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The first thought I have as I turn around and begin to look back over the span of my adulthood (which covers 40 years now) is, “If I had only known THEN what I know now……”  I don’t say this about anything trivial, ordinary or mundane.  I say this about something I see as being so important that if I HAD somehow had the information I have now, the entire course of my adult life would have gone differently.

There are two brilliantly lit spots in my adult history, and they both appeared within months of each other when I was nearing 30 years old.  The first one happened when my 4-year-younger sister took a bus from Edmonton, Canada to visit me in Minnesota.  She was hugely pregnant, and I can still see her resting on my humble living room couch, her head tipped back a little as I came through the doorway into the room.

“You know, Linda,” she said to me, “if you aren’t very very angry for the things Mother did to you while you were growing up there’s something very very wrong with you.”

Talk about a dead-stopper, that was it.  I’m sure my eyes popped wide open, my mouth too.  I had not one single word to speak back to her.  I just stared.  Yet on the inside something happened to me.  She opened a crack in my carefully crafted adult reality that had never been there before.  I didn’t recognize what happened at the time, but her simple statement itself changed the course of my life.

Those changes have been gradual, but I can name that moment as the one that moved something inside of me I didn’t even know was there.

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The second brilliantly lit moment in my adulthood happened about a month after my sister’s comment.  An older Native American friend of our family named Larry had stopped in for dinner with his wife.  After we had eaten, after everyone else had left the table and he and I were sitting there alone together,  Larry looked straight into my eyes across the plate cluttered table and simply said, “Linda, you aren’t the person you want everyone to think you are, are you?”

Again I was absolutely stunned.  To tell you the truth, I had no conscious idea what he was talking about, and nearly 30 years later I STILL don’t!  Did I ask him what he meant?  No.  But here again he stuck some kind of a gigantic crowbar into the crack my sister had opened up inside of me and pried that crack wide open — somehow.

I have never forgotten his words.  I remember them exactly, and I remember myself receiving his words in stunned silence, just as I had received the words my baby sister had spoken to me just as simply.

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I would say right now that both of these statements were straight ones, perhaps the most-straight statements I have ever heard in my lifetime.  These were words of truth and accuracy that shot straight into the center of ME, and never in my lifetime will I lose my appreciation and awe for the power these words had to help straighten out the course of ME in my lifetime.

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I had one similar experience during the long 18 year course of my severely abusive childhood, only this time the words came from an unknown source and I heard them inside of my own self.  I must have been about 13 or 14 when I heard them spoken.  I had been punished severely, beaten, berated, and banished — for what THAT time I do not remember.

What I do remember was lying in bed in the middle of the day.  Being put to bed was a punishment even worse than being put into a corner, both of which consumed massive segments of my childhood.  I know I had been crying, and looking back I know my pain was so deep it consumed me.  My eyes were open, and I was staring at my mother’s carefully varnished plywood wall.  I remember the wandering, curving grain of the wood and the curved ‘eye’ and ‘lip’ shapes embedded here and there.  (I had no idea as a child what these were for, and only found out as an adult that they were ‘plugs’ put into plywood to repair spots where twigs had grown into the tree.)

All of a sudden I heard a voice like none I had ever heard before.  It spoke clearly, but seemed to come from far, far away as it calmly stated, “Linda, it is not humanly possible for anyone to be as bad as your mother says you are.”

That was it.

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Many Indigenous People use a term for The Great Mystery to describe all things deeply spiritual that cannot be talked about in any other way.  I would include all three of these statements in that category, even though I know two of them crossed the lips of real human beings.  But the source of these words, the meaning of these words, the timing of when these words reached me, and what they all touched deep inside of me belongs in my mind to The Great Mystery.

As I consider the words that appeared to me in that tear stained, sorrow-filled bed when I was still a child, I think about my mad, mean mother.  I think about some invisible ‘line’ that divided her from me and me from her, as I ask a question that has no answer in this lifetime.

“Why was I gifted with those words that saved me from becoming like my mother?  Why did it happen that no words were given to my mother anywhere along the span of her lifetime that could have just as equally saved her?”

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I feel like I am standing at the edge of a great, horror-filled and very dark abyss as I write now.  I am going to take a step off of firm ground out into thin air, trusting there is something solid I can trust will hold me up even though I can’t see it.  As I take this step, I look down, and I see two people falling into that inky blackness.  One is my mother, the other is myself as a child.

I hear again that voice and those words that came to me that day in my bed of despair, and I see that they caught me and stopped my fall as surely as if they had spun a net to catch me.  I see that there were no words to break my mother’s fall, none that she could possibly have heard anyway, and she continues to fall.  Fall, fall, fall, to the moment of her death.

What I heard in those words as a child is not what I now see as their full meaning.  As a child I needed to be told that I could not possibly be as bad as my mother said I was.  I now see the other part, the ‘humanly possible’ part.  To be told in this way at this particular time that I was HUMAN at all is what MOST saved me, though back then it was having the limit set on how bad I could NOT be that I somehow heard.

Back then I must have instinctively swallowed the whole spoonful of saving elixir contained in the whole statement.  If I had stopped to say to whomever spoke those words, “They are meaningless to me because I am not even human, therefore there is no limit to how bad I am,” I do not believe I would be alive today — and certainly not alive without the madness that consumed my mother.

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As strange as it might be to think this way, I believe the hardest part of letting go of my perpetrator, my terrible and terrifying abuser, my mother, is not that I hate her.  It is not that I don’t forgive her.  The hardest part is coming to terms with the fact that I could not then, cannot now, can NEVER save her.  I cannot save her from her falling.  And more than anything else I can possibly think of, this lets me know that in my heart of hearts — if I ever question this, and I do — I loved my mother then — and I still do.

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Now, getting back to firm ground I turn away from the edge of that wicked abyss and walk away, walk away, walk away, walk away.  I do not run because the pull of it, the gravity of it echoes, echoes, echoes.  Which leads me to the point I wanted to make at the beginning of this post.

What I know now that I didn’t know as a child, didn’t know through the first 40 years of my adulthood is that this abyss exists.  It is very real.  It is at the center of my natural life because its existence was at the center of my mother’s life when she brought me into this world, and every interaction I ever had with her, most clearly all of them for the first 18 years of my life, happened as SHE was falling through the horrible blackness of that pit and as she did everything in her power to take me down there with her.

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I can come up now from this writing so far and take a gulp of sweet fresh air, gaze out my window at the clear blue sky, listen to my parakeet chirp away at some foreign bird it hears perched on a tree branch.  And as I come back to this present world I bring back three words like they are the plug at the end of a long electric power cord of truth — and insert these three words into the history of my past as I know it.

The three words:  Insecure Attachment Disorder.

Not having some way to anchor ourselves safely and securely in the world our body lives in means that we are falling, falling, falling  into an inner world of terror and darkness without end.  Those are the words I now have to describe what I did not know even existed — as an essence of my life — as a child or as an adult person who heard the three statements I mention here.

As I look back on my entire life, including my adulthood past, I now know that this dark bottomless pit has always been with me.  It’s force, its gravity, its existence?  I have felt it, felt it in my body, and never knew its name.

As I look back on my adulthood I can see the patterns.  Over and over and over again — for every major decision I have made in my life, I was FEELING that great open pit, and I ran from it.  I didn’t walk, I RAN as fast and as hard as I could not knowing I could not escape its pull even though I seemed to be able to avoid it.

I did not.

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I met men.  I had sex.  I fell in and out of love.  I did drugs.  I drank heavily.  I had babies and cared for them.  I married and divorced and married and divorced.  I traveled.  I moved from one end of this great country to the other.  I wandered.  I found homes, made homes, took them apart and moved on.  I wandered by the crashing ocean side, I wandered by the lakes and through the forests and over fields.  I planted, I reaped, I preserved food.  I bought things and sold them and gave them away.  I tried studies, read books, went through treatments.  I tried jobs, a career, did art, made things — and gave them away as well.

Now?  I mostly sit still, and I write, and I learn to read and play music.  And now?  I am naming that hole, that inky dark pit that I live with — right here, right now.

I am beginning to comprehend that the more I struggle the more powerful the pull that black pit has upon me — because it has its tendrils built right into every cell in my body.  I can’t change that, but I can change what I know and what I do.

I no longer wish to fly off in one direction or another every time some dissociated fragment of myself is triggered by some event in life that blindsides me and makes me lose my poise and balance as I have during the days of my past.

I am intent on learning what this black pit is and how it operates.  I will run from it no more, nor will I let its influence determine my reactions within my own life.  At present I believe I am making some progress.  I can hear its tone — its single roaring tone.  I believe when all is said and done it only has ONE TONE, one main feeling that it sets to resonating within my body.

That tone?  I call it inconsolable despair.

There.  That’s not so hard!  I can learn to recognize that tone when it starts resonating within all the cells of my body, and begins to crawl around within the neurons of my brain.  Inconsolable despair.

Sure, it would be nice if I didn’t know what that tone was, and didn’t know what it feels like.  But I believe every mammal is born with it, and perhaps other kinds of species as well.  It is this, the existence of this inconsolable despair that motivates life to seek all that it needs to continue its existence.

I can thank my daughter who is such a fantastic mother for describing to me how her newly born (now five months old) son wakes from deep and peaceful slumber EXPRESSING this feeling.  There is nothing that has happened to him in his present lifetime that would explain where this feeling state comes from for him — except that he was born with it.

Most appropriately, everyone around that new little person rushes to his rescue when he wakes up crying, sobbing his sounds for his feeling of inconsolable despair.  That is as nature intends.  His needs are always met through safe and secure attachment patterns and my hope is that over time as his body grows, his nervous system and brain grows, his mind and his self that maybe he can gain so many good ways to solve that eternal problem that he will never have to feel it again.

But for those of us who DO still feel it, I think it’s helpful, no, downright empowering to know what this feeling is and where it comes from so that we can find the best ways possible to offer our own self healthy consolation that can dim — even though it might never be able to extinguish — our deeply felt feelings of inconsolable despair when they threaten to overwhelm us.

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So in response to my old friend Larry’s comment about the person I am, if I can keep from running off into some dissociated life pattern, if I can remain here true to my present task of learning not only WHO I am but most importantly HOW I am in my body in this lifetime, perhaps someday I will understand what he was telling me that day because I still have to say his words simply still remain a part of The Great Mystery.

Larry left this world a long time ago, and perhaps at this moment he is looking at me and smiling — or — shaking his head in puzzlement that I still don’t know what he meant.

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