2 February 2018 Morning pages
Forty-five years ago today, my mother passed away. Sad I am. Sad that there were so many generations of hatred and dysfunctions in my family. Sad because of the owies in her soul. Sad with the endless misery that she inflicted upon her children. I send love up to heaven on joyful, beautiful, colorful balloons with an offering of healing and hope. Sad things must have an end.
This movie called life gets stuck in insufferable wads of ignorance and despair, and like an old record it wears away and wears away until nothing is left on either side that doesn’t correspond with the wounds. I would like to think of my mother all dressed in white…smiling with relief as the hurts open up to be cleansed with understanding, and peace, and angel tears.
Our lives were, indeed, hopeless. From the ceramic Dutch girl nailed to the wall near the front door to the covered wagon lamp that she loved until dad traded it for beer, hopelessness was her daily bitter bread. And she passed that bitter bread down to us, kneaded and punched down, and much increased in size and bitterness.
How interesting it is to note that we too often become the roles that our parents chose for us. As they described our lack of beauty and possibilities and carved a map of mediocrity into our souls, we forgot that they weren’t God. They only seemed to be. We loved them…Looked up to them…Depended on them for our survival and in this dependency, we somehow bought the idea that their opinions were God’s law. Whatever they said had the stamp of an unalterable decree that sentenced us to a life of dream vapors and pathetic fantasies that we never achieved…because we allowed those “gods” to ordain and decree our future.
Letting go and letting go, I find it feels a lot like standing in a busy mall completely naked before the murderers of my childhood innocence. The humiliation has worn me away and left raw tissue exposed. “They” don’t matter. “It” doesn’t matter. All of the once longed for attachments, no longer matter. Standing tall with all my scars, with all of my disappointments, I unflinchingly face those long past enemies of my soul.
I can now quietly point out that I was the scapegoat for all of the parts of them that they ignored and hid away from themselves and from the world. Hearts that couldn’t connect and love. Brutal ignorance scissored and trimmed like ornaments on a tree. Unholy ideas that had trailed through many generations before them. Underneath their masks of perfection and superiority, they had only rot and decay. Nothing lovely had grown, because growth requires the brilliant light of exposure and honest open reflection.
Beliefs, and expectations, and distorted images of the world my mother taught me bleed away from center stage like grey disgusting rats that had been given a high place…a royal position. Now I can see all of her cruel proclamations as rats slipping in and out of shadows and holes and garbage cans. There is emptiness…a hollow aching emptiness…where her decrees once lived. My work begins by confronting that emptiness where the sad and foolish once had residence. After lies and false beliefs and self-defeating expectations are stripped away, what next? I could go find more of the same to fill the space or go through the long, arduous dark night of the soul to hang on to the slippery edges of reality until the centering, stabilizing power of truth pulls me into a tiny droplet of light.
All of the other stuff was so big, so loud, …and now all that is left is a droplet of light, but in this tiny droplet of light, the heaviness peels away, and peace begins.
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