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I am ready for something uplifting.  A few posts ago I mentioned a book I am reading:

Walking With Loneliness by Paula Ripple (1995) Ava Maria Press

There’s no money being made from this blog, so for educational purposes only I am going to copy here a story Ripple wrote in her chapter IV, Noticing Life.  Times have changed since this was written.  I am not sure that even parents who are sending young children on a plane who are not flying themselves can get through security let alone visit with the child once it has boarded.  But here is Ripple’s very nice story:

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Rhonda, the little balloon lady

“I was flying from a religious education congress in Spokane to Minneapolis.  When I got on the plane, sitting in the front row of the nonsmoking section and crying very hard was a little girl.  Kneeling beside her, and clearly not flying with her, was a young man.  With tears streaming down his face, he hugged the little girl as the cabin attendant announced that all visitors had to leave the plane.  I have seen this in so many airports in the country:  “child visitation” they call it.

“I was sitting in the row behind the little girl, and I reached to touch her shoulder and ask her if she wanted to come and sit with me.  As she turned her tear-stained face upward, she was crying too hard to speak and could only shake her head to say “yes.”

“As I took her by the hand I asked her if she wanted to sit in the center seat or by the window.  She was very clear about wanting to be near the window.  As the plane was being pushed back from the jetway, she was crying ever so quietly, looking at the gate area in the airport and saying, in a barely audible voice, “I want my daddy, I want my daddy.”  As she spoke these words, her left hand was cupped around her face.  She was barely moving the fingers on her right hand as she waved good-bye to her daddy.

“This little child was bearing her pain with such dignity.  She was so protective of her daddy and told me later that she had tried hard not to cry because she knew it was difficult for him to leave her.

“During the first hour of the flight my little friend told me that she was almost five and that her name was Rhonda.  She reviewed, through her stories, all of the ways in which the divorce experience affects children.  She spoke of her divorce, never of her parents’ divorce; she believed that the divorce was her fault because she had been naughty; she knew that both her daddy and mommy were hurting and so she didn’t want them to know how she felt.  She also believed that, if she was good, the divorce might not happen.  Such large problems for one so small.  Such inner burdens for which there was no present relief for her.

“Then she turned to me, asked to borrow a Kleenex and dried her tears, as if to suggest that she wanted to think about something else now.  She asked me if I wanted to see the presents her daddy and her grandfather had given her.  She showed me a set of felt-tip markers and a coloring book that had some blank pages for “Rhonda originals.”  I asked her if she would make a picture for me.  She asked me not to look so that the picture would be a surprise.  When it was completed, she presented a picture of a lovely clown.  When I asked her how she knew I had a special fondness for clowns, she looked so pleased.  Then she put out her hand to take the picture again for a moment while telling me that she wanted to give her clown some balloons.  When she handed the carefully drawn picture back to me with the balloons added, every balloon was black.

“How I envied this little girl whose feelings were so clear to her.  How grateful I felt for her trust in sharing them with me.  What a paradox that picture was — the happy clown figure with the black balloons.  How much it was like her life with its sadness of separation from her father and the periodic happy space of a visit with him and her grandfather.

“As I was tucking the picture into my briefcase, the cabin attendant came to take Rhonda’s bag to the front of the plane.  Rhonda looked up, pointed a finger at her and said, “I don’t want you to take my bad.  This lady will do it,” pointing to me.  How quickly bonds form between people who share life.

“When it was nearly time for us to land in Minneapolis, Rhonda tugged on my sleeve and said to me, “I’d like my picture back, please.”  With sadness and reluctance I reached for it and as I did she must have noticed my disappointment so she quickly consoled me by saying, “I want to make another for you.”  The second clown was nearly identical with the first but this time only two of the balloons were black.  Somehow I believed it was her way of telling me that I had made her life a bit brighter that day.

“As we were leaving the plane, she had to wait for a cabin attendant to take her and I had another flight for which I was nearly a half-hour late.  She put her arms around me and kissed me and said, “You are a very nice lady.  Thank you.  Why were you so good to me?”  I hugged her and said, “You are nice, too.  I like you very much, Rhonda.”

“We said good-bye and parted.  As I walked to my concourse my mind and my heart were filled with this child who had been such a gift to me.  I felt so good about myself because, for me, it is very special to be loved by children.  I spent the entire flight to Boston thinking about the qualities that I loved and had come to admire in this young child, qualities that she had been neither embarrassed nor afraid to share.

“Rhonda was very much in touch with her feelings and she was trusting enough to share them, even with a stranger.  I wish that at any given moment I could be that clear about how I feel and wise enough to entrust it to someone who would either help me accept the black balloons or help me exchange them, one by one, for a brightly colored balloon bouquet.

“She was very good at making decisions and clear about what she wanted, whether it was where she would sit, who would carry her bag, or what she wanted to share with her father as he left her on the plane.  I wondered why I so often have difficulty in making decisions or, even more often, why I sometimes hesitate to tell someone what I have decided.

“Rhonda did not feel sorry for herself.  She spoke much more of her daddy’s pain than of her own.  She was so sensitive to my short-lived disappointment of losing the clown that she quickly offered to make another.  She who was so tiny and carried such large hurts made me realize my own ability to magnify small hurts and to let them fill all of the space inside me….

“…Rhonda somehow knew that meeting people and sharing life with them was one sure way to become happier, one sure way to see another facet of life.

“Because Rhonda liked herself she was not afraid to give others the opportunity to love her.  She needed some reassurance from me that I cared as I left her, but through the hours that we shared, it was clear that she liked herself enough to believe that I cared.

“By the time I reached Boston I had noted, in a journal that I keep, 27 qualities about Rhonda that I loved and admired.  I did this because she had reached deep into my life, and thinking of her was a way of reliving the happy time we had shared.  I did it as a reminder to myself to notice my own life a bit more and to see if I am doing as well as she did….

“I am thankful that I met Rhonda.  My “dedication to thankfulness: demands that I remain faithful to all that I learned from her about allowing others to be present by letting them into my life.”  (pages 62-66)

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I can’t tell if I’m losing ground on my book writing project or not.  I fear that I am.  I fear I will give up completely.

The woman, Joe Anne, who knew Mildred from her August 1957 arrival in Alaska until her death in 2003 just called me and talked for 1 1/2 hours about her history with my psychotic abusive Borderline Personality Disorder mother.  Joe Anne just finished reading book 4 of Mother’s writings to be published in the Mildred’s Mountain series, The Up Down Mountain Waltz.  Joe Anne had a lot to say, but I am not sure today was the day I wanted to hear things like my father very nearly killed his wife twice after I left home.  (I know the abuse done to me prevented Mother from turning on Father and then he on she until after I left home — one helluva burden for me — I was only a CHILD!)

This conversation coupled with how clear it became to me through my brother’s visit that he is so NOT PRESENT in any possible way with me in my writing work about our family leaves me at this moment having my memories of being SO ALONE with the abuse I suffered for 18 years while my siblings lived their entire different all-good life in Mother’s psychotic split world.

I felt so alone as a child because I WAS alone.  I feel so alone now with this writing because I AM alone.  Why should my siblings care?  Why should they have cared then and why should they care now?

I have one of five siblings who can tolerate even thinking about Mother.  She has told me she will talk/write something at some point down the road, but she is busy with her own life.  At least her support helps me.

I was not prepared to have this reaction to spending last week with my brother.  If I can’t get past how I feel right now what needs to be written next will never be written.  I am OK with taking a break now — but I have no way of knowing if I am headed toward abandoning my work or toward finding a new place inside of myself to return to it.  If I have lost my way I would say the timing of my brother’s visit was devastating to me.

If I become swallowed in the family denial my book writing is done for.  I am dangerously close to giving up.  I knew I needed at least one of the nine books in the editing queue to be finalized and epublished to help carry me forward in this awful work.  My daughter is too busy to give any time to this project.  This has been very, very difficult for me.  I wait.  Those books wait.  And I have always known there is a line beyond which — if I cross it — I will NEVER finish these books.

Where is my commitment and determination?  I feel as though I’ve been hit head on.  I fear I have crashed.  Yes I am strong, but without even the remotest encouragement or remotest interest, concern, compassion, support or assistance from my siblings I am not sure today that I am strong enough to write what needs yet to be said.

My siblings suffered.  We all had an insane Mother.  But as the child chosen to be the target of Mildred’s psychotic abuse my suffering so far surpasses theirs that I cannot understand why they would not WANT to help me in any way that they could.  I am deluded.  I live in an idealized world.  This one is real.

I am feeling discouraged.  Stupid for caring or trying.  Is this a low spot I am in or is this a bottom?  I am angry, feeling my siblings have turned their back on me as surely as Mildred made sure that they did while we were growing up.

Maybe I am damn sick of caring.

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This is a mere collection of thoughts.  A few words.  First, to talk about my new drums.  When my brother was here he took me to a nearby town (I can’t get to on my own given my old car and cost of gas).  There was a small music store there.  I was waiting when the door opened and bought these:

THE DRUMS

I couldn’t afford them.  I couldn’t afford not to afford them.  I have flour and yeast and a bread maker.  Lots of peanut butter and jelly.  So I turned my food budget + into drums. 

My new friends.  Their heads are loosened waiting 24 hours, resting, becoming accustomed to this altitude (about 4500 feet) and this climate.  This afternoon I will tighten them again and begin to play.

I have a Latin station on Pandora radio.  I can play that music.

Rhythm.  Sound.  Bringing the apex of heaven and the center of the earth together with those drums through my hands.  Through this body of mine.  I need this.

Trauma survivors.  We all have gifts.  We all have pure joy inside of us somewhere.

Permission.  Granting permission to let our talents and our joy come together no matter what we’ve been through.  It’s not easy, I don’t think.  With the weight of the world not far from us how do we find our own freedom?

I still have my keyboard.  I am still teaching myself to read music and to play.  But I cannot deny the damage done and the healing needed as I work rather than gamble around freely with music that way.

My mother’s raging abuse began before my ears could tell voices apart from overwhelming sound.  When I hit a note on the keyboard I do not hear that sound in ordinary ways.  Much sound actually hurts me, according to its pitch.  My brain shuts down listening to any note above middle C when I hit those keys.  Damage done to my developing brain by verbal abuse, by screaming by my mother.

Drums.  A different matter.  I finally understand that.  I know rhythm.  Mother did not damage that about me.  So at 62 I finally granted myself permission to gather into my home and into my life the tools I need to express myself this way.

I walk through my front room now and there stands these two drums.  They feel like sentinels of freedom to me.  Friends.  I lay my hands upon their heads and feel peace.  Gateway to FUN!  All by myself.

I so often feel like an exile in this world.  I need time to fly, and I found instantly that playing these drums gives me the closest feeling to flying I can probably ever have in my lifetime. 

It’s never too late to fly.  Forget the world, Linda!  At least some of the time, forget the world.  All the complications, all the difficulties of this journey.  Forget it.  Go for the rhythm.  That which joins all the world together, every tiny part of it.  Heartbeats.  Top to bottom.  Inside out.  Outside in.  All combined rather than taking it all apart into little bitty pieces.

Giving up the struggle.  Letting go.  Flying.

I began having dreams about flying when I was 9 in the 4th grade.  I flew in my dreams sometimes until I was 30.  So many years since I have flown.  Life has been WORK for me!  Work, from the time I took my first breath.  I am getting tired.  Tired of the struggle, of the battle, of this work of life.

Tired of thinking.  Tired of feeling.

Tired of asking and seeking.  Tired even of the finding.

The drums seem to be alive.  I lay my hands on them and rest them there as the drum heads are resting.  For a few more hours.  They feel like a part of my body.  Mine.  Claiming a space.  Claiming a right to pure joy.  Nothing else to it.  Just joy.

Joy without a name.  Joy of the smell of the still desert air as the crescent moon above me slides soon into the light of day.  Joy of birds waking up.  Joy of spring coming.  All joys combined together.  So big there is no room for sadness.

A sound.  Once made.  Does it live forever?

Being a part of sound, not apart FROM the world, a part of me with a part of sound sent into the cosmos — out and up and through.

I’m OK with that.  By this afternoon I can tighten the drum heads again and they will come alive and an ancient part of me will awaken with them.  One single simple word:  JOY!

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LISTEN

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I can never, never fool myself into thinking a life with so much deep sadness built into it from child abuse from the start is easy.  There are days like today is as my brother flies home after his visit here when the sadness feels so big it’s hard to make space around it to get through the day.  This has happened to me in large part because of the stage I am at in my book writing as experiences are closer and bigger to me from my childhood than they have probably ever been since I lived through them in the first place.

I know enough now to name the largess of my current feelings as the body memories that they are.  My brother’s leaving today is triggering in resonance how both he and I felt around my age of two and his of three when our insane mother began to remove us from one another’s presence — always when she was in a psychotic state of rage at me that meant I was being hurt.

Today I realize not only was I traumatized terribly from whatever form her attacks would have taken but probably more so by the repeated loss of my brother who could not reach me — nor could I reach him — when these attacks happened. 

NOTHING in our life was right.  Nothing stable or safe.  No reason.  No sanity or predictability around our mother.  No reprieve.  No salvation.  All I had was my little brother.  I know during these attacks he suffered right along with me even though he was Mother’s adored darling all-good world child.  She hurt him as much or even more than she hurt me.  He is still hurting.

I know enough now to understand the impact of the combined, cumulative pains of the trauma especially from abuse when I was so small I had not even developed enough of a mind to use it to help myself get through what happened to me — and simultaneously to my adored and adoring big brother.  Yet we both remember and will never forget what happened to us — me with my words.  My brother without.

I do not fool myself into thinking that our shared trauma and pain isn’t present every time he and I are in one another’s presence even though he is 63 and I am 62 years old now.  I don’t choose to think about these things.  My body tells me with feelings.  Feelings that do not diminish, do not go away.

I cannot avoid knowing what my body tells me about being torn apart from my brother from the time we were very, very small and young.  Those feelings are awakened today.  There are so many levels of suffering that happen to little children when they are terrorized and abused that comes exactly from being tiny and little, helpless and vulnerable and defenseless.

It doesn’t matter how big or how old we are we are not invulnerable to the awakening of the feelings our body holds in memory for us.  They will appear at times throughout our lives.  They add themselves into our present day experience because they cannot be separated from who we are as people.

This super-sized suffering takes effort, energy, resources and attention away from what we have available to get through our days.  The added costs of coping with massive trauma from infancy and childhood can steal the joy out of our present life.  It can make what might be a difficult problem to non-trauma survivors feel nearly insurmountable to survivors. 

I cannot be awake and aware in my body without being influenced by the burden of my trauma history.  The abuse was too severe, too chronic and it lasted over 18 long years. 

I guess I could have seen this response to spending time with my brother and to his leaving coming, yet I would never have denied us this visit.  I have a belief that when I have completed all my writing I will be “better,” although I don’t even know what I mean by “better.”  More immune to the “old” feelings?  More protected from their awakenings?  More distant from them?

I cannot sugarcoat the fact that as our culture allows infant and child abuse to happen we are creating degrees of additional suffering in those who survive it that cannot be imagined by those who were not so cursed.  The very least we can do as a culture is to honor the complexities survivors face in their lives that come directly from the unbearable and inescapable suffering that was built into all of us. 

Some days call for a gentleness that ongoing life does not easily or often offer.  Such days as this one is for me are especially hard for survivors.  I am reminded of a quote I heard once although I cannot remember the source:  “Never hurt anyone, no matter whom for no matter what.”  I want to remember to practice softening and gentling of my voice and heart toward other people, and toward myself.

I triage my pain.  My oldest wound of love has been touched.  It is open, raw and weeping.  I cannot heal my brother’s pain.  I love and pray for him.  I hold him close to my heart as if he is a new robin’s egg without its shell, so full of life lived.

When people tell me, “I cannot start to cry because if I do I will never stop,” I believe them.  Still, I can tease this sorrow into the light a little more than ever before.  I let my feet move slowly, full of lead.  There is something to be learned here even about great sibling love in toddlerhood and before.

What depths of life.  What breadths.  Crashed upon the rocky shore through raging storms of terrible abuse this love did not break.  Can there be a more tender love or one more brave?

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My older brother just left after his week’s visit with me to drive the 90 miles to the Tucson airport to fly home.  I miss him.  I always miss him.

I am left with an inner avalanche of impressions about how trauma from abusive childhoods shared with siblings (I have five) never leaves us.  And, yes, as a dear blog commenter reminded me this morning, the tragedies of these traumas can never be completely avoided when we are with family members no matter how much we love one another.

I HATE that fact and process!

But I must accept this reality.  Trauma triggers among family members is a huge part of the ongoing aftermath of surviving early trauma.  There is no other choice.

It is HOW we live the best we can in spite of the traumas that matters.  Our tapestry of life is so complex.  Yet in my family we are all determined to create the most beautiful life that we can — even though — there has been great hardship.  Hardship is a part of life for everyone.  Yet for survivors of severe early abusive trauma these hardships are very deep and pervasive.  They give us massive amounts of creative fodder to work with!  That much I know.

I have been brought face-to-face with myself in important ways that come so clear to me ONLY through my sibling relationships.  I want to take all pain away!  Of course the patterns in our family of me being the chosen target of our mother’s psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder abuse always meant from the time I was born that all that was “bad” in our family’s life was due to my being alive as a member of our family.  The reality of these patterns is so big that nobody could ever truly face them wholly.

Especially with my brother here I faced my deepest values.  I wanted my brother to be happy, to sparkle, to be well and free and impassioned with his own dreams and talents.  He was most shackled by Mother’s madness as he struggled from the moment I was born (he was 13 1/2 months old) to protect me.  He was forced into an adult role that not even our father dared accept.  (Our father was an abysmal failure as the central supporter of his wife’s mental illness and abuse.)

I hold the image of my brother being free, well and radiant closest to my heart.  On the reverse side it is most difficult for me to hold this same image of myself!  That is MY job in this life.  Knowing where the boundaries are between people has always been most difficult for me, in greatest part because of the powerful branch of Mother’s psychotic abusive illness that required that I be isolated and confined alone. 

I could not play with my siblings, and much of the time we were not even allowed to speak together.  Mildred (my brother only refers to her as “the one who shall not be named”) BELIEVED not only that I was born the devil’s child, but that I had the power to take all of her other darling, beloved “all good world” children to the devil.  I was not allowed to develop a body-brain that could process any levels of human interaction other than the most surface apparent ones related to having bodies that take up space in the world.

And yet the essence of who I am was not bound by Mother’s madness.  My essence, my ability to sense vast amounts of invisible information, is literally fantastic.  I am not sure I could be more sensitive.  But what am I supposed to do with the information I detect when it comes to other people?  What do I “let in” and what do I leave alone as belonging to the people who are NOT ME?

I do the best that I can, and when a critical time comes such as today is as my brother departs, I only know to ground myself in my body in the material world.  Given the basics of eating, of exercise, of taking care of myself in my world, I can move forward in time as so much that I feel — as well as what I can learn from “all this” digests itself, transforms itself, into a different more expanded me as I move forward in time.

Fodder for more beauty.  I spent most of my month’s (low) income yesterday buying a set of gorgeous conga drums.  I will learn to play them.  The next time my brother comes to visit me I will be able to play them for him.  Meanwhile, I will play them for myself. 

I am afraid.  I don’t deny it.  More times than I could ever count I have become aware of how vast the trauma is that existed in our family home as we grew up.  It has never yet stopped me.  It has not stopped my brother.  We are strong.  It’s when I doubt this that I fear being crushed by forces so huge that they cannot be withstood.

Yes.  They can.  And more importantly they can be transformed into LIFE — one second at a time.

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I do not know how to be in relationships where there are so many doors closed to where conversation could lead — that it can’t.  Where things of importance cannot be touched.  Where people seem to conceal from themselves the background that sustains all that is not known evidently because people cannot afford to know these things.

If a person tries to plan a trip forward to go somewhere and there are road blocks and detours that lead in circles or nowhere at all — everyone concerned or involved will eventually become so lost there’s no return and no destination.

I don’t know if this is true for myself because I can’t find out, at least not from other people.  I am left feeling alone even in the company of others.  I end up thinking if I had been raised in a home without so much abuse I never would have asked the questions that I do.  Then I wouldn’t know there are so few answers.  Or, more probably, none at all.

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The inner pain, the inner confusion, happened so long ago in abusive families all involved, most certainly siblings, were forced to proceed not knowing the questions and left without real hope for answers because everyone was overwhelmed from the beginning.  Left to do the best they can do.  And this has to be enough for love to flourish between people — anyway.

Such love flourishes in spite of all the difficulties.  It seems to be something unique in me that seeks to work things through in language.  In words.  In conversation of open give and take that would seek for truth where others keep it forever unknown.  Out of sight.  Hidden.  Buried away.  Permanently concealed.  Off limits.

How do I negotiate to retain relationships that have so little access to truth needed to actually maintain them?  How does give and take get negotiated?  How does need and want, desire, fear and hope between two people slide back and forth smoothly and cooperatively when nothing related to anything of meaning can be spoken?

Is nearly everyone (it seems) so bound and gagged even in their thoughts that we walk together in a world of mass joint silence that keeps denial alive everywhere we turn and so few can ever even notice?

Do we end up internalizing one another’s silence until it seems to become our own?  Until we give up trying to figure out where our own forced silence has joined with another’s so that what they refuse to know becomes what we cannot know ourselves?

I cannot guess.  I cannot force anyone to open up what they choose to keep covered up inside themselves.  I cannot pry.  I am too aware of keeping peace by keeping pace as those I know or meet or love allow me to be in their lives — only to the degree I keep my mouth shut.  Keep my own thoughts and feelings about nearly everything I would talk about — to myself.

How do I retain and maintain my own relationship with myself?  Walking through life with so many people who are so silent even tas they talk and talk about affairs of being alive in a material world, where conversation stays on the surface having to do only with the basic levels of physical needs in a physical body in a physical world that belies the possibilities of deeper understanding about the experience of being human?

Doesn’t this become a never-ending series of encounters with people where compromising what really matters leads us into hollowness, generation after generation, as we exchange between one another words only about our material nature as if we, too, are made of dollars and cents?

We leave unspoken, unfaced, unmined, unexplored, unknown, the truth about who we REALLY are while we reduce so many of the moments, hours, days, months and years of our lifetime to materially based transactions while we remain empty inside and empty together.  What human relationship can we find, then, when so much of what makes us truly human is missing in action?

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It is not a good sign for the future of America that “shallow” has been replaced with “empty” and so few even notice.  I don’t think the problem rests only within members of families where horrors of child abuse left children now grown with so little to talk about other than sheer continued material survival. 

It seems that the truly human voice of great literature depths has left us as we now wander through life in some kind of a daze we do not recognize.  Do not identify.  Struck, we are, numb and dumb with our own inner depths left idle.  Left alone.  Left silent.  Untouched.

Where, then, lies the soul of the world while we clank and clunk around transformed into consumerized zombized robots?  Where lies our true power?  Where lies our grace and our passion?  How did this great disconnect happen that led us so astray from who we could become if we knew who we really are?

Are we the disenfranchised intent on keeping distant from one another by so thoroughly, carefully, intently, determinedly keeping so hidden from ourselves?  Are we going in the wrong direction?

What will our future hold?  Does shallow lead to empty and then to nothing?  Are we becoming empty shells?  Are big box stores and subdivisions full of ugly box houses and pavement consuming us from the inside out as we enslave ourselves to our base material existence?  As we extinguish our own contact with the inward sources of our own humanity?

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What do we actually question deeply?  Do we really believe that smut pulp fiction (ask Random House publishing) makes us better people?  Do we question the source of what we believe?  Do we remember that as humans we are exquisitely designed to look below the surface of our material world to see the source of life’s heart beating within everything we see and touch?

Is this a spiritual disease that empties a nation of its soul?  Is this disease contagious?  Where are our thinkers?  Where are our watchers?  Our listeners?  Who speaks?  Of what to whom?

Are the lights of our true and inner selves being extinguished, blinking out one by one as darkness envelops our earth even as it is lit up only with light bulbs that make our planet glow empty from outer space?  Until?

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Where are the gatherings in every community where humble people join together in conversations about what actually matters?  Are we all so enslaved?  How do the lonely few keep their own inner light burning brightly as they work to transform their experience into knowledge and wisdom that sustains the deep levels of being human?  What can we give without giving up or giving in? 

We have an increasing quantity of human bodies on our planet.  Do we have any quality left to show for it?

I can’t help but wonder.

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March 8, 2013

+WHAT CAN I OFFER TO THE GREATER GOOD?

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I wrote in my last post about the book I found and am reading, Walking With Loneliness by Paula Ripple (1995) Ava Maria Press.  Ripple wrote one chapter about the passing of her mother and about how her eight children agreed on how their mother loved them in a way that gave them each the greatest freedom to claim and to live their own lives — their way.

Ripple uses the expression “know your own name and name your own days.”  By “knowing your own name” in reference to how her mother did this Ripple was honoring the fact that it was only because her mother was able to increasingly know her own self that she was then able to allow her children to each know their own self, as well.  By choosing to “name your own days” Ripple described how setting the course for one’s life each day by naming it means that life does not pass by unnoticed, unheeded, or unattended to — from the inside out.

Most people who find their way to this blog had their lives interfered with if not “claimed” in abusive, invasive and harm-filled ways by the very adults in their childhood who were supposed to set the example about how to live one’s life to the fullest — but did the opposite.  Ripple’s mother was clearly a healthy person.  My mother was the opposite.  Yet I have lived my own life in spite of her, although I never feel I have lived my life to the fullest.

As I concluded the reading of Ripple’s chapter about her mother I found myself thinking about how naming one’s own name and naming one’s own days leaves no room for trying to control any other person.  This kind of naming seems perhaps like drawing a picture of one’s self with a pencil that defines boundaries, that defines our self within OUR life — the life lived in our days. 

I am thinking I have very high standards for myself that I never let myself meet.  Is this a destructive or constructive pattern for myself?  Do I look over my own “fence” into some other field where I do not belong?  My days are my days.  My space is my space within which I live my days — within my own boundaries, inside and out.

Have I hung up my own sign in my life saying, “Linda lives here and she is doing a fantastic job?”  Is naming — a kind of claiming?  I claim this day.  I name this day.  It did not pass by me unnoticed no matter how humble my day might seem — IF I compare it to — whose?

All the way from my early teens through my 40s at times I heard a voice calling my name as if from a great distance.  I can hear that calling inside my mind now any time I think of this.  It remains a mystery to me, this name calling.  The voice was female and it was beautiful, but it also seemed filled with longing.  For me?  Was I calling myself?  Was an angel calling me?  Did the voice cease its musical calling because I finally found myself?

I cannot imagine naming my days by anything other than something I value.  Something I value is something I love.  I am a person who has struggled a lifetime with not being able to say with truth, “I love life.”  I watch so many I know who claim no belief in any kind of life after the death of their physical body.  I cannot imagine for myself having that kind of dead-end take on life.  And yet sometimes I suspect it is because I believe the life of eternity after this physical life is so much better than this one that I lack the appreciation I WISH I had for being here now.

I work on this in some way every day of my life.  Naming myself in my life — naming the days of my life — before I pass through the veil at the end of this life into the next world — I often think it is exactly because of the great loneliness I so often feel that I think the next world will befriend me because I have so much trouble befriending myself and my life in this world.

Ripple’s point about her mother was that because her mother gave herself her own name and named her own days of her own life she was thus able to give so much to other people.  This is one of the greatest losses I suffer from the 18 years of severe abuse by my mother in my childhood:  I have the greatest difficulty giving myself permission to be giving to ME.

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Wandering around with my visiting brother yesterday I stumbled upon a book I find very useful and fascinating.  It’s available online for a penny plus shipping – and well worth this cost!

Walking With Loneliness

By Paula Ripple (1995) Ava Maria Press

I am not Catholic, but this bothers me not the least.  The book is excellent, and of great use to me – and perhaps to other severe early abuse survivors who struggle to creatively comprehend facets of life that perhaps few others ever have to contemplate.

If in the future I have the time I would be honored to write a kind of study of my reactions to the words Sister Paula Ripple included in her text.  The pages are filled with gemstones, even for those who find themselves pondering life without any particular spiritual aspirations.  For example from pages 28-29:

“The writers of the gospel do not speak directly of the loneliness of Jesus but we cannot miss the impact it must have had on his own journey if we look at the misunderstanding, rejection and betrayal that were a part of Jesus’ life.  Even his closest friends missed the meaning of the reason for his coming.  They looked to him to be a person of power and earthly kingdoms despite all his words that this was not why he had come.  The loneliness of Jesus must sometimes have been like the loneliness of one who has mastered a particular discipline to the point where it offers no new challenges.  The loneliness of Jesus must sometimes have been like that of a person who has developed a finely tuned sensitivity to life and can rarely find someone with whom to share that feeling.  The loneliness of Jesus must sometimes have been like the loneliness of the person who sees and tells the truth in the presence of people for whom truth is of less value than acceptability [being accepted by others].  The loneliness of Jesus was the loneliness of individuals who have entered deeply into the cave of wisdom, of those who stand in their own place, of those of flawless inner integrity — as they relate to others who have lived as spectators rather than as participants, lived at the surface rather than at the depths.”

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Sister Ripple offers that no human on earth escapes loneliness; that in fact loneliness is one of the most essential experiences of being human.  She writes about how all efforts to “make the feeling go away” are failed attempts that can cause us to miss what might be the greatest learning experiences of our lifetime. 

Loneliness is a creative experience, and befriending and following the lead into learning that the loneliness we early abuse survivors know so well might offer to us our greatest opportunities to even stun ourselves with the discovery of the depths of our great potential.  Sister Ripple continues on from the above passage:

“I know what loneliness is.  I have felt it in my body and in my heart.  I have sometimes feared it, sometimes sought release from it, sometimes tried to ignore it or forget it.  But, at same moments, I have also never been far from the inner conviction that there was life for me in those dark spaces — life that pursued me with an intensity like no other.

I can speak of loneliness with authority only as it relates to me and to my life.  I believe, because others have shared their lives with me, that their way of experiencing loneliness is not foreign to, nor is it different from my own way.

I can describe my feelings as I have experienced loneliness on the banks of the Mississippi and the Charles, on the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific, in the inner city and in the small rural community.  But, what I wish to center on is not so much how I have felt, as what I have done with the pain and the fearsomeness of those feelings, where I have allowed them to take me.

What I wish most to share is my own system for and manner of walking with loneliness….”  (pages 29-30)

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 I am not sure there has ever been a day in my life when essential loneliness wasn’t my companion.  I know loneliness as if it is “the set point” of my being, the state I always return to.  I am chronically lonely.  I seem to have been built this way.  This author knows how to put into words what I need to know in order to think about loneliness more specifically, constructively and — hopefully.

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“The presence of strangers with whom I shared life in whatever way has been important for me as I struggle with a deep strain of loneliness.  It is a loneliness I no longer wish to remove, but with which I must deal, in which I want to find meaning and life.”  (above book, page 63)

I am glad this little book has come into my life.  I know I will find some important statements in it that will help me move forward in my life with more confidence as I learn to understand myself as a human being a bit better.

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Bittersweet childhoods.  Bittersweet tales.  Part of me wonders if it is possible to begin again at some point in adulthood as a new person with an entire abusive childhood set aside as if it never happened at all.  Would I want to forget, to have an amnesia that meant (perhaps) I could set aside all I know of what happened to hurt me, if it meant I would also then forget all of the beauty, as well?

All that I learned as a child about beauty in the world around me.  The music of a leaf, a single leaf, twisting at the end of its tiny stem as it hangs on for dear life but dances anyway.  That the hanging on and the music and the dancing and life itself all happen at the same time.  That one cannot happen without the others happening — at the same time.

One moment of time spent watching water swishing over and around rocks in a stream.  Again, making the music, doing the dancing, passing by where my eyes rested for a moment.  Just a moment.  On that spot.  And there comes the leaf!  A season.  Completed.  Leaf.  Swept by the wind to land to lay alongside a fallen branch.  Settling there.  For a moment.  Being caught in a current.  Swept away.  Swept along.  Heading — where?  Certainly past my childhood watching eyes.

I look ahead, upstream.  I look ahead, downstream.  Somewhere in time I look for the completion of this task, this story telling task, looking forward to a time when the story is all told and something else will happen.

Being in the middle of a process that has not ended.  Yet.  Sometimes feeling silly, even stupid, for caring the way I do.  The tale I tell myself.  That somehow I can write something that gives voice to what some suffering child somewhere knows — a child I will never know — some suffering child without a voice — how can I begin to think I can ever speak for THAT child?

Do I try to spin a thread of courage into my tale, to somehow prepare the way, for some suffering child down the stream of its life to be able to speak of what is unspeakable?  Unimaginable?  To speak the truth of the harm along with the beauty?  Making something a little more possible for someone else?  Because I did it?

Because I can do it?

Because I have to do it?  Have to not leave the beauty I found as a child in the world around me, in my own hands as I laid a crayon against paper and found a way to reproduce there the swaying flashing glory of the northern lights?  A little deer drawn beside a stone with green grass growing around it?  Dare I not question this task I have taken up, that I haul around with me, inside of me, because it’s not done yet?

Dare I believe that this story can be told, that it can be DONE, because I have done it?  Sometimes, perhaps for many people, what is required is the surviving of the trauma — and then the never looking back.  Never looking back.  Never.  Looking.  Back.

What is it about me, in me, that sends me hacking my way back to rescue myself as a child?  Why don’t I leave myself there?  This is all a trek of the mind.  Nobody makes me do this work. 

When really I know it is best for me not to question what I do.  I know I am going to do it anyway.  Do it anyway hell or high water.  Will I know WHY once I am done?  It probably doesn’t even remotely matter.  This must be a part of who I am.  That I collected all the parts of my story every moment of the way through those years because the story itself called for me to do so.  Tucking certain memories, collected, into a knapsack I spun and wove together out of lines between stars on moonless nights.

Carrying a story along with me as I was carried by it.  Where everything good matters.  Every fragile story about using berries on fishhooks to catch little trout because they were round and bright like salmon egg bait I didn’t have.  Because fishing made me happy.  Fishing for trout in a shallow stream pulling them out as they passed me.  I caught one and that one did not pass me by.  Small.  I threw it back.  Did it live or die?  Only it wasn’t me who lived this story.  It was my beloved brother.  He had just turned seven.

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I ordered this book and began reading it when it arrived at the post office yesterday:

Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop Smoking by

Allen Carr

I am impressed, so impressed that I stopped reading it – for now.  My brother will be here in four hours for a visit.  He lives a long ways away and doesn’t come very often.  He’ll be here a week.  Carr says (I don’t know if he’s right but I am not going to run the risk that he is) that if a smoker does not stop smoking after they read this whole book they will continue smoking for the rest of their lives.

I sure am not going to quit right now with my brother coming!  No possible WAY!  I smoked my first cigarette 46 years ago when I was 16.  I am going to have some serious difficulties to face when I snub out my last cigarette – and I am not going to do that when my brother is here.

After he leaves on March 5^th – I will finish this book and hope to be among the 10 million people so far that Allen Carr’s method has assisted to stop.

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When I quit I will be working my way around some of the information that Carr presents as the informed severe early abuse survivor that I am.  There are some very particular and very special differences I am well aware of that cause the smoking experience to operate differently for survivors such as I am.  I have confidence that I can work through how these differences make smoking a different kind of experience for me than it is for people who did not suffer from relationship trauma that changed their physiological development from the moment they were born (if not even before that).

I imagine that I will be doing some writing about the whole experience as I go through it.  I hope that I am not seriously sidetracked from the book writing I will also pick up again after my brother leaves.

I will literally keep you posted!

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