I M Perfect lady

Tag: neglect

  • 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.

     

     

  • Love without Hurt.

    What I didn’t know was that my distrust of kindness and love, was actually fear, that love to me was very wobbly and had lots of sharp edges and was ever changing, it was smooth and calm one minute, but filled with rage or hurtful the next, I didn’t know that love didn’t have a hurtful side.

    To me, Love hurts. If not now, it is coming so prepare it room! There was no time in my life that love didn’t eventually turn to hurt, turn to mistrust, turn to betrayal…so, Love Hurts, eventually.

    In fact the people I loved were people with two sides.

    They had the side of trying to be good, be better, be kinder and then the side that failed.

    We were taught to forgive the failing side and to focus on the trying side.

    I was taught that all folks had this Light and Dark side, and that you overlooked (forgave) their darkness and put them back in the Light.

    It wasn’t focusing on the Light that did the damage, but overlooking the dark side.

    This dark side seemed to be forgivable, because it was uncontrollable, its animalistic ways were beyond human control, it rendered many a man helpless.

    It was a sin, that seemed to come in from the outside, but it wasn’t really them. A happenstance, but not of them, so do not throw a person away due to bad behavior. Forgive and forget, until the next time…

    These sins were just clouds that happened by and you got caught in them, it wasn’t something you had control over and within each human was a weak spot.

    A spot colored in by whatever ‘bad’ behavior they didn’t have control over.

    It is this spot that I have spent 6 years investigating within me, and it isn’t a spot, but my whole pathology of becoming me, a monster whose love was nothing but fear.

    I began to dissect all my relationships and all my actions to see what was what, only to discover, unbeknownst to me, I never met love, not the real love, the love that doesn’t change love, the real genuine thing.

    I was a stranger to real love. I had never felt real love, for within me lay fear. If you are full of fear you can’t feel love, all you feel is fearful.

    Fearful it won’t last, fearful it will betray you, unease and afraid, you sit with fear by love.

    My journey has been to climb out of the hole of fearful love, as a monster of fearful love and then in the Light of day, learn what love is.

    It was scary to show the world that I am fear, that I do fearful things, that I come from fearful places and have wounds of fear and that for 46 years I had no clue what love was, and was loveless inside.

    I had such empathy and love for my monster of fear while I was so inept at what love does, how love feels, where love goes, how it speaks, how it listens, how it lives.

    How grateful am I that I was able to transition from a fear-based life to one that is embracing love.

    That saddest part of being the monster of fear is that you feel you are handing out love, compassion, caring while you are sowing seeds of fear.

    I had to feel the icy water drip into me after I had transformed myself, to really understand this monsters message.

    When my daughter’s abuse presented itself to me, I had post traumatic like behaviors, I vacillated between fear and love, and I felt the calm peace and acceptance of love and the wild terrorizing bitter cold fear, and watch the affects both had on my daughter.

    My brave little daughter was caught in the maelstrom of this fear filled love monster.

    What an incredible transformation and what a roller coaster ride, for all who live with me, myself include, to get to just one side of love.

    Love without hurt.

  • Orphaned with parents.

    The view I have on my childhood home, is that my father sits and does nothing and my mother runs around busy busy.

    And yet how much further from the truth that actually was.

    My father sat, after he abused.
    My mother did nothing about the abuse.

    Their opposing actions are what twist the mind of a child.
    We look for signs, and see the opposite of our experiences, we think we are nuts, we have a problem in our head.

    There he sits and does nothing, there she goes busy again.

    As we speak, she is in another land, rocking orphaned babies. It is ironic or not that she is rocking her own children…for we were left on our own in our own home.

    Orphaned but not homeless. Orphaned with parents.

    (I am not for sure for sure, IF she is gone to the orphanage as planned, this is an assumption of mine.) I may hear of my false info, so wanted to be upfront, the plans may have changed, it could already have happened, her where abouts is unknown to me.)

  • Matter to someone.

    What came to me yesterday was the moment in the diner this summer, when I saw my mother for the first time after a 5-year separation, and how my body responded. How before I could put on my social cloak, I was riveted in fear.

    My body had reacted perfectly and yet I didn’t have all the puzzle pieces, but now I do.

    The reason I feared her isn’t because of what she would do to me, but what she had been unable to do in my past.

    How she was unable to get me/us away from a pedophile, that in fact she did the opposite, she tried to make their union normal, while he abused us.

    How she forgave his sins, and rallied harder to make their marriage work, to keep him so we had a father. She put all her efforts in keeping something that wasn’t true. She focused harder on him, and never once treated our wounds.

    As a child you see how invisible you are, how unhearing she is, how unresponsive to your pain.

    I now feel better about the way I feared her, for at the time it almost felt like I had self empowerment leakage, where even as a 51 year old woman, my 80 year old mother could send me into a fit of terror.

    My body recalls her and responds in its truth.
    I love my body and its meters.

    And how true to form she has remained after all these years.

    What stands out the most of the days, weeks, months after my father being arrested for molesting his granddaughter, is the absence of my mother.

    She actually was sequestered and not taking our calls. She went on vacation to Australia and Hawaii, she stayed in the warm climate for months, and only arrived here around the time my father was driven home in chains.

    I do not recall one action that would bring comfort to a child who was abused by that man, not one. She was so busy caring for her needs and his, that she overlooked the dozens of girls, by this time, who stood around with their underwear down, bottoms exposed, abuse clearly showing, and did what she needed to do.

    When I sat in her home, four months after the fact, I saw her shed tears about what was going to happen to her, I saw her strength arise in defense of him and her religion, I saw her blank and defensive when I confronted her on her actions as a mother.

    Not a tear fell as I told her about my experience with her husband, it was like the doors were all closed, I was talking to nothing.

    Isn’t it incredible yet again, that we can fear actions of nothing.

    Nothing. To do nothing is extremely painful to endure.

    My mother sent cards and made personal visits to all the girls she knew who had been molested by her husband, neighbor girls, but she did not give me her daughter the same courtesy. She apologized in a letter saying how sorry she was, that she didn’t believe this young neighbor girl and was sad that it took years to do so.

    The detective handed me that letter, and I crumpled it up and threw it on the floor, like a child enraged, and I was.

    My own mother at the time was sequestered and not taking my calls, was unable to hear of my childhood abuse, and she was penning letters to other hurt little girls.

    How telling, how cruel, how insane…how dare she dismiss me that easily.

    Again what I feared from her was nothing.

    Nothing again.

    I am worth nothing again.

    Nothing.

    What she gives me is nothing, a void. Space, silence, a void.

    I just looked at the two words together. A Void.

    I didn’t know that avoiding was nothing.

    A void.

    When you avoid someone you give them nothing and doing nothing creates a void

    A void isn’t love, it is space, silent, open, and alone.

    Imagine feeling this energy from a mother while you have wounds from your father?

    Instead of being able to find comfort and shelter, we encounter a void, space, emptiness, where no one is coming, nothing will happen…

    A void is who my mother is to me.

    Running from my father I fell into a void.

    It is no wonder my mind couldn’t comprehend or compute, there was no safety anywhere.

    Who is there to catch you when you fall?

    My last line in my letter to Mr. Detective man was, “Every little girl should matter to someone.”

  • 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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  • Serves Me!

    In Waking, by Matthew Sanford, he writes again about his experience with yoga.

     

    “Maha mudra is a strange pose.  In yogic lore, if a yogi practices it enough, he or she can eat anything, even something poisonous. Regardless, it has a magical feel to it.  Seated on the floor, one leg is straight in front of you.  The other leg is bent at the knee, with the sole of the foot pressed against your inner thigh of the opposite leg.  One reaches down, hooks the big toe of outstretched leg with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, lowers the chin toward the chest, inhales, and tightens the abdomen, pulling it back toward the spine and up toward the diaphragm.”

     

    “As I move into this pose, something clicks or snaps into place or becomes manifest. I experience a new ding.  I suddenly feel a tangible sense of my whole body – inside and out, paralyzed and unparalyzed.  I am stunned.”

     

    “Jo, this feels different, something is different.  I can feel where the pose goes, the unity between the actions.  I can feel it actually moving.” I gasp. “The abdomen hits back and up, and the straight leg thigh pushes into the floor…right?”

     

    “Yes.” She says, breaking a smile.

    “Then the…energy” – I struggle for words – “moves out through the heel.”

     

    “Well actually, the physical actions is to hit down with the thigh and stretch out through the heel,” she says, her tone informative. “….as the spine and chest life in opposition.” I chirp in.  My mind is racing.  How am I feeling this?  How is this possible?  I am perplexed, but the moment is mine.  My entire body is working in concert.  It has been a long time – some thirteen years.  My lost body and my potential body have joined in this pose.  My past, my present and my future are touching.  Although I am choking with grief, I am also an excitable boy.  I have worked so hard to make it back to this moment.”

     

    Jo and I do not say much.  It is too big, too fresh, and not to be spoiled.  Silence – the lamp’s light, the darkness outside the window, our reflections in the class, my creaking house.  My world has changed its shape tonight.  A new level of me is coming alive.  I am overwhelmed with the feeling that my body has been waiting for me to stop neglecting it, waiting for me to quiet down and listen.  My heart is breaking. I feel grateful.” 

                        Matthew

     

    My heart is breaking and I am grateful is exactly the correct sentiment.  To sit in awe of all the neglect and how the body still worked to serve me, given what I have fed it and how I moved it.

     

    I have done lots of yoga this year, working to help my body process all the stressful situations it has endured, and giving it flexibility and strength to move easier.

     

    My mind, my body and my soul are all being greatly helped in yoga each day.

     

    What a great vehicle we get to ride around in!

     

    I too am heartbroken and grateful, many times a day as I witness how it lives and breathes and serves me!

     

     

     

     

  • Affirmed by His Experiences

    Maha Mudra, a chapter from Waking by Matthew Sanford.

     

    “When I return home from the hospital, everything seems the same – my blue velvet chair, the sounds of my fridge, the creaking of my wood floors.  Everything except for the feeling that I have recently chatted with aliens.  That’s how my body memories strike me.  How could my body have memories?  Bodies don’t have memories, minds do.  Not only did I believe this growing up, but my philosophical studies reinforced it.  Now, in the span of a few days in the hospital, my sense of who I am, where I begin, and where I end once again has broken wide open.  My body interacts with the world and records it regardless of whether my mind is having any experience.”  Matthew

     

    This is so reassuring to someone like me who has no memories of the actual molestation, the rape that my friend witnessed, and yet my body has given me the feelings of it, the paralyzing terror.

     

    While Matthew couldn’t recall the accident where he was paralyzed, his body was aware of the whole ride and recorded it and stored the information in feelings.

     

    It is the storage that I find remarkable.  It is stored until we are strong enough or willing to seek deep inside of us and explore the feelings that seem to be there at odd times, or feelings that don’t match our thoughts in reality.

     

    When my body responded physically to the news that my father was a pedophile, there wasn’t any thing I could do but follow its lead.  I knew by the second day that I too was a victim; I just didn’t know how I knew, for my mind was still as blank as ever.

     

    Yet deep within my cells, I felt the truth of it all.

     

    I knew that he molested me, I knew that all the times I feared him were justified and I felt this to be true, with emotions and feelings that were beyond an intellectual thought.

     

    Matthew continues.

     

    “ This seems simple enough.  For example, at any given time, the back of my head is visible to the world during every instant that I am awake.  My body is also present in every second that I am alive, even while I am sleeping.  Both of these thoughts are easy to grasp intellectually, but to feel them – that is different altogether.  I felt those body memories in three dimensions.  They went beyond the two-dimensional mental experiences and instead expressed themselves through the three dimensional experience of my body. That my body could be a possessor of memory made me confront something that was undeniable.  My body – not just my mind was also conscious.  How does one truly open to something like that?”

     

    “The act of “opening” consciousness makes us feel both uncertainty and the onrush of silence that comes with it.  This is one of the reasons that becoming aware is often painful.  There are many stunning things about the Grand Canyon.  One of them is the eerie silence that accompanies its vast expanse.  It is both awesome and unsettling – one knows not to stand too close to the edge.  The feeling of openness and a confrontation with silence are deeply related.”

     

    “Opening to the fact that my body was conscious caused me intense grief.  I took advantage of my thirteen-year-old body so many years ago. It was subjected to profound violence and I abandoned it in the process.  Did I really need to?  Was it really my only option?  The existence of these body memories made me confront the silence and uncertainty of recognizing my own mistakes.”  Matthew

     

    I know the grief that follows this awareness of consciousness within the body, the neglect we feel for not knowing it was alive and filled with feelings and how it awaits for our cue.  I am humbled by this body and I am now trying to release it from any other feelings that are lodged within. 

     

    Yoga seems to be a vehicle for doing this.  Matthew also speaks of his experiences with yoga…

     

    I will write more on that tomorrow.

     

    For now, I am affirmed by his experiences. 

     

  • Being Motherless

     

    On Mother’s Day, expressions of gratitude and cheer rise up for those mothers who could be a mom.  Children everywhere salute their moms for all they did and gave in order for their lives to be better.

     

    This leaves out half the children.

     

    We sit here on mother’s day and the cards don’t match our experience, the feelings we have are not written on flowery paper, they have no Brunches for us kids.

     

    Standing once again feeling awkward for not having the Hallmark mom, we again don’t match society’s definition.

     

    It would feel much better if there were two sides of mother’s day, where if you had a mom to cheer, awesome cheer away.  But for those of us who survived a childhood with a mother who wasn’t there, than you belong over here.

     

    On this side of mother’s day we will honor you for having the courage to live.

     

    To live when a mother doesn’t see you is painful, it takes a strong person to walk on.

     

    I salute with great admiration all the children who walked on alone and damaged; it is not your fault.

     

    Today own the fact that you are not the reason she is broke, she was broken long before you came along.

     

    Her brokenness was all she could give and your innocence was all you could give, a dance without a happy ending.

     

    If you stay you get broken, if you leave you dance alone but reclaim your innocence.

     

    For children with broken mothers, the best mother’s day is to be alone and separated from our hurtful mothers. 

     

    We spare them from giving us more hurt and spare our selves from being hurt. Peace, love and joy are found being motherless.

     

  • I Did Not Run Away!

    “I did it,” I said as I completed the last pose, I did it and I felt this accomplishment deep within, I did it.

     

    The overwhelming emotional feeling of victory settled all around me as I was bathed in the feelings of success.  A success between my relationship with my body and I; I had kept my word!

     

    I am learning how to be present,  be aware and to be honest with my body, what I put in my body and how best to treat it.

     

    For so long my relationship has been distant, aloof, uncaring and neglectful and my body displayed that marvelously.

     

    The body is such an incredible living mirror; it can only reflect how you treat it, nothing more or nothing less.  It simply responds.

     

    I am with a body that lived for years and years without a connection with me, for I didn’t want to feel its pain.

     

    Geneen Roth explains in her book Woman, Food and God, “…I tell my students that the greatest blessing of their lives is their relationship with food.  They look at me rather quizzically, but the sentiment sounds so lovely that they are willing to hear me out.  Then I say that we are not going to fix their relationship with food; we are actually going to walk through the door of their eating problem and see what’s behind it.  Instead of using food to avoid discomfort, they are going to learn how to tolerate what they believe is intolerable.”  Geneen

     

    I found out that I loved sweets for their ability to numb my body and make me tired, I am learning that by doing yoga it can wake me up and give me energy.

     

    It makes sense to me that I distanced myself from my body that I tried to shut it down.  It was hurt and abused. As a small child I had to shut it down to survive and I escaped with food that numbed the body so I didn’t have to feel.

     

    As you awaken this body back up, you do have to feel what you couldn’t feel way back when, but you feel more alive than you ever have felt, more powerful and confident knowing you can feel deeply and still breathe!

     

    When you numb out the bad feelings you also take the good ones too.  I didn’t know this. 

     

    I felt the rush of victory and accomplishment I did it! 

     

    I stayed with my body for 120 days I did not run away! 

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Testimonial for Bikram Yoga Dallas

    Karen calls me her Remote Student, because I live hundreds of miles from a Bikram yoga studio, and without stepping into a Studio, I have completed the 60-day Bikram challenge.

     

    My remote studio is my basement.

     

    There isn’t a set class time, no teacher to monitor my comings and goings, no one making sure my room is heated, I am all things in my home studio.

     

    The hardest part is keeping my word to myself, making sure I get out of bed to stoke the fire, moving around while the rest of the family sleeps, stealing the first section of the day for Bikram and myself.

     

    I stand alone in the mirror, just my body and me; no one is there to see my humble renditions of each pose, as I struggle valiantly to hold my balance, and fail, only to try yet again.

     

    In silence my amazement rings out when I am successful and some times tears in moments of sorrow or tears of gratitude that my body still responds.  In this quiet time, I am forming a new relationship with my body, my mind and Soul.

     

    How exciting it was to feel for the first time muscles I didn’t even know existed, and to feel the steadiness grow in my balance, to witness the affects of releasing unexpressed emotions that seemed to pour out of screaming joints. 

     

    Each day there is a morsel of difference in a pose, a snippet of improvement, a bit of hope and the thrilling feeling that I am doing it.

     

    I am leading the charge.

     

    I am bringing my body to the yoga mat, and following Bikram and my body is responding in spades!

     

    The 60 days have given me a great foundation, a second chance at a relationship with my body, a way to be kinder and more aware of what it really needs to be at its optimum health.

     

    In all areas of my life these improvements follow me, for I am the common denominator in each thing I do.

     

    Being a ‘remote student’ isn’t for everyone, but it is for those of us who do not have access to a studio.

     

    When I was inspired to do the challenge, I mentioned it to a few people, and soon we had a yoga buddy email list.  It is those inspiring individuals on the list that is my source of motivation and inspiration, when my own fails.

     

    What I want you most to know is that 60-days of yoga will change your life, and there is no excuse for not doing the yoga, all you have to do is get to a mat, a teacher or a Bikram CD, and begin!

     

     

    (My brother introduced me to Bikram yoga in 2001, when my arm hung useless.  In doing three weeks of Bikram yoga, the neck and shoulder muscles unknotted and I had zero pain.  I then began an on and off again practice.  When pain arrived, I knew where to go, to Bikram yoga.  I am happy to have the time/space and energy now to devote myself to working this into my every day life. At 51, this body was showing signs of neglect.  In the 60 days of doing the challenge, all aches and pains have disappeared, I am not stopping now, I have just begun!)