This is the newest great line of the 21st Century said chirpily into cell (mobile) phones everywhere…so it it’s good enough for Everyone Else, it’s good enough for my blog. As I am in fact ‘on the bus’ – waiting before leaving for another bus station in another North Eastern city.
And here’s the miracle, my friends, I enjoyed visiting my parents (mother and step-father no. 3 – long story, if you don’t know it already, don’t stress even my long-term therapist can’t keep track of my family…You Are Not Alone…). But at first, was hard, with my mother (aka from shamanistic healing session below ‘the spider’). I could feel the sense of suffocation and was thinking, damn, damn, it didn’t stick, but then a mixture of reaching out to my friend who worked with me and then also beginning to speak finally. Speak my truth as we used to say in some remote decade since gone and it sounds quaint now post-deconstruction, etc…’truth’ what dat? Yeah, yeah yeah…I know all that I wrote a fucking PhD on that, but still…that’s what I did, so fuck ye who would be cleverer than thou…thank you.
OK, so enough griping. The good stuff. I could breathe, in situ. In the ‘heart of the beast’ which of course shrunk the beast because of course at this stage in my life ‘the beast’ is no longer my actual mother but an image of her I have created and old habits, etc. The miracle, which always works is that when my behaviour and outlook changes, miracle of miracles, others do too! Or even if it doesn’t, it doesn’t have the same effect on me.
So I was able to look through old 70s photos with her, tell her I couldn’t hack in anymore when I mentioned something from my childhood, she would top it with a story from hers (old pattern: my childhood sucked, but hers really sucked, to the tune of no memories from ages 8-13, etc…). And she heard me and I watched her stop herself from doing that after I said this. Also she heard something I said about my relationship with my ex-husband she had never heard before (and believe me I had said it before) that gave her an insight into her relationship with my last step-father (that’s the gay one…believe me, my one family could populate a Russian novel written by Oscar Wilde…oh that would be good wouldn’t it???).
One of the hardest things in dealing with my mother was her constant implied or overt justification for all of her current behavior due to the past, including towards me. And while it’s still there, I see a shift and this is great. And that’s because, most likely, there’s a massive shift in me…so the shamanistic healing work held even through this test, hurrah!
Also, I am very clear now that I made that little moss church on the rocks in Maine for the healing 40 years later. I know this sounds hooey, but I know it’s true. Time is not linear. It just isn’t. That is my experience.
I find the breathing difficulty coming back a little whilst writing this which is curious, maybe the fear, the fear of telling, of saying anything bad about my mother, which of course was so much a fear growing up I never even thought a bad thought about her – it was cut off at the pass…
Also the fear, especially because of her (as she called it) ‘aha moment’ about her last husband that I am subtly or not so subtly becoming, continuing to be her AA sponsor/therapist etc…I don’t want this role nor have signed up for it but as I grow and share stuff with her it affects her…good or bad? Not so sure. Leave that one up to the universe to sort out.
And now I’m on my way back to the Big City to have a public showing of some of my work. Scared and excited in equal measure about that. Did I mention yet I have no visible means of support? I feel so weirdly free and that probably has something to do with Not Having a Job. OK, so I have to do some work when I get back to my adopted Big City in The Old World, but I mean it’s not a real job…as a matter of fact at 47 I am proud to announce I have never had a real job. Should I be proud of this? Don’t know, but the artist part of me, i.e. the central part of my entire existence, is happy about this…however, the other part of me that knows I live in Anglo-Saxon cultures that simply do not acknowledge creative work as work is one of the reasons I feel this way.
I was able to discuss with my mother and stepfather the Big Writing Project, which I have embarked on – not this blog but something else, and that was good too. Because they got it to a large degree and my mother surprised me by getting a particularly complex bit and explaining it to my stepfather. Some of this blog may end up in that project, but not sure yet…so far leaving this as what it is – open, discussion-based not particularly ‘writerly’ – however, there’s a freedom here that may be useful too…not sure.
I think that large writing project, however, if it does get done and I sure as shit hope it does, may have to be published anonymously, though not sure about that either, as I want to work between fact and fiction in a certain way that publishing may be possible under my name. This whole issue of exposure is such a huge one for me. Growing up I had to be as invisible (except for certain accomplishments that were acceptable) as possible, certainly anything I actually felt or thought, which as mentioned above were so buried I didn’t even know what they were…So to even expose myself in this way – anonymously – seems like a huge risk but with my name, oy. That’s not just about the anonymous program stuff, that’s about visibility and risking it.
The piece that is happening on Monday, the person directing it will not be taking the risks I usually do, but I told him that’s OK as I know I grew into all that and did not go barreling down the road I’m on now all at once. I am curious too, very curious, to see how this will play out. My work will be visible on a different level to a different kind of audience and that’s scary and exciting as I’ve already said. Can it survive? Will it be OK? Is it OK to make people angry? Scared? Excited? Laugh?
All of that at once?
The trees are changing, leaves of bright yellow, orange and red…the dance of autumn perhaps my favorite time of year and one I usually miss in NE USA. So grateful to see it now.
I’m meeting someone soon who I met online in a meeting, on her first day sober. Never met her in person before. That was a year and a half ago, we ‘met’ when I wrote about how scared I was, and I was terrified, whilst writing the draft of my PhD (in May and it was due in July). I just shrieked in words much to the consternation of more orthodox AA folk who thought I Wasn’t Sharing the Message. However, this woman, who was attending her first meeting, thanked me for my honesty and she is still sober today…which leads me to a new thought, which I shared in a meeting yesterday: Honesty is Service.
Any alcoholic worth their salt who walks into an AA meeting for the first time will have his/her ear pricked up and ready to hear bullshit and upon hearing bullshit will think: bullshit and walk out. An alcoholic who hears the truth about his/her condition from another alcoholic – and this includes Feeling Everything and Total Fear, etc… will know she’s in the right place and maybe will stick around for me. Happy clappy talk about being free and happy said through clenched teeth aint gonna cut it. Not for a suffering alcoholic. But that’s me and my opinion…having said that, there probably are people who walk into an AA meeting and need to hear happy clappy talk and that’s what keeps that person sober. This is why it is So Good none of us, including me, runs the show…we’d ruin it with Our Big Ideas about What Everyone Needs… when we just don’t fucking know…
Thank you again God/dess for saving us from ourselves.
It’s lovely writing all this stuff to you, whoever you are who read this. I know some of you and don’t know others and there’s something amazing about that. Thank you for reading. I think I will sign off now and post this. Time to look at leaves and puffy clouds….
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