Tag: setting

• Rotting Tree

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

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

  When you do that, I tend to move away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Will my values be theirs and should they be?

  Will our morals match?

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

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

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

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

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

  A rebel with a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  January 28, 2011

  boundaries, go…, hanging, legacy, letting, life, lifestyle, on, power, setting, skills, tools, whole

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• 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.

  November 30, 2010

  boundaries, healing, healthy, mother, orphan, purposeful, restraining, separation, setting, unnatural

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