Wishing You the Mother Lode* of Good Things to Come...
*The real or imaginary origin of something valuable or in great abundance
This is a photo of my daughters and I on Mother’s Day in 2006. The day before, together with their dad, the girls and I dug a hole, surrounded it with a circle of paver stones, planted a magnolia tree, and filled the remaining space with dirt and wood chips. I thought I would live in that house for the rest of my life. It was my dream home and I loved it. We moved in when my oldest daughter was 4 months old. We moved out 8 years later in 2010. I went back last spring and asked the person who has been living there since, if I could go in the backyard to see the magnolia tree in its 17th year of blooming, as pictured in the top photo, whereas the bottom left photo is the first year after we planted it.
My friend Chris sent me a meme the other day that in part said “Don’t wait to start writing until you have something to say. Start writing so you can find out what you have to say.”
I think this is great advice whether or not you fancy yourself a writer. There have been times when I have been out of my head angry or confused and start a word document with a password (just in case it saves prior to me deleting it so no one can ever access it) and I just spew everything I’m thinking without regard to how it might be interpreted by others because it’s for my eyes only. When I get it all out of my system I delete it and empty the trash! It’s incredibly therapeutic.
This week’s shorter than usual article is a culmination of additions and deletions that occurred in the pursuit of what there was to say this week while really I just wanted to curl up in a ball and shut off my mind altogether. I thought I had a head start with a bunch of words written from earlier in the week that I moved into a potential word doc for next week, because they just didn’t seem to be what I’m supposed to say today, particularly because it’s Saturday and tomorrow is “Mother’s Day”. I started to think about what I could say about “Mother’s Day” and it really got my head spinning… and not in all the best ways. Motherhood is a sticky subject, but on “Mother’s Day” we put all that on the back burner and make it all about brunch and bouquets… or not.
Personally, I’ve come a long way in understanding how I’ve been affected by having a mother who didn’t want me. As a disclaimer, I’d like to premise this with saying, my mother did the best she could with the times she was in and the lack of options that were available. She was conditioned by society that a woman’s primary goal in life was to find a husband and have a family. She became infatuated with a man four years older than her who abandoned her when he found out she was pregnant. She gave birth to me two weeks before her 19th birthday. She was despondent while pregnant with me and at the time of my birth. But the goal underneath the shame and judgement she had to live with, was still to find a husband to take care of her (and now me, as well).
She married my stepfather, the only dad I have ever known, just after I turned 3 years old. 5 months later, she gave birth to my brother. They were both “needy” to feel loved by someone. I know they had a whirlwind of a romance, and my mom was swept off her feet by my new “dad” who had (and still has) a lot of honor and wanted to do right by her. He had PTSD from being a combat marine in the Vietnam war. He came home wounded. Many of his fellow soldiers were not so lucky. He had an extreme amount of hostility, and he didn’t hold it back. Within one year his life went from being a 21 year old single man working in retail with a brand new convertible Thunderbird, to being a husband and father of two working on an assembly line. I know my mother lived in constant fear of being abandoned, and as a result never said anything to “rock the boat” even if it meant completely ignoring his treatment of me, her or my brother.
I love my parents. Though it took many years, we went on to have good relationships and a lot of respect for one another. But in those early years, they did not have the emotional capacity to be in a healthy relationship with one another, much less raise emotionally healthy children. It isn’t their fault and yet it happened. My brother and I were wounded by our parents’ inability to be there emotionally for us as we were growing up. My brother acted out in a lot of different ways, and it became even more imperative that I be “the good one” at all costs. It was an absolute necessity for me to be liked by others to compensate for the resentment I felt from my dad, as though I was keeping an inner balance sheet to prove I really was good enough. I still teeter back and forth from wanting to be there for everybody… making sure everyone feels loved… so they will love me in return… to wanting to fall off the face of the earth and never see people ever again.
While I logically 100% completely understand and forgive the dynamics of “what happened” to get me to this place, I still struggle with the consequences of codependent patterning and the inability to truly "be there” for myself. Despite my best efforts, my value is still tangled up in what I can do for others. These neural pathways can only die off if I learn to put myself first in so many important ways, allowing for new neural pathways to develop and be utilized instead.
While not every woman becomes a mother, whether by choice or circumstance, every woman has a mother. For every 25 women I know, there are 25 different stories as to how they related or didn’t relate to their mothers. It can be heavy stuff. Surely my own daughters have issues in relation to me (and they do come up from time to time) and my greatest desire is to be healed and available to them as they eventually heal the childhood trauma that has been accumulated throughout their lives regardless of my efforts for them to have better.
I don’t know if it was good for me or not to have scrolled through 22 years of Shutterfly photo albums today. Of course they were full of the happiest moments of our lives. But doing this also brought up memories of other things, not pictured, that I knew were going on during some of those times, as well.
I was incredibly gloomy this Mother’s Day Eve, and it took until early evening to finally sort out my words enough to come up with this that I did. I literally felt like I wanted to crawl out of my skin. Aside from hours of scrolling through photos, I tried going for a walk, meditating, snuggling in my bed with my favorite blankets, watching movies, trying 4 different settings to sit in to write, writing, deleting, writing, deleting.
I’ve considered that perhaps what I am experiencing is tapping into the collective consciousness around Mother’s Day. While it is some level of a celebration for many, it couldn’t be further from a celebration for others.
I’ve contemplated that this is the first year I’m not really a mother in the sense of the word that I’ve been a mother in for the past 20 years. Last year, I still lived in the same household as my younger daughter. She shopped for and cooked my favorite breakfast, bought flowers, and picked up my favorite coffee that had been ordered in advance by my older daughter, and it was all waiting for me when I woke up. It was the sweetest thing, and I will never forget it.
This is the first year I will be apart from both of my daughters. I think it’s affecting me far more than I thought it would. Being a mom is what defined me for the last 22 years, and while I took that seriously and for the most part embraced it, it has also kicked my ass.
Me with my babies… all grown up!
I’ve spent the last year, in a sense, recovering from the last 22 years. Having the freedom to rest my nervous system after a lifetime of being in constant overwhelm. I’ve done a lot of healing during the last 18 months, not only from those 22 years, but especially from the years before that time and who I became from the resulting consequences. I wish I would have been completely healed prior to having children, though perhaps it was having children at all that gave me the incentive to recognize there was more self-work to be done. I’m also realizing I still have a lot further to go. While I’ve made significant strides, I now intend to begin the process of reparenting myself and I look forward to sharing that journey with you.
I recently joined the SelfHealers.circle monthly membership for $28/month led by Dr. Nicole LePera (TheHolisticPsychologist.com). I’ve listened to two videos so far and they have been amazing. Prior to that I’d followed her amazing content on Instagram for over a year. There are a ton of different courses included in the membership and worksheets to utilize. I’ve barely explored it as of yet, but I look forward to sharing gems such as this with you going forward:
You’ll know you need reparenting if you:
Have a habit of self-betrayal or not keeping your word to yourself.
Hold low self-worth
Have dysfunctional relationship dynamics
Hold a chronic fear of criticism
Have issues setting and holding boundaries
Have a lack of understanding of your own needs, wants, desires, and passions.
It has become so obvious to me, perhaps as a result of the recent solar flares, which I will talk about more in a few, that I need to put finishing writing my book on hold for now and take my healing to another level. Part of me feels pathetic and hopeless about there still being more work to do, but a much more knowing part of myself understands that it is good news for the awareness of this to have bubbled up from my subconscious.
Obviously the work I’ve done this far has created the space to be able to take on what’s next. Of course, we can’t know for sure if these solar flares really do have an effect on us as individuals, but I don’t know why else this shit would suddenly be popping up for me.
Apparently some conspiracy theorists are saying giant colored flood lights were somehow shined upon the earth to scare us, but someone I follow on Facebook who tracks the Schumann Resonance and the magnitude of geomagnetic storms affecting the Earth’s magnetic field (Kp = the planetary K-Index) posted this today:
Apparently there is a prophetic meaning to the Aurora Borealis appearing around the world at the moment. It makes sense if you contemplate that perhaps the sky really does contain a myriad of spiritual messages. Depending on the myth or culture, the Northern Lights are always interpreted to be a sign of good things coming. Who doesn’t have seeing the Northern Lights on their bucket list? I love that they have radiated upon the earth in places they aren’t traditionally visible from, since basically the whole planet is in need of some colored light therapy.
I started seeing photos people were posting mid evening yesterday. Only shortly before that had I read an article via cbsnews.com titled “Extreme G5 geomagnetic storm reaches Earth, NOAA says, following “unusual” solar event.” There have been several days of solar activity sending explosions of plasma and magnetic fields toward Earth. Apparently such strong levels of storms can cause power outages and damaged transformers… even the collapsing of complete grids. Such solar flares, which are essentially bursts of radiation, are the largest explosive events known to happen in the solar system.
My cousin Liz and I had just retired to our respective bedrooms when we instead decided to drive North 30 minutes or so out of the light polluted city of Colorado Springs. Thankfully, I had read that the colors were more visible through the lens of a camera then with just the eye.
These are 3 images side by side. The far left is without the camera being in “night” mode and shows what the sky looked like to the eye. The middle is with the camera in night mode, but also another car’s headlights brightening the area in front of where I stood. The last photo is with the camera in night mode, but the other car’s headlights gone.
Most of the photos I saw posted by various people were far more vibrant shades of green, purple, even magenta. I love that the map of consciousness below (by David Hawkins) is not just noted in terms of energy, predominant emotional state, etc., but that it is also presented by colors of enlightenment, variegated up through the rainbow colors of the chakras starting at the bottom with red representing shame and ending at the top with magenta representing enlightenment. Varying shades of purple come just under the magenta with words like peace, joy, love, reason, and further down into the green are acceptance, willingness, and neutrality. Who can deny we are in plenty need of all of those things at this time on the earth plane to eradicate the other red words of grief, apathy and guilt, on into the orange and yellow energies of fear, desire, anger and pride.
David Hawkins said he created this map to help people understand the world. Each level of consciousness has its own view of life, including how one would view God, the self, emotion and process, depending on what level they are at on the map. It’s not as though a higher or lower level is any better than any other level, however, your view on life and the resulting emotions you experience are absolutely different depending on where you are at on the scale of consciousness.
The chart was created as a tool to inspire humanity to come out of its despair.
Also…being weighed down by shame sucks.
Courage is a critical line midway through the levels on the map (the top of the yellow section before moving upwards toward the healing levels of green). David said that our biggest problem spiritually is the self-centered ego. When we dedicate what we’re doing to something larger than ourselves, we are coming from a higher place. I write primarily for my daughters. They are currently 19 and 21 years old and honestly, they are too young… not having lived enough experiences yet… to really understand or resonate with many of my words. However, they will have them to reflect on forever. So, when they are my age, or perhaps sooner, they can read back and see what I was experiencing as I focused on what there was to heal. My deepest desire is for their generation to have hope. To break out of that which currently has them trapped within the programming of the last centuries.
David Hawkin’s wife, Francis, wrote about crossing the courage line in relation to Alcoholics Anonymous. She says that people’s lives go from total despair to life changing results when they find the courage to tell the truth about themselves instead of blaming someone else.
Below is an example of the map of consciousness explained as though they are temperatures of water, so that you can get a better understanding of water is water…but depending on the temperature, different experiences occur. The hottest water erupts in steam, the coldest water solidifies in ice.
I think I’m shedding a thick, energetic skin right now. I’m realizing some deeper things about myself and also feeling into what it will take to truly get beyond these things. I knew change was on the horizon, but I’m grateful to finally also be seeing what there is for me to do to prepare. Here is another gem from the SelfHealers.Circle. I could expand on them some more for clarity, and I most likely will in the future, but for now I’m just putting them out here for further contemplation.
This list of Trauma Responses in Adulthood, can describe some of the actions of almost everyone I encounter. The truth is we are a collective trainwreck and often in denial of the truth of the self-work there is to be done. It isn’t “just” everyone else fucking up the world as we know it, but each and every one of us not doing the internal work needed to un-fuck it one person at a time.
· Gossip or shaming other people for the sake of connection
· Denying our own reality
· Always going to “worse case” scenarios
· Viewing codependent relationships as true care or love
· Obsessive overthinking
· Taking all behavior personally
· People Pleasing
· Self-Sabotage
I want to end this week’s article with a quote from Anita Moorjani (Author of Dying to Be Me). It describes what I’m feeling in a nutshell:
As always, and even more so based on my mood of the day, I do apologize for any typographical or grammatical errors I may have missed. Thank you for being here for the ups and the downs. I am so grateful to share my words and especially today…so grateful to now be going to bed.
P.S. If you are a mother, I wish you an extra special day of relaxing your nervous system! As I can hardly tend to my own psyche these days, I don’t know how I managed to be primarily responsible for the development of other humans.