The missing piece is us. I wish I could see it in myself. I do not know if I have or have not.
You do.
I read your words in this way, Copa:
The missing piece, that thing we could never safely do, was love our abusers. Not cleanly; not without identifying with them enough to see ourselves as they saw us in order to justify their abuse of us
and believe ourselves essentially unlovable, contemptuous things; things to be used to service the abuser's dysfunction. To the degree we identified with our abusers, we feel a sense of fraudulence, a mistrust of decent, respectful relationship. The essence of the work we have done here throughout these months was learning to witness for those terrified children we were; was learning to see and accept and cherish and hold them with compassion.
And that was so impossibly hard for us, Copa.
Just to cherish ourselves and our lives and the lives of those little girls (or boys) we were was a very hard thing. The abuser's contempt forbid it.
Layers and layers of contempt and shame and abandonment
and what those things taught us about our own value, about who we were.
What would the flavor of loving a parent like that be.
That is why we do not trust; that is why we chose men whose mothers loved them so securely they were able to take charge of us and of our emotions and never bat an eye. (M: "I haven't left you yet.") We took the challenge in them Copa, but could never believe they did not hold us in contempt. Sexual power was the balance. Beauty was the balance. Threat of desertion was the balance.
And then, we fell in love with our children and because we loved them, learned to love ourselves.
It's some kernel of a center that revolves around these understandings that are not clear to me yet. I saw it immediately in your post, but seem not to be able to describe it adequately.
It has to do with the unnameable complexities of emotion loving parents like ours would involve, all of it drenched in fear of mortality, in shocked hurt, in shame and rage and utter contempt. In identifying all of that with ourselves in order for it to be possible for us to love the parents. And yet, as whatever piece of research it was that taught us that though the mother may not be programmed to love her child,
the child is programmed to love the mother...we loved our mothers and still do.
But it's messy in here, in the heart of us.
But when we had our children Copa, we loved them clear and clean and free and with such gratitude that in loving them we healed ourselves .
We have discussed love as Nietzsche's first and natural state; we have discussed loving those who have hurt us by choice in order to forgive and to heal ourselves; we've discussed learning to accept and then to love ourselves, and we've discussed mercy and compassion for ourselves...but we have never discussed what it meant to us to love our children with our whole hearts and without fear and to feel such pride and wonder and gratitude for their presences in our lives. We touched on that only in oblique ways, because we have never seen loving them as a choice.
The Sleeping Beauty kiss. That was the love that awakened all that was good and real and fine in us. How confusing for us then, to feel anger or disgust or betrayal from our children.
So we took that on too, just as we had learned to do in our abusive families.
We went from real to role in a split second.
We have posted about the happiness in those normal, everyday times before our families fell apart, but our attention has been fixed on our children, on what we are losing, on the bitterness of that black emptiness when we found ourselves treated as though they hated us
and believed that somehow we had failed them, or that they had seen the truth in us that our abusers saw.
And we lost what we had.
What of him who has nothing. He will lose what he has.
We are amazing. I could cry at our bravery, at our defiance in risking real and the hurt and vulnerability that, for us especially, attend coming real.
But we did it.
We have seen loving our children freely and without reservation and without fear as a gift from us to ourselves. And again, love worked its magic, and we healed because we did love. And they loved us back and did not hate us; and we healed into a place where those old hurts meant nothing. And our children admired us, and we admired them, and we watched them when they slept and we laughed together and kept them safe and clean and believed ourselves safe, too.
That is the message in The Little Prince.
That in caring for something, we come to love it, and loving it makes us happy, completes us in ways we did not know we were incomplete. And when St Exupery suggests we would do better not to listen to the flowers, but only love them, and care for and admire them for their beauty or scent, he was very right.
But we could not do that, until now, when we understand the dynamic you posted for us here.
The Sleeping Beauty kiss.
It was our children who awakened us, Copa.
That is the place where we broke. And that is why we broke. We were very correct to pursue this healing together here.
Yay for us.
That is the name of the difference between parents who survive their children's troubles with equanimity and parents like us, for whom the world fell apart each time our children fell into the intricacies of addiction or illness. Even parents who have not overcome the challenges we have overcome just to risk loving someone are devastated by the words and behaviors and pain of their G F G kids.
For us, that pain is magnified and echoed and reverberates through every smallest corner of being because we are freshly healed, are still fresh with the wonder of loving the way the Little Prince loved his flower.
Add my mother; add my sister, keyed into blood frenzy by my vulnerability
especially when my daughter was beat, and was homeless and was dying, and when I was half crazed with it.
And just think what my sister did, then.
Wow, Copa and everyone.
***
Add your sister with her creepy determination to force you into that dysfunctional childhood role you were forced to accept so the stepfather would stay and the mother and the sister would be fine. And in your vulnerability to your son Copa, you broke when you came back into those old, terrible patterns and belief systems.
r o a r
But you have nothing to be ashamed of, Copa. You were so brave. You protected and served as witness and heard her pain and finally, finally loved her without reservation
because it was safe to do so as she left you.
***
Now we know so many of the colors of thread that went into this weaving, Copa. I believe that thread you found was a bright, beautiful scarlet, its patterns woven throughout the tapestry and now that we know it we will heal further.
It's horrifying, what happened to us Copa ~ what happens to us still.
What kind of monsters are these people, anyway. Surely they are aware of what they are doing.
Surely, your sister is aware that what she is doing is not only morally wrong, but stupid.
Jealousy is a powerful thing they say, blinding. We could never believe anyone would be jealous of us.
Maybe, we were wrong.
Cedar
Good. I will be showing off all over the place any day now.
Okay. So, that's not exactly true. People always look like goofballs when they show off. But what will happen is we will not be too ashamed, ever again, to dance and move and have the joy of it with all our hearts and risk it all on a whim and create it over and over again.
We've done it a million times.
That we have been able to heal and come back from this is an impossible, astonishing, accomplishment.
And we've done it routinely, and we've done it all our lives.
Good for us, then.
Happy Hour here, everyone.
Copa, thank you.
Cedar
I love the idea of my children saving me.
That is perfect.
