To Tell the Truth

[Albatross]

His ambition? Was to sue people. We were hoping that meant attorney. Wrong again! He meant to do nothing and get money.

HAHA!

It is not that I wish them to know the taste of my situation. I would like to understand my freaking situation in a way that does not leave me wounded and vulnerable to further manipulation. Friends or not, we know darn well those successful parents have just as many tics and shortcomings and hang ups as we do and yet their kids are fine. This puts us on the rotten outside looking in again.

I have a friend with a son my son's age. He was a difficult child when my son was a easy child. Looking in from the outside, there were "reasons" for his difficult child-ness as far as his home life. Then the boys hit their teen years and it all flipped. I don't know why. And she doesn't know why. One day when we were talking about my son's problems she said that if one looked at how our children were parented, HER son should be the one living in his car and battling alcoholism and MY son should be the one graduating from college with high honors. That helps, when friends can say (more than superficially and half jokingly) "This really IS fundamentally just a big ol' crap shoot sometimes." Those are the real friends, the ones who truly GET that.

We have parented fully and beautifully. The beauty in generosity, in forgiveness, in loving someone for the best in them ~ all that stuff is ours, is bred into us, is in our natures.

We will still be ourselves, but our eyes will be open.

Oh Cedar, that is such a lovely vision. It is hard to find that person, when she is buried under all the fear and shame and cynicism.

"What crappola from them."

HA! OK, it's actually ON MY FRIDGE! Right next to the one that says, "A year from now, what will you wish you had done today?"

I am picturing assembling our lives into something like a beautiful mosaic, built of all the little pieces of our love and hurt and shame and forgiveness and all of it...but it is just a pile of broken pieces. We don't know how it all fits together until we get the first piece set. Acknowledging it's crappola...first piece!

 

[Hope_Floats]

I think we are going to have the world's most beautiful refrigerators! Well.....at least when the puzzle pieces come together, lol.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

The post about how fully and generously we parented dovetails beautifully with Headlight Mom's post. That is the key for us, I think. We can be honest with ourselves, so that we can be wary and wise (like we were discussing on an earlier post) without slipping into coldness or allowing the ugliness to devour us, to change us and make us bitter or make us question the rightness of loving and celebrating the vibrantly human beings that comprise our families and that we are, too, ourselves....

We are vibrantly human beings, too.

Not just mothers.

("Where is my pirate skirt?" Cedar mutters, shaving her legs in preparation because, as she has always taught her children, details matter.)

:O)

Laughter is magical for me, it helps to color my worldagainst the shades of darkness.

This posting from Tanya fits here, too.

This is how we can do this. These words are the guideposts we can measure our thoughts and responses against. And if we can make these patterns of response our own, then the ugliness has no lasting power.

That helps, when friends can say (more than superficially and half jokingly) "This really IS
fundamentally just a big ol' crap shoot sometimes." Those are the real friends, the ones who truly GET that.

You must have been such a source of nonjudgmental strength for her when her child was endangered, Albatross. And you must be quite extraordinary, yourself, for your friendship to have survived that abrupt reversal of roles between you and your friend. This tells me you are, to this day, to this minute, an extraordinary mom, too.

I never can figure this out, but I think the source of the shame we feel (I feel) has its roots in the pain of sort of having my nose rubbed into the losses my children have sustained. I think there is the guilt of it.

I am ashamed before my children for the lack in me that prevented them from taking the lives I could give them.

I think some variety of this thought is at the core of the shame response I feel before other parents, too. I am always questioning how they did that ~ how they raised their kids to be healthy, successful people.

Yep.

That's the core of it.

If I were not trying to figure out where I went wrong, I would not be so sickly fascinated with where they went right.

There's me, looking in from the outside, again.

So, there is something for us to have a look at.

The nature of the core of the shame of what has happened. Once we know what it is, we can address the way we think about ourselves, and be free of the shame, altogether.

Remember Cher, in that movie about the boy with the bone disease? One of the reasons her character felt no shame is that she did not blame herself for the genetic disease her child suffered. It would kill him, eventually, and she knew and faced that, too.

I will have to watch that movie again.

Rocky. The boy's name was Rocky.

Time played its tricks, for my children, and those lives are not there anymore, to be claimed. Whatever they create of their lives from here, I am in the bleachers (I heard that somewhere. That parents of kids in their forties need to get it that they have been relegated to cheering for the home team.)

Well, okay. So the article wasn't actually about kids in their forties. But that was the age mine were getting to, so I just sort of extrapolated.

The thing is, there just isn't much out there for moms whose kids are nearing forty.

Go figure.

:O)

Your son is young.

He is healthy.

He knows how you see what he is doing, and that matters. Whether we think they heard what we told them about decency and integrity and honesty or not, they did hear. Our task, yours and mine and the business of every one of us, here, is to come through whatever any of this turns out to be able to trust, able to believe in the ultimate rightness of things. I lost that, after the beating and the other things that happened in that time. I don't know how to see what happens without taking it seriously, anymore. I cannot put a space between the most awful what if and the chance that it will be alright. I become so deeply offended now, by the repetitious obscenity of it all that those ugly thoughts and behaviors do begin to devour me. I don't know how to not do that.

But maybe it is simple, after all.

"Sometimes, its the only gratitude I have for him. So........I'll take it."

That was from Headlights Mom's post again, of course.

But in that gratitude, I can remember all the goodness, and the ugliness just is what it is, nothing more, nothing of value.

Those words have given us safe harbor.

We can go back to them again and again.

We can know now, how to see ourselves as we live this thing we don't know how to do.

Cedar

 

[Hope_Floats]

Cedar,

Sometimes I just drink up every word that you type like it is a rich, thick milkshake.

If we are looking for meaning in our experiences, I wonder.......if we hadn't been in the positions that we are in.......would we have been challenged to think so deeply....

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I am picturing assembling our lives into something like a beautiful mosaic, built of all the little pieces of our love and hurt and shame and forgiveness and all of it...but it is just a pile of broken pieces. We don't know how it all fits together until we get the first piece se

When the tiles of that mosaic
first composed in blood on stone
Fall seamlessly together, revealing no face
but her own

Then witch and Child, awakened
repossess the cauldron and claim the loom
Reweaving tales first told in ancient blood on
stone

So I suppose this means that, though our journeys dovetail so closely, we are all, mother and child alike, working toward our own wholeness.

It is like a mosaic, isn't it, Albatross. All the pieces are there, but the simple complexity of the thing being created can only be known, and the thing itself created, through the exercises of will and intuition.

"Lest I grow cold about him or let his ugly behaviors devour me. Sometimes, it's the only gratitude I have for him. So........I'll take it."

Headlights Mom

And so, we all were saved, somehow.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Sometimes I just drink up every word that you type like it is a rich, thick milkshake.

:O)

I love the way we think about things here, Hope. We are deeply engrossed in healing ourselves and in loving our children through it and I love it that we've come together, here.

***

would we have been challenged to think so deeply

It has been such a long time for me, now.

I don't know for sure, but I think this level of thinking is a kind of natural deepening that comes with maturity. I guess I think that, as women, so much of our lives is not in our control. We undergo the rapid rush of hormones, we are pregnant, we fall in love with our babies and they grow away from us.

I think it is more difficult to be a woman, for those reasons.

For those of us here on the site, those difficult challenges are compounded ten thousandfold. With our children in such pain, there is no reflection out there to validate us.

Just the opposite.

To me, it seems that the challenge, the ultimate endpoint of it, maybe, is to become so much more "there" that we find that we have navigated through the pitfalls of hatred and ~ and madness, even.

And sometimes, when things are so bad, I can't help but surrender to it, surrender to the pain of it and hope with all my heart there is a purpose here, though I cannot see it.

I read once that at the touch of Eternity, we will know.

That's beautiful, isn't it.

But you know what I love about this site?

Though we are so honest with one another ~ touchy or offended or compassionate ~ we laugh at ourselves and each other and sometimes even at our kids, and that makes it all somehow okay.

Somehow okay, and so...we can face the next day.

*

I am so happy we all are right here, and I think we are doing impossible things, and doing them gracefully and very well.

It is very hard.

But we are here together, and that makes all the difference.

Cedar

 

[Albatross]

Thank you for this wonderful thread, dear friends.

When the tiles of that mosaic
first composed in blood on stone
Fall seamlessly together, revealing no face
but her own
Then witch and Child, awakened
repossess the cauldron and claim the loom
Reweaving tales first told in ancient blood on
stone

What is that from, Cedar? It's lovely.

 

[TerryJ2]

I was thinking that Cedar wrote it ...

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I did write that.

:O)

It is part of something written years ago, when all this started. Our identities do shatter when our children pull away. In healthy families, that is called empty nest syndrome and is a hard enough thing for the mom to go through that we all have heard that term. For us, for the moms here, it is so much worse. Our children are generally younger when they leave. They refuse preparation for their futures, we are often ashamed of what they are doing and who they seem to have become, and they stupidly put themselves in danger with drug use or dangerous men or weird, unfathomable belief systems.

Where was I going with this.

Oh, yes. I loved Albatross' imagery of the mosaic, and remembered the poem, and the brokenness of that beginning time, when difficult child daughter first began acting out, especially.

It felt (I felt) as though something precious had been broken into pieces, into so many irregularly shaped pieces.

I loved Albatross' imagery, because that is how I felt, too.

I still do, to a degree. But the colors of the pieces have changed, and the blood is fresh, flowing water, now. Here is a curious thing: For me now, the pieces of the mosaic I imagine are brilliant, metallic blues or greens, metallic like dragonflies.

So much (about a third) of the mosaic has come together.

I can see a pattern.

I am coming back together.

With that dragonfly imagery so much on my mind lately, I looked up the meaning of the dragonfly and learned it means rebirth.

How do you see the pieces of the mosaic?

***

Here is something beautiful that I heard last night during the President's State of the Union address. He was describing a letter sent to him, if you remember, by a young mother. In his description, he said:

"They were young and in love in America."

And he quoted the writer directly in the following:

"We are a strong, tightly knit family that has come through some very, very hard times."

So, I am loving the sense of freedom and good fortune in that first observation. We live (for the most part) in America, too. And the possibilities and the brilliance of the future, for us too, are limited only by our imaginations, by our perceptions and belief in ourselves.

Our lives have not ended.

Something precious was broken; but we are not consigned to trailing along after our kids, holding out a beggar's cup.

Please don't do this.

***

Cedar

 

[Albatross]

I did write that.

Oh Cedar, that's so beautiful!

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Here is the coming-together part of that poem:

And in that brilliant, breaking dawning the cripple stood
and walked, alone
Child of the Wind before and behind her;
of the Fire and of the phoenix ~
of the witch and the falcon, flown

Child of the cauldron's acidic integrity
and of the novitiate's determined intent
Of the gravid lust of...vengeance
and of the Child's own hellish descent

Huh.

I can't remember the rest of it. I looked, and don't find a copy of it here. Whatever. In the end, the person (me) is whole, again.

Dorkily enough, I like it very much too, even if it is my stuff.

:O)

I must have it around here somewhere, and I will post it for you when I find it.

It am so happy that you like it, too.

Cedar

 

[Lil]

You are an amazing writer Cedar. I have to ask, though you don't have to tell, if you are an author by profession?

Because you should be. You use such beautiful imagery.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

"We are a strong, tightly knit family that has come through some very, very hard times."

Oh for heaven's sake. I got so distracted by that imagery of the beggar and the cup that I forgot how important it was to me to hear those words:

"We are a strong, tightly knit family that has come through some very hard times."

That can be us, can be every one of us, here.

Our families are tightly knit, or we wouldn't be here, suffering over the broken places. And it is true too that, one way or another, we will come through this time and whatever is coming next, too.

So, in my heart, this is now how I will see my family:

"We are a strong, tightly knit family that has come through some very hard times."

It may not look like that Hallmark card family I am always mourning around about. But the truth is that my family is tightly knit. The truth is that the kids do manipulate us but the thing I forgot is that those manipulations are come of the situation ~ of the addiction or the illness, of the poverty.

I love my children.

The story isn't pretty, but it is mine.

I think I am getting over the shame of it. That shame piece...I don't know what is happening around that.

It is dissolving, somehow.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Lil, hello there!

Thank you. I never can tell, when I write something, whether I am communicating, or not. I already have the triggers inside, so whatever I write is going to seem to be describing the way something felt for me. It will make me very happy to think any one of us here could see those reflections, those ways I made sense of our situation to myself, in her situation too, and come through it stronger sooner.

Ha!

I will definitely look for the rest of that piece, now.

Ego is involved.

:O)

Here is what happened with writing. I do write. I love it. It happens to me that I lose time, that the writing writes itself and I am cleansed by it, somehow. But when difficult child daughter fell apart, I put it away.

I could not throw it away, but I stuffed everything away, hid it away. It seemed to have been something selfish I had done. Maybe, it seemed to me that if I had not been selfishly focused on writing, this would not have happened.

The poetry posted here was written on the sly, out of desperation, against the rules of the bargain I had made with God.

I think putting the writing away was where I first began to betray myself. Or maybe, I was bargaining with God that if I had nothing in my life but my children, I could bring those dreams of a whole, healthy family to fruition.

Or maybe it was a shame and an ego thing. Sort of who did I think I was, writing meaningless words and paragraphs while my child (and then, my children) suffered.

It was something like that.

It was what happened in my childhood compounded by what happened to my children.

I was not to understand the dynamic of what happened to all of us until the unbelievable things that happened in difficult child daughter's life within the past three years ~ long after I was no longer mother to a child in trouble.

difficult child daughter was an adult, when she made the choices she did, this time.

I was able to consider and believe the diagnoses made in this time because otherwise, I would have been too disgusted, too deeply offended at what she had done, to love her, anymore.

We break, and break, and break.

I still have trouble writing that phrase that describes difficult child daughter's issues. If it were anything else, if it were something I'd done, I could help her.

I could try.

So, sometimes I have to cry for myself over that one.

Anyway, I have not written seriously since. I have not taken writing seriously since. I have not been myself since this happened to all of us.

It would be an appropriate thing, if I were to break through and begin writing again because of posting that piece on this site.

You all have been so much a part of my recovering myself.

Women are amazing. (And Jabber too, of course.)

:O)

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

So, here is how that initial verse, the one about the mosaic, is supposed to go. I still can't find the exact poem.

When the moon be full
and the westwind, blown
When the phoenix be reborn
and the falcon, flown...

When the tiles of that mosaic
first composed in blood on stone
Fall seamlessly together
revealing no face but her own

Then will witch and Child, awakened
repossess the cauldron and claim the loom
Reweaving tales first told in ancient blood
on stone.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Something precious was broken; but we are not consigned to trailing along after our kids, holding out a beggar's cup.

Please don't do this.

This is what we say to our children. We hold out our empty cups.

"Please, don't do this."

But we are behind them now, not ahead of them or beside them anymore, and they will do as they please.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Swift, swift comes the sly inheritor ~
comes the falcon, thundering the Wind in full and prescient flight

Comes a mirror; come...white candles

Come the paths a blinded child did walk
beneath that fragile, holy light....

Come the children
condemned, damned and determined

Come the witches, black and white

Comes a power swift and silent running ~
comes startling clarity of sight

Comes the cauldron, acid etched beneath the stars
wherein the tale was ever writ

Comes the dancer, and comes the spirit of the white mare
with reins of braided satin black as Hell
and with white satin, for a bit

Comes...the memory of Jesse

Comes the laurel; comes the left hand clasped
as ever it was written, in the right

Comes...the Mercy

Comes the bald and glass-eyed witch that bore it
through all that black and endless night

Comes the crippled Child that bore them all ~
thundering that Christless realm of greed-borne vigilance
of secret hatred; of stealthy rage and envious vendetta

Comes the fiery, wheeling magic of
communion

Come thundering cacophonies of brilliant, breaking light....

Comes the silence
burning

Burning...
bright

Comes the innocent; and comes the linen-clad novitiate
comes the phoenix rising, brilliant white against the sun

Comes that which was foretold, then

Comes let it now
be done

****

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

In that brilliant, breaking dawning the cripple stood
and walked, alone
Child of the Wind before and behind her
of the Fire and of the phoenix ~
of the witch and the falcon, flown

Child of the cauldron's acidic integrity
and of the novitiate's determined intent
Of grinding dissonance; and of the gravid lust of
vengeance

Of the whisperings of the angelic host
and of the Child's own hellish descent

Marked by stars and marred by solitude
destined to soar the rising glory of the wind that sings her maiden flight
alone

To shelter against the bloodied breast
of the wounded white dove

And to weave, of the dancer's shadow and the white mare's
breath

The innocence of the novitiate's heart to the witch's soul of the woman
grown

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Here is something pretty.

Gentle awakening, stem
to petal
Furled...
awaiting sun, and
time

Promise
whispered on the morning dew....

Rose

Red-hearted fragrance
dying on the stem
No dew-kissed bud
but flower

Waiting on the wind

 

[Albatross]

This place is SO...amazing!

I think it is absolutely remarkable, another head explosion really, that you have had these beautiful words hidden away, that you have had this WRITER in you hidden away all this time, and talking about it brings that out to be shared again.

I mean...really, Cedar. "Mosaic" is a very specific word to just come up in our conversation, isn't it?

It is as if all the little bits of everyone's input here might have led you in the direction of being able to allow that part of yourself to shine forth again.

I'm so very, very glad that you did. I knew you were a good writer, but I really had no idea that you had these sorts of works hidden away.

I like the poem very, very much too. And the one about the flower. I'm so happy you shared those!

I can see a pattern.
I am coming back together.
With that dragonfly imagery so much on my mind lately, I looked up the meaning of the dragonfly and learned it means rebirth.
How do you see the pieces of the mosaic?

I have been thinking all day about how I see the pieces of the mosaic. Like your imagery of blood on stone, I see it initially as very harsh and cold and elemental, primitive even. We don't have a choice, do we? We are their mothers, so we love them, even when it leaves our flesh raw and stripped to the bone. From there I think it has to somehow circle around and around and around. There have been no straight lines in this journey! Then I am thinking it should somehow build to a vortex or come down to a center, like a galaxy or a nucleus, because it leads us to the core of who we are. For some reason too I am thinking of the sand mandalas that Tibetan Buddhists create. So intricate, slowly created with sacred intention, fragile and temporary, reminding us to be vigilant and grateful for the moments of beauty and grace we share.