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There are two intriguing instances in my current life that I refer to as ‘strange’.  One of them is that I have several books to write that I cannot (currently) finish.  The other is that even though I am only now at age 60 taking piano lessons and learning to read and write and play music, I can clearly write songs that I lack the mechanical skill to PLAY.

Both situations are frustrating to me.  Yet even though I have to be patient and very cautious with myself regarding the book-writing, I am so far, quite willing and able to continue to make progress on the music!

I have a perfect piano teacher, a gift from God as far as I can tell.  He lives in the same small town I do and charges ONLY $12 per hour for lessons.  He is a wonderful man and a terrific, skilled and very gifted (and wise) musician.

Now that I can read and write the music on paper I can mirror the song notes and rhythms I ‘hear’ in my mind.  Yesterday was the first time I wrote words to music — and then found on the keyboard the tones that go with those words.

Nothing really surprises me much any more about what appears in my consciousness regarding pieces of my severely abusive infancy and childhood, so I take it in stride the song that appeared to me as my first ‘personal’ one (with words) is about an experience I have always remembered and so far have NEVER put into words.

When my teacher comes today he will be able to explain to me how the tones I wrote fit together in their bigger picture.  As far as I can tell the melody (I hesitate to call it that because it is NOTHING but dissonance to my ears/body and so far dissonance in music is very hard for me to listen to, hear or tolerate).  Not only is this pattern the core of the piece — F#, D#, C#, A#, G# — but the melody moves in and out of the sharps repeatedly and only in a very few specific places finds any rest (to me meaning beauty in harmony).

In other words, I do not ‘judge’ this song to be ‘a nice’ one!  Some part of me distinguishes between ‘noise’ and music.  This is a NOISY song!  It places the burden of distress it conveys upon the listener.  Dissonance to me is disharmony.  What about those of us who have horrendous experiences with the dissonance/disharmony of traumas, especially of early ones?  Do we not speak or sing of it because none of it feels or sounds ‘nice’?

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The summer before my August 31st 12th birthday my abusive mother sent me to a church camp.  This week was the only one I ever was allowed to be away from her — and from home.

There is more to this story than I am going to tell here, but in regards to the song that appeared yesterday I will say that I had NEVER been swimming in my life.  Being raised in Alaska meant that all rivers and lakes are extremely cold, although some very tough children that I know of were brave enough to enter Alaska’s water for swimming anyway.

So this song is about something I did one night that has always surprised me and puzzled me as I remember it.  One night I climbed out of my cabin’s bunk bed, dressed silently, and headed outside directly to the edge of the big lake the camp sat beside.  I had seen the canoes along the beach edge.  I have no memory of ‘the kids’ taking them out.

What I do remember is the night I untied one of those canoes and pushed it along the sand into the water, climbed in, and headed out across the lake in the nearly pitch black darkness alone.  I had some kind of mission, some kind of determination, made some kind of choice — and had no fear.

No fear of tipping over.  No fear of getting caught.  No fear that nobody knew I was out there or where I went if something had happened.  No fear of getting into trouble.  I just WENT.  (This memory is about a ‘portal’ experience I had, really…  There was a ‘doorway’ I found and went through — yes, alone — but I knew no other way of being in the world.)

These are the words that appeared yesterday that found their way to their accompanying tones:

“Nearly Twelve”

Take this canoe to the island

in the middle of the night.

Who says this is stealing?

I plan to bring it back.

The bravest thing I’d ever done

alone at camp and sneaking

I and the crescent moon

slide by in whispers.

My own awakening

all others sleeping.

I ventured out to leave their noisy world

so peaceful now

behind me.

Alone in this canoe

they do not know I’m gone.

Shadows of the silent trees

so black against the sky.

I circle not stopping until

I claim this island

as my own.

++

This morning as I find my thoughts wandering into the future of this afternoon when my piano teacher will arrive, I find myself wondering if I will work toward creating a second melody for these words that I can experience as beautiful rather than as nearly excruciatingly jarring and almost impossible to tolerate listening to.

I wrote the notes to this first melody exactly as I felt/heard them in my body.  Very clearly they belong to a realm BEYOND words as they express a level of true reality to me that I have never been able to name.

This morning I am including ‘dissociation’ in my thoughts.  It is not true that I dissociated my memory of experience taking that canoe out across that wide deep very cold lake in the middle of the night alone.  I have always remembered this.

But looking ‘objectively’ at this experience I realize that ‘who I was’ as I did this action was a ‘different me’ than the one that had any contact WHATSOEVER with the world of humans.  THAT me was the me that suffered unbelievable terror, pain and sorrow.  And yet what that suffering me WANTED to do was to simply glide alone across a peaceful dark lake to circle a nearly wilderness island under a crescent moon.

I brought the canoe back after a few hours, parked it where I had found it, returned to the cabin, undressed, put my pajamas back on and climbed into my bunk.  Nobody ever knew I had been gone.

++

At the point in my book writing about my childhood prior to age 10 1/2 where I have currently frozen-in-place and cannot read a word or write one more on my 2nd draft, I suspect that I was asking more of myself in that effort than I am (at least currently) able or willing to give.

I desire a deeper level of truth, both its knowing and its telling, in my writing.  If I cannot write a book of integrity about what I knew through my abuse experiences at my core, then as far as I can tell I will be selling myself and my story too short to write it.

There is something about what I knew as THAT child in this canoe memory.  I find it fascinating that my experience of it so far seems to belong to the language of music itself rather than to a regular printed page.

Trauma has ended up a part of human experience since the time of our beginnings.  Because we have only used spoken articulated words for the past 140,000 years it is obvious that we had movement, mime, gesture, sound, pitch, rhythm, dance, music — LONG LONG LONG before that.

I surprise myself feeling surprised that the level of soul I wanted to reach and express in the final drafts of my book writing about my severely abusive childhood may very well be truly able to tell itself only in the oldest languages known to our species — leaving words merely as a scratch upon the surface of the tales.

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Second half of this story:  +STORIES WE DO NOT TELL — WITHOUT A WHOLE LOT OF WAITING FIRST

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This is a foreign world I live in right now without writing.  I must have reached a burnout state without realizing that was where I was headed until I got there.  All I can do now is rest my mind and wait to see what happens after the first of the new year.

I am spending a lot of time practicing on my keyboard.  I want to learn in 40 hours what I guess it needs to take five years to learn.  I am not that patient.  I will my mind and my fingers into proper action on these keys.

I can read the music now so that I can write the music for songs.  This process fascinates me.  I wrote a song today in words and sound — a very strange one.  Tomorrow I will show it to my piano teacher.  He is able to assist me to understand the patterns in these sounds.

So out-of-reach of words are some of the things I need to say right now.  Being able to describe feelings and emotion in sound without words is like entering a new universe that is so familiar yet so very strange.  Another language.  I needed that.

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I have no real idea what if would feel like to be a free being as a child of 9 or 10, but if I now were that age I would say that I found what the tone of D-FLAT – or is that C-SHARP – looks like to me.

From my adult point of view, I am pursuing music therapy.  From this point of view I can follow what I learn and experience about music like I might were I a child and I would say that I found the line that separates D-Flat from C-Sharp!  Yet there is no clear line defining this single tone anymore than there is one between myself as a child from who I am as an adult or between what I know and what I do not know.  These arbitrary lines are simply about sensing.

When I look up and see a clear blue sky that is C-Sharp.  When I can see any physical object that cuts a clear line against clear blue sky that to me is where D-Flat is.  The top stony ridge line of a mountain against the sky:  The mountain sounds D-Flat until I look at the sky instead where the two lines meet and there it is – C-Sharp – on the sky side of the line!

Then I saw those tones along rooftop ridges, fence lines, clotheslines, power poles and power lines, even bare tree twigs and branches and their leaves against the sky.  I would see it along the lines of a bird wing in flight.  I can see the lines when I hold my hand up against the sky.  (I am not at all sure that is the tone – high or low, up or down – that I would be able to see where a cloud edge meets the sky.)

How D-Flat feels to me soft and warm and very clearly a part of the close world I live in while C-Sharp feels distant and, well, SHARP?  I do not know because if nobody had named them such I would never have broken these tones apart (Yes, they are identical in vibrations, but…..).  Just like I would never have thought of my own self, body and all, as being separate from this world I live in if nobody had ever told me such-and-such is so.

This music stuff I am learning, this is not intellectual for the most part, although I am finding great thrills in being able to read and write the part I can hear that matches what others have defined for me within the range of ‘western thinking’ sound.  I do now know why D-Flat seems ‘lower’ to me when according to ‘rules’ C-Sharp is moving down the scale while D-Flat is moving up.

With my human senses I can only hear so much, can only see so much, yet I also know that my ears are designed to detect the slower vibrations of color while my eyes are designed to detect the faster vibrations of sound – all far more primitively than I imagine many other creatures can.  Yet what I practice now is to hear tones with both my physical ear and the ear of my soul.  Something happened to me in my body by severe abuse of all kinds from the time I was born that somehow broke apart my ability to listen with both of my ears to the same tones at the same time.  I am pursuing a course of healing.

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I am reminded of these words that tell me also that some sounds also have fragrance.  There is much mystery in Creation!

“Intone, O My servant, the verses of God that have been received by thee,

as intoned by them who have drawn nigh unto Him,

that the sweetness of thy melody may kindle thine own soul,

and attract the hearts of all men. Whoso reciteth, in the privacy of his chamber,

the verses revealed by God, the scattering angels of the Almighty

shall scatter abroad the fragrance of the words uttered by his mouth,

and shall cause the heart of every righteous man to throb.

Though he may, at first, remain unaware of its effect, yet the virtue

of the grace vouchsafed unto him must needs sooner or later exercise

its influence upon his soul. Thus have the mysteries of the Revelation

of God been decreed by virtue of the Will of Him

Who is the Source of power and wisdom.” —BAHÁ’U’LLÁH

Baha’i Prayers: A Selection of Prayers Revealed by Baha’u’llah, the Bab, and `Abdu’l-Baha, Pages iv-3: gr1

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I am working my way through the book, Forces of Our Time: The Dynamics of Light and Darkness by Hooper C. Dunbar.  What does it mean to me, to combat ‘dark forces’ with spiritual discipline so that I ‘refuse to think negatively’?  What does this mean to me?  “We can change the world by changing how we think.”

I find three words stuck in my thoughts as I write this post:  Love, hope and kindness.  I wonder if I discipline my spirit if I can find a way to turn every thought I have today in the direction of one, two, or even all three of these qualities.

Severe infant and child abuse survivors know as few other human beings can what living in a world filled with the opposite of love, hope and kindness feels like.  But it takes no effort at all at any given moment for ANYONE to find instances and circumstances of ‘the darkness’ in this world we look at – if this negative is what we choose to see, feel and experience.

Knowing we suffer under burdens that deplete the joy in our own life, and therefore also deplete our ‘communal’ life as citizens sharing the bounties this earth provides us, simply gives us an opportunity to choose to find a way to let those burdens go.

Yes, difficulties are very real, but those difficulties do not guarantee us misery.  Although I am also not a fan of ‘pie-in-the-sky’ messages of ‘things will be all better if you just want them to be’, I have to believe that every moment I am alive carries with it an opportunity for goodness.

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What is this about?

“Due to popular demand, we put together a series of FREE videos and resources based on the work of Dr. Emoto and David Sereda.”

WATER SECRETS REVEALED — Discover How Your Consciousness Affects Your Health, Your Environment and Mother Earth

Who is this man, anyway?  Masaru Emoto

Masaru Emoto (江本 勝, Emoto Masaru^?, born July 22, 1943) is a Japanese author and entrepreneur known for his claims that human consciousness has an effect on the molecular structure of water. Emoto’s hypothesis has evolved over the years of his research. Initially Dr. Emoto claimed that high-quality water forms beautiful and intricate crystals, while low-quality water has difficulty forming crystals. According to Dr. Emoto, an ice crystal of distilled water exhibits a basic hexagonal structure with no intricate branching. Emoto claims that positive changes to water crystals can be achieved through prayer, music or by attaching written words to a container of water.

Since 1999 Emoto has published several volumes of a work titled Messages from Water, which contains photographs of water crystals next to essays and “words of intent.” In addition to his books, Emoto also sells various water products from his websites and catalogs, which are purported to have healing properties derived from his research and experiments.

Emoto’s ideas appeared in the popular documentary “What the Bleep Do We Know!?“. Like that film, Emoto’s work is widely considered pseudoscience by professionals, and he is criticized for going directly to the public with misleading claims that violate basic physics, based on methods that fail to properly investigate the truth of the claims.

Humm…..  And then I found this site:

Miraculous Messages from Water  — How water reflects our consciousness — by S. Sharp

“From Mr. Emoto’s work we are provided with factual evidence, that human vibrational energy, thoughts, words, ideas and music, affect the molecular structure of water, the very same water that comprises over seventy percent of a mature human body and covers the same amount of our planet.”

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OK – so what about this?

Could Meditation Have Something to Do with Plummeting Crime Rates?

And this:

Transcendental Meditation Experiment Arrests Crime:  Study Shows Dramatic Drop in Violent Crime During D.C. Project

“The demonstration project involved assembling nearly 4,000 practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs from 81 countries….  time series analysis of FBI crime data…showed that violent crime dropped significantly during the demonstration period….”

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One of my sisters mentioned both of these two ‘bodies of information’ to me several years ago.  I have no idea why it is TODAY that my thoughts turned in this direction as I watch the golden new morning’s light play among the clouds.  I do know that meditation involves the workings of the human mind.  I do know that the 18 years of terrible suffering I endured as an infant-child happened to me because my mother’s mind (and its connections in her body) was so, so sick.  I do know that the ‘comet trails’ within my own body and thoughts that came to me in direct response to my having to grow up in Mother’s hell will never entirely leave me in this lifetime.

Yet I also know that I can take action every moment of my day – even though I am not ‘a meditator’ – to place my thoughts in line with love, hope and kindness that will ALWAYS be able to counteract negative forces and their energy.

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I am NOT a fan of whining.  Bad habit, that whining stuff.  How do I increase my discipline to be able to examine the thoughts (and actions) that originate with me so that the positive energy it takes to do this amplifies in SOME WAY in my life today?  What might be the influence every one of us can have to positively resonate with SOLUTIONS rather than with PROBLEMS all of us face on some level in this lifetime?

How can we all be members of the quiet revolution that will change our world?  “Gifts given in silence are sometimes the most powerful.”  Love, hope and kindness = PEACE!  I want more of this today, more for me, more for everyone else.

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“Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. ²³“I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. ²⁴Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” Mark 11:22-24

Sometimes I comprehend images in my mind that are so clear I cannot deny that I am being faced with a scene that is telling me something important about myself in my life.  In my book writing process I have encountered one of these images.

As I communicated with people dear to me yesterday I verbalized this image I have about my writing as I told them, “I am standing with my nose to a massive mountain cliff side that is so tall and so wide I can see no top or side to it in any direction.  I cannot move forward in my writing, at least not now.”

The next level of my awareness about my writing is that I cannot tolerate the misery I feel now as I write about my miserable stories of the misery I endured from severe child abuse during the first 18 years of my life.  True, I have written the first massive rough draft of the first book, but I cannot now tolerate ‘facing’ its edit.

After yesterday’s conversations I have decided to put down my book writing pen at least until January 1, 2012 at which time this entire topic will be reconsidered.  It might be that I will never be able to tolerate the writing of this book.  It might be that with prayer and with a break-time for healing and increasing my strength and endurance on all levels, something will change during this resting period.  I do not know.  I believe the answer will appear through faith and prayer.  If God wants to remove this mountain I am facing, He will.

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I found some more clear words this morning that I also believe refer to what I am now facing – the entire quote is posted here (bold type is mine):  *SOUL AFTER DEATH (AND STORIES OF THE SOUL):

“And now concerning thy question regarding the soul of man and its survival after death. Know thou of a truth that the soul, after its separation from the body, will continue to progress until it attaineth the presence of God, in a state and condition which neither the revolution of ages and centuries, nor the changes and chances of this world, can alter.  It will endure as long as the Kingdom of God, His sovereignty, His dominion and power will endure. It will manifest the signs of God and His attributes, and will reveal His loving kindness and bounty.”

“Blessed is the soul which, at the hour of its separation from the body, is sanctified from the vain imaginings of the peoples of the world. Such a soul liveth and moveth in accordance with the Will of its Creator, and entereth the all-highest Paradise. The Maids of Heaven, inmates of the loftiest mansions, will circle around it, and the Prophets of God and His chosen ones will seek its companionship. With them that soul will freely converse, and will recount unto them that which it hath been made to endure in the path of God, the Lord of all worlds. If any man be told that which hath been ordained for such a soul in the worlds of God, the Lord of the throne on high and of earth below, his whole being will instantly blaze out in his great longing to attain that most exalted, that sanctified and resplendent station….”

* Author:  Bahá’u’lláh — Source:  Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, US Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1952 revised edition, 1971 5^th printing, pages 155-158

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It seems possible to me that as I attempted in my book writing to begin to express what my soul knew, even during my first terrible beating that I know of from my mother when I was 22 ½ months old (with my father watching), which is where this ‘cliff image’ appeared beyond which I cannot write, that I have encountered what may well be a spiritual truth:  Perhaps what I experienced – what my soul experienced – during my first 18 years of life spent in hell – is something that is NOT meant to be written about or to be disclosed while I live in this body on this earth.  Perhaps my stories are meant to be “recounted” to an entirely different audience:  “With them that soul will freely converse, and will recount unto them that which it hath been made to endure in the path of God, the Lord of all worlds.”

It this IS TRUE I hope to know it by the first of next year.  If I am meant to complete any book, certainly this first one, I have to know that something extremely GOOD is meant to come out of this effort.  In the meantime I am not going to worry about what only faith and God can show me.  I will spend these next weeks strengthening my body and soul.

I do know for a certainty that my story is about what happened to me and how I survived living with a mother so sick in her body-mind that her soul seemed to have been barred from her conscious access – so that terrors of evil pervaded her relationship with me.  I find my answers in pondering the truths I posted at this page:  *DEATH, SICKNESS OF BODY AND THE SOUL

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I am the one you follow.  Locked into my wispy wake we trail through the shallow mists.  I am that arrow launched before you breathed.  I do not tow you.

See the rosy lavenders.  See the deepest darkest bluest green.  Faintly.  Listen.  Prayer air whispering like turtles perched on high dry ground.

You do not need to follow me.  You have tone on one wingtip and color on the other.

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William Ernest Henley. 1849–1903

 Invictus

OUT of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

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Maybe much trauma drama is a side effect of the need to run.

My need to run originated early in my life, probably even before I had the ability to sit up, crawl or walk.  This need to run is tied directly to the fight/flight/freeze response to threat.  My need to escape Mother’s abuse existed long before I had the ability to think about what was happening to me in words.

Once I left home at 18 my urge to flee found fulfillment although I had no words even then to think about what I continued to do all through my adult life.  Even today at 60 as I left my home to drive into town today to sit at a coffee shop outdoor plaza to write this, that is exactly what I did.  I ran.

More than a need for change or drama my urge to flee is tied to difficulties I have in processing information.  These difficulties exist deep in my trauma-altered physiology.  Changes that ongoing abuse trauma from birth created in the way my nervous system/brain formed in response to trauma means that I often lack the natural ability to process certain hardships and stresses in my life.  My active coping mechanisms frequently require that I continually and physically move forward in SPACE at the same simultaneously as I move forward in TIME.

I can clearly track this pattern in the first full-body age-22 1/2 month old beating memory that I so avoid writing right now.

Scientists know that sharks and migrating geese have no need to sleep because no new information is coming into their brain for processing.  When I run, I count on moving through time and space as they do.  It is not new information I am seeking or running toward most of the time.  I run FROM information in the past (often the immediate past) that I lack abilities to process and integrate.

My movements into a continual new future need to be AWAY from trauma rather than into it (if at all possible).  While my continual moving/changing locations was often hard on my children, I never met changes in this process that presented a challenge I could not meet one way or the other.  There were tough times and hardships to face but conquer them I could – and did — again, one way or the other.

It has always been the challenges on the inside of me that I have most found impossible to resolve.  Understanding is a high-priced item.

Even as I contemplate the work I have ahead of me to face the writing of my childhood memories, I have no hope of resolving anything.  I can do no more than travel backward into trauma experiences hoping that good will come out of this book in the future once it has been written.

It is not my nature to move backward in time.  It is in my nature to run into the future.  Any hope for relief I ever had as a child existed in some unknown moment in the future when a beating would finally end, or when I could go to the bathroom or eat or leave confinement in a corner or my bed.  Any hope for resolution of problems I continue to have resides in the infinite possibilities of the future.

These patterns have always been about survival.  Hope for survival is the same thing as survival itself.  No matter which way I turn this book writing task around in my thoughts, continued survival is all that I see.  Anything else that ever happens in my life is a mere ripple in that great ocean of “To be alive means only that I move into my future,” and I do not stop.

I would not sing a song backwards.  One doesn’t put a puzzle together backwards, either, or one would be taking it apart instead.  I have enjoyed ‘making things’ with my hands all of my life since my age two (that I know of), and these acts of creation are also about moving forward into the future, not backward into the past.

Even though this book I am working on is about my past I have to find a way to ‘move it into my future’ — one word at a time — or it will never be written at all.

NOTE:  My force-of-life was focused forward when I was growing up, not backward.   I moved forward in time AWAY from an attack — certainly never did I move forward in time TOWARD an attack — I was nearly ALWAYS surprised when I was attacked again out of nowhere — I could not predict, control, avoid or escape any of them.  Forward memory (future memory) in the brain is about anticipation and prediction — when traumatic chaos builds an infant-child’s brain these processes are changed.

Retrospect is meant to be an ability in the brain that allows us to take what we learn from the past that’s useful for the future.  Early severe infant-abuse trauma does not create the opportunity to learn a single thing from violent, unpredictable, insane chaos (something any sane growing brain-mind is going to run from as soon, as fast and as far as it can).

What I am talking about today is part of what it IS like and FEELS like to have one of the ‘evolutionarily altered brains’ described in this article:

The neurobiological consequences of early stress and childhood maltreatment.

Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 27 (2003) 33-44

Martin H. Teicher, Susan L. Andersen, Ann Polcari, Carl M. Anderson, Carryl P. Navalta, Dennis M. Kim

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What people do not seem to understand, and by people I mean myself also, is that a child being raised by an abusive Borderline mother is NEVER safe.  Although I was the ‘special’ child of our family singled out for the severe abuse, every time Mother attacked me in any way including verbally, all my siblings received witness abuse at the same time.

I hate to say this, I hate to know this, I hate to live with this — but at 60 years old I am finally coming to realize that the wounds I have from the 18 years of abuse I went through ARE NOT GOING TO HEAL IN THIS LIFETIME.

I don’t choose to feel anxious during my days, or choose to be overwhelmed by the madness I see in most human contact, or choose to wake up as I did before dawn today crying with tears soaking my pillow — for NO GOOD REASON — except that these 18 years of unhealed wounds make me SAD!

So why do I feel guilty that I am sad and anxious?  Why do I feel I made that choice to wake in the dark of predawn crying?  Why do I burden myself with feeling so responsible for not being 100% OK if I ‘chose to be’?

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Last night I was happy to accept the invitation of a friend who lives in town on the boulevard that surrounds this small town’s only real park to help her distribute the $150 worth of Halloween candy she bought to the crowds out wandering the streets last evening.  I sat beside my friend on the brick bench on her well-lit wide porch as friend divided the candy ‘donations’ into equal-sized piles while I handed them out as fast as I could to streaming hundreds of people.

I felt as if I were parched nearly to death for the light of pure joy in people’s eyes.  Not only were the joy-filled costumed little people such a great delight to me to see, but also even the teens, and also the parents and older siblings and grandparents that accompanied these little people.

I was very sad not to be with my daughter and 20-month grandson last night as they trailed out to collect the treats where they live nearly 2000 miles away from me.  Some of my inner tears are from that loss.  Yet it was all I could do last night to keep my tears from streaming down my face as I looked into the eyes especially of the children under age 7 that came up to me on that porch with such a bright light shining in their eyes.

If anyone doubts the love of God that created we humans in this world let them donate their time, and maybe some candy, too, and offer to go help someone in one of those ‘fancier’ houses where the hoards like to swarm on Halloween eve.  That is a job, that candy-giving!!  Three hours, non-stop children/families, and what I needed to see for myself last night was that perfection in children that I can so seldom see in grownups.

In that perfection, in the eyes of nearly all of those children (I did see its opposite in the eyes of one boy), is absolute trust.  In that perfection is an innocence that is born by NOT being a continual punching bag for one or more hate-filled parents.  There is, unfortunately, no reason to believe that all of those children I watched last night are safe all of the time from harm done to them by big people.  But at least I could see last night they were safe THEN.

An abusive Borderline’s children are prey.  Prey are never safe if they cannot escape the presence and threat of their own personal predator.  A never-ending viscous circle of never being safe.  If I had been out with my mother like those children were last night I would have had to ALWAYS be alert to where she was, what she was expressing, hyper alert to everything about me in the world!

I was never safe as a child.  If I had been one of those children who forgot to say Trick-or-Treat, or forgot to say thank you, or tripped on the hem of my costume or slipped on a step or stood in the wrong place or walked in the wrong place or looked up when I should have looked down??   An infraction such as that could, with my mother, have nearly cost me my life in violent and complicated punishments that ALWAYS included the evils of verbal abuse.

And certainly Mother cost me my happiness.  It is probably my biggest problem in my life that I hold myself responsible for these unhealed wounds from her that I never asked for, never deserved, could not avoid — these wounds that woke me crying from my sleep this morning.  I DID NOT ASK for this — not THEN — not NOW.

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