Waking up kid-free, people free, day off, with only my dogs and an invitation to join trusted others without a requirement to do so is niiiice. The fact is I need lots of people-free time to recover. Not to recover from the people I love(ok, well maybe a little from them) but to recover so that I have something good to give them, not just my 48 years of fatigue. I have been learning about trauma. A reality that is taboo, too obscene and scandalous to speak of, yet honest dialog is essential for healing, no matter how many decades have since passed. Time does not heal shit. Truth does. The knowledge of our experience is stored in our bodies.
As children without adequate language or an enlightened witness to help process trauma, survivors are forced to internalize the abuse and to favor the abusers. And with that information stored in our cells and no healthy way to address the pain, we end up hurting others and/or being chronically, ill, tired and/or depressed, even suicidal. How can we expect unsupported children to grow up with any thrive and moral certainty after being demanded to tolerate the unacceptable? What screams for my attention is the idea of a moral code that says when we speak these truths, we are betraying or blaming parents. WTF??? Oh. Okay. So, basically with this morality, the truth is not important. Wholesome truth speaking, (healthy personal boundaries and asking for help) is never wrong, though does often make trouble. AND. There are no such things as innocent bystanders in the case of abuse. Positions of “neutrality” are cowardly and horseshit. Speaking truth and taking right action are as risky as they are right.
As parents, we are care-givers that either provide or deny the nurturing of our 
children from the moment they come to us. That is just a fact. Whether the denying or providing is conscious, does not change the results of having nurtured or denied a child’s whole self. I am still blamed for my own abuse and unlovability (while also, each of these things are emphatically denied. Wait!!-I caused it and it is not real). Denial is the opposite of healing. Healing requires asking questions, listening, experiencing empathy and love, not blame and shame. I have experienced no healing in my family.
I am attempting reclaim my energy so that I may be present and patient for my sweet sons and others. But the energy required for the repression of my own truth fatigues me at a cellular level, leaving me able to cope with and enjoy very little. My intention is to heal– with or without my family of origin. There is not a shred of doubt, that this is mine to do on my own. I am free to heal. Free…(not a total Squee moment, but still a blessing to have the tools and support). I am not free from their scorn or my desire to have an actual family. Grieving that is a whole nother Oprah 🙂 I have my sons and our sweet lil blended family and a few good friends who love us unconditionally. As I heal, I have more to give. Healing is not only my right, but my responsibility.
I know my truth more than any other person can. And I wished it were different and I have tried to not know and not feel the horror of what was allowed to
happen, repeatedly. It has been more desirable to make me feel or look crazy than to face the perpetration of me. I guess as the youngest in all of my family, even those who might have suspected might one day reflect less harshly, noting that I was younger and smaller and begging for an enlightened witness, in all the ways I knew. I did not cause or imagine my abuse. And the continued and collective suggestion would make any person go effing nuts. Of course, I was deranged with anger, confusion, paranoia. How the fuck are you supposed to be while living on those terms, hostage to those charged with protecting you? Nobody fucken protected me. It was required that I handle it myself, deny it, shut up, get small, pretend, and also to relax and quit causing tension. My lil body could not cope and neither could my mind. Constant illness, worse during family gatherings, and intense anxiety were manifestations of a truth I could not bear, articulate, or repress. It looked like my own instability,
anger, insanity. I think that typically, that is how it looks. So by standard definition, I handled the abuse in a perfectly normal way. I suppose my family did also. Today is Independence Day. I am grateful AF for the freedom to just be. No demand to socialize, lighten up, go out, like food and sounds and people that I find unbearable. Boys with dad today and tonight. Tomorrow we will celebrate with Sweet Greg and his son. For tonight, I may or may not join them. I am free to choose what is best for me. I am allowed to enjoy and relax and not feel banished. That is freedom and a miracle.
I have the privilege of parenting my boys with kindness and mindfulness of who they are and that they are not me, or an extension of me. Additionally they are being armed with awareness of abuse– to not tolerate abuse or alienation for themselves or others. Pride does not begin to describe how I feel about the undeniable courage and kindness that drives them. Sadly, this does create an inner dilemma for them as they are required to attend gatherings with my sister, mother and nieces, where if morality were at work, these gatherings would honor the sanctity of my sons and their parents. Trying to build relations with them as if I do not exist is insane. Literally. My sister on more than one occasion bragged to me that she raised “pleasers”. Well, I am raising lil protectors, love warriors. And so far, they are very pleasing as well….and they are aware, feeling compromised by her unwholesome-initiatives, what she chooses to continually do at their expense. —Flexible morality at its finest. From what I am reading about trauma, it has clearly affected her as well, and I hope she will find the help and healing she deserves. Happy, mentally healthy and well people don’t knowingly harm children in even the slightest of ways to meet their own needs and desires- and then justify it. Recovery also teaches that defending behavior ruins all relationships. There is nothing to defend. If we do wrong, we apologize and amend. If we do not do wrong and still cause harm, we can apologize, when we are mentally healthy and strong enough to tolerate and own imperfection.
“The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden of shame
and anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! SHE HAD NOT KNOWN THE WEIGHT, UNTIL SHE FELT THE FREEDOM. ? Happy Independence Day. Most Especially, to all the courageous and wholesome badasses sharing the difficulty and wonder of parting from people and things that are…. best, parted from. ?? Rejection is God’s protection. ?✂️✂️✂️
What are you grateful to be free from, today?
Love,
Magda Gee
OK, my darling girl, I’ll do as the instructions command: Leave a Reply and Be the First to Comment.
I thought as I read your soul-rending entry above, and I’ve thought this many times: everybody is exactly like everybody else. Everybody IS everybody else. These are profoundly spiritual statements. Otherwise, no Al Anon, that’s for sure. Otherwise, no AA. No “savages” cutting out the hearts of their sacrifices; no bishops dressed in red gowns, and covered in white lace tunics, and wearing beautiful rings for the hoi-polloi to kiss, creating the sacrifice of the eucharist (communion in the churches where ministers wear business suits or jeans and sweaters or T-shirts) with only wine or grape juice to represent blood, and bread to represent a human body (of Christ). Incidentally Christ is not a name.
The humblest Al Anon mouse in the corner, weeping as her heart breaks at an “old timer’s” share and the Bishop are one and the same, one and the same as the serial killer awaiting a lethal injection.
One of your pictures above says, “Your child is not giving you a hard time. Your child is HAVING a hard time.”
Bingo. That’s what I am saying here. At long last, I spill the beans:
Last night, being July 4th, was noisy. Noisy in a way that often sounded like gunfire and explosions. I later realized those were probably not the connections my baby was making. I have this new bathtub, and when the installer came to do his stuff, the first thing he had to do was to remove the old tub. We had not even thought for a moment how LOUD that was going to be. Like standing beside a jet taking off. I once lived unwillingly very near an international airport, that’s how I know.
My dog was very upset by the noise. We petted him and assured him it would be all right, but didn’t stop to think of what would really help him, how traumatized he was becoming, how he would carry this trauma into his little future. So last night, guess what? Despite his 11 past July 4th’s and other loud celebrations, which upset him some, but not much, he went into a complete nosedive. He came into my bathroom and tried to get into the new bathtub with me. Thank God it has higher-than-usual sides. I was about ready to step out anyway, but the moment I opened the door, he crowded into the insufficient space at my feet. I couldn’t get out, he couldn’t get all the way in. I began to feel panicky, too.
Panic has nothing to do with fear. I was not afraid of anything, as he WAS afraid of the loud noises.
About 90 minutes later, I was in a full fight-AND-flight mode. He kept jumping on my bed, I kept pushing him off. I wasn’t even trying to get IN bed, only to put on my nightgown, which was on the bed, and which he was mindlessly tearing at. I ended up actually THROWING my dog on the floor. The first time, I was horrified at myself. After two or three throws, the fact that he kept jumping up again (seeking safety, which I could have accorded him had I been less freaked out) and I kept throwing him down or pushing him off began to make it seem to me, at a very primal level, that I was right and he was behaving badly and stupidly.
I don’t really remember exactly how I got myself and subsequently him under a little bit of control. Maybe we just wore each other out. Anyway, we went to sleep, I feeling like a non-human, and he feeling, most likely, like a little-understood and abused dog, which he was.
This morning, I brushed him for at least half an hour, explaining how this would help him by releasing endorphins, and sure enough, he obviously felt tons better. So I started telling him the story of Rapunzel and her beautiful hair. When I got to the scariest part, where her mother was about to start cutting her hair off, Bernie got up and trotted out of the room. No more sad stories for him, no more suspense, no more sadness and panic anywhere in his realm. I don’t even know whether the mother could have cut off Rapunzel’s hair before the prince got there to save her. The mother would have been happy, too, since her only reason for keeping Rapunzel in the tower was to wait for a real prince to come along and ask for her hand in marriage.
I was Bernie. I was in the same panic he was. I was supposed to be the mom, the big sister, the wise and kind one, and I blew it big time. He is lying next to me now, not too close. I am not quite the savior he should have been able to hope for.
The question is: Are all Mothers as sad and do they feel such failures as I do? One of my sons is dead because his father and I divorced and Jer’s defense mechanisms couldn’t handle the trauma; my other son won’t speak to me, although he tells other people he wants to; my daughter lives here and we alternately love each other consciously and totally, and want to dice each other into small chunks and feed the pieces to Bernie and any other dog that comes along.
So that’s my truth. There is truly something in me that can be accessed by this terror, panic, lack of control by one of my dependents. Can I find the source of this polluted stream? Can I detoxify it? Make it clear and beautiful?
Stay tuned… It may take until the third or fourth incarnation from now…
Peace in your sweet heart, never doubt it,
JJ
GiiiiiGiiiiii-
Thank you for being her and for reading the words and noticing the pictures that I choose to share my heart and soul. Thank your relating and saying me too. It is beyond generous, courageous, humble and that you will do that here with me is a precious gift. As for all mothers any one thing? I think at one point we are very helpful and at many points we all feel very needy and useless, though either I am wrong or many would just rather dies than say so. I think those of us who grew up with cold, angry, punitive mothers struggle more. I think that those who experience at least one of their parents or family members as present, loving, protective definitely have a leg up in life ant their future parenting game. I think it is never too late to make things better, make ourselves better. I think the need to be right and to find or assign blame or deflect it it just the disease at work, our egos, running the show and keeping us separate. I think you are striving every day to untangle some of the myths of your life. I believe Kate and you have so much to learn from yourselves and each other and am grateful for the arrangements you have to keep you connected and protected from each other. This is intergenerational madness. I am certainly guilty of employing those same attitudes and tactics when someone else’s struggle is too much for me. Let us keep learning, seeking, detoxifying, clarifying, purifying. What else is there to do besides that? Love to you, Kate, and Bernie! You are a magnificent soul. I am grateful to communicate you in this way, at this level, on these matters.
Big love always,
Peace in your sweet heart, YOU never doubt it!
Magda Gee