise beautiful kind world filled with sunshine and happy deeds, if only we would keep our mouths shut and our darkness to ourselves!

    We carry their disowned darkness, we the little ones carry their loads for them.

    In a letter my mother wrote to me on my birthday in 2004;

    “I have Beth’s core love as a daughter for her mother. I saw her as this beautiful small child. Blond hair chubby cheeks – sitting on the grass by the side of the house, a schoolgirl working very hard at home and at school a very good sincere child. Serious beyond her years. A young adult trying to keep the whole family marching along in line, reaching back to gather up the stragglers. Stepping up to carry part of the burden of my son’s handicap, to lightening the load for her mother…..

    In some way I cannot understand with my limited knowledge some where along in her childhood she picked up all the stray, sick, mixed up emotions whirling around our family. All the emotions and ugly undercurrents I did not see or feel, she did. As a child she tried to make everything right. A hopeless task. The same way I tried to make our family close, loving etc by pasting on false fronts, making excuses for my husband, working harder taking all lacks myself to make the perfect mother perfect family. (Daughter) you can rest now. You no longer need to carry this unmanageable load. I grieve your 46 years but I cannot undo it. I no longer need your affirmation of your love. I have it deep inside of me. Nothing can remove it….. Forgive me so you can release your soul to soar among the angels. Always forever, Mom

    I carried this letter around for a while, it seemed that my mother could see me, yet in the end it was her only seeing my love for her.

    It was painfully clear that in order to have her love, I had to carry the load, put the load down, so goes the love.

    Darkness is the only love she knows.

  • Shamelessly Me

    “Yoga Makes you you” is what Bikram says near the end of the 90 minutes of yoga, and until today I had always envisioned a new me.

     

    Today I realized that I get to be me minus the shame.

     

    Shame was my inner state of being.

     

    Shame colored the lenses with which I seen myself in the world, or felt myself in the world, I didn’t leave home shameless; I was filled to the brim with feelings of shame, in shame of being me.

     

    In shame of being me, yet I didn’t fully know the cause or when the seed was planted, it seemed I came this way.

     

    Now, I know better, the seed was planted by my father and fertilized by my mother in her reaction to me.

     

    It wasn’t until I read the book “Hannah’s Gift”  by Maria Housden that it affirmed my belief, that depending upon the way my mother handled the facts it would directly affect me.

     

    The tragedy of abuse, of incest, of being raped by your father, is it is bad enough his treatment of you, but then to have a mother do nothing compounds the shame.

     

    Her lack of doing anything to move away from that man locked me in my closet of shame.

     

    I lived there for 51 years.

     

    Today in yoga I finally felt free from the shame I carried about being an abused me.

     

    “Fake it ‘til you Make it” quote came to mind as I looked back upon my last 5 years, I literally forced myself to stand tall, when inside I was shrinking in shame.

     

    To walk a walk of one with no shame hasn’t been easy. To stand and believe in myself against all enemies both foreign (strangers) and domestic (family), to put myself out there all bruised and beaten claiming my rights to be me.

     

    I didn’t know if I was writing my death sentence, if I would survive, but I knew for sure if I stayed in the closet of shame I would have.

     

    I have been out of the closet for 5 ½ years and today was the first time I felt it is my right.

     

    It is my right to live shamelessly me!

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  • A Mother who Walks in Reality.

    Last night I read, “Hannah’s Gift” by Maria Housden, Lessons from a Life Fully Lived. 

     

    What a great gift they gave each other as they bravely faced life as it unfolded for each of them, in truth.

     

    For a mother to be truthful in the face of death allowed her daughter to fully accept with grace who she was, for her son to walk step by step, hand to hand, eye to eye sharing her journey full on.

     

    ‘Sparing’ the truth may seem kinder at times; I am once again affirmed that truth is the only way to be.

     

    There is grace and peace in an odd way when you are able to set your fears and selfish wishes aside, when you can disregard your dreams, and instead stand bravely in what is.

     

    Even when the what is, is the death of your child. 

     

    It allowed this little girl to live her life honorably, for her mother honored her just as she was, in each moment, fully embracing what she had, now.

     

    Her intuition in giving her daughter a voice, allowing her to be who she needed to be to live a life that was hers, no matter its length is remarkable to me.

     

    The courage to let go of the pretend reins we all believe we have in controlling our worlds, our children’s world and gracefully succumbing to reality’s power, to ride the ride no mother wants to take, but do so with her eyes on the child’s desires, is what I believe makes a truly remarkable mother.

     

    Thanks so much for showing me the walk of truth.

     

    Coming from a child whose mother couldn’t face the truth, I know that it was you who gave your child the greatest gift on earth, seeing her truth!

     

    Allowing her to be okay and be fully her self, even while life seemed to stealing her away, she was able to live completely as herself until her very last day.

     

    She never, not once had to pretend to pretend to be anything other than herself in your eyes. 

     

    What a gift you gave her, she was allowed to Live as her self.

     

    Your journey shows me that a mother can literally change a child by their reaction to the child’s truths, if you can’t see it, they will pretend not to see it either, but if you can, you both will be enriched.

     

    Truth sets you free to be you in reality.

     

    Thanks Maria for sharing the wonderful journey being a mother who walks in truth.

     

     

     

  • Fear Moves Me Away From You…

    My mother and I had lunch at the Pilgrim River yesterday.  Unscheduled, unplanned and unseen.

     

    Five years have passed since I laid eyes upon her and she looks the same, dresses the same, and seemed her old self, not at all how I envisioned her to be.

     

    Not sure what had me look in that direction, but I caught the side of her face from behind, and immediately I felt it was her, it had to be, and then she disappeared from view.

     

    A ghost from my past…a shocking sight.

     

    My body immediately responded, without a thought in my head, it needed no direction from me.

     

    The friend who was with me knew something big was going on, for all my emotions rushed to my face, our conversation evaporated, she could tell something was dreadfully wrong.

     

    We each spoke at once, her asking and me telling.

     

    What I told her matched my emotions.

     

    Mother and fear.

     

    When I knew she was exiting the dinner and not staying for lunch, I felt much better, my tight chest relaxed, the heart slowed down, the nausea settled, and the lump felt like it had been bruised, squeezed and twisted. 

     

    This visceral fear that my body displays leaves me shaky and vulnerable, as well as embarrassed that it responds this way, that I appear as a frightened child instead of the adult that I am.

     

    My body and soul were wanting nothing more than to disappear, there was not one teeny part of me that wanted to holler and run out to reconnect with her, not one. 

     

    I was pushed into my seat, caught like a rabbit in a snare.

     

    In less than a minute she reappeared outside in front of our window where a pane of glass now separated us, I in the shadows and her in plain view.

     

    Her chatting and smiling, reaching and touching this stranger, not knowing her estranged daughter looked on.

     

    It was odd to see her there, like I was now a ghost in her life watching and her unaware.

     

    It was only a few minutes and she and her friend parted and she was gone. 

     

    As I started to feel my body relax, she once again came into view.  Driving by in her van and slowly make a u-turn in front of me.  My last view was of her driving away hand to cheek, and then she was gone. 

     

    What is so enthralling to me, is how my body responds just being in the room with her.  How it isn’t a thought in the head or a mind full of reasons and excuses, for before I could gather my thoughts, my body was in full fledge panic mode.

     

    It has its own visceral reaction far ahead of me, and I scramble to catch up.

     

    How to explain this? 

     

    What I know to be certain is that my body language speaks for itself, there wasn’t a word I needed to say to my friend, she knew by the look in my face how I Felt about my mother.

     

    It isn’t anger, it isn’t resentment, it isn’t judgment, it isn’t a myriad of things I have been accused of, IT is fear and sheer panic.

     

    I fear my mother.

     

    I don’t like the way my body feels in her presence.

     

    I feel like an addict in a meeting, putting this out on paper…”I fear My Mother.”

     

    I fear what she stands for.

     

    I fear what she supports.

     

    I fear what she loves

     

    I fear her weakness.

     

    I fear her strengths.

     

    I fear her religion.

     

    I fear her forgiveness. 

     

    I fear what she fails to remember, but remembers to forget.

     

    I fear her.

     

    And my body agrees. 

     

    Perhaps fear is like love, you don’t get to decide, it happens to you don’t get to choose, it is chosen for you, you just get to ride along. 

     

    I don’t think I started out fearing my mother, it happened instant by instant and over time, I grew to fear my mother.

     

    Somehow it feels like a weakness that I fear her, that I want to stay away.

     

    That it has her in a higher spot, that she has control over me, that I am powerless.

     

    Powerless to me is being without  the power to get out of the way.

     

    Powerless is not moving away when you fear.

     

    Fear moves me away from you…

     

     

     

     

     

  • Caught

    One last section from ‘Sickened’…by Julie Gregory.

     

    Spring thaws the farmhouse, and in front of the mirrors, my breasts begin to form. They get white, tigerlike stretch marks on their sides from a burst of growth.  My hipbones expand like a time-lapsed flower in bloom.  I grow like a girl in puberty. The pod I was stuffed into has perforated breaks in the skin, and I, ever so painfully, am unlacing myself from the tight shell.  I use my fingertips to tug and pull laces loose, unfurling myself from the cocoon I’ve been kept in, folding and falling, jutting the angles of crooked atrophied limbs out of its hold.

     

    I touch my face in the mirror, study it for hours.  I need to see what my face says.  What my expressions look like to others, what my eyes do, whether my face twitches, like hers.

     

    Away from the mirror, I do not register that I am pretty.  I cannot comprehend I have an attractive body.  Or that it holds in its untapped wisdom the potential to heal itself.  My instincts are wound tightly into a ball of fishing line, so tangled and knotted that it will take months of daily, delicate picking to see loops in the line and pull them free.

     

    I curl my body up in front of the mirror; skin and bones, the ribs of my back casting curved shadows over my thin skin.  I study tiny blue veins, fascinated by the light pulse that pushes blood through on its own; an affirmation that I am living.  I do not have to pump the blood myself; it is my heart that keeps me alive.

     

    I look at every part of myself through the mirror, wanting to see what anyone outside my skin would see.  My hands, they look so beautiful, I turn them around and around in the mirror mesmerized.  I look at my face again, soft and childlike, my body lean and lithe.  I step away from the mirror but nothing comes with me. The moment I lose contact with my reflection, I lose touch with what I see there.

     

    My mind is imprinted with images of a sickly reverberation of what I felt like inside and believed to be true of myself for all of my twenty-six years: That I am some bizarre, frail creature, destined to die early.  My mind’s eye sees me as a stooped and wasted, with dark greasy hair, a slaughterhouse horse’s long, sunken face, drooping bottom lip, absent eyes.  Since that is what I believe, that is how I feel. Since that is how I feel, that is how I act. And since that is how I act, that is how the world treats me.

     

    So I step back to the mirror and there she is again, that girl, that strange girl that everyone else sees.  I reach my fingers out to feel her face.  My eyes cannot get over it.  They peer at her suspiciously. Surely this is not me staring back?  Truth in my mind and truth in the mirror are completely opposites. And I am split down the middle, straddling the chasm between two worlds, flitting back and forth between the world I know and the one that exists in the glass.  It will take me three years of pacing between the two before I can finally bring them together.

                    Julie Gregory

     

    My mother had a magical mirror and words would allow her world to remain perfect, sins could be erased with the magical phrase, and it would erase all blemishes that may other wise appear, returning him always to be whiter than snow.

     

    It is horrifying and shocking to see the damage he was able to do, while she continued to stare dreamily into her cracked mirror of dreams.

     

    Behind the wall, lay many broken little girls whose wounds could not be erased so easily.

     

    There are no simple phrases that will return your world upright, restore trust and love and give you back faith.

     

    When we are taught that words can erase deeds, we are left in twisted place in our minds.

     

    In our minds a mirror appears that switches things around, but in reality nothing changes.  Nothing.

     

    It feels like the magic mirror was the release hatch my father needed, the escape door…. Her words allowed him to change magically into a kind man, always.

     

    Her catch and release program allowed another little girl to be caught.

     

     

  • Keeper of their Illusions.

    One more part that really stayed with me from Sickened by Julie Gregory.

     

    “I now feel ready to try and talk to a therapist again.  Most times I do not feel like a client, but an educator who pays to teach my therapist about MBP.  I answer her questions?  How did it slip past the doctors?  Why didn’t anybody notice? Didn’t you have neighbors?  Were you really sick?

     

    But still, in our sessions, I cry from the guilt of betraying my mother, for not keeping the shroud on her secrets when I held them locked in such trust.  And I feel terrible about my own secret.  I have been writing, writing about what it feels like to be cut open while your mother’s tight, thin smile mouths, “Doctor’s orders, honey.”  To be emptied and filled by your mother, just like the IV bag she’s arranged for you. And to believe you are genuinely ill because that is what everything in your world mirrors back to you.

     

    My therapist explains that my mother was cannibalistic.  That she wanted to ingest my living flesh, to tear chunks from my body. That the closest she could come to cannibalizing me was to lift me onto the serving platter for the men of the medical community to carve.  The longer I hold guilt for betraying her, the more I will keep climbing on the platter all by myself.

     

    And yet the hand that pushed me down was the hand that helped me up.  The one who beat me was the only one to save me from being beaten. The one who wanted to kill me was the one who would kill her self if I didn’t offer myself under the knife.  I was trained from the womb as an alibi for her innocence.  She would snuff out my life if I went against her, even in thought.  She brushed me this way as casually as you would slide a ling brush down a pair of slacks, to get all the grain running in the same direction.

     

    I still told myself that it was okay, it really wasn’t that bad.  A normal sacrifice for any child to make for her mother.  Words programmed into me as my own. Tangled in her web, if a doctor couldn’t decipher what she did, how could I?

     

    Until I turn thirty.  Then I see her almost as clearly as if I was standing on a windswept sea cliff and she was looking up from the sand below.  There is only one line that connects us, and it is wrapped around my waist; my hunger is tied to the most intimate, emotionally deep contact you can ever get: a mother’s touch.  Anything less that where she took me feels like not enough.

     

    And so it is for the people I bring into my life.  My relationships, like the one I had with my mother, turn immediately intense, sometimes violently invasive.  I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me.  Ah, yes, let me count your cracks.  Let’s see, one hundred, two…yes, you’ll do nicely.  A cracked companion makes me look whole, gives me something outside myself to care for.  When I’m with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks: the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.

     

    So I start over.  When I ruin something or when someone vines around me, I move on.  It is just another opportunity, another chance to interact with the outside world and not have it take me completely, utterly to the bone.”  Julie Gregory

     

    As much as her mother needed her sick, my mother needed me innocent.  We are the exact opposites.

     

    She was well and her mother needed her to be unwell.

    I was molested and not okay, and my mother needed me to be okay to hold her marriage, her life, and her world together.

     

    We both found out that what our mother’s needed had nothing to do with us, but rather we were the vehicles used to get her where she wanted to be.

     

    Perhaps we know what our unveiling will do to our mothers, we are wrecking purposefully her illusion, and we are no longer caring enough to sacrifice ourselves for their insanity.

     

    We know we are shattering their dreams to a million pieces… yet their dreams go on; someone takes our place to be the keeper of their illusions. 

     

     

     

  • The Silent Aunt who disappeared….

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    What made her leave the stage she was born upon?

     

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

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    She also had a brother who committed suicide.

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

    I will not be the silent Aunt who disappeared….

     

     

  • Wrong Places.

    "Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you" Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

     

     

    What I want to know is what will satisfy me as far as my mother goes?

     

    Funny, I thought I would be satisfied if she were to show all who she is, now today, and who she was all those years ago.  For her to show her insanity.

     

    She can’t be more visible, yet unseen! 

     

    What I failed to appreciate is that what I call insanity some see as sane! 

     

    Her actions are typical for her, so they see that their world hasn’t changed, they see their normal mom. 

     

    They find comfort in her unchanging ways.

     

    What leaves me breathless is that no one seems to care that she is staying in the same house with my father, the pedophile.  That this choice of hers isn’t insane.

     

    Their fabulous mother is simply stopping off in Dallas for a spell.  A normal event in their lives.

     

    How can your really overlook, look pass and around the fact that her husband wounded so many little girls?

     

    How is she not seen as insane or incredibly blind and disconnected for being able to be in the same space as him? 

     

    Two birds of the same feathers…

     

    My inability to shed a glimmer of light to show how off base her actions are leave me voiceless.

     

    How in the hell can I utter one word that will outshine her very own actions?

     

    Sadly being satisfied that your mother is insane doesn’t feel good, knowing that she is okay with the man who raped you leaves you reeling in thoughts and feelings.

     

    I wonder if us kids of incest are forever seeking to be satisfied in a way that is impossible to have?

     

    Is our own sanity jepordized by the fact that we still want something from our insane parents?

     

    Isn’t insanity trying to fix a problem at the same level at which it was created? (Einstien)

     

    If my satisfaction will only come when my insane parents make sane moves, I will be forever waiting.

     

    Accepting their insanity has been the hardest thing to do.

     

    Or is accepting that no loves lives there…

     

    Perhaps we are always on the look out for that little drop of love, just one little tiny dot.

     

    And all we see is more and more reasons how they don’t.

     

    How sad we subconsciously are waiting in hope.

     

    “Looking for love in all the wrong places….”

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  • The Web Called Life!

    I now know what it is like to come home from a long day of work, to be relieved of the stress of wondering if your car will make it through the day, (my breaks are barely working) ready to sit and sigh, and instead be assaulted by the mail.

     

    The mail lies on the counter, in a seemingly harmless pile and in the midst I see her handwriting again, I shove aside the bill on top, to expose the recipient’s name, relived, it is not mine.  Addressed to my son, his yearly card, the one time she singles him out, his birthday card.

     

    I know that assaulted is a strong word, and that perhaps I am being dramatic again, but it seems that it literally can pierce and intrude into my world. 

     

    Her handwriting is like a scream into my house.  I may be over sensitive, but like a ghost from the past, it arises when I least expect it.

     

    And then last night she appears in my dream.  In the dream we happen to be reaching for a grocery cart at the same time and she comes to hug me and tell me that my ‘dad’ misses me.  In the dream I move away, mumbling something incoherent to both of us……I wake up, it is near morning.

     

    My family ghosts are free spirits, they can and do pop up whenever they please, unleashed and unbounded, they plop into my world and I then bobble for a while as they steal this present moment, flooding it with a jumble of past and future daydreams.

     

    While doing this new mail route, I delivered mail to a younger brother, and while sharing that info, the other carrier said that he knew my oldest brother real well, in fact just spoke on the phone to him for a long while.

     

    I simply said, “Oh.”

     

    The carrier lived near my brother’s place before my brother sold it and headed out of town to live near my dad. 

     

    What can I do or say about that?  Luckily my silence was chalked up to concentrating on where the mail goes.  Instead in my head I had to continue to push away the thoughts of him and fight to keep the focus on the mail.

     

    Isn’t it peculiar that a mention of a name can open the floodgates of so many thoughts and emotions, that by simply seeing handwriting it brings forth a volume of words that hold stories upon stories?

     

    It may be my naivety where the trouble lies, for some reason I am surprised always when I happen upon a sister or hear a brother’s name, or see my mother’s handwriting.  What am I expecting?

     

    Isn’t it like being shocked that there are bears in the woods, fish in the sea, and birds in the air.  I live in the same place, and not much has changed physically, just that my relationships have been greatly altered.

     

    How divorce parents make it is beyond me.  I guess we will forge this new non-relationship and until that becomes familiar, this will be odd and assaulting to me, until I get used to it.

     

    Isn’t that like getting used to being slapped?  How will I become used to that? 

     

    Is it better to explain and to point out to strangers that I no longer speak to that brother, for that brother paid the defense fees when my father was in jail for sexual abuse! Isn’t that cruel and unusual punishment to the stranger?

     

    What would be a way we can both stand in that spot, this man who seems to like and admire my brother and me who shudders to think how off balance he truly is?  Is there a mutual spot?

     

    It always leaves me silent.  How does my life’s drama fit into a normal day learning a new job? 

     

    When we enter into new places and are introduced to new people we immediately try and find out if we have common ground between us, and in my case, my ground is unusual at best.

     

    You know the term, “it is a small world after all” it truly is. 

     

    How the connections continue to spread like a matrix around us, that no matter where you go, no matter what group you attend, there will be someone in there who has ties to your family.

     

    There are 16 in my immediate family counting me, so the matrix is spread far and wide, like a spider’s web.

     

    Oh the web we weave……I think that was when we are lying, but we weave webs just living life day to day, we make pathways and alleyways, we build and demolish roads, my web has to be a real tangled mess.

     

    Instead of the spider that is weaving it, I feel like the fly, or a very dizzy spider, with disconnecting lines!

    Do spiders plan their webs or do they just continue going around and around and in the end there is this wonderful tapestry that glistens with dew drops in the morning sun?

     

    Do they have a pattern they are following?  Are spider webs like snowflakes, no two alike?

     

    I guess we spew out the same tiny threads as we walk along in this life, a matrix is being tied in behind us, we are leaving a trail, by word and deed, a fragrance of who we are, the web called life.