I am judging myself harshly because you, Cedar, have ejected the internalized self-condemnation for deeds and deficits that were not your own. And I cannot move beyond this limbo and I am back to bed these last few days.
The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not "get over" the loss. You will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again. You will not be the same. Nor would you want to be.
I have been frail the past few days. Feeble again. Again I fear that I will never get up from bed.
I ask myself I use the return to bed to shame and blame myself, and that is it's power. I mean to say, do I go back to bed in order to take the winds from my sails? An means to restore equilibrium when I have flown to far or to fast. Or is it what I accuse myself, that I am inherently weak and broken and will never again have a life of which I can be proud or a person that deserves self-regard.
Because each of these leads to a far different conclusion. Let me explore a bit, the former, and new way to see things. That I scare myself by moving too fast and too far and use the bed as a way to slow myself down.
I like this. Even though it can have a negative aspect, it does not have to have the sense of deserve...It could also embody self-care, modulation. That I do not have to rush, to chase, to flee. The desperate quality does not have to be there.
In other words, I am returning to bed to rest.
And that is how it begins. I return to bed to rest. But then something takes over. When I go to bed too much or for too long and when I do not want to do anything more than be in bed, I far different and crueler voice becomes dominant.
And I recognize that voice, and it is that of my mother. And with that voice I cannot recover myself.
I begin to feel I will never, ever not need to be in bed. That I am old. Retired. My life is over. There are no more third, and fourth acts to come. It is over.
Except this cannot be the likely end. Because the fallback is M. I love him. He loves me. The worst case, if I go blind (which I fear) or I guess worse than that would be a stroke...he would be with me. At least I hope so. And life is good with him. If he was all I had for the rest of my life...and the things of home and domesticity it would be enough. Because I have never had it before. Such a treasure for me. There is still so much to do here. I have 2 sewing machines. 2 Looms (table),a closet full of yarn. I have raw wool. I have 2 spinning wheels. A dozen spindles. I have embroidery floss, and crochet hooks and knitting needles. Because M loves this too. I have cameras. I have yet to make a garden in the back. And I have a profession, if I can one day return to it. There would be enough. If I could go nowhere ever again. I have enough. If I have M.
But then I fight. I feel he is ordering me around. Or that he is raining on my parade. Telling me I cannot do this or that. And it is not so.
Is that my Mother too?
So if I look at things from the perspective that I have described, the tyranny is to feel desperate that I need to go across country to a big city to have a life. That I am always at a disadvantage, lacking and need to leave to get something to be complete. That I am always on the margin between what is not enough, missing something I need, and wanting more. And only there between the missing and the wanting is where I live.
The fights with M seem to center around two things that symbolize to me the getting better, the regaining of a life. That our house is finally fully arranged and beautiful and that our interests are handled here where we live. And that we be able to go to a large urban area across the country, for a new chapter. For adventure and possibility.
If I look at things with this newly gained perspective, what does finishing the house mean. It means leaving to again seek more. And the other piece of this has always been...because I am not enough....by life is incomplete....I need more. To be more...to have more.
So that is the quandary. The reality is. I have enough. I am enough. Finally, I am at peace. Except I will not allow it.
Who is it that spun the gold thread, Rumpelstelskin, and then unwove it, I cannot remember why but I will find it. Because something bad would happen if she completed her work. And that is who I find myself now.
I am not letting myself finish the house. I am not letting myself get up from bed. And why? Do I fear I will lose M, if I get too strong. Too better? Is this returning to bed a way of not losing what I have? Are going to bed and unweaving my house, a means to keep the status quo? No longer because I do not have enough but because I have too much? And want even more?
I have always lived seeking the possible. I had so little on which to build a future. So vulnerable. As I explained to M yesterday. If only 3 hairs on my head were apt for possibility and growth and 30,000 not, I would go with the 3. Fearing nothing. Because to me the fear was to stay in place. Nothing could be worse than stagnation. And the risk meant nothing to me. Nothing at all.
And this M both grasps and does not. He wants me to see specifically what needs to be handled and what we put at risk to go forward. And every time he says these words I rage at him because I feel he is telling me no, that I can't, that I must stay here, that I will never have another phase in my life. That it is the end. This is my last chapter. And so I start thinking when I will be put in a nursing home, like my mother.
Even I can see that is extreme. So then, M, under stands that somehow when he speaks about being conscious of the costs or risks...I somehow end upon feeling as if somebody is killing me and that I my life is over...and I will have nothing at all.
(I need to insert here something that I am remembering. That as a child and teen I always wanted to run away. And I did, more than once. As early as Kindergarten, I ran away. I did not bolt. I chose it. But I remember my mother telling me she used to have to hold my hand so tight because she was afraid I would run into the street away from her into the traffic. But then sometimes I believed this to be her wish. Except those times had been so special. Shopping. She loved shopping. Always. And she was happy out and shopping. She would buy me a hot roast beef sandwich with gravy on top. And for desert, chocolate cream pie. And this little, little girl would eat it all.)
And then I remember that I have M. And then I feel mixed. I never really had anybody before. But I want Tango, and I want Art School, not to forget every type of textile arts class, and I want to walk and walk and walk on City Streets. And I want to go to a Bridge Club in a big city like I did before. And I want to speak Portuguese, and Spanish too. And I want to put together Boho outfits better suited to a 20 year old and not care one bit. And I want M, too. And I want this house. I cannot ever imagine not wanting this house. And I do not know why. Because nothing really is here. Except that it is home and safe. And all this stuff. And I freak out when I think M is telling me I have to leave here. And I go to bed. Because everything, just everything is too much.
I have had many acts in my life, mostly related to either goals or jobs or places lived. Not to relationships because my mistrust of others and vulnerability kept me insulated to a much greater extent than are most women, I think.
Except for my son. And if I had to guess why I am again despairing, it is because of him. He is not calling. I do not know where he is. His phone no longer connected, I cannot call him. I called his friend and the Dad said he had not heard from him in a while. Where is my son?
And why is it that I am unable to develop a thicker skin? Detaching is not in the main related to something that can be defined in time or space. It is a way to be...in oneself that is able to live, to be, suspended from need and to allow others the same. To not live as emotionally conjoined with the other. To believe, and to know and to feel that one lives and thrives separated from the other.
And this I am not. What is it to say that my son is the air I breathe...and yet when I am with him...I suffocate.
And I guess or at least fear that he feels the same about me. Not good.
So, I guess I have to go back to my mother and father. In order to separate from my son. I had a bad depression after I learned my father was dead. My mother sent me a letter 4 years after my father had actually died. That was her way of reaching out.
At that time I had not seen or spoken with my mother in 5 years, having seen her last at the funeral from my grandfather. We had already been estranged for 3 years when my grandfather died. I had already made the choice to not see my beloved grandfather if the price was to see my mother.
So, my Mother wrote a letter telling me my father had been dead 4 years. And this was shortly after a beloved had left. I bought a house. I went to bed for 6 months only leaving the house when I had run out of money.
It was then that I decided to adopt my son. I had reached the point of being unable to live with only myself and goals.
I had had many years of therapy, and when I can figure out a way to tell you about what had happened there, I will tell you. I came out of that believing I was irretrievably broken. With no way to fix myself. From that place I adopted my son.
Followed years and years of love and contentment. I established my career. We moved many places. We traveled to many countries. My son had issues, but we were complete in our love. I got services for him. But the problems I was always able to externalize to the world outside of us.
Let me know try to find some way to put together these pi eces. I adopted my son when I had been broken apart. I felt that through loving him I could heal. It had been a miracle. He thrived with our love. Whatever issues there were not "us."
Until they were. Our troubles started at an age-appropriate point. He was 15. By the time we left Brazil, the conflict had become so that he had broken my foot. I had not been ready to leave but I could no longer dance. For a month I tried, with a broken foot. I could no longer deceive myself and we returned to the States.
If I look at the recurrent themes in this document. Broken and seeking what is needed to be whole. Missing parts and trying to find them. Broken but strong enough to seek what is missing.
And still my son and I were functioning, working in a dysfunctional way. I kept on working in my profession. And life marched on. And life still worked when I met M. Life dictated by fixing the house and working and trying to figure out what to do with my son. Until my mother got ill.
I want to tell you about M. His combination of strength and morality and kindness and care and hardness. How he always holds back something of himself. So that everything he gives is freely given. Because he decides. And can take it back. If he wants. There is something so reassuring about that to me, that he can walk away. If he decides. It is like I will never be consumed by him. He is separate. He chooses. And so do I.
Cedar wrote something a week or two ago, about husband. She said I will miss him. And I wondered, where is husband going? And how after 40 something years can Cedar think about a time without him, without crumbling?
I say to myself, I will not be able to live without M. He is the mother and father and best friend that I never had. That is to say that I trust him most of the time.
I wonder how I lived independently all those years and fear that without M, I will shrivel up again like a conjoined twin, then lacking an essential organ without him. And yet I was alone most of my life, except for my son.
I will grieve it forever, as I should. It matters very much that I do not have what I need. It matters that was hurt; it matters, that I was tricked.
So maybe this is the key. That I stand up and say a version of this: I needed you and you failed me. You, when I could not stand or sustain myself without you, chose instead to turn away. Instead you sustained yourself at my expense.
And my world was forever defined this. Defined as prey I sought always to escape that trap. Living in a series of temporary and transitory lives...that were always not enough because I was not enough. And when my son needed to stand alone I saw it as a betrayal. Because I had needed him and his love to be whole. And he had needed me to be whole and self-sustaining...and to let him go...to be himself.
And it is that that I feel so disabling. Because I was never ever whole, at least in the image of myself.
Believe them, when they tell you who they are.
I believed them. That is why I left them. And then I decided to go back. To go back to take care of my mother. I re-entered the dangerous killing fields to go back for my mother.
There was an artist with the BauHaus group in Austria, I think it was. And she and her husband were taken by the Nazi's. And as she was taken instead of gathering personal effects she gathered art materials. And in the camp where she was taken there were children. And in the months she was there she taught those children art. How to use art to escape their confinement. How to use art to express their pain and to mourn their losses. How to transcend their degradation and soar beyond the walls of their camps to create their own lives symbolically. And of 500 or so children with whom she worked, maybe only 30 or so survived. The rest were murdered as was she.
Because she (falsely) believed that her husband had been taken to Auschwitz to be executed. So she volunteered for the next train. That was who she was. And she was taken to Auschwitz and was soon killed. With her husband to mourn her. Frida Dickers Kramers, I think is her name.
And that is what I did. When my mother was dying I went back for her. I knew where I was going and I chose it.
I went knowing the risks to me. I may not have known it would result in my death. I soon would know. And I did. I tried to escape one time. I went back again.
And I did not try to escape again. I went deeper and deeper into the camp. I stayed.
I did not die with my mother. Or right after. It came later.
It seemed while I grieved her, I had developed a mortal illness. My real life came to seek me out. And it would not leave me alone.
Finally, I had stopped. I could no longer run. I could no longer run for some other life. My real life finally I could not escape.
Still, I ask myself, why is this so hard?
I believe that I have mourned my mother. The pain is less. It got somewhat better when I was able to see the hardness in her in that one photograph. I was then able to remember the reality of things, instead of mourning what had never been.
She sickens me. My mother ~ the woman she created of herself ~ sickens me. Prior to working things through here, it was myself I was sickened by.
I share some of this disgust and the shifting from self-disgust to disgust for my Mother.
My home is filled with her things. Much of her clothes will return with M's mother to Mx. As my Mother played G-d with her money, much of it stolen from my sister and I, she bought the most trivial and unnecessary things. I can see in my home, my lesser value. I was worth less than vases, picture frames, clothes, purses, shoes and pretty much. Everything else.
In all of my life, that burning intensity of feeling was directed at myself. Powerless; coward; fraud.
I guess Cedar, as I read this I can insert guilty as the self-accusation.
What's that thing, Karaoke. Where you sing the words and go through the motions.
I am singing they are the guilty ones, my father, my mother, my sister.
But when does this theater become me.
When does saying it or mouthing it become my truth, turned into reality. All I want is to be able to stay out of bed all day. Except for those few months when I found out about my Father, this never happened before. I rebounded and rebounded. Always. And I even rebounded then.
My body and soul seem still to feel guilt. I must still believe that the crimes were mine. After all, why would anybody be punished if not for crimes that were theirs?
So I guess I am right there with SWOT. She judged herself as bad, because her mother could not be loving to her. Her mother could not respond with love or with attention or with care. And SWOT told her little self that the crime was her own. That had she been a good enough little girl, her mother would have treated her with love.
Bad, bad girl. So everything became about SWOT's badness. To justify the cruelty, the sadism of her mother, SWOT searched for more and more bad about herself. And it became a race between the child and the mother. The more that SWOT's mother failed the more SWOT raced to find deficits to justify the parent's failure.
My mother was extremely orderly and clean. So was my grandmother. As long as I can remember I liked chaos. Would sit on the floor of my room, surrounded by crayons and would draw on the floor (hardwood floors) and the walls, as far up on the walls as a little baby girl on a chair could reach.
And I would sit on the floor in the kitchen with pots and pans and their lids all around me and bang them. My music. I was making music. And somehow my mother allowed it. I think she loved me then. At least she wanted me out of her hair. But I think she loved me in the way that she could.
Was the crime how much I loved my father? Was it how much at heart I feared him? Was it that he loved me more than he did my Mother? Or that she believed he did? Or was it that I wanted him to love him more than he loved her? Or was it that I feared he loved me more than her and wished it was not so? Did I just want him to go away? Or was it that I wanted to leave? I do not know. Still.
Or was it that it that my mother was stuck at home. Beautiful. Restless. Self-centered. Stuck. A life she thought she had wanted but did not. My fault.
My mother crying at the window. Waiting for him. My sister and I huddled next to her on the floor. How could I make it better? How could I make her better? It was my job to make it better.
It was my job to fix my father. To make him happy. To make her happy.
How else could I be safe?
And their fights. Yelling. Throwing things. Strangling. Cruelty on both parts. My fault.
I lived in a house of dangers. Of extremes. Of extreme emotion. Of danger.
I loved my Mother. I thought I loved my father. I did not. If I ever did, I could find it in my heart. I do not.
Crimes borrowed from others? I have long suspected this. That my sense of guilt had been borrowed from the real perpetrators, whether my mother or father.
I have always looked vulnerable. Whether it was insecurity or timidity or femininity or self-doubt. I do not know. It did not feel like this inside. It felt like fear. Anxiety.
The sense of guilt was not ever-present and receded when I adopted my son. And my career helped a lot. Because it was such that I had to call on my strength, and whatever past vulnerability or victimization was present, seemed to reassure others, and served to unify us, and gave me the capacity to deeply understand suffering, as SWOT talks about, because it was me.
So, it seems as if the illness and death of my Mother and the events surrounding my son, and my relationship with him have triggered this deeply embedded sense as guilty, as criminally guilty.
And my sentence seems to be to spend the rest of my life in bed. And that I do not deserve a reprieve. Every time I go before the parole board, having tried to get my record in order. A next step, another chance, i am denied. By myself.
And with respect to the house, I get up and I try to work, and I am overwhelmed by the boxes, and the pictures to by hung and the painting and the curtain rods....and I go to bed. And I see and feel myself a failure. And every little thing is a new crime. And everything. Everything that I have already done...in the house and in my life...is not enough. Or so far, has not been. Enough to convince me that I deserve to continue living out of my bed.
The difference this morning is that I understand now that te only way I could interact with them was by creating an internal reality in which both past and present day episodes of cruelty were discounted in favor of some utopian future reality.
There used to be a TV show called Run for Your Life. It was about a man who had been accused falsely of killing his wife. He went from City to City running from the police while at the same time trying to prove his innocence. I fear I have lived like this. Running from city to city from goal to goal. To escape the truth of my self. And at the same time trying to get what I can out of life. Like a tumbleweed. No nutrients or water. No roots.
For most of my life I have have sought to know what was the crime, the deficiency from which I fled.
And now my son. I failed. The only one I was ever able to fix was myself. And ultimately, I could no longer anymore make myself better.
Humpty Dumpty.
I look like my mother, too. As a toddler, teen, and even now, as I age, I resemble her.
I was the pretty child, and stayed pretty until recently. I became ugly. But still others see pretty. And like with the house, nothing seems ever to take the ugly away. And yet the house is filled with beauty. What is there, even amidst the disarray, is beautiful. And I recognize it as such. The beauty cannot be stopped. Of the house. And this I have done. It came from me. But I cannot finish it without going back to bed.
I will conclude with the pictures. And wonder where they fit.
And all of my baby pictures and those of my son my sister took. As vengeance, I believe. And control. Because she could. She had my stuff. She illegally had her husband enter my dead mother's house and they deliberately stole. Because she could.
To hurt. To destroy. To control. To avenge. Because she could.
So much now exists now only in my mind's eye. Did my sister try to rob my life? And my image as pretty? Did she try to rob my grandparents from me? My son as a baby? Because she did return the small album of pictures of him before he was with me. What she robbed was our life together.
There is so much that I can forgive. Or if not forgive, at least distance myself. Why is it that I cannot find the knowledge and the growth in this and be thankful for what I do have. Not the pictures, anymore but this. Or that.
But maybe this is wrong. I am already closer to letting this go. By holding onto the pictures, I am giving my sister her power. Better this:
Everything I have ever had and needed I have. There is nothing missing that is essential to me.
Copa
