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My topic is loneliness.  It is that life-long recurring state of isolation and aloneness that has never left me for long.  I live with it now nearly constantly.  I want to learn more about my aloneness because I have no more hope that it is ever truly going to leave me in this lifetime.  At times my aloneness attacks me, gripping me in a death lock and does not let go.

I  returned this weekend to an event that happened to me 23 years ago when I was nearly 36 years old that I suspect holds a key to something I need to learn about myself.  At this age I had been gone from home nearly 18 years, the same length of time I had lived in my mother’s abusive home.  Eighteen years seemed like a long, long time.

I read my age 34 journal, and have transcribed much of my age 35 journal.  I was looking for the date that this event I wonder about happened.  I found the date, but I wrote nothing about the event itself, so just now had to recall it from memory.

This event can be singled out as an important one for me that I have never understood, but it belongs to the story of my life.  In the story of my life I found myself for over 30 years being attracted to Native American teachings.  In the journal I transcribed today I pulled out the dates that came to be related to my first introduction into Native American ceremony.  I have not attended any kind of ceremony for the past 15 years, and do not anticipate ever attending one again — but that is a whole different story.

Yet as I read what I wrote at 34 and 35, I was again reminded of those years of being a recently divorced single mother of three children in the far north country of northern Minnesota, on welfare, in poverty, struggling to find a way to find myself in spite of every choice I had ever made that created the situation I was living in.  I obviously knew by then about the seriousness of the infant-child abuse I had experienced — but I had no idea how to connect what had happened to me with who I was, or what any of it really meant.

I could not recognize that so much of what I struggled with was due to very real brain-mind difficulties that were a consequence of an entire infant-childhood of severe abuse.  Those difficulties are still with me, but at least now I recognize them for what they are and realize that most of them have always been permanent.

NOTE:  Of the $336 our family received in AFDC grant per month, the state received $290 per month in child support from my ex-husband for his two daughters.  The state paid the difference of $46.  He paid his support faithfully, and as a result we also received an additional $50 check from the state every month as ‘incentive pay’.  In the nearly 25 years since my son was born his father still owes the bulk of his child support, none of which was paid during the years I raised his son alone.  We also received medical coverage and around $100 per month in food stamps.  In time the county allotted me five hours a week of paid respite day-care for my extremely active baby.  I doubt I could have kept the family together without this help.

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These two links travel to this part of my story.

A slice of my life for the year between my youngest son’s 1st and 2nd birthday:

*Age 34-35 (August 1986 – August 1987) First Sweat Ceremony

The story of one July night:

*Age 35 – Bear Butte and the circle around me (1987)

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