Family of Origin (FOO) Support Thread Part 2

[Scent of Cedar *]

My Mother was tough as nails. My self-concept is of being absolutely clueless, defenseless, alone.

Who taught you that, Copa?

Who needed to create that in you?

For the record, I do not see you as clueless. I see you defenseless, like I am too, before the things I was taught were true about me. I see you as alone by choice. Like the predatory bird, Copa. Strong and beautiful and trapped in a cage not of your making.

A predatory bird will die in a cage, Copa. That is what the falconer knows. She will come to the wrist of her own choice, in equal partnership, the tiny bells on her ankles chiming as the falconer hoods her and provides her reward.

Though both know she may have flown free, have taken her own food, at any time.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

One objective was to extricate myself from my Mother. ( succeeded.)

I vote "amorphous extrication". Therapist failure. For heaven's sake. That is what he told you he could do but he didn't even manage that. And just look where we are today.

I suspect he told you she was whatever in a million ways and you were absolutely correct to condemn turn away.

And he never once ~ never not once, Copa ~ addressed that you love her with your whole heart. It could be that he was male, and did not love his mother as a woman loves. We welcome and enfold and give back. We are my mother/myself. I think this is what I think. I am still working on these issues too Copa, so I can only write about where I think I am and that could change in a heartbeat. Nonetheless, here it is: I think we have a responsibility to ourselves, a responsibility to our healing, to review and change the perspective from which we see incidents of abuse in our pasts. There will be a certain amount of condemnation, a certain defiant refutation of our abusers in achieving this change of perspective that is necessary for us to refute the ~ I don't know, Copa. The artifacts of our mother's illnesses or of the hurt, unhealed places within them that they took out on us. But we cannot condemn our moms, Copa. That is the lie of it. Those are our mothers. Just as, whatever they do and however they treat us, these are our children.

We are and we always will be my mother/myself.

What we will achieve, what we must achieve, to heal, is compassion for all of us. For our moms, for the battered little kids we were, making what sense we could out of everything that was so wrong.

You love your mother, Copa. As it is with our kids, you don't get to make a different "choice" about how you feel about her. What you do get to do is see the error, the confusion, in the way the Child within came to see herself.

Her mother/herself.

This last incident about the building, and the Jewishness, and the vulnerability, Copa? Is that who you thought you saw in your abuser's eyes? Is that how you justify, how you rationalize, treating yourself as you sometimes do, as an adult? Are those the secret, shaming things that broke through when your own child was in danger?

These things are true, for me.

Remember when I posted the poetry from the first therapist for you, and we traced what I heard from what he said? Remember the poetry from the female therapist, from the female healing that occurred, seemingly without effort, in that therapy where she was one of us?

She taught us how to travel the blasted lands Copa, without accusing ourselves or our abusers.

So we listened and we traveled and we healed.

I will post that poetry for you again. Listen this time for the difference between the feel of the therapy between male and female therapists, okay?

Cedar

We are my mother/myself Copa. We cannot have it any other way without destroying ourselves, without shattering our identities. A male cannot give that back to us. We are female. We require mothering to be whole.

We just need not to let whatever was the matter with our mothers destroy us.

We still get to love our moms, whether we see them or not. We still get to wish we had all that we hoped, all that generous, bottomless love that we needed.

Here is a secret, Copa.

We do.

We are women. It comes with the territory. We could no more put our capacity to love and to join with and to not be separate from aside than we could ~ anything.

Love is intrinsic to us. That is where we must go to heal.

That is not a man's way. Our therapists were not only men, but they were not ethical men. Even if they didn't understand the core of a woman the way M does, or the way D H does, Copa? The therapists, as we knew on some level, that they would, whispered or spoke right out loud, weakening words.

We were their patients. We paid them with our money. The deal, at the least of it, was that we would risk and they would not hurt us.

If they could not help us, that was a risk we were willing to take to heal.

But they did hurt us, Copa.

Everything they taught us is open to question.

All of it.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

In a far land of witches and ogres
in a time of princesses on strings
There would come
to those trapped on that I land

A staunch ally
from the Valley of Horses and Kings

On the Wind they would ride
the princesses and the ally
Through Fire and through Smoke
to the land, far and fair

On white horses with reigns of
black satin
Seeded pearl ribbands
in their sun-scented hair

Draped in veils sewn of silk and
white cotton
Beneath which fly the colors of each Lady
fair

So they traveled
the ally and the Ladies
toward the Dawning...
Through black, blasted lands
wherein each Lady's past
had its lair

So they traveled, the ally and the Ladies
princesses of dark, timeless lands without water
or air
Toward a sunstruck aerie of white and cupolaed pavillions
at the behest of the ally, gone before them
on the back of a white and a spirited mare

So they traveled, the ally and the Ladies
single file, to the land, far and fair
On white horses with reigns of...black satin
seeded pearl ribbands in their sun scented hair

So they traveled, the ally and the Ladies ~
spending the coin of those dark, timeless realms....
Purchasing ~ courage
with coins minted in fear

Telling tales of old scars and of dark, unhealed wounds
that the Child within each might...appear

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Another, to deal with my ambivalence about men. (failed.)

As M says: "I haven't left you yet."

How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal, but by degrees?

Or however that quote by Shakespeare goes.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Another, to go back to my childhood, this time accompanied by a strong and fair prince, and to confront those horrors. (failed.)

We are learning here, I think, that though what happened was horrible, what we learned, what we saw in our abuser's eyes and came to believe about ourselves ~ that is where the brokenness that affects us today lives.

In their eyes, and in our having believed them at the cost of confronting our defenselessness, our own mortality then, if we like, punched them in the nose, or something. So, we crafted and created our survival; our somehow survival, that feels like a fraud instead of the wondrous gift it is, to be alive ~ especially for those of us who have come so often, face to face with well, with being a dead thing.

It is a hard problem to face. Grown men soldiers going intentionally into battlefields where they know people are going to try to kill them and where they know they are going to try to kill the other guy back come home with PTSD.

We were just little girls when it happened to us, Copa. Just little girls, so pretty and filled with hope in that special way all little girls seem to glow with.

And whereas the soldiers who cannot forget what they've seen knew all along that if they could just make it through, they would go home.

We were home, Copa.

That is where those pretty little girls, those stalwart, handsome little boys lived.

With the witch mother, and everything that entails.

And it was very dark. A very bad time, Copa.

But we lived.

I can look at all of this in two ways. I can say that because I had already been failed by men by the time I met this man, to foretell his weakness and his inability to stand with me or for me...would have been my position no matter who or what. With anybody.

It was only bad luck that this man revealed himself to be a charlatan.

The other perspective is this: I discounted the signs for reasons within myself. Self-destructiveness. For example. In a way it was to hedge my bets. Like our difficult children do.

Well, or you could say: I always knew what happened in my childhood. I always knew it was horrible and wrong. I did not know how to incorporate or heal it so I rose above it. Then, one day, for whatever reason I decided ~ I decided ~ to heal it and have it finished and resolved. For my sake, and for the sake of my life and of my capacity to love, I decided.

You could say that.

Which would pretty much leave the therapist being well, sort of an arrogant dufus preying on the grievously wounded.

And the money, Copa?

That was to keep him honest. This is an attractive woman. She is my patient and I will not compromise the vow I made in my Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. I am her protector. I am her hired gun, her Security Force. We will go where she says, and I will protect and never twist and rape and require her humiliation.

But he did, Copa.

I just don't see where you did anything wrong, here. For heaven's sake, what were you supposed to do when confronted with Security Boy's fallibility once you were already in heart of the black and blasted lands?

Fire him?

He knew that would be impossible for you when he agreed to play Security Boy.

That was the deal.

Wrong hero. Only an insipid chimera of a hero, Copa. But the blasted lands? The lands without water or air?

Those were very real.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

So from my new perspective I do not understand where the self-betrayal was. Except in the way I saw it then, when it occurred. Believing it had anything to do with me. Or my worth. Or my deserving. That I had deserved what happened to me as a child. That I deserved his failing me. That this train wreck that was my life as it was set up for me. I deserved. That is the only betrayal of self that I see.

Well, yeah.

That's what we went into therapy to heal. How we saw ourselves and what we felt we deserved, versus what we were entitled to, which was nothing at all. It isn't like we were drooling over our dinner or wetting our pants in public in our lives. We had already pulled everything together and were functioning beautifully. True to our natures, perhaps, we saw something out of place and decided to address it.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

And felt, still, completely entitled to their loving devotion. Their protection. Their loving and devoted care. Is it any wonder that I have so much trouble putting myself in that position, as deserving love and protection and respect from myself?

In this post, Copa, you are seeing yourself through your abuser's eyes. Where we intend ~ okay, where we fervently hope ~ to get to is seeing the abuser through our eyes. Is it an abuse of the power of The Mother, of the power accruing to that imagery of Mother, of the Universal archetypal Mother Copa, to do what your mom, and mine too, did with that power. We made them mothers, Copa. In nature, you know the joy in the face of the mother cat, of the mother dog, of the mother alligator as she carries her baby in ferocious jaws and never hurts them. That is what we gave to our mothers with our births, Copa.

That chance, that option, that possibility to heal and to be healed by loving the flower, the tiny, defenseless, four-thorned flower that will teach us, in its very dependence, the wonder of what it is to love, to sacrifice the self for the sake of the loved other.

That is the betrayal our mothers committed.

We intend or, as previously noted, at least fervently hope, to see our our mothers were never The Mother, that title we keep honoring them with and berating ourselves for not somehow having been enough to deserve, at all.

They never were, Copa.

Whether through a choice to hate or through some missing genetic component, our mothers were...were different, Copa. In the same way Forrest Gump was different.

They were just...not right.

We didn't know that and so we blamed ourselves, not only for their not rightness, but for the imaginary protections we believed in and felt guilty about and were afraid they would find out about and I am still afraid she will know, Copa. That monster with the hate in her eyes coming for me and she is so big and she hurts me and I am nothing, nothing at all.

Shamed.

And oh, if she ever knew what I really think....

That is why we lived, Copa. That is why we are not like them, today.

Because on some secret level they knew nothing about because it does not exist in them, we whispered, "F you, mom."

So that was pretty brave of us, don't you think?

Yes.

And we will get through this part, too.

That is my motto, currently.

My abuser never did extinguish that little spark of defiance. Nor did yours. Or we would not be who we are today, Copa.

On we go then.

What kind of mom sees her children, her own children Copa, the way your mother (and mine) saw hers?

And what would you do Copabanana, if your son had a child. And you were visiting and came into the nursery and listened to his wife, listened to the mother of your grandchild, whispering those lies your mother told you into the tiny, perfect ears of your infant granddaughter or grandson?

What would you do to her, Copa.

roar

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

My problem is that I loved her. I still do.

And that I think your struggle, too.

Yes.

I am separating the mother I was and am entitled to, even if I have to create her myself, from the mother who exists. In that separation, I see my mother as a woman; I see vulnerability and a messed up power dynamic that turned her into a coward and a bully.

The mother I need is within me.

I am learning to recognize the taint, like the faintest whiff of fish or body odor beneath too much perfume, where the mother I love by my choice to do so is contaminated by Abusive Mother, by Mother To Be Discounted and Refuted, within my mother/myself.

And I am learning what I am learning about betrayal, and about betrayal of self through the miasmic swamp of initial betrayal, to assist me in navigating this bottomless psychic sea to the far shore.

The problem is that sometimes? The craft I was so sure was like, an ocean liner? Turns out to be the tiniest little raft. Like the raft the shipwrecked executive and Wilson, the soccer ball, made to sail the ocean.

The love he felt for Wilson kept him going, and my love for Wilson, for all the Wilson's that are me and those I love, will keep me believing, will keep me going, too.

A little wet, sometimes, that's all.

:O)

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

How is a person online, any different than a person? We take each other's measure and we go from there.

Thank you, Copa.

This is true.

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

Forgive me. Because of its length and complexity I did not finish it. I am afraid I will lose it. So I will post it as it is, and work from it, already posted. again, I am sorry. It lacks internal unity and the order of things is all wrong. I will fix it.

My point of view is psychoanalytic. Much of what I have written here is not something I consciously believe about myself. These are attitudes and beliefs and actions that I took from a child's viewpoint in order to protect myself.

I know it does not make sense from a rational standpoint. That is why I am trying to root out these false beliefs about myself and life.

So here I go.

I am trying to piece together here how the experience with the renters and the experience with the therapist, might be similar and therefore illuminate my position as a child, and how distortions from that time undermine me still.

First there is the knowledge what I will call eating the forbidden fruit. From the onset of the relationship with each I sensed both the renters and the therapist were to some extent untrustworthy. I should have run away.

Something that you, like I did too, refuted to continue in therapy at the very same time you decided to leap, to trust the therapist

We did it anyway, knowing, beneath all of it, that we would come through it.

But because we were talking about going to the far away BIG CITY soon, it made some sense to offer them those 9 months we would be gone,

(I made the offer (to the renters) even though I had extreme concern about the nature of the behavior that I had already seen.)

In the course of my involvement I became aware of my greater strength or position and my greater strength frightened me. In my psychic world it should not have been so.

I was stronger

hardest of all, to see that I was the stronger

I am afraid of my power, still.

Stop being ashamed of your strength.

I become frightened by my strength. Actually, right word is appalled, at the reaction of the other to it.

that my strength to him...had been frightening.

I begin to cut my self down to size to stay in the relationship in subordinate position, as I had with my mother. I call this disarming. I am beginning to think that strength is my secret shame. The prototype for this is your example, Cedar, of the ballerina with weights on.

people without deformity or with appearances or intellects that could be construed as threatening to those whose appearances or intellects or whatever it was, could not be construed as threatening, were forced to don in public that the others not be shamed or made to feel less than.

we backed down...to avoid dispute.

she knew I loved her. And would subordinate myself and my needs to her.

Simultaneous to giving up my own power, I give way to a fantasy of a rescuer. I compensate for this give away of my strength by a fantasy of rescue. I endow prince charming with the powers to save me. I am failed.

that he could not rescue me or save me.

these people were not as we needed to believe them to be.

When my rescue fantasy is dashed, I feel it is due to something secretly shameful about me. That I must have deserved to be failed because of failings and defects. The sense of having something wrong with me for which I deserve bad things is my cover story. Because on some level I believe that my power is my secret shame.

Like the ballerina with weights and chains I begin to jettison anything that I believe may be an asset.

I do so to pacify my angry mother or to attempt to protect myself, by making myself less threatening. I continue to jettison strengths in a vain attempt to refute the truth I see. The truth I see or fear seeing is that the parent or parental figure is threatened by my being whole.

Despite the sense of the other's perceived untrustworthiness, I continue to stay engaged. Meanwhile I am tearing self down to stay in the relationship. The relationship becomes more and more unstable. I keep going, attempting to find equilibrium by jettisoning my own strengths and needs.

When my rescue fantasy is dashed, I feel it is due to something secretly shameful about me. That I must have deserved it because of my failings and defects.

The characteristics of the angry mother are:
demanding
entitled
morally corrupt
blaming
cruel
tough as nails
punitive
abandoning
refuses to address needs of child
chooses herself instead
undependable
unstable affect-- presents one way; acts another.
cold-hearted
martyrdom and playing the victim
hypocrisy
and indifference. The worst thing of all.

My mother always asserted she was entitled to superior status and care.

The tenant and my Mother. Both demanded concesions based upon moral superiority they knew they did not deserve. A certain corruption, while asserting moral superiority.

Even though SHE KNEW SHE DID NOT based upon her own decisions and actions.

My mother's sense of her entitlement.

And did not care less. Felt entitled to it. Felt entitled to what that money bestowed. The power. The gifts to self. The security.

My mothers sense of her deserving, independent of her quality of mothering.

And felt, still, completely entitled to their loving devotion. Their protection.

And when I had demanded she respect it (the will)...she played the victim, Cedar. My victim. When she always knew the opposite was true.

And this is where the extreme betrayal of self begins. I begin to target myself with the same characteristics and attitudes of my mother. She becomes unnecessary because I have taken on the targeting of myself, with her behaviors, in absentia.

I punish myself.
I abandon myself.
I am cold hearted
I am withholding
I choose her.
I ignore or mock my own needs
I am cruel
I am a hypocrite.
I am demanding.
I am blaming.
I tell myself I do not deserve anything
I am harsh
I am extreme and unstable in my emotional regulation.
I put aside all moral justice. I become morally corrupt against myself.

Why do I do this? I need my mother. I love my mother. I will do anything to keep her. No matter what is the cost to my self.
result in the child psyche

I have abandoned myself.
I become willfully blind. I will myself to not understand what I see. I give up any protections.

Because I cannot fight. I will expelled from the family I need. I choose to be alone and defenseless. Willing myself not to understand. I do this to keep the little I have. Because after all, I cannot live by myself.

I have identified with the aggressor.

I come to see myself as an undeserving child.
I have come to see through my mother's eyes and not my own.
I see my own offending behaviors instead of my need and most importantly instead of the abrogation of responsibility of the parent.

And when I do that there is a predictable result every time.frightened.confused.alone

Having willfully thrown over board any strengths I have, I feel defenseless.

However horrible is this state of mind, it is preferable to being abandoned.

To cope with the dangers in my FOO this is the preferred identity (which keeps me safe): Terrified. Targeted. Out of control. Without protection. People are trying to hurt me. Come after me. They can do whatever they want. Smear me. I am alone. Nobody to protect me.
Terrified. Like a target. Like prey.

I am out of control. I cannot protect myself. People are trying to hurt me. They can. They can destroy me. Come after me. Smear me. I am alone. I have nobody. Nobody to protect me.

My self-concept is of being absolutely clueless, defenseless, alone.

I have rendered myself senseless, or as I call it, clueless, defenseless, alone.

I prefer the identity as dominated and taken advantage of than being abandoned.

No matter how much I feel that it is shamefulness that has stigmatized me, and is my secret crime, I believe at the root of my shame is power and advantage.

I have inverted any strength or attribute I had that either threatened or I interpreted as threatening my mother, to pacify her anger and jealousy of me.

All of these other things are after the fact. I may have incurred my mother's wrath because of a toileting accident or because she resented changing a diaper. But my real crime was that I saw the truth of my situation.

I erased my own awareness of my situation, and erased the potential that she would become aware. And abandon me.

I became my own accuser and the result was an underbelly of feeling, that I incorporated as my identity. I prefered and chose this alter-ego instead of the positive attributes that make other children stars in ballet or in class or in sports.

This was my chosen identity: Vulnerable. Alone. Nobody. Pishy. Rejected. Helpless. A pariah. Denounced. Abandoned as unworthy. Bad.

So when I see myself as having needed to change in order to deserve better treatment from my mother, it was not to improve. It was to become invisible. Compliant. Passive. Non-demanding.

In my case, the change I made was to take on an identiy as helpless, denounced, etc. So at once, I punished myself for my crime. Being strong or advantaged. And made myself more appealing to my mother. And less likely to be ejected from the household.

My secret shame is strength.

What you do get to do is see the error, the confusion, in the way the Child within came to see herself.

We are treated like this because we deserve it. Shunned, Reviled. Set apart. Abandoned.

Why would a child do this to herself? Fear of the punitive, destructive, engulfing and abandoning mother.

what we deserve

Terrified. Like a target. Like prey.

I am out of control. I cannot protect myself. People are trying to hurt me. They can. They can destroy me. Come after me. Smear me. I am alone. I have nobody. Nobody to protect me.

My self-concept is of being absolutely clueless, defenseless, alone.

Even though I won.

they decided to try to destroy me

They tried to dominate and to get the advantage.

That there are forces that try to destroy me.

And that I am vulnerable to being destroyed.

And whether or not this is cause or consequence of seeing life and the world through my mother's eyes,

My reaction to the tenants.

We are afraid we will be hated for it, reviled and set apart. Shunned, even

if we'd only been some impossibly better version of daughters, our mothers would magically have become the mothers we needed to survive ~ to live at all

I wanted to save her from that Cedar. I still do. Even if I have to sacrifice myself.

she was not the mother she needed to be for you for herself, either.

Standing down betrayals.

I wanted rescue from the past. I wanted somebody to stand with me and face it down. He failed. I felt horror.

Renters and therapist

I foresaw his deficits and failure. I foresaw it all.

Renters and therapist.

For going into an arrangement that on some level I foresaw as dangerous.

hedging bets

In a way it was to hedge my bets.

Hedging your bets (hedging your best.)

If you start off with something in which you already have doubt...the risk is not so great...the failure is not so great...

What does it mean to be a survivor. stronger

A cold clear eyed decision. I survived. He did not.

I deserved what happened to me

That I had deserved what happened to me as a child.

Is it any wonder that I have so much trouble putting myself in that position, as deserving love and protection and respect from myself?

Nature of my mother's love

And she saw her children in need. And she refused to help...unless forced.

That her children may have been degraded, in need, desperate. Mattered not at all.

my mother/myself.

She is gone, Cedar. There are no more chances to love her. Sometimes I enter the closet where she is. I see the urn. I have to physically stop myself from trying to climb in. (It is a reasonably small urn. Not even my forearm would fit. I would make a huge mess if I tried. That horrifies me. But I want to, anyway, climb into that bronze urn with my Mom.)

Secret shame/secret power

This last incident about the building, and the Jewishness, and the vulnerability, Copa? Is that who you thought you saw in your abuser's eyes? Is that how you justify, how you rationalize, treating yourself as you sometimes do, as an adult? Are those the secret, shaming things that broke through when your own child was in danger?

I think this is true, Cedar. And I do not know why. The hated Jew stereotype is on the one hand dirty, too sexual, out of control. On the other hand threatening and too powerful. With too much, and threatening to take away what others have.

And how a little girl could divine this, I do not know.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Family estrangements are broken relationships between parents, grandparents, siblings and children. Although a family estrangement can begin at any stage of life, it often begins during late adolescence or early adulthood. Characteristics of estrangement include a lack of empathy in one or more of the parties involved. This may result in heightened levels of stress in all parties, although in the case of an abusive relationship the victim may feel a sense of relief once the source of stress has been removed.

Estrangements may involve a third party, such as a member of the extended family or the adult child's spouse. The third party provides emotional support to the party initiating the estrangement, providing the estranger with an alternate social support system and thus enabling the deepening of the estrangement.

The rejected parties may try a number of strategies to repair the rift. In some cases, taking responsibility and making amends for harsh words or difficult circumstances may improve the relationship. However if the estrangement is the result of a behavioural pattern (such as a personality disorder) rather than a sequence of unfortunate life events it is doubtful that the relationship will survive in any meaningful form.

In some cases, the initiator of the estrangement stipulates boundaries in order to maintain limited contact (and therefore limit emotional damage) with the person they see as their abuser. In other cases, the initiator is unable or unwilling to consider any type of reconciliation.[2]

Health implications
Those rejected by one or more family members in a family estrangement experience a decline in psychological and physical health.[3][4] The social rejection in family estrangement is the equivalent of ostracism which undermines four fundamental human needs: the need to belong, the need for control in social situations, the need to maintain high levels of self-esteem, and the need to have a sense of a meaningful existence.[5] The rejected parties suffer adverse psychological consequences such as loneliness, low self-esteem, aggression, and depression.[6]

Family estrangement activates the grief response. However, the rejected family may not achieve the final grief stage of acceptance, given that the social death of the relationship is potentially reversible. The prolonged suffering of the rejected party, together with a perceived or real stigma of having been rejected by a family member, results in isolation and behavioral changes in the rejected party.[7][8]

I become frightened by my strength. Actually, right word is appalled, at the reaction of the other to it.

Perhaps we both need to channel Donald Trump in these instances.

Let the person who started it, who had the gall to insult our integrity in the first place, deal with their reactions to our Monty Python Frenchman vs English king way of seeing things, now.

I begin to cut my self down to size to stay in the relationship in subordinate position, as I had with my mother. I call this disarming. I am beginning to think that strength is my secret shame. The prototype for this is your example, Cedar, of the ballerina with weights on.

Yes. But we are no longer defenseless children, no longer little girls. Truthfully, we have faced more terrifying things than anyone in the adult world can throw at us.

We bend the knee out of habit, out of mortal fear of the Witch Mother...a fantastic ogre who could only exist in the world of the defenseless Magical Child.

Simultaneous to giving up my own power, I give way to a fantasy of a rescuer. I compensate for this give away of my strength by a fantasy of rescue. I endow prince charming with the powers to save me. I am failed.

That is how scary is the world of the blasted lands. In our desperate need for safety is indication of our courage.

Betrayed.

We are betrayed.

Oh, look. Here we still are.

We lived.

He is nothing to us if he is not what he promised; if he is not who he promised he was.

Everything about him can be and should be and must be, discounted.

We would be fools to believe in the promises (or the threats, or the rationalizations) of a Liar.

The truth I see or fear seeing is that the parent or parental figure is threatened by my being whole.

Yes.

A whole person has no truck with the coward or the bully. They despise them.

Do you see the reflections, Copa?

The whole person despises the bully, the coward, the liar, because such people cannot be trusted.

Remember, back when we started, when one of the decisions I needed to make to keep going was whether it was me who was lying, or...my own mother?

That was a hard barrier to breach.

I could not go further without breaching that barrier.

It was scary too. What would that mean, if the liar here turned out to be me? And what would that mean, if it turned out that my own mother....

All I could decide to do was keep going. So, I did. And it was very hard.

In the thousand reflections that once were a mirror
dark and savage truths appear

When my rescue fantasy is dashed, I feel it is due to something secretly shameful about me.

No. When the authority figure you paid to take you into the blasted lands betrayed you. There is a huge difference. And when he betrayed you Copa, he knew exactly what he was doing; he knew Copa, what that would do to you and he did it, anyway.

What kind of person does something like that? And takes your freaking money the whole time when he knows he is going to shatter the only protection you have and, once it's gone, betray you?

He is meaningless, Copa.

Meaningless little man with nice shoes.

That's it.

Try again.

Leave him behind and continue the course. Like a beautiful white-sailed ship leaving the storm behind, Copa. Navigating by the stars.

The characteristics of the angry mother are:
demanding
entitled
morally corrupt
blaming
cruel
tough as nails
punitive
abandoning
refuses to address needs of child
chooses herself instead
undependable
unstable affect-- presents one way; acts another.
cold-hearted
martyrdom and playing the victim
hypocrisy
and indifference. The worst thing of all.

Yes.

And you survived even that.

Brass trumpets; red silk banners.

Dawn.

The tenant and my Mother. Both demanded concesions based upon moral superiority they knew they did not deserve. A certain corruption, while asserting moral superiority.

Know what D H says about these kinds of happenings?

"F you. Get out of my face."

That is the difference, Copa. Healthy people say that. They do not question their rightness in destroying the aggressor.

That is why there are no aggressors, no swaggering bullies, no haters, slimy with cowardice, in their lives.

That is where we are going, too.

My mothers sense of her deserving, independent of her quality of mothering.

What you are actually describing here Copa is greed.

Like a pig at the trough.

Greed.

And this is where the extreme betrayal of self begins. I begin to target myself with the same characteristics and attitudes of my mother. She becomes unnecessary because I have taken on the targeting of myself, with her behaviors, in absentia.

Yes. But I would say, at least for myself, not in absentia. The Witch Mother, the terrible destructive ogre mother lives in my head, now. I think I am going to love her out of it. She thinks that will be fine, and will see me once she finishes her dinner.

Roast Cedar's brain again, tonight.

One of her favorite dishes, the child grown and fattened, like Hansel when the Witch lures him in, the promise of all those wonderful candies affecting his judgment.

Which is why the Witch created the trap in the first place.

But you and I know the end of the story.

Into the oven with the Witch, the smoke of her burning darkening the skies.

Why do I do this? I need my mother. I love my mother. I will do anything to keep her. No matter what is the cost to my self.

Well, in that timeless realm of the Magical Child, part of you doesn't know any better than to do that. She doesn't know you've grown up. She doesn't know the thorns and briars and brambles protecting the Seeping Beauty are a self created thing; are something she created herself to keep the Child safe from the Witch Mother.

That may be why the imagery of the kiss, of Sleeping Beauty awakening, holds such fascination for you.

So, we must be deep into the thorns and brambles...then, and now.

I have abandoned myself.
I become willfully blind. I will myself to not understand what I see. I give up any protections.

Could it be Copa, that you are only sleeping?

A witch cast spell, a spell of great magic spun by....a Child.

You, Copa.

This is how you lived.

And when I do that there is a predictable result every time.frightened.confused.alone

Until now.

Until this thread and this site.

Little kids, all of us, holding hands in the dark.

But oh, how much scarier it was to face this, alone.

White candles
in an Innocent's mirror

Having willfully thrown over board any strengths I have, I feel defenseless.

However horrible is this state of mind, it is preferable to being abandoned.

Speaking only for myself here, I think what I choose defenseless over is my raging desire to kill the Witch Mother.

But that's just me.

Twin wolves
livid red
in those eyes....

Bad Cedar.

F you, mom.

Sadly, sorrowfully, F you, mom.

Turn way.

Continue.

Save the Child.

To cope with the dangers in my FOO this is the preferred identity (which keeps me safe): Terrified. Targeted. Out of control. Without protection. People are trying to hurt me. Come after me. They can do whatever they want. Smear me. I am alone. Nobody to protect me.
Terrified. Like a target. Like prey.

Oh, so...you've met my mother, then.

:O)

I prefer the identity as dominated and taken advantage of than being abandoned.

Well, you are nicer than me, Copa.

I prefer it to matricide.

Not in real life, but in my brain. My mother/myself. How can I be myself if I destroy half of myself? So I let my mother live, and committed to destroying myself.

For wishing to live.

For the audacity of wishing to love.

Not even to be loved, Copa.

But to have my love accepted.

It was the only gift I could give.

The only thing that was left of me.

I wanted to save her from that Cedar. I still do. Even if I have to sacrifice myself.

You cannot save her.

You can save you.

That is the Mission: Impossible, here.

That is the core of the conflict.

Who is the liar, here. Who did this to Cedar. Who did this to Copa. Who did this to Serenity.

Who is the liar, here.

I have inverted any strength or attribute I had that either threatened or I interpreted as threatening my mother, to pacify her anger and jealousy of me.

Yes.

Because the other choice would be the one I make.

The one Serenity makes.

The one you must make, too.

Who is the liar, here.

Who did this, to Copa.

There is such rage for me in that question, Copa.

All of these other things are after the fact. I may have incurred my mother's wrath because of a toileting accident or because she resented changing a diaper. But my real crime was that I saw the truth of my situation.

One of the traumas I have not shared here has to do with my brother and a toileting incident and my mother's stupidly selfish and forever unacceptable rage. She rubbed excrement on his face, Copa.

And made him walk into the kitchen.

Crying ~ oh, man. I will never forget it.

And if I was four...he was three. Just a beautiful little boy whose mother rubbed s**t in his face and then made him display what she had done to him.

I do hate her, Copa.

I became my own accuser and the result was an underbelly of feeling, that I incorporated as my identity. I prefered and chose this alter-ego instead of the positive attributes that make other children stars in ballet or in class or in sports.

This was my chosen identity: Vulnerable. Alone. Nobody. Pishy. Rejected. Helpless. A pariah. Denounced. Abandoned as unworthy. Bad.

And your mother would have it no other way. For all of her life and of yours Copa, she would never, ever stop.

A beautiful little girl, Copa. Shining with that rare beauty every child possesses. I've read we are born "trailing clouds of glory" come from the truth of our essence.

And that is what your mom did to that beautiful child.

She did that to you, Copa.

You came to her fresh; an innocent and free thing, trailing swirling clouds of unimaginable glory.

Of hope, Copa.

For her. A chance to recreate herself through loving her child.

She couldn't even do that.

Why would a child do this to herself? Fear of the punitive, destructive, engulfing and abandoning mother.

And, for me, to cover her rage. Because even as children, we knew what they were doing was wrong; was evil.

No wonder, we reason, she hates me. We hate ourselves for the way we think about them, about that first object that we so desperately love, too.

This is true for me. It may not be true for you.

That is what I forgive, and that is who I forgive.

Me.

Up with this, I will not put, right?

Bad Cedar.

Courageous Cedar. So much to incorporate, to try to make sense of, for such a little girl.

Whose heart is fulled with love...and with its opposite.

The choice was mine.

I chose.

My secret shame is strength.

Yes.

And Witch Mother will be right to kill us, if she knows; if she were ever to find out.



White candles
in an innocent's mirror....

hedging bets

Nope. Raw courage.

What does it mean to be a survivor. stronger

It means to live, to claim our wonderful lives and never to listen to the flowers again. The benefit to us is in loving, in caring, in erecting the fence to protect them and to love them with everything in us.

Or is it to take possession of that castle in the English countryside and to send the English king packing "lest I taunt you a second time".

It is the English king, after all, who has nothing to offer but a meaningless quest for a Grail we already possess.

All we have to do is claim it.

Declare it to be what it is and claim it for our own.

"Lest we taunt you a second time."

I deserved what happened to me

Copa, I believe there is a purpose to what happens to all of us. Everything is too minutely complex for it to be other than that.

You did your best. You behaved with integrity.

You are not responsible for his path or his fate or his choices or for his growth, or for his refusal to grow, through them.

But you are responsible Copa, for yours.

And as always, you require of yourself honesty and integrity.

Good work.

She is gone, Cedar. There are no more chances to love her. Sometimes I enter the closet where she is. I see the urn. I have to physically stop myself from trying to climb in. (It is a reasonably small urn. Not even my forearm would fit. I would make a huge mess if I tried. That horrifies me. But I want to, anyway, climb into that bronze urn with my Mom.)

Secret shame/secret power

And the Child's desperate hope.

And how a little girl could divine this, I do not know.

Me, either.

We do seem to though ~ children, I mean.

Once upon a time, in a faraway land where time and distance had lost all meaning, there were born to the peasantry a generation of female children whose task and whose talent it would be to unravel the tangled skeins of deceit, viciousness, and trickery that bound the hearts, the souls, and the bloodlines of those families into which each would be born.

?

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

She rubbed excrement on his face, Copa.

And made him walk into the kitchen.

Cedar, this is as bad as anything I have heard and I have heard a great deal. She deserves to go to prison. Still.

I think what I choose defenseless over is my raging desire to kill the Witch Mother.

Yes, that is the missing link. There is no other reason for the child to disarm unless she would use her weapons and resolve and strength by turning her rage against her oppressor.

So I let my mother live, and committed to destroying myself.

Yes, I did this, too.

I will put in writing my intention to look at the months before my mother's death, through this lens.

Because I held in my hands the power of life and death of my mother in these months. It would have been an acceptable decision, in fact, advocated by at least one doctor, to let my mother die in hospice.

As somebody that harbored matricidal thoughts, how must this have been for me?

It felt as if it was matricide the idea to affirmatively withdraw treatment, or lifesaving measures, as long as she voiced that she wanted to live....even though she was unable to sustain necessary functions to sustain life.

It absolutely informs my extreme suffering and self-blame after her death, for everything in her life. I was punishing myself for matricidal impulses. And this is why I am still in bed.

Because on some level I must fear that my son's problems and mine together with him are a deserved punishment for what I have harbored in my soul.

 

[Copabanana]

I am thinking about the Iran Nuclear deal this morning, especially since the announcement by Chuck Schumer that he will vote against the deal.

I respect Chuck Schumer, and to understand better his position I read a little bit of Allen Dershowitz's position, as he too, is adamantly against the deal. (I dislike Bibi Netanyahu and was not one bit moved by his rants.)

I want to include here, a bit of Dershowitz's criticism of the deal, because it demonstrates approaching life from a position of strength (remember when Dershowitz was acused of sexual transgressions and how he went to war against the accusers?)

This is what he says about Obama and Iran:

“He took the military option off the table, and that was an extraordinarily naïve and wrong thing to do because that allowed the Iranians to negotiate with us as equals,” said Dershowitz. “And I’m not the only one who has said this. Many liberal Democrats I’ve spoken to believe we made a tragic negotiating mistake, that what we should have done was said to the Iranians: Look—You’re never, ever going to be able to develop nuclear weapons. That’s American policy, and we’ll stop you, whatever it takes.”

I am seeing that much of our FOO madness has to do with POWER, its abuse and our failure to see it and call it what it is. We are abysmal negotiators, within ourselves, our families and in our lives. In fact we never ever negotiated.

Any conversation we ever entered into with members of our families, were fantasies. Because in their heads we were never even present. They had never given us legitmacy at all in terms of personhood. We entered the conversations having already granted impossible concessions (personhood, and voice, to begin with), already having disarmed, (scrubbing clean any awareness of our toxic hatred that we harbored towards FOO-types.)

As in the Obama/Iran example, we had been armed. We had the power. We gave it away, weakened ourselves to get something we already had. Already had.

And engaged in life portraying falsely a defeated, beseeching, vanquished personhood, that was created out of whole cloth.

I for one ran away with my tail between my legs and eventually crawled into my bed, and refused to get out.

And I am believing now that I ran from myself. Because in my deepest soul I wanted to kill my mother for her meanness to me and to everybody else.

And perhaps that was my underlying fear when my son turned against me. That my punishment was finally being levied. I was defending myself from that.

I too am fascinated by Trump and his appeal. Today he is talking about blood in Megyn Kelly's eyes and seeping out of other body parts. Misogyny might be going too far, at least to the female newscasters who are rallying around her.

But there is something to be learned from Trump. He is the French Soldier to the max. Of course, he is the English King, also. That is the problem.

This is all getting a little bit interesting.

I am secretly a little bit gleeful that I am guilty of matricidal thoughts. It is better than being such a powerless whimp and wanting to crawl into the very pretty bronze urn with my used to be very beautiful mother.

At first I was scared that I would have to give up my love for her. Of course, being matricidal would not be very conducive to deep love. Except it was.

Actually, as I get used to myself as a killer want to be, I can see that I no longer need anger. And the love can be sweeter and truer. The compassion, too. For myself.

What a dreadful and horrible life for a child. To be driven to such a point to want to kill off the mother she loved most of all and whose love she would have killed to have.

But that was then and this is now. How wonderful it would be to live the rest of a life crawled out from these rocks. Into the sun and the air. No longer hiding all of this from myself.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I too am fascinated by Trump and his appeal. Today he is talking about blood in Megyn Kelly's eyes and seeping out of other body parts. Misogyny might be going too far, at least to the female newscasters who are rallying around her.

I hate that he said such a crass and cowardly thing. He should be ashamed.

It is an interesting thing to me that blood shed in battle has a supposed purity and that the blood of women ~ the blood that means life itself ~ is labeled unclean.

Anything to do with that blood is labeled unclean, including the women who shed it, whether in birthing a child or in cleansing the womb to prepare it for birthing a child.

Here again: Which of us is it, in this thinly disguised dialog of power between male and female, who is not telling the truth and why, for the love of God, have we believed them?!?

What is the matter with all of us.

Strong flowing, sacred Woman Blood
cyclic blood of fecundity

Whatever about how the rest of that one goes. I will find and post it.

And yet the blood shed in battle, the eviscerated soldiers, the bloodied hero's death ~ this stuff is clean?!?

roar

Well, anyway. I came back on to post that as I was showering, I realized I never needed to feel guilty for hating my mother, for detesting that fool of a woman who hurt and shamed her own daughters, her own sons.

That was my shame I was confessing. Not hers. My shame, that I freaking do not find it in my heart to respect this woman I have witnessed committing atrocities with a self-satisfied grin on her face and the meanness that is power over in her eyes.

Smug.

Breaking someone, anyone will do, at last.

I have posted before about that feeling of...what did we call it. That feeling of fraudulence, of trying to do the right thing, of tension and guardedness in ever interaction with my mother. I felt badly about acknowledging that. What kind of daughter does that make me, that is what I thought.

What kind of person behaves in such a way toward her own mother.

I was right.

I was right to behave as I did. I know who she is, really. I know her in a way D H does not, though he claims he spotted her (and my sister) within seconds. D H says neither is worthy of respect; that they can be tolerated for my sake.

So another layer, for me.

Thank you, Serenity and Copa.

My head is spinning. I cannot believe I was punishing myself for the horror and rage I feel at what that woman has done.

But I was. I was ashamed. I was. Not of her. I am disgusted, outraged, not ashamed, of her.

I was ashamed of me. That is where coward comes in. Incidents like that one, times I did not protect my brother.

If I was four...he was three.

Four. I named myself coward at four because until this afternoon's discussion, I literally believed the villain here to have been me.

Coward.

Now I will think some more about this.

I suppose it happened as it did because I had zero choice about what that Mother of my brother did to him. My only choice would have been to attack her, and that, I did not do.

Coward.

Huh.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

This is all getting a little bit interesting.

I am secretly a little bit gleeful that I am guilty of matricidal thoughts. It is better than being such a powerless whimp and wanting to crawl into the very pretty bronze urn with my used to be very beautiful mother.

At first I was scared that I would have to give up my love for her. Of course, being matricidal would not be very conducive to deep love. Except it was.

Actually, as I get used to myself as a killer want to be, I can see that I no longer need anger. And the love can be sweeter and truer. The compassion, too. For myself.

What a dreadful and horrible life for a child. To be driven to such a point to want to kill off the mother she loved most of all and whose love she would have killed to have.

Yes.

You write eloquently, Copa. Spare and strong. I love it.

***

Gleeful? Okay, Copa...I will be gleeful about those feelings, too. I love that thinking. Mostly, I am only aware of the feelings, of the overwhelming nature of the feelings, and of how easy it would be to topple into Vengeance and into the realm of the Magical Child.

I suppose that is where we will have to go to clear it.

But oh, you are right! There is glee in admitting that even if I did not have the power to change anything, I certainly did hate my abuser's living guts. (Hear the Child? :O)

And I still do. Hate the sight of her, if the truth be known.

But I love her, too. Oh, so much.

And all this business of compassion and etc....

As we heal, our responsibility will be, as it has always been, to our integrity in thought and action.

What compassion could there be for those who take a kind of willful joy in setting up and hurting and shaming their own daughters.

Their own little boys?

Those things our mothers did were acts of intention.

The brother I posted about today? Is the brother who confronted my mother about the way she was showing such partiality to my sister's grand. And my mother called the person who wanted the tire rimming machine or whatever it was and gave it to him free on the condition it be gone that very day.

And then, she sent my brother into the garage to be certain he got the message correctly while he was still vulnerable from having risked standing up to her for the sake of his grands.

Unbelievable.

I have not told D H that story. The one about my brother and what my mother did to his face.

I will never tell him that story.

But no compassion for that woman, for that stupid, crazy woman. My crying brother met my eyes. That was the instant of depersonalization for me.

Snip.

I think the place we get to is: "I owe you nothing." And I think that once we get there, we will find we no longer owe anyone in our lives honor, whether they merit it or not. That is a piece of the rental property dilemma I think, Copa. You are honoring those who should be despised.

M is correct.

I can't even imagine how differently life will seem for us.

We will have become the Frenchman in the Monty Python clip.

Can you imagine the joy of it?

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

I was right.

I was right to behave as I did.

My head is spinning. I cannot believe I was punishing myself for the horror and rage I feel at what that woman has done.

My mother/myself. Little girls introject their mothers. They as if swallow them whole. Form their selves, at least initially, by taking in the mother into their own psyche. I cannot explain well the mechanism but will look into it so as to better communicate about it.

You had no way to believe, nor did I or SWOT, that the hatefulness in our mothers, was not in us. I think we killed off that piece of our power, so as to protect everybody, including ourselves.

Look at shame in another way. Did your mother feel shame? Not in a way that it could be transformed into guilt so that she could be able to change herself. Did mine? I do not think so. Not that she ever expressed or let show.

Your sense of right and wrong was sufficiently developed that you knew it was wrong. You condemned it. You condemned that part of yourself that could ever perpetrate violence against anybody and you felt shame that it ever had existed.

suppose it happened as it did because I had zero choice about what that Mother of my brother did to him. My only choice would have been to attack her, and that, I did not do.

Think about it Cedar. You weighed how many pounds? 35 no more than 40?

First there is the tragi-comedy of it. Here was a hundred pound woman going after with killing affect her defenseless baby children.

Who loved her. Her children loved her. What they hated and needed to deny was their hatred of her acts towards them and her hateful behavior and attitudes. You loved her, and wanted her love, at that time.

Even if you could have won against her physically, using a weapon, for example, you would not have done so. Because you loved her.

All you wanted was her to stop being and behaving like a monster. It was not cowardice that stopped you. It was the impossibility of your situation. You lacked words, language to denounce her. You lacked options or the capacity to even conceive of them let alone execute them.

All of this I am on shaky grounds, theoretically speaking. I am not even sure if I understand fully what we are saying. I only know it makes sense. And it is true.

While we will fine tune it and elaborate it, I think the essential truth we have written.

 

[Copabanana]

There is glee in admitting that even if I did not have the power to change anything, I certainly did hate my abuser's living guts.

There is so much to celebrate here, Cedar. Our courage. Our love. Our responsibility.

Our chance for freedom, now.

I do not think for me it will be easy or certain. I for one, do not know the road out of bed. I think it will be harder for me.

Because after all I have lost my Mother. There will be no chance to love her more, from a position of strength.

And there is self-blame for me. Because if I had only been stronger or had more capacity I could have figured this out while she lived. And been able to be with her and love her.
And she is gone forever.

I will have to figure out how to love myself, because that will be the only way anymore to love her. And, still I do not know how to do so.

I am worried, too, that I am not understanding some of where we have gone, what we have come to. I wonder if I am rendering myself stupid to not see it, or whether I do not understand really.

I say to myself, Cedar understands, I do not. What am I missing?

Maybe she will explain it to me. And with that, I have again put myself down.

That is what I am afraid of.

I think the place we get to is: "I owe you nothing." And I think that once we get there, we will find we no longer owe anyone in our lives honor

There is something about presumed equality here. Like the French Soldier. Never for a second bought into any kind of inferior status.

We are developing rules of engagement, here. Beyond keep your fangs in your mother and your knife in your purse. (!!!!OMG, Cedar, that was a Freudian slip. I mean, keep your fangs in your mouth!!!! Believe me, I did not mean it.)

I am already wondering if the moderators are going to kick us off the board for being murderous.

Honor only ourselves.
If somebody has mistreated you, leave.

The relationship with the renters could never have resurrected itself. They had already demonstrated themselves as abusive. No matter if it met could meet some need or another of mine. It had already demonstrated that it could never meet my needs: They were abusers.

While every other person in the world in business, may be able to live with this kind of ambiguity, I cannot. Like food sensitivity, I lose myself and control over my life, if abuse is on the table.

M is correct.

M is not D H. After all, he was abused too. M is a complicated case. Often he identifies with the weaker person AGAINST ME. For an instant. I can get him back. He sees me as powerful (I am guffawing here.) But when I feel abandoned by him in favor of someone for whom he feels compassion, I become enraged at him...rather than bereft.

Like you describe the play with your D H with his pushiness and your push back, we are working out something here...that goes way back.

 

[Copabanana]

Cedar, imagine the scene. We were adorable children. Exquisitely well-behaved girls. We were actually plotting. to. kill. Our. Mothers. Is this not delicious? I mean, our fangs in our mothers. I mean, we were at war Cedar. While you were cleaning, and dusting and sweeping, this was the Art of War. Instead of the Bobsey Twins I should have been reading Sun Tzu. Thucydides and Virgil.

I mean no wonder I never could plot anything in Checkers or never learn Chess. I had suppressed an identity as A HIT MAN.

I mean how much better is this...than being passive, afraid and a victim of everybody. My identity as road kill and prey.

I could have been Alexander the Great. Napoleon. Ulysses S. Grant. I could have been a contender...

In fact, I was.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Okay. You know what the word was that I was too afraid to shout?
When my mother did that and I deserted my brother by making him nothing?

STOP

The word was STOP.

The legitimacy of NO.

That is what I have never had, not in all my life. (Except for D H, which is different.) I have trusted in the...well, in the kindness of strangers, right? Like...A Streetcar Named Desire? Is that it?

Blanche?

Whoever says it, that is who I have been. Trusting in the kindness, integrity, beautiful truth in the soul stuff and mostly, getting kicked in the pants for it.

That may be over.

That is the portion cleared today.

And I mean, not to be too big a dork here, but Holy Gratitude is what I feel, to have watched this one fall together.

Thanks, Serenity and Copa and everyone.

Thanks so much.

Cedar

The legitimacy of NO.

Oh, man, that's big.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Because after all I have lost my Mother. There will be no chance to love her more, from a position of strength.

And there is self-blame for me. Because if I had only been stronger or had more capacity I could have figured this out while she lived. And been able to be with her and love her.
And she is gone forever.

I will have to figure out how to love myself, because that will be the only way anymore to love her. And, still I do not know how to do so.

At this moment, I am savoring the freedom of not loving my mother, Copa.

Whatever was good about her...I don't know, Copa. I am seeing everything in such a different light. It's disorienting. Copa, here is a secret I think I know. When we are better? We will neither consciously love nor consciously hate ourselves or anyone else.

We will be nourished, Copa and Serenity, and we will just be, part of everything and taking everything in like breathing.

We won't have to wonder however we are going to let all this go. It will resolve on its own.

There is nothing we have to do.

We are meant to be whole.

We will just be, and that will be joy enough and joy, especially, for us. We've never been here before, Serenity and Copa. We've loved, and only known that it was true love because we suffered for it and been unable to get loose of it or find some way to intellectualize it, right to the core of being. Over our children, we freaking suffer. There is no overriding it. There is no dealing with it or putting it aside or anything else.

They are ours.

We love them in the most exquisite way, really.

I think that comes next for us.

Joy, and the dissolution of guilt; and the legitimization of hatred for the evil act.

Legitimacy.

Perhaps that is where we are going next.

Cedar