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Monday, August 1, 2016. Just saying “A piece of a journey” would be enough, with so very few words, to synopsize what all the rest of the words in this post are about. As so often has happened in these past nearly three years what could be a post here ends us being no more than thoughts passing through along the way – because, as we all know, words by themselves do not take up space. They do not really exist.
Or do they?
Perhaps it was a natural proclivity for words and images, for sound and motion, that made sure humans discovered the technology we so happily use – these days. Maybe we are designed for this extension of our combined lives.
There certainly DOES seem to be plenty of space here. I have yet to see my blog posts’ words piling up in a corner collecting either mold or dust.
So – why do I hesitate to add the words of this post into that vast invisible ocean of ones and zeros? It is personal. No usefulness in personal? Well, for heaven’s sake! Who wants to be the judge?
This began my day:
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I wonder on this gray breezy humidity-soaked, promise of heat searing day, how many moves I have made in my life. Is there a magical tally point where my moving around disappears into more accurately being called traveling? Wandering? Or – the frightening word – homelessness?
Yes, I’ve lived under many different roofs, within many different walls, in many different places with many spans of time I have kept utilities under my name. Yet here I am again, preparing to launch myself along with some variety of my stuff, back out along a road full of strangers. Destination unknown. Direction? South by west.
(When my youngest was nine he succinctly summarized our lifestyle this way one day, “You know Mother. We are on the road to nowhere.” He sure has made himself a wonderful life and home now, and I told him in a message this week that I don’t think ANYTHING about his childhood adventures with me as his mom could have been changed – without those changes having negatively impacted his life now, and his life now is MOST excellent!)
I cannot be entirely unhappy about this anticipated move. It means I am going to find some way of yet again escaping the northern Midwest. The environs here have never suited me. Yet it seems clear that some kind of destiny (from God) landed me here 45 years ago so that I’ve bounced in and out of “here” ever since.
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Where is home?
This seems to be a profoundly meaningful reoccurring question in my life that entered my existence even while I was being born.
A mother is home before birth of her baby and is supposed to be home to an infant once it is born. This I did not have. In fact, except having my basic physical survival needs met, I experience the very opposite of mothering from birth.
Maybe, I think this morning as I approach my 65th birthday at the end of this month, I was sent off along a trajectory of no-home-in-this-world even before I was born. Only God knows. It could be that Mother’s profoundly harmful psychotic break happened during difficult labor. It could be that it happened at the instant after my birth when she was told I was a girl. The substance of the break is what mattered.
In consequence of it I was doomed by Mother’s mind to be her nemesis, her non-human child sent by the devil to kill her while I was being born. I was severed from birth from any ability to really know what HOME can possibly be. With the exception of my childhood on our Alaskan mountain wilderness homestead.
But I cannot return to VISIT that home. It’s subdivided now. Roads paved. “Littered with the houses of strangers.”
Beyond this?
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None of this seems helpful to me today as I work to deplete my possessions yet again as I need to reduce what I take with me to essentials that will fit into a small 2-wheel U-Haul trailer to be towed along behind my 1978 (305) el Camino – that at this point I don’t even know if I can DRIVE! (What a predicament I have gotten myself into.)
(What about my art and craft supplies, my tools, my large craft selling inventory? Take those and no clothes, no dishes, no………………whatevers?)
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Can I reduce the range of my thoughts and feelings down to essentials? What IS essential? Om the range of 7.$+ billion humans on the planet – my concerns — do they matter?
Do I reduce my struggles to nothing in the face of “all that is?”
Do I matter?
No more, no less than anyone else does – can I give myself permission to keep with me this essential knowledge that “YES! I DO MATTER” because I breath?
And is this self-valuing inextricably bound to PERMISSION?
Can I grant myself permission to not only BE myself but to LOVE myself?
In the middle of all the unknowns in my life right now – it is always the “I within” that is doing the traveling through time and space.
Where PLACE and STUFF fit into this process is everyone’s struggle in this competitive survival world. As long as we are here as a soul it is fundamentally our body that is our home-of-homes. (And many sickness devastate this relationship.)
This might be the level where human worth is central and pivotal – “If you are alive you matter, you have value (and you have rights).”
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It might be easier for us to recognize this innate nobility and goodness in infants and young children. There is no extra layer of “value added” consideration in what the youngest among us do. We do not demand that they justify either their existence or their value. Not yet, anyway. That comes with growing older, growing up.
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Pushing the questions in these seeds of questions back down into the earth-for-later, I remind myself – that these re-location cycles I go through require me, as Socrates advocated, to examine my life. When money is scarce I also have to examine carefully the value of and my purposes for my possessions.
This is not easy. It is not fun. It is not simple. But like life itself – “It’s gotta get done.”
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Now I seem to have moved forward through the writing of this post to this next essential question: How, given the complexity of life — at any given point in time (which includes a point in space) — in any circumstance — do I be the best me I can be?
I ask this – “homed” or not – in a spiritual way because I do trust that our Creator has given us all spiritual work to do to work to make this world a better, healthier, happier, more educated and more maturely managed place for all. No matter who we are, where we are, what we own, we are all in this life together — for a season and for a reason.
No matter that right now I am struggling to feel any comfort with any of this. Life just simply is full of chances and changes. We can then just do the best we can do – and that is good enough.
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Here is my first book out in ebook format as it provides an outline of the conditions of my malevolent childhood. Click here to view or purchase–
Story Without Words: How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?
It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge. A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.
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Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame
Stop the Storm 