Healing

One minute I held the carving knife firmly in my left hand, scrubbing it vigorously with the brush in my right. The next minute it was somehow airborne and swooping across my index finger, just under the nail. As it clattered into the sink I looked in horror at the newly formed inch-long, too-deep-to-believe, gash.

I am generally a very careful person. Sometimes too careful. However, in the kitchen I tend to release all care. It's where I'm the most comfortable and confident. I don't always follow the rules because I know how far I can push things. Usually. That said, I've cut myself before and have a couple of decent scars on my hands to show for it. Potato peeler against thumb, glass breaking and slicing a knuckle with too much pressure applied in dishwater, knife piercing a hand used as a cutting board.

None of those wounds compared to this one. It scared me into considering a visit to the emergency room and stitches - my possible first ever. A consideration I pushed away in exchange for applied pressure, a couple of prayers, and a we'll-wait-and-see.

Much later in the day, when I got up the courage to really look at the cut, it was bad. No pain. Not a lot of bleeding. Just long and deep. When I finally let Walt look, after making him promise not to tell me I needed stitches, his face and silence scared me almost as much as the gash itself.

I decided to give it a day: gauzed and taped my finger; held it protectively away from whatever I was doing; cradled my hand gently when at rest. Even though I'm left-handed and the wound was to my right index finger, I actually use my right hand for a lot. Like brushing my teeth, peeling an orange, zipping my jeans. All activities nearly impossible to do with an extended index finger.

And so what I got from my decision to let my body take care of itself was a week of focused awareness. I helped her in every way possible - keeping the wound clean and dry and protected. I was careful with that hand - mindful without distraction.

The healing process was nothing short of miraculous. By the next morning the canyon was filled with tender red flesh. The skin around the cut was puffy but not inflamed. I could look at my finger without feeling too woozy. One more day saw the wound getting smaller as the ends of the cut began to close. Each successive day revealed more healing and allowed the return of more freedom.

Healing is a theme of my life. There has been much to heal, both from without and from within. But like my finger, the true healing had to start from the deepest place of the wound and work its way out. It couldn't happen without help. If I'd ignored my cut finger and not cared for it at all, the process would have taken much longer, with some possible bad detours into infection and pain.

Healing has its own timeline, even under the best of conditions. It won't be rushed. It also doesn't allow skipping around or avoiding the icky parts. Inside out, deepest first, or nothing sticks.

One small cut has a huge impact on the rest of the system. All those years of insisting the emotional wounds of childhood, adolescence, young adulthood weren't important did nothing to diminish their impact on my ability to be a whole human being. The toxicity of those untended wounds made everything harder, brought me to the edge of death more than once, kept me imprisoned in the very walls I built to keep them hidden.

Even healed, wounds remain tender for a long time and require gentle attention for much longer than seems should be necessary. My finger no longer needs bandaging, but it cannot endure much pressure before it hurts. There's an interesting dent and some bruising and the promise of an interesting scar to come.

It's amazing how one simple cut can be a metaphor for one complicated life. But it's all there. The major wounds of my life, after years of hard work under the skilled and loving tutelage of a gifted counselor, are healed. (I reread this sentence several times, testing it for truth, finding just that. Truth.)

What remains is tender, interesting, uniquely me. What remains is a new appreciation for the deep wisdom of my body, and gratitude for the gentle lessons she offers. What remains is a sense of wonder at the gifts born from pain and the hard work of mindful healing.

picture from Flickr

Thanks-giving

I sit at my computer facing east, the direction of new beginnings. The pinks of sunrise absorbed into hungry night fog lying low over the ground. A cloudless sky begins to birth blue.

Grace, a Siamese friend to any potential lap, sits thrumming at the edge of my desk. Toby, a dog of unrestrained joy and simple pleasures, wanders in the back yard. Walt, a husband whose love and certainty of our soul-mate status never wavers (no matter the storm coming from me) sleeps at the other end of the house.

In this stillness I consider my wealth. Somewhere in the last space of time I've gone from being a survivor to being a woman who thrives on the gifts of each new day. I count as friends an enormous circle of men and women who are brave seekers of light, who inspire and who make me laugh. I spend my days as a writer and teacher and wife and friend and sister and student and explorer, but no longer define myself by any one of those labels.

I sit comfortably in my twirly desk chair, kept warm by pink polka-dotted flannel, allowing my heart to flow through my fingers into this amazing magical rectangle of technology. The peace lily in the corner offers its giants leaves over the edge of my desk, which is covered with my favorite red, yellow and turquoise antique cotton tablecloth. Coffee softened with cream sits at my right hand, a pile of work waiting for attention sits at my left. A small three-drawer wooden chest sits at the left-hand corner, a gift from my mother at high school graduation that reminds me she wanted to love me and did in fact do the best she could.

I feel well, rested, loved.

There is nothing else I need or want in this moment. I am full, fully present, overflowing with gratitude.

May you know that you are loved and valued and understood. May your eyes see nothing but beauty and your ears hear nothing but music. May you fill to overflowing with gratitude so the world is filled with its brilliant light.

Namaste.

Joyous Thanksgiving.

photo from Flickr

An Online Circle

As those of you who visit here regularly know, Carrie Link and I are offering a writing workshop in Portland starting in January. We are amazed and excited that so many of you have asked about the possibility of an online class. So it is with pleasure that we are announcing our online memoir writing class, to begin Monday, January 11. (We still have two more spots in the in-person class, if you live in the Portland area.)

Many of you are in situations where going to a class won’t work, but you’re hungry for a memoir writing community and for the accountability attending a class creates. If you’re looking for a safe place in which to tell your story and receive support and feedback, whether it’s your first effort or whether you’ve finished a book, this class will satisfy that need.

We will provide prompts, deadlines, teachings that will add to your craft tool kit, and detailed feedback for your writing. You will write, share your writing, and offer feedback and support to each other.

Please contact us for cost and additional information. We’re looking forward to learning and writing and moving closer to the light of truth together with you.

Fairy Tale Wedding

We were to get the year for this week's assignment (see previous post) by dividing our age in half and telling our story from that year. I actually turned twenty-nine in 1980, but since my birthday is so late in the year, I claimed 1981 as my halfway point. That year gave me a far different story than the one I intended to tell.

She glides down the cathedral aisle, twenty-five feet of lace trailing after, her shy smile blurred behind a simple veil held in place by an understated diamond-jeweled crown. Each step on the aisle brings her closer not only to her bridegroom but also to a genuine fairy tale life. This aisle is long, so long the prince waiting for her at the altar studies the floor as he waits for his princess to arrive.

I sit in my suburban Vancouver living room, alone but in the company of almost a billion other people, watching the fairy tale unfold with unwanted tears welling. I remember my own wedding, less than six years before, and I know exactly what Diana is feeling on this day. Hopeful. Afraid. Like her deepest dreams have become happily ever after.

I wonder if she’ll share my current feelings six years into her marriage: frustration, loneliness, resentment – happily ever after a dead distant dream.

We share more, the princess and I, than anyone might expect. I’m seven years younger than Marv. She’s twelve years younger than Charles. Our husbands share a certain look – a reserved, self-contained caution softened only by a rarely shared smile. Our marriages, while happening with our consent and desire, were arranged.

Diana was thoroughly vetted before Charles was even allowed to propose. She had to meet multiple critical criteria before being considered appropriate to enter the royal household. Love was not at the top of the Queen’s list, but they look like they love each other in all the pictures. He waited so long, surely he wouldn’t marry someone he didn’t love.

Marv proposed to me after the elders of The Body told him God wanted us to marry and after they asked me if I would obey God and say yes. We were given to each other as husband and wife because of our obedience to God and The Body. We loved each other as brother and sister in Christ. I believed if we obeyed God he would bring a more intimate love into our marriage.

An unseen couple, their voices husky with sensuality, discuss the virtues of Martini and Rossi Asti Spumanti. It would be so nice to celebrate this occasion with a cold glass of bubbly, but I gave up alcohol for God. It would be nice to talk to someone, to be talked to, the way they’re talking to each other. I gave up that fun, too, when I gave my life to Jesus and The Body. It would be nice not to want.

Back to the processional, I study the screen of our small hand-me-down television from the middle of my hand-me-down orange, green and brown floral polyester sofa, drinking Tab from a hand-me-down glass. I want to see Charles’ face the minute he sees his bride’s. What I see instead is Diana’s face break into a radiant smile toward the end of the walk. Charles is suddenly by her side, mostly obscured by the camera angle, which shows Diana’s father, then her cumulous dress, then Charles’ dark head bending toward her.

The next shot shows them from the front. What a contrast they are. He stiff in his formal gilded and beribboned military uniform, dark wavy hair slickly parted to one side, his angular face unreadable. She in her miles of lace and fluff and ruffle, light to his dark, her innocent face full of joyful wonder.

Marv and I looked nothing like this, except perhaps for his rigid sternness and my innocent wonder. Marv looked more like a Russian prince with his white tux and ruffled shirt, and much older than thirty-one with his receding hairline. I just looked impossibly young, face free from makeup, and overwhelmed by the borrowed veil billowing over my modest hand-sewn polyester dress; certainly not twenty-four and certainly not like the fairy tale bride I’d dreamed of being since I was a girl.

Another commercial comes on. Brooke Shields whistles “Clementine” wearing the tightest, sexiest jeans in the most provocative pose I’ve seen in a very long while. She says, “You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvin Klein jeans? Nothing.” I’m not sure which I feel strongest, my desire to be her or my indignation at such graphic sexuality on television.

When the network returns to the wedding, the camera, still focused on the couple’s faces, shows them smiling, laughing almost, – whispering sideways as the processional finishes. I see happiness and love – two people on display in a ceremony that has very little to do with them and very much to do with the people observing it, willing to endure, possibly even enjoying, to get to the part where they get to be alone together.

I remember Marv’s face while he watched me make my very short walk down the aisle of the historic log cabin that served as our wedding cathedral. He didn’t smile at all. I don’t even know if he blinked. It was hard to see his eyes behind the thick lenses of his glasses. I smiled – hard, hopefully, trying to get him to respond. I told myself he was nervous, shy, waiting until we were alone together to show me how much he really loved me.

Almost six years later, I’m still waiting. He doesn’t love me. To be fair, I don’t love him either. It has seemed at times over the years like we might love each other, I know I tried hard to love him, but feeling loved means such different things to us. I need to be held and touched and looked at with tenderness. He needs unquestioning obedience. Neither of us is getting what we need.

My favorite fantasy these days is widowhood. I wear the weeds of mourning with Godly grace – Marv died far too young. It’s so sad he didn’t take better care of himself. I will bear the burden of this grieving until God provides a new husband. One who will love me with passion and without reservation. I have no idea what or if he fantasizes, but I’d be willing to bet the bank that if he does Harold is his partner, not me.

Harold, our prophet and leader. The man I believed God put on my path to help me atone for my sins and to start my life over. The man who told me God was so pleased with my obedience that I was being allowed to marry. Harold who now spends all of our money on trucks and trailers and their maintenance. Harold whose words my husband uses whenever he tells me no to something. Harold whom Marv spends every spare minute with, and without whose permission will take no action at all.

I watch this fairy tale wedding day and consider other possible scenarios for mine. Would I do it differently, knowing what I now know? Would I say no to the elders? Could I tell them I didn’t love Marv? “I want to be obedient, but I can’t marry someone I don’t love. It doesn’t seem to me God would ask me to marry someone I don’t love. I’m pretty sure Marv doesn’t love me either. Can he and I talk and spend some time to get to know each other?”

I already know what the answer would have been. “If you start to question God now, before long you’ll be questioning everything. That’s not what truly committed servants do.”

That means to say no I would have had to leave The Body. There would have been no room for a disobedient servant. And how could I have done that? I promised God - I made a vow - to obey His prophet and follow His Word, to never rely on my own selfish Satan-influenced judgment again.

James Garner’s voice brings me back into my living room. He and Mariette Hartley are talking about the latest Polaroid camera in that funny back and forth way that I would give just about anything to have with Marv. I love these commercials. I wish they were married to each other in real life. Actually I wish I were married to James Garner.

Charles and Diana, now the Prince and Princess of Wales, stand side by side on a balcony, looking out over an adoring crowd. The wedding is over. They are really and truly married. A very British commentator wonders when they’ll kiss, the first official married kiss. As if in response, Charles takes Diana’s hand, her left in his right. He lifts it, his eyes dancing all over her beaming face, then presses his lips firmly on her tiny hand in a kiss that is equal parts chivalry, mischief, and promise of things to come.

The tears that have waited in the wings patiently for the last two hours tumble down my face. I try to chide them away. This is just silly. All that romantic nonsense. It’s all a show. Who knows whether they really love each other. Whether they’ll have a good marriage. God’s love is so much more important than the lust in that man’s eyes you’re equating with love. You’re ridiculous to keep trying to live in a fairy tale when God provides all your needs so abundantly.

Some small stubborn part of me refuses to believe that voice. She’s been getting louder lately, as Marv pulls farther and farther away. He doesn’t look at me, even when I talk to him. There is a large arctic barrier down the middle of our bed. The only scripture that gets shared, both at home by Marv and at meetings by Harold, is about wives submitting to their husbands.

Can one single act of not submitting really undo my marriage, my standing in The Body, my relationship with God? After all these years of giving up everything that mattered to me except my dream of having a baby? Can’t they understand that my choosing not to adopt a six-year-old boy with no capacity to attach was an act of survival, not an act of disobedience? Not for the first time, I wonder how I find myself in this particular place of desolation, just months short of my thirtieth birthday. When I joined The Body seven years ago, it was so I would never have to feel this way again.

Mystery Year

For those of you who follow both Carrie's blog and mine, you know we're taking a class together. I'm inspired by her Monday post to offer my own challenge.

The assignment is to choose a particular year, and without telling the year, write about it using cultural references. Here are the references that stood out for me:

An actor is elected president.

Sandra Day O'Connor becomes the first female justice of the Supreme Court.

Prince Charles and Lady Diana get married.

The first American test tube baby is born.

"Endless Love" by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie is a hit.

Mork and Mindy get married.

"Internet", "Post-its", and "AIDS" become part of the American lexicon.

Luke and Laura get married.

Princess Diana announces her first pregnancy, on my birthday.

Pulling the Edge In

"But it hurts even when I do the beginning stretches." I'm talking to Susan, my extraordinary acupuncturist, about my still cranky hip.

"Show me."

So I stand, raise my hands above my head, clasp them with pointer fingers extended upward, arms glued to my ears. I bend my body to the left - not nearly as far as I think I should be able to - and say, "Here. It hurts here."

She directs me to come up from the bend until the pain stops. I'm barely bending at all, but don't have a chance to whine about it before Susan says, not for the first time, "I want you to pull your edge closer in."

I look at her with a raised eyebrow, a rueful smile, and an "aha" light bulb above my head. "You mean no pain at all?"

Susan's been telling me for weeks to pull my edge in. The first time she said it, the words struck me as soul-changing profound. I saw myself standing alone in a huge windswept field with a cliff's edge far far in the distance. That edge represented a part of myself I kept at the farthest possibility of perception so I wouldn't have to feel it or know it.

The thought of bringing the edge closer, something that would never have occurred to me on my own, felt comforting and healed and easier than keeping it so far away. I loved the idea of it.

In yoga the teachers say frequently, "Go to your edge and then just a bit beyond." And so I would. I'd go to where I felt pain, push through, keep going, and pray the pose would end soon.

And after over two months of practice, lots of things are getting slightly looser and some things are getting stronger, but my hip pain has not gone away. Even trying to pull my edge closer in, if the pain wasn't too bad, I'd breathe through it and keep going.

"No pain at all?"

And finally I get it. In a life full of emotional pain, I learned to push it far away so it didn't consume me. In a life where I couldn't look powerful and listen to my body at the same time, I learned to ignore physical pain until. . . . Well until last spring when my hip got so cranky and noisy I couldn't walk or sleep or sit without the pain settling over my brain like a black villain's cape.

Pulling my edge closer means listening to my body before it has to scream, or even do more than whisper. The pain isn't a punishment for being weak. It's a wise warning that a limit has been reached, and there will be a price to pay by going beyond. A price I no longer have the currency for.

On Friday, I held my edge close, like a loved child. Went to the pain and backed away from it. Sat in Child's Pose instead of doing Triangle, hearing Susan say, "If you have to sit in Child's Pose the whole time, you're getting benefit." And almost believing her.

Refused the bully voice in my head saying, "Really, that's all you can do after all this work? They're going to think you're slacking. Your lazy energy is going to slow the whole class down."

No instant cure. The pain persists. I remind myself to be patient. And so for now my edge and I will spend some time getting to know one another, long lost friends reunited at last.

Picture by alasis from Flicker

Becoming My Mother

This week's homework was to start with the quick write prompt: I am still afraid to write about. . . . Whatever story emerged from that initial writing needed to include the elements of money, sex, a taboo, and a secret.

The picture haunts me. It always has. Even before I knew the secret of my paternity.

A young woman, my mother, kneels at the side of a maple spool bed with her newborn daughter, me, propped up on a pillow facing her. The mother looks at the bundled baby with such awestruck love, beaming from a smile I have no conscious memory of, the light streaming through the window is dimmed by the smile’s power. Barely tamed dark curls, a rounded nose and one thick eyebrow, her own mother’s features, create a profile of a new mother’s love that Mary Cassatt would have been proud to paint. The baby looks back at her mother, a cupid bow mouth forming an “o” of wonder. The love between them is so palpable my heart aches to see it.

I’ve spent a good portion of my life trying to get that woman to look at me in that same exact way. With no success. She held me at a distance, held me responsible for behaviors impossible for a child, and held me to standards she didn’t follow herself. “God hates a liar,” she would always say. I lied constantly to protect myself from her silent shunning wrath and Daddy’s two-inch leather belt applied with enough energy to leave welts and occasional bruises. When I finally had proof that she was the biggest liar of all, the victory was bitter and left me feeling even more unloved.

I tried to follow rules that shifted like loose sand under bare feet, and when that didn’t work I broke her clearest rules by drinking and sleeping around and then becoming pregnant by a married, black, ex-con. I tried to be smart because she valued intelligence (she would have become a lawyer if her granddad hadn’t forbidden it), and when I couldn’t be smart enough, flunked out of college. We both wanted her offerings of money (to bail me out of hospital debt and college loans) to repair the huge rips in our relationship. When that wasn’t enough, when nothing was ever enough, I gave up. I dedicated my life to being nothing like her, only to discover that not-being someone is not living.

Time and the hard work of healing have brought acceptance of, and even gratitude for, the complicated relationship we had. Rather than needing to make her understand me and take responsibility for the harm she inflicted, I find myself wanting to understand the woman I called Mommy.

I study the picture and overlay the facts kept hidden in the secret for so many years. I consider the childhood she survived (a childhood not completely revealed to her children until after the secret was), and try to put myself in her skin.

I become my nineteen-year-old mother, just over a hundred pounds, still tender from giving birth. My smile is wide and open, in spite of the embarrassing ill-fitting dentures I’ve worn for just a year. I’m aware of Granny across the room taking this picture and ignore her – finally I have something she can’t take away from me.

I gaze at my daughter (the very beginnings of myself) holding her two tiny perfect hands in mine. Nothing else exists except for the two of us, the power of the love that binds us, and possibility. I pour my soul out to her.

You are so beautiful. It’s worth the loneliness and embarrassment of these last months to be able to hold you now. I can’t believe how real you are – so soft and alive with those bright bright eyes looking back at me. I’m sorry to bring you into a world with no daddy. Oh, you have one, but he’s not here, and he will never be. I will see to it that you never have to know what a monster your daddy is. You look so much like him. I hope you grow out of that.

I’m a little scared, Debbie. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. I don’t want to have to keep living with Granny and Granddaddy – actually they won’t let me stay here long. They’re already talking about when I can get out and get a job so I can support us until I get married again. I can’t imagine leaving you to go to work, but you’ll be in good hands. Granny can hardly keep her hands off you. I wonder if she loved me that way when I came to live with her.

I don’t remember Velma, my own mommy. I wish I did. I only had her for a year and a half before she died. I wish she were here now to see how gorgeous you are. I hope you grow up to look like her. I promise not to leave you like she left me. I know she couldn’t help dying, but I do wonder how different my life would have been if she had survived her illness.

Danny’s mom, your Grandma Dee, has already said she’ll take you as often as she can, even though she’s busy working as a teacher. I think she feels really bad that her son left his pregnant wife for another woman. Bad enough that she paid for our divorce.

I want you to know my sweet baby that I left him. I wasn’t going to live with a man who didn’t want you. He made me choose, him or you, and I chose you. And I’m so glad I did. How could a cheating, lying, drinking jerk come close to competing with you? There was no choice to be made. Truly. I wanted you from the moment my body told me you were here.

I promise to love you always little one. I won’t leave you. I won’t ever make you feel like you don’t belong anywhere. I won’t let anyone hurt you.

You will never know this, but I know a thing or two about being hurt. First not having my own mommy and having to share Granny with your Auntie Bea. Then being left behind by a daddy who starts another family, but doesn’t come back for me. I don’t have a daddy to give you right now, but you will always have your own mommy.

Granny and Granddaddy have a possible new daddy picked out for you already. I can’t stay single, they say. It’s bad enough that I’m divorced and it’s certainly not right for a woman to be raising a child by herself. I don’t want to get married again, ever.

Danny and I loved each other in the beginning. He was exciting and sweet; I felt like I really mattered to someone for the very first time. We were going to travel the world and have great adventures and then have tons of children. All that seemed to change the minute we got married – he drank and yelled and hit me. I couldn’t tell anyone. A wife has to please her husband, so it felt like my fault that he got so mad. I actually didn’t mind when he left me alone, even after I found out where he was going.

If I absolutely have to marry this new guy, there will be some clear ground rules set this time. If he wants me, he’s going to have to agree to never tomcat around, never get drunk, and never ever hit me.

I want you to grow up with a daddy who loves you. If marrying this new guy will make everyone happy, and give you a childhood I couldn’t have, then it might be worth it.

Mother and Child, by Mary Cassatt (1908), from Flickr