Living As All of Me

[sanmagic7]

hannah1, i'm loving your intentional dressing!  hooray for pink pants, indeed!  what a fabulous way to show all of you with a view.  love and hugs

[HannahOne]

Thank you for the cheer, SanMagic7!

[HannahOne]

TW: All kinds of abuse

The algorithm is learning me.

I was just presented with a video of a bunch of baby chicks snuggling under a feather duster. 

It's like the wire monkey mother.

The chicks had been pecking each other's eyes out in stress. And once given the feather duster, they all stopped their stress behaviors and thrived.

I am in need of a feather duster.

I feel some shame at being my age and still having these kinds of emotions. I question myself about it. Am I self-indulgent, do I just need better bootstraps? I can only figure that it's the arrested development, unmet needs don't just go away. I guess.

I feel compassion for my mother. She had a horrific life.

Still, I am in need of a surrogate.

I go back and forth between thinking I am the surrogate and need to keep becoming my own feather duster, and thinking that is impossible and I need a reparative relationship, I need a therapist who can provide some of the care, seeing and hearing that was missing.

The alphabet soup therapies taught me a lot of cognitive and behavioral strategies.

And there is still this pain or lack. I can bear it, no problem. But it calls to me, it keeps demanding attention. I'm not sure what to do with it, how to be with it.

Something about my mother was very deadening. I am in need of enlivening. I am trying to blow on the flame inside, to make myself more conducive to the energy all around me from the natural world and other people.

Yet I still often feel so tired emotionally, energetically.

Today I was remembering that my mother called me a slut the day before my wedding. Because my dress had straps on the shoulders. It came up to my collarbone and down to the floor. I was borrowing it from a friend for the rehearsal dinner. I was just turned 22, I had no idea what to wear to a country club event, I was so lost and just trying to get through the wedding. So I could be away from her. I had nothing to wear and my friend said here, wear this.

I ran out of the house we were staying in crying. I walked around for hours and came back after midnight, snuck in and went to sleep, and got through the wedding the next day.

Due to the extreme religion I was raised in and the extreme control my parents had over me as well as years and years of abuse, I was actually a psychological virgin at my wedding in terms of having never had consensual sex. I'd been thoroughly deflowered but not by my choice. I was the most prudie uptight little thing, terrified of men, zero flirt, thin as a rail, in a dress that went from my collarbone to my toes. But she called me a slut.

She just couldn't love me. And I still feel that lack every day. Even having loved and mothered my own children, having been a living feather duster for the last 20 years, having brooded and brooded over my little chicks. Mothering others somehow did not heal the hole where my mother should have been.

If anything I feel it more intensely as the years go by. Which is a bit strange. I guess the more I know what a mother is and does, the more I see my children growing up and striking out on their own with me as their ground and foundation that they push against and push off from to launch, the more I see I had nothing to stand on let alone push against. It's as if I were just floating in space. Somehow I was able to steer, navigate, get to a planet, make a home.

But inside there's still a little chick trying to peck its own eyes out from stress, in need of a heat lamp and a feather duster. I try to provide for myself the warmth, attention, care, concern, and love that was missing. It has to be enough.

It's a bit of a full time job sometimes. Sometimes I still feel disappointed, confused, or frustrated at how I spend my time, feeling as if I "Should" or "could" be doing "something else" like "other people."

But the painful parts, the inner children, the chicks, I don't know what words to use, live inside, and are so present, so needy. And you can't mother full time and work full time. And I can't seem to find a nanny or daycare for this inner pain. I have to manage it.

Meanwhile my children grow and thrive and carelessly leave their jeans on the floor, or drive off to new adventures, to begin their lives.

Time is strange, space-time bends, loops around and overlaps, repeats. Sometimes unravels. Fifty years ago I dropped a doll on a shopping trip. I'm still looking for the mother that wasn't there that day. My mother still only searches for the doll. I don't exist, to her. She can't see me. Or hear me. Or know me. Or love me.

And what am I gonna do? It's past time to start dinner, I will heat up the lentil soup... the dog wants a walk, the clothes need folding. I should run the vacuum as tomorrow the PT comes and we will by lying on the floor seeing any dust bunnies from Frank's ubiquitous fur clouds... I have a life here to live, such as it is. A life that can never make sense of the past. The past remains unsolved, unresolved.

I feel I could learn to be that mother that is missing. I feel I could slow down. I could slow way way down. I could feel as I'm thinking, and not think only. I could allow a certain resonance to my voice, melodious the way you speak to a baby or child that you love. I could put my hand on my chest. I could feel safe enough to let my eyes move around instead of locking them so I can't see. I could feel comfortable in my skin, my hair, I can imagine what that would feel like. I've done it at times for years on end in the past, it was called out of me by hormones and healthy babies who cried, demanded presence. It's difficult to enact it just for me, in an evening with the sun going down and the dog looking out the window. But I'm worth it, as much as anyone.

Somehow I want to bring these parts of me together. I am deeply, deeply tired of feeling so alone. I am aware of this constant inner seeking behavior, the constant looking for the feather duster, the despair of pecking out my own eyes when I cannot find it. I want to provide the feather duster. Frank help me. There are feather dusters everywhere, I am an adult and can go buy one, I can buy time with a therapist, and putting my hands on my chest and slowing down is free. I feel so close to what All of Me needs, and I feel so much pain between me and that. It's just a foot away, but the chasm is a hundred miles deep. It feels like it's right there a moment away, but the moments stretch on and on. She called me a slut. She hated me. She could not love me.

How to live with that, and how not to. Step one, get up and reheat the soup.