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Chopping up the past

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What do I want to do? I mean really do?

It’s a weird thing to wake up at 50 and realize you finally have the time and resources to ask yourself that question.  The clarity to see that it’s not selfish to do so.

The excitement to discover that you love yourself enough.

What makes me happy?  Fulfills me?  Serves me?  What are my passions and life goals?

Am I living a true and authentic life while doing the best I can to love and help others?

Learning from the patterns of generations that came before me.  Recognizing and being willing to talk about them out loud.

I come from a long line of women who didn’t love themselves enough.  Who didn’t allow other people to love them.  They chose hard lives and hard living which resulted in a lot of bad relationships, of all kinds.

Generations of family who struggled knowing how to be family because of the inability to be self reflective without judgement, to love and be loved without fear.  To trust each other.

I’m gifting myself and my children and grandchildren a new heritage.   I want to be open to everything this life has to offer.

What do I want to do.  Love.  I want to do Love.

 

 

 

 

 

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Evolving from Fight or Flight

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Most of my life I’ve struggled seeing the beautiful life right in front of me.

Joyful moments.  They never rang true.  Never lasted.   If I waited long enough or just peered around the corner I’d see the bad things coming.  I’d create them if I had to.

I was stuck in the belief pattern that Good things don’t happen to me.  Good people don’t happen to me.  I don’t deserve to be Loved.

As a child I lived in constant fear.  I was always in Fight or Flight mode.  There was no downtime.  Either parent could blow at any given time.  Sometimes separate and sometimes together.  You did everything with one ear open.  Listening for trouble.  Ready to hide when it came, if you were fast enough to get out of the way.   If not, you better be ready to fight.

We are genetically engineered for Fight or Flight.  It’s how we have survived since the beginning of time.  When that DNA is fired up as children we end up carrying it, like a torch,  into our adult life.  Drawing to us the same kinds of relationships that require us to rely on that familiar response system.  There’s some comfort knowing your terrain.

For me, it took a dark knight of the soul to break free from those patterns.  A complete breakdown of everything I knew to be true and a rebuild of my thoughts and beliefs.   I didn’t do this alone.  I got myself a great therapist who helped me unpack a few shipping containers of trauma.

I still have moments where I’m feeling absolute Joy and my brain will start wandering into dark territory.  I’ll see it.  Recognize that it’s Fear.  Breath deeply and let it go with my breath.  Touch my heart.  Give myself permission to be happy.  Really happy.  In every cell of my body.

I bring myself back to the moment I’m in and focus my thoughts on just that.  The Bliss.  I remind myself that I really do deserve to feel all the joy that comes to me.  All the love.  I’ll say the words out loud.  “You deserve this Joy.  You deserve this Love”.  Breath.

Fight or Flight.  I see you.  I just don’t need you anymore.  There’s been an Evolution.

Then comes the gratitude.  The overwhelming gratitude for a beautiful Joy filled life.

 

 

 

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You can’t pray it away

Old deserted House

So she’s not dead.  I thought she was when I first walked in.   Slumped over in the frame of the chair, her body motionless and grey.  Empty, like a dilapidated building, once filled with Life.  Where beauty still lingered but only because of Memories that you imagine might have happened there once.

 It strangely hurt my heart more than I had prepared myself for it to hurt, even after all the years of practicing for the inevitable.

Almost 20 years of Prescription Pills and Alcohol.  Each overdose somehow coming as a surprise.  It’s been ‘Food Poisoning’, ‘A stroke’, ‘The Flu’,  a multitude of ailments that we all know aren’t real but no one has the energy to call out.  Again.

I’ve felt like I was standing in some kind of Fog or Mist Horror Story, where no one was willing to admit there was a Monster lurking.  Only me.  Every time I screamed ‘Monster’ another member of the family would disown me.  How dare I be so disrespectful.  Those are ‘good’ people.  ‘Great Friends’.  God Bless them and we’ll pray for them.

They lived in a beautiful perfect home that could have been put together by Martha Stewart herself.  Not anymore.  The money is gone.  Not even enough to finish the small cabin in the woods they are trying to build.  Sleeping on a mattress without sheets and sitting on camp chairs by the woodstove, which is their only source of heat.  Walls and ceiling half finished.  A pantry full of canned Pork & Beans and soup.  A refrigerator full of nothing but beer and wine, no real food.  A washing machine full of folded clothes and shoes, because at some point there was major confusion on how to do a load of laundry.

We talked about it in secret, when no one else was listening because no one else wanted to hear it.  No one wanted to clean up that mess.  In all fairness maybe no one knew how.

You don’t pray away an Opioid & Alcohol addiction.  You don’t sober them up with coffee and a couple AA meetings, or apparently 22 years of them either.  That Monster just lingers in the Mist waiting for the door to be opened.  Waiting for its friend Death to join him at the Party.

This time though, it brought me and my sisters into a room, together, for the first time in 20 years and we all were in agreement on how to proceed.  We left the elephant back at the shack.  We locked arms around the Tree of Life and we talked about being Sisters and we imagined what that might mean now.

We had an amazing shift, where Love was shared.  THAT was a beautiful and unexpected gift.

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The Fear of Loss

No matter what happens around me, or to me, as long as I am alive enough to see the sun and the moon rising I can still grow and love and life is amazing regardless of Loss.


This week I stood, once again, over a hospital bed watching my Mom recover from an over indulgence of Doctor Prescribed Medication and Budweiser.  Her face a puffy caricature of the  beautiful high cheek-boned person I knew.   Once perfect lips, dry and cracked and almost undetectable except for the tongue that keeps darting out as she tries to form what I can only guess are words, a hopelessly failed attempt to convince the doctor she has Food Poisoning.  Her eyes yellowed and blood shot, an obvious cry of help from a Liver that seems almost ready to take a permanent vacation from a body that has become way too much work to maintain.  Nicotine stained fingers tinged with a hint of blue, her lungs are not awake enough to take in air but not dead enough to completely stop.

I just want to go home.

I stand there looking at My Dad, who is studying the lines on the floor as if they are going to give him the secret answer to the Universe and think, “You watch her sober up or die.  Not me.  You are the one lying to the doctors.  You know the Truth.  Why will you not share it?”  He catches me staring and I see Fear.  It has rendered him speechless.  I want to slap him.

So I walk to the nurses station and tell them her real story.  The truth that she has been struggling with prescription drug addiction for 15+ years.

Plenty of Fluids later and she has recovered miraculously from ‘Food Poisoning’.  They are going to walk her and then she will be released.  It’s no longer an emergency.  This time I don’t beg the doctor to send her to rehab.  I’m not angry.  I’m not really anything except tired.

The next day we have our ‘day after’ talk where I tell her she’s going to die and ask if that’s the Legacy she wishes to leave behind.  I remind her that her mother died from a cocktail of alcohol and pills.  She cries.  She tells me she’s sorry and it won’t happen again.

It’s the same as always. The only difference this time is that I have let go of the Fear of losing her.  I have let go of the responsibility to try to make her sober.  I have let go.

I hug her like it might be the last time I ever see her, because it might.  I look into her hungover eyes and will her to understand that she is loved.

I walk away without any Fear of Loss and I walk back to my life where the birds are chirping, bees are buzzing, my dog is farting, my kids are calling and my husband is hammering on something in the kitchen.

No loss, except my own life, will kill me.  There is Freedom in that Truth.

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Taking my feet to better places

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Leaving the couch and TV behind and taking my feet to better places.

Getting out of my head and into Nature.

Letting go of Fear!

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