Is there a time we can and should say good-bye to our past?

[BusynMember]

Thank you so much, cedar and cops, for your long, thoughtful.
, beautiful posts to me. I only just noticed them and read them now. I'm so ditzy. This is the first I saw them.
I don't even have the right words to thank you both for those wonderful thoughts.
Just tears.
Thanks again.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

The pain and sorrow and emptiness are not my fault.

The pain and the sorrow and the emptiness come of abandonment. Though we had mothers, our primary response was the wariness of fear. Wariness of fear. Hope of welcome. Betrayal...no welcome, here. (Just like in Forrest Gump, when none of the kids will let Forrest sit with them, on the bus to school. Like that. Only we had nowhere to go. We were home.) Fear as second nature; rejection as anticipated truth.

And yet, we were made to love. Humans, and puppies and kittens and alligators who carry their babies to safety in their open jaws.

That is why that Nietzsche quote meant so much to me.

"We love life not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving."

The loving comes first. Before any of us really knows we are alive, there we are, all set for loving everything ~ flowers and stormy skies and blue ones and scents and tastes and faces. That is already inside us. So, for a child of a parent who just can't manage her own emotions...I don't know. That's a pretty bitter backwash, to have those wonderful feelings we came hard-wired with devalued, and to know fear, instead.

And to know fear, and the shame of it, instead.

So, seen this way, rejection has nothing to do with the child. Children do what they do. They are artless and easy to love; curious and so pretty and open and innocent. There is a sweetness about little kids, and even about adolescents, really.

So those things that we learned about love and vulnerability must have been very hard things for little hearts to know.

We've come through it.

Good for us.

Good, good work, for us that we know this about how it was for those little girls (or little boys) that we were.

Cedar

 

[BusynMember]

When I was very little to at least in my 30's (possibly LATE thirties, which is kind of sad), my BFF and I used to describe something to one another we called "the void." We both had suffered from abuse and chaos and instability as children. We both had long, long, long, long discussions (like we have here) about our FOO. We both described the void as an empty feeling in our stomachs, as if something is missing in us. We spoke of this ad nausseum. If we were in a roomful of people, we still felt the void. Even or especially with family.

We were out of touch for a long time because of distance and just the busyness of family life, even though we have grown kids. Both of us have grands. We have both gone through so much spiritual healing both together and apart. We have like soul sisters on a journey together, even when we are not able to talk much or actually be together. We connected the first time we met and our connection has never severed.

When we spoke this last time, I asked her, "Girlfriend, remember that void? Do you still feel it?"

She laughed and said, "No, it's gone. With the love from my husband, chidlren and grandkids, I no longer have that emptiness inside of me. How about you?"

I had to tell her the same thing. "The void has been gone for a long, long time, Girlfriend. Aren't we lucky?"

I don't recall exactly when the void in me went away, but it seems as if it was after my ex and I divorced and husband and I married and had our wonderful children. And our peaceful life. It is wondrous to me that the empty pit is gone. I am positive it was the lack of love I felt and Girlfriend felt. But both of us never quit reaching for the love that we had inside of us and we found it in ourselves and others.

Even when I feel a bit down about FOO, I never feel that void.

My Operation Oblivion, which has mostly been a success, has helped too.

Children feel a terrible void when they don't have love from their parents. It comes out in different ways...the empty pit, eating disorders, cutting, being afraid to have close relationships, so many things.

I am not healed completely. I hope I can heal completely, but am not expecting it.

But the void is gone. I am happy with my peeps. You have both become my peeps too.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I have that void place. Granddaughters and I were discussing how it feels to have been through what each has been through. For them, the place no one can be with them has to do with the uniqueness of their experiences. They have been emotional places alone, and there is no one, certainly no one in their peer groups, who can empathize.

Or even imagine it.

Ten thousand betrayals on every level and yet, they love and are loved by the mother (and grandmother too, in some ways) who have not protected them.

Even here, where we share so much, each of us brings her unique experience and perspective, but we cannot heal for one another.

I have learned that so much of what you post comes real for me over time, too. So maybe I will not have that void in me either, in time. That could be. It has something to do with trust. I am seeing D H differently, am coming to believe he could love me ~ that there could be a kind of love, between a man and a woman, having to do with commitment or with loyalty across time.

The void place was created for surviving betrayal.

From having been alone, and from having survived betrayals that most people have no frame of reference to understand.

My grandchildren are very wise, to know that and to be able to define and name it.

Cedar