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The words that go along with these pictures of my oleander killing project have been affected by the poignant comments I received today to this post:

*BEING WITNESS TO MY OWN ABUSE

It became very clear to me as I replied to the comments that what I do with my work out in my yard is not only ‘gardening therapy’ for me, it is an expression of myself in an art form:  Adobe.

Today completes the basic work on destroying these two oleanders in my yard (see: +MY TOXIC MOTHER AND THE OLEANDER).  What interests me about my thinking in response to today’s comments is the similarity I see between this oleander project and my severe infant-child abuse survivorship:  While I do not believe in ‘getting over it and moving on’, ‘putting our abusive childhoods in the past’, ‘forgetting our past’, ‘leaving our abusive childhoods behind’, etc., I do believe in positive change.

I am reminded of the posts I wrote some time ago in which I described my realization that my mother as the abuser and my father as her enabler would have deserved a minimum jail sentence each of 14,500 years for what they did to me — and that was figured using the tip of the iceberg and vastly minimizing my mother’s attacks on me over the 18 years of my childhood.

Crimes against a child that could have/should have resulted in 14,500 years of incarceration is NOT something I can even conceive of resolving for myself with ‘forgiveness’.

This does not mean that I simply accept what happened and how I am today as a result of it mildly!  Nope!  Not this woman!

So, my latest project has been teaching me how I understand that a severe infant-child abuse survivor can emerge from their earliest years being an extremely TOXIC person — or NOT!  Nobody is perfect, but my mother didn’t earn her 14,500 year jail term assessment from me by simply being a little bit flawed.  Nope!

So — my mother and the metaphor of the deadly poisonous oleander.

I would — and I am serious!  Need a bulldozer in this yard to remove the roots of these two hundred year old oleanders — or dynamite.  I have no access to either — and I have no possible way to remove those roots.

Parallel:  I have no way to remove the damage my mother did to me through her mentally ill devastating abuse of me.  The ‘damage’ was built right into my developing body-brain from birth, as I describe so many times on this blog.

But, I can do the best I can to pare all of it down — put boundaries around what was ‘her’ and what was ‘me’ — and most importantly I can CONTAIN and QUARANTINE the toxic poison to minimize what is affecting me ever day — to the best of my ability.

This is, to me most certainly NOT about forgiveness.  This is about continuing to survive the best way that I can.

SOOOOOO……  Here are the latest pictures, including one from the previous post showing the start of this project:

 

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I WILL make something beautiful out of the mess!  I hope the height of this will be right for bench around the outside — place to put flower pots down the center — I can plant flowers in this toxic soil — I hope to find the money over time to put up a TALL privacy fence along my neighbor’s chain link — the oleander did give some privacy, but at way too high a price!

And every moment I have worked on this project I have thought about my mother and her toxic abuse.  I can’t change what she did to me, but I sure can work to chop it all down to size (perspective-gaining), contain it, quarantine as much toxic parts as possible, and BURY THE HELL out of the mother I have NEVER yet been able to feel ANGER toward.  I hope I am moving in that direction – so I can learn what anger has to teach me and move on from THAT — which is possible — and mine to do!

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