Your mother and mine were deliberately cruel to us and invalidated all that we did
This is so important a piece to know, for us to be able to create and claim the change in mindset and outlook we are working for, here. We have been finding the cruel or invalidating internal messages taken on faith; we have examined and are countering, and then, finding them invalid and extinguishing them. Please do watch the TED talk. It is about making change within happen. It is about the rare miracle it is to have been born, to be who we are. It is about acting on that good impulse and creating change and how to do that. The speaker has a book:
Stop Saying You're Fine.
If you adopt a child with special needs and get a subsidy, you do not get the bills paid.
Your mom hurt you at the core of you as you were formed. That core, for you I think SWOT, is composed of kindness and of determination to speak up, to make change, to
do something about the sad things, or the stupidly bad things, in the world. This core self is where your mother and your sister too, did their nefarious work. You are stronger, finer, better balanced, more sensitive and human and humane than they are, SWOT. That is why they tried to break, or to cheapen or discolor your interpretations of your essential self: to make it impossible for you to believe in yourself strongly enough to believe you could create the change in the world you see in your mind's eye, and in your heart.
I think it was very special, what you did, SWOT. Most people only want to adopt the dream child, the perfect child.
The way I see it is that you could pay someone a million dollars every year, and it would never be enough to keep them committed to a special needs or even, to a racially and culturally different child unless that is who you already are in your heart. That is who you are inside, SWOT. There is no good or bad about it. At some level, this is what you would always have done with your life. This is how you would make a difference in the world. That is how committed you are to changing the badness that is. It wasn't a dream, it wasn't pretentious; it had nothing to do with money.
There is no amount of money that can buy what a mother does.
If you were in it for the money, you would have started a chain of day care centers. You would have been able to take care of special needs or differing ethnicity children and made a fortune and changed lives. But what you wanted to be was something even more special than that. You wanted to give children something you never had.
Their own mother.
And I think, from the way you talk about Sonic and Jumper and Bart and Gone Boy, that you really did well, SWOT. These were not your flesh and blood. (Bart was.) But you made a mother for them, and you gave them that incredible thing and you changed the world.
You are like the Kennedy's in that way, SWOT.
Had you been well-mothered enough to believe in yourself heart and soul, there is no telling what you may have accomplished, for yourself, and for the world. Even carrying the burdens you carried, you did change the world, for those children you adopted and cherished and made strong.
***
Copa, you too. Your mother loving you, or at least, your mother allowing you to love her, destroyed your resistance, took away your strength.
You began to doubt yourself; you began to doubt and regret the right paths you had been so determined to walk.
I think it would help you to look at it that way, just for the sake of exploration, Copa.
Did your mother love you at the end of her life, or was she so weakened that she allowed, or you claimed, the right to love her?
Don't let her do it to you, Copa. Don't let the sister, weak mother reflector that she is if she is not a loyal sister, determine who you are, either. Stand up, Copa.
Pronounce your own name.
Donate the freaking comforter. Go away from this life for awhile. Go with M or without him, but go.
When you return, everything will be clear, so clear to you, Copa.
You have done so many things that were more impossible than this thing your body and brain and spirit are telling you to do now. Do not just let go and pretend you did not need what you needed, Copa. Do not convince yourself it was enough that you loved, or that you did not merit being loved. See it. Taste what they did to you. Declare your own name, Copa.
I already know that finer Copa. I see her in your posts. That is who you are. We all have to fight for it, Copa. You and me and everyone, even if they've been perfectly mothered.
We all have to fight for it, Copa.
You have what you need.
You always had it, or you would be the sister who chose to follow exactly the path the mother set up. And you would be the sister now, so blindly determined, as my sister is, and as SWOT's sister is, to see those same destructive patterns continued.
I can see your name, Copa.
I cannot hear my own.
But I am getting the idea now of how to declare my own name, too. And it is a very different name than those people I trusted to define me gave me.
It's simple in one way and a complexity of toxicity in another. What I need to do this, what I need to learn and define and pronounce my own name, is to see and believe, with unshakable faith, that they lie. Everything I think I know about how things work, about how to respond to the challenges that come to each of us, everything they taught me about how to do that is a lie.
So I will be naked. I will look really stupid. I will feel wrong and at risk and I will crave safety and certainty.
So what.
I crave all kinds of things that are not what I need to do this.
So that's what I know this morning. Like abuse in the first place, and like the predators who are drawn to our vulnerabilities and who try to convince us to fear or admire or give ourselves over to their higher wisdom or their higher anything else, there is nothing personal to us, or even to them, in what they did to us then or what their stand-ins, those predators we continually invite into our lives, do to us, now.
And we need to be certain not to pass who we believed we were when they lied to us ~ we will not pass that on, to our children.
We are way more than enough or our predators would not be drawn to us, today. Whatever it is in the heart of us, that strength that is ours, that is simply who and how we are, is what they want subverted to them. They do want to possess us. They want us enthralled to them, they want us validating that they are whatever more than us it is that they need.
Let them want whatever they want.
Just don't believe them. We have established, beyond doubt, that they lie.
No trust without mutual respect. No love, without trust.
End of story.
The predators in our lives cannot give us what we needed, then. Those times are over. It is what it is and that cannot be changed. We are essentially alone in the world. Alone is safer, is the better choice. Until we are healed enough to demand healthy people, healthy and healing and integrity-based relationship, we will be alone.
No trust without respect; no love without trust.
That is the essence of what we are teaching our kids too, now that we have the words, or now that we borrowed the words from those here on the site who were stronger than we were.
So we're good, then.
The similarities in our stories, the seeming dependency of our sisters and their determined, blind lust to see us destroyed. How could we all have that really rotten dynamic at the core of our female relationships to family?
Our mothers, each equally determined that her child will not ever see or think or act for herself. Our mothers, so determined to change the realities of what we have gone on to create of our lives that they will lie to us about who we are to our faces to this day
and will unite with our own sisters, with those very people who should be sources of strength and intelligence and identity through all our lives and into our deaths, each mother and each sister, uniting to deceive us about who we are.
I have read your posts about your mothers and your sisters, about the gears and wheels and the mechanisms creaking away at the hearts of your families of origin and in them, saw the truth of my own.
So that's what I have to say about that, this morning.
It sickens me a little to see just how similar all of our mothers and sisters were and are. I woke up a little sickened by it, by the loss of it for me. It was more fun to believe everything was okay. I am believing this is an adjustment phase, too. It must be that I took pleasure from thinking about my family of origin, and from believing in that dinner we all would have. It makes sense that I would; that it would soothe the hurts and soften those KFCD repeating tapes when I do that.
D H asked what was learned on the site yesterday. It seemed so ugly to me that I did not want to sully the air with my words about them, and about what I learned about them. I don't feel that same emotional punch in the gut I generally feel when I write or think or say "mother" or "sister". I miss that. Now? I feel nothing. Sad, with little tears prickling at the corners of my eyes that I ignore. So there is proof positive that negative, hurtful connection is at least connection. I've read that we will die, without connection.
I will have to be very careful now not to glom on to my children or grands for connection. I have to remember it is my task to love them, but that it is not their task to love me, except as that loving makes them stronger human children and human adults.
My task is to love them, not to look for love from them. I will not tell them any of what we do here. I will be looking to teach them about establishing strength and connection within themselves, not through my words but through who I become as I develop strength and willingness to look foolish, and to be naked and vulnerable to the moment I am in and to be okay with that.
That is present. That is what present and real feel like.
Vulnerable and open and flexible and flexibly certain.
I will have to remember that.
Either that or they were so out-of-it regarding who we were that they actually talked themselves into believing it.
I think that is a piece of it, SWOT. At some level they did believe it; at other levels they did not. Mostly, they seldom saw us or themselves, at all. Everyone living in their heads, listening to all those same boring, repetitive negative tapes instead of being present to the wonder, to the unpredictability that is really living, really checking in and staying present, to the wonder of our own lives, to the undeniable fact that we are alive and that time is short.
So I guess that for me this morning, the question is how to eradicate the tapes. And what to replace them with. And how to keep going right on in the scary face of unpredictability. That is why we kept the tapes. We believe our mothers to this day. A bad map, one sure to direct us to the island where the muses sing and entrance us onto the rocks, is at least a map; is better than no map, at all.
So we are going to have to let go of everything we think we know.
The tapes are so stupidly wrong. There is no benefit in them, and such a waste of the time we are given here in this one lifetime, to listen to them, to consider those tapes, at all. Yet, they are there, sneaking and taping away under all things.
So, here is the other lesson in the Monty Python Grail piece. The French responders 1) Did not acknowledge the authority of the king. "You silly king." The way the king's call was answered ~ not with fear or respect, but with those voices that were slightly irritated at having been disturbed, or curious maybe, about who was making that noise in the morning. 2) They had their own. When the king presents his offer of: You give all of us free dinner and lodging for the night in exchange for disrupting and then, risking your lives on a Grail quest for something you already have. The Frenchman's answer is: "We've already got one." When asked whether they have actually seen it or whether this is a trick, the response is: "Oh, yes. It's very nice."
And then they laugh together, the Frenchmen, at their response to the king.
That is what family should look like.
Unshakable validation of what is real about us.
And that is why the determination to prevent the creation of family, in our families of origin.
Then, the Frenchmen repeats what he's told the king to representations of himself, and they laugh and find strength in laughing, at the king because whether they actually "have one" or not has nothing to do with this king or his quest or his authority from God.
Yet, like our sisters, the king refuses to accept our reality. He attacks the castle, instead. And again, the French refuse to accept the king's interpretation of the seriousness of his quest. Cows and chickens and everything they can think of ~ including night slops ~ rain down on the king.
And he retreats in the face of their ridicule and their certainty.
Because the way into the castle is a slippery and exposed set of stairs.
Unless the king and his cohorts had been welcomed, as we have welcomed our FOO to validate our realities instead of their own, there is no way into the castle.
***
Feeling badly, as I am this morning that the king and my sister hold no further threat because "We already got one." is like entering an echoing chamber.
That will fill with self, now.
It is only lonely now because it is freshly cleared.
There is fresh air, and the sea.
It is a sunny day.
So the thing is to keep going. The tapes have been exposed and the KFCD signal, weakened. Here is an unusual correspondence between internal and external life: I am finding it almost impossible to listen to radio or television except for things that matter. I am conscious of television as a waste, as a distraction from savoring, from being present.
Good.
I had not understood why that was happening.
Imagery: Reaching up, pulling myself up, seeing the stars and hearing the Rocky theme and recognizing myself, just as it happened in the poem. It is again that feeling of determined alone-ness. Of doing my best and not knowing the outcome, at all. I like it though. Perhaps that is the absence of KFCD.
I don't have to explain it to you. You know. I adopted kids for a couple of interesting reasons. One is that I did not want to duplicate my DNA again, looking at my entire family (not just me). I was afraid. Bart got the least of it, maybe because he was so distanced from FOO. My grandson does not appear to have much of this lethal DNA. Another reason I wanted to adopt is that I wanted a large family. I knew THEY would be my family, not FOO. Another was I care deeply about the very poor a nd deprived and wanted to give love and a home to a child who maybe needed it. That was a huge factor in not adopting white children, as t hey get homes more easily.
If I did not have you and Copa to explain myself to, I would never have come through this as I have. Explain away, SWOT.
That is where we heal. You know that the discrepancies between what is real and what you were taught about your own realities exist. Find and eradicate them and you will declare your own truth for the first time.
As for your DNA. I think the world would be so much less kind a place without your particular DNA. You are here with all of us, willing to try, willing to offer support for the quest, willing to figure out what it is to be human and how to do that. Just as we have found is the case in my family of origin, the reasons for the ways we were hurt are invalid. That is why I kept trying to see what the win was, for them to do what they seemed to be doing. What I am figuring out is that why they did it is just why they did it. It is my job to see and judge the truth in their conclusions about me, to judge the truth in what they told me mattered about me.
There is not much truth there at all, SWOT. There is not strength for me in believing what they are so sure that they know.
There is so little of value, and so much that is deeply toxic in how they insist we see ourselves. What benefit could there be to us in seeing ourselves through the eyes of those determined to have us believe we are less than we are?
We need, and we need to require, that our interactions validate that we are more, not less, than we are.
We can meet that challenge; we must see to it that we do not live down to their expectations. There is no benefit in it that I have been able to find. There has been no wisdom, no learning or unusual way to determine what is real from reviewing the nature of interaction in my FOO.
I needed to know that.
Like the French say in Monty's Grail quest: "We already got one." And, "Yes, it is very nice." And then, to throw whatever they've got at the silly king. Not like a war with something you are afraid of, where your sword must be sharp and vigilance eternal. Just, "Oh, go away, you silly king." So, whatever I have when they come, if they come, when they call, if they call ~ whatever I have will be enough and more than enough and if they keep trying?
That is when you pull out and pour out, the night slops.
And then they will go away.
The trick is not to miss them when they are gone. Celebrate the empty.
Cedar
