My maternal grandparents were Russian Jewish, and fled oppression from the Pale.
What is the Pale, Copa?
For a while now I have been googling "beautiful old women." I want to see if there is a chance for me, if at some point I come back from the dead.
Well, you know the Boy Scout motto: "Be prepared."
:O)
You are coming back, Copa. We all are. And who would have believed we could do this thing.
I am so sorry about the blue eyes and the brown eyes, Copa. I can know the hurt of it because of what my granddaughters share with me about these things. Here again, I could never have known my own prejudice...or maybe, unawareness to any smallest degree would be a more appropriate phrase than something so intentional as prejudice ~ without those teachings from my grands. My abusers are blue eyed. (My sister has brown eyes
and she talks about the bright haired ones ~ my brother and myself.)
That may figure in here somewhere, too.
My sister's grand is blue eyed. There was always such a fuss make of that fact. Some of my grands are blue eyed, some brown eyed. We do not have any green eyed grands, and I would like one. That is white privilege, right? Not seeing the difference. Blue eyes, red hair ~ that's me. D H has brown eyes, and is fierce-looking and beautiful to me, like a pirate.
To have a beautiful environment is for me one of the highest ideals, but I have a hard time still creating it and sustaining it for myself.
Because it is the love within it that makes it shine for us, Copa.
We will begin, in small ways, to cherish these things for ourselves, now. For me, it began with the gift of the sunrise; the birds, singing.
That was the first gift I gave to myself.
BOOM
Love, again.
:O)
I have felt Cinderella my whole life.
Here is a secret thing I have been thinking this morning, Copa.
Cinderella was the good guy.
Had she determined to remain as she was, taking joy from service, essentially, she would have been destroyed into ugliness, too. But there was a fairy godmother; for each of us, that has happened too, in a way.
We got out, after all.
We are getting out from under, now.
It is not a usual thing, for us to complain about the bad stuff. We see it differently, and we are so fortunate in that. So fortunate, Copa. You will come back. We are, each of us, here on purpose. There is something more to come, something that will happen. Whatever has gone on in all of our lives cannot really be defined. One of my favorite books, Descent Into Hell: "What more there was had not yet begun to happen."
Somehow, that feels right, here.
This image evoked my relationship with my therapist.
I don't know how you will put what happened between you and that therapist away, Copa. But I realized something last night.
Had these things not happened with that therapist, I may never have stood up, at all. I was that committed to believing we could do whatever it was that needed doing. Clean a house, love a child, smile at a stranger. But there really are predators out there, Copa.
We needed to learn that lesson.
As I see it, things never cut just one way.
There was something that therapist too needed to learn, or ~ not to sound too goofy here ~
you would not have been given to him.
And, since I think these terrible betrayals that have happened to each of us were never meant to destroy us (since they haven't), then we just need to keep going. We don't have to make sense of any of it. That will all be worked out in time, maybe. They do say that, you know. The mystics, I mean.
That at the touch of Eternity, we will know.
What a heavy, heavy burden. The weight of everything. ours. In my case I believed I caused all the pain, and thus, it was mine to fix. And if I could not, I deserved to die, I guess, as I have been doing now, it seems.
It didn't feel like a weight to do those things, Copa. I'm sure it didn't feel like it to you at the time, either. A little while back, I was posting about feeling that I was carrying an impossibly heavy burden, like a cross or a burlap bag. That was shame, Copa. That is what is heavy about the things we have done so willingly, about the hatred and the hurt of it. I have been thinking of the taste of the shame in all of it too, lately. The shame in the secret of who we all were, really. The shame of getting older and knowing my mother was so different, so weirdly, meanly, horribly different from those of the other girls. The shame of my father, so sad but I never even knew it then because fathers are heroic figures to their daughters.
And he was turned against me too, Copa. My mother gave him the phone, when she insisted on that first shunning of Cedar because Cedar's D H was as he was. I have not posted this part, but during those five years of that first shunning, my mother called me at some point. She said this had gone on long enough, and that it was between my father and my D H, what had happened, and that it had nothing to do with she and I. She asked me to meet her for coffee.
I said no, that I didn't think that would be a good idea.
Those things were all lies, Copa and SWOT.
Even I knew that.
Where was I going with this.
Huh.
Oh. The weight of it. I think you are like me and like SWOT, Copa. It is only when we lose everything that we regret that we did it the way we did it. If it had worked ~ if we all were together now in some good way, I think we would never have thought again about whether what we had done for the sakes of our families, and for the sake of that family dinner ~ cost us.
So Copa, we have to battle through those feelings now. They are not appropriate feelings because they will not strengthen us.
I know what you mean though Copa, about that burden, about that heaviness.
I think I am still carrying it; I understand now that I am carrying something real
for that time. There is compassion for myself there, Copa. These were very hard things, the things each of us have lived through. There is so little to be proud of, in having come of people who might have chosen differently ~ who were bright enough, certainly, to have chosen differently ~ and who chose as they did with their eyes wide open, instead.
My mom and my sister are choosing that today, Copa.
There is the proof of it. That is how we lived. That is the way they have always chosen to feel about us.
I see that same truth in the way your sister seems to feel about you, Copa.
I am so sorry this happened to you, and to me, and to SWOT.
But it's okay. Everything is going to be okay, Copa. SWOT is a little ahead of us, then here I come, getting so much better every minute it seems, and you are coming right behind and we all are neck and neck and somehow, Copa?
It matters very much that this is so.
A death sentence, for me. To fail, over and over again.
We don't know that we failed, Copa.
At the touch of Eternity, right?
And most of all, my son. My love for him was supposed to redeem everything. It clearly did not.
Only children well loved and secure feel safe enough to abuse their parents, Copa. Look at me. I was so freaking hurt and time-blasted and it took me until I was 63 to have a look at who my mother is, really.
You loved him well. He is strong enough to do what he is here to do because you loved that strength into him.
I'm so sorry, Copa. That is all we get to do.
We cannot do this for him; that would be cheating. We need to try, with all our hearts, to pull ourselves back together from the devastations of our dreams.
It's like a mother cat in a way, Copa. The reason she is safe harbor for her kittens is that she is stable, warm, purring, happy within herself and welcoming them home when they come back.
Maybe that is good imagery for me, ad for you too, Copa.
Actually, I think that may not be true, Copa. We are their moms.
We know they are better than to do what they are doing. We believe, Copa. That is something worthwhile, something to come home to, to find a guiding light in.
Someone who knows us better than we know ourselves believes we can do this thing.
I think for me, I have had to learn to be honest about where the kids are falling short in the here and now. I generally always say: Oh, it will be fine you are doing fine everything will be fine here is money car driver's license and etc. Now, I am saying those same positive things (because they are true, and I really do believe them, of course) but I am giving to the kids the power of change and of choice, too.
Maybe this is how they want to do it; their lives are ultimately their own creations and I need to honor that.
That is the difference now, I think.
I was not honoring their choices. I was judging their choices.
That is the difference, somehow in there in a way I have not figured out yet.
To love myself enough that I will learn a new way of being for my own sake. When I hate myself so much. Because I could not love my mother through her life and because my love failed to heal my son, enough, whereby he could love himself. And I would not love my father, and he destroyed himself. And my brother, dead. And I did not care.
You did love your mother, Copa. I remember your posting that you left to keep yourself safe and to be free of the destructive patterns of hatred in your FOO. That was why you felt so badly when she was too sick to hurt you anymore, Copa. Because you made the decision to leave and now, here it turned out she did not want to hurt you after all.
I'm sorry, Copa.
She did hurt you. Your mother is like mine in that way I think, Copa. To the degree she was able to hurt you, she did. I see that in your story. I am so sorry, Copa. You loved her.
That has to be enough, Copa.
That is all there is.
***
For your father, for the rotten jerk who was your step-father...I just think you are working hard to see through your own eyes Copa instead of theirs and that, once you do, you will hold yourself with such compassion Copa that it will break your heart wide open.
And that is when you will realize how you cherish the brave woman you are. You just can't see it yet, Copa.
I am sorry to learn of your brother's death. It seems I do remember your having posted something about that, before. I made my brother not a real person too, Copa. I had to. I could not stand the pain of him, of what was happening to him. I changed him into someone who wasn't real.
That was such a great loss for me and for you too, Copa. I hear women who have brothers they never had to choose between loving or choosing to freeze those so deep emotional connections that are usual between brother and sister.
I can touch the places I did that, Copa.
I can touch them to this minute.
If you look Copa, you will find them, too. I think that, like me too Copa, you lost your brother long years before his death.
I am so sorry, Copa. I grieve this loss for myself with a tenderness and an intensity and a sense of true loss I rarely allow. That is why I can still touch those places, those places where he is alive and vital to me one minute and the next, there is only: sad.
Nothing else, Copa.
What a horrible thing to happen to a little kid. For me and for him and for all of us.
It isn't even the bad things that happened, Copa.
It's the good things that never happened.
A brother would be an amazing thing to have. A real one, I mean.
Someone alive in my heart.
I feel badly for us both. SWOT, did you have this kind of thing happen to you where your brother was concerned too, if you don't mind sharing that?
***
You father, Copa. Baklava grand's father is dead. He died when she was sixteen. I have posted about that, in other places. Here is what she meant, to him: It was her name tattooed on his arm. All of his life, she was a source of pride to him because she was not raised as he had been raised, and because she would not live as he would be required to live. He had nothing, Copa. No money, no education, no nothing. When she was still a very little girl, he bought her a tea set. Years later, somehow, someone got it to us.
We still have it.
It isn't expensive, but it is priceless to Baklava grand because it is proof that she mattered to her father. Proof that, in all those years when she believed him a hero and he was not, he loved her; he mattered, Copa,
because of her, because she existed, and so, he was someone better than he was.
You mattered to your father too, Copa.
Sometimes, it isn't so much about saving as it is, about mattering.
Cedar
