 | In beauty I walk With beauty before me I walk With beauty behind me I walk With beauty above me I walk With beauty around me I walk It has become beauty again - Navajo Prayer |
Story #2. I've been wanting to write for years. Even before I had my kids, my long-term goal was to begin to get my stories out there in a helpful and meaningful way. I find writing internally organizing. It helps me to draw out the essence of an experience without getting mired down in unhelpful details. It reminds me of the path I've walked and the one I'm walking. That all of experience is just that - experience. "You are the universe experiencing itself as human for a little while."
So I didn't really expect to hit a block immediately following story #1. I have loads more to tell - why am I suddenly completely clammed up? My first post was an experiment and assertion of will. I feel like I've been hiding for some time, paralyzed in various ways, and feeling a pull, for once, to conjure my own magic, rather than always following the magic of others. One of my 'tried and true' strategies that I have used in my own life and frequently offer to clients when they are stuck is what I call the "Do Something" approach. If you feel lost or unsure, wanting to make a change but not sure how, just pick a thing and do it. Don't worry whether it's the right thing to do, it may well not be, but it's an assertion of your life energy into the world in a particular way. The universe can't really work on you if you're standing still - you've got to get yourself moving. So feel into your intention, pick a thing that is currently possible for you, and do it. From there, doors can open, and that thing you're doing will lead you to the next thing and the next thing and before you know it, you're living what was once only a dream. These posts were my "Do Something" in response to some dreams and what felt like a stagnating path.
And now I'm stuck. The first story was an easy story. One with a happy ending in which, 10 years later, we're not just surviving but thriving. The vulnerabilities tucked within it are easy ones because I've overcome them. They're not really vulnerabilities anymore. I'm not sure the rest of my stories are quite so tidy. I also encountered a whole bunch of feelings I hadn't really expected. A feeling of apology. Who am I to think...? Who am I to take up space? Who am I to tell a story? It was an ambush of internal criticism - as soon as I hit 'publish' I began to crumble under the weight of shame and doubt.
There's a familiar story - shame and doubt. My existence an apology that I'm always having to make up for. Ugh. I know this story. How did we get here again? How are we still here?
When I sat down to write this post, I didn't quite know where it would go. But as I sit and write, a story does come. A story of internalized shame, handed down through the generations. So it is with most of our shame. It isn't really ours at all. As Sonya Renee Taylor writes in The Body is not an Apology, giving back our internalized shame is like peeling off the ugliest of black sweaters and returning it to the store you got it from, walking out in your dazzling birthday suit. It was never yours to begin with. You just carried it because you were told you should. Because it felt too dangerous not to.
So I didn't really expect to hit a block immediately following story #1. I have loads more to tell - why am I suddenly completely clammed up? My first post was an experiment and assertion of will. I feel like I've been hiding for some time, paralyzed in various ways, and feeling a pull, for once, to conjure my own magic, rather than always following the magic of others. One of my 'tried and true' strategies that I have used in my own life and frequently offer to clients when they are stuck is what I call the "Do Something" approach. If you feel lost or unsure, wanting to make a change but not sure how, just pick a thing and do it. Don't worry whether it's the right thing to do, it may well not be, but it's an assertion of your life energy into the world in a particular way. The universe can't really work on you if you're standing still - you've got to get yourself moving. So feel into your intention, pick a thing that is currently possible for you, and do it. From there, doors can open, and that thing you're doing will lead you to the next thing and the next thing and before you know it, you're living what was once only a dream. These posts were my "Do Something" in response to some dreams and what felt like a stagnating path.
And now I'm stuck. The first story was an easy story. One with a happy ending in which, 10 years later, we're not just surviving but thriving. The vulnerabilities tucked within it are easy ones because I've overcome them. They're not really vulnerabilities anymore. I'm not sure the rest of my stories are quite so tidy. I also encountered a whole bunch of feelings I hadn't really expected. A feeling of apology. Who am I to think...? Who am I to take up space? Who am I to tell a story? It was an ambush of internal criticism - as soon as I hit 'publish' I began to crumble under the weight of shame and doubt.
There's a familiar story - shame and doubt. My existence an apology that I'm always having to make up for. Ugh. I know this story. How did we get here again? How are we still here?
When I sat down to write this post, I didn't quite know where it would go. But as I sit and write, a story does come. A story of internalized shame, handed down through the generations. So it is with most of our shame. It isn't really ours at all. As Sonya Renee Taylor writes in The Body is not an Apology, giving back our internalized shame is like peeling off the ugliest of black sweaters and returning it to the store you got it from, walking out in your dazzling birthday suit. It was never yours to begin with. You just carried it because you were told you should. Because it felt too dangerous not to.
 | When I was in elementary school, probably 1st grade, we were given an assignment to write a small book about what we wanted to be when we grew up. It was maybe 3-5 sheets of that beige paper with the top half blank for pictures and the bottom half with those big blue lines for little kids to write their story on. I was 6, maybe 7 years old and my memory of the events are a touch sparse. But I vividly remember picking out my two favorite Crayola markers, lavender and turquoise, and drawing stars. I remember a page covered in purple and teal stars, planets, and a floating astronaut. I remember a feeling perhaps of wonder that I now see in my own children from time to time. Apparently, I wanted to be an astronaut, and in my mind, space was AH-MAZE-ING! |
Then I remember nothing. But in the next frame of the memory is a pencil-drawing of a woman in a skirt, smiling and sweeping, carefully colored in with muted crayon. On the blue lines below, in neat pencil, were the words "When I grow up I want to be a housewife." I felt sad and scared. That I had done something horribly wrong in both wanting to be an astronaut and in the messy outpouring of those two outlandishly colored pens. I'd had too much fun with them. The blue and purple stars, like my dreams, were just too much.
I have a vague and foggy memory of my mother yelling. That I couldn't turn in such messy slop and I needed to take pride in my work. That I thought I was too good to be a housewife. That I thought I was better than her. A vague feeling of her vitriolic defense of her position in life. In my childhood, when my mother's rage was activated, my self-preservation mechanism was dissociation, and those memories, if they return at all, come back as a foggy jumble of words and sensation with no definitive narrative. I wouldn't be able to tell you her words, or what actually happened in that gap in my memory, but by trusting the story my body tells, her violent disapproval was made very clear, I absorbed it all, and I shrunk my volition immediately so as not to threaten her further. I had been handed a big box of patriarchy, tied with a very jagged bow.
My mother was a feminist of the worst sort. Angry and vitriolic, she was the embodiment of the patriarchy via the feminine - a classic case of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". Her rage at the oppression and violence that she experienced in life became internalized as a deep seated hatred of her own femininity, and a violent display of power over any man that happened to enter her sphere. She desperately sought male power in the subversive ways that were available to her, and I had the poor luck of being the third girl born to a mother with a bizarre fantasy of birthing a 'male heir' as a path to her own power. What a start. The story goes that I did not cry at birth and rarely cried as a baby, not even waking to eat. I was losing so much weight that my mother had to wake me for timed feedings. Somehow, even then, I knew that it was safer to just try and be invisible. Not make a fuss. They would eventually have the boy that was so wanted, and I would love him deeply, only to see him lost to my mother's machinations.
My mother was born in 1951, the first of six children in a deeply impoverished family. Her father was abusive and her stepfather was abusive and an alcoholic. At 13, she met my father. His mother, born in 1918, had attended college and taught school for a time before having children. All of his sisters were expected to attend college. Although modest by today's standard, his family had a level of generational wealth that must have seemed dream-like to my mother. My mother's parents did not support college education for women, and so at 18, my mother married my father - it was the best she could do with the hand she had been dealt.
I don't believe that motherhood came naturally to my mother. She had her first child at 20 and the remaining three would follow over the next 12 years. It wouldn't be until she was in her 40's that she would go to the local community college and eventually join the workforce. Things actually got a little bit better once she was working. For one, there was more money, but more importantly, I think working gave her something that we, as children, never could: a sense of herself that she could feel good about. The patriarchal lie that motherhood would complete her was a difficult blow. It did not. And her response was that of an ensnared animal, all teeth and claws. Had my mother been born male and with more options, I believe her life would have looked very different, and might have even contained a sort of peace. My mother's life was a casualty of poverty and patriarchy, and so when she saw those big teal and lavender stars and my big dreams to get to space, the pain of her own lost dreams was too much to bear. And so she passed the box of her shame and shrinking on to me. It wasn't mine. You could solidly make the argument that it wasn't even hers. And yet, here it is, poisoning the well of our entire family.
My childhood was a deep lesson in how patriarchal ideas are genderless and equally ruthless in their evisceration of both feminine and masculine bodies. I watched my father become hollowed by my mother, and I watched my brother begin to contort in the same way. I do not wish to portray them as hapless victims of my mother - they most certainly were not. But that is a different story, and this is this story.
Giving back the box of shame is important, but it's only the first step. Dismantling the beliefs you've held about yourself and reality as a consequence of the shame can take time. Grieving all that has been lost to the shame and illusion can be difficult. Changing your current relationships to reflect healthier relational patterns can feel like (and be) a Herculean task. But as you move through this work, life begins to feel lighter and new possibilities abound. What ugly black sweaters are you still wearing that you'd be better off without? What have you inherited from your family and culture that serves only to poison and shame? Freedom is possible, and every inch of progress we make in our own journeys is a gift not only to ourselves, but will ripple outwards to every person we touch. Keep fighting the good fight. It's worth it.
I have a vague and foggy memory of my mother yelling. That I couldn't turn in such messy slop and I needed to take pride in my work. That I thought I was too good to be a housewife. That I thought I was better than her. A vague feeling of her vitriolic defense of her position in life. In my childhood, when my mother's rage was activated, my self-preservation mechanism was dissociation, and those memories, if they return at all, come back as a foggy jumble of words and sensation with no definitive narrative. I wouldn't be able to tell you her words, or what actually happened in that gap in my memory, but by trusting the story my body tells, her violent disapproval was made very clear, I absorbed it all, and I shrunk my volition immediately so as not to threaten her further. I had been handed a big box of patriarchy, tied with a very jagged bow.
My mother was a feminist of the worst sort. Angry and vitriolic, she was the embodiment of the patriarchy via the feminine - a classic case of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". Her rage at the oppression and violence that she experienced in life became internalized as a deep seated hatred of her own femininity, and a violent display of power over any man that happened to enter her sphere. She desperately sought male power in the subversive ways that were available to her, and I had the poor luck of being the third girl born to a mother with a bizarre fantasy of birthing a 'male heir' as a path to her own power. What a start. The story goes that I did not cry at birth and rarely cried as a baby, not even waking to eat. I was losing so much weight that my mother had to wake me for timed feedings. Somehow, even then, I knew that it was safer to just try and be invisible. Not make a fuss. They would eventually have the boy that was so wanted, and I would love him deeply, only to see him lost to my mother's machinations.
My mother was born in 1951, the first of six children in a deeply impoverished family. Her father was abusive and her stepfather was abusive and an alcoholic. At 13, she met my father. His mother, born in 1918, had attended college and taught school for a time before having children. All of his sisters were expected to attend college. Although modest by today's standard, his family had a level of generational wealth that must have seemed dream-like to my mother. My mother's parents did not support college education for women, and so at 18, my mother married my father - it was the best she could do with the hand she had been dealt.
I don't believe that motherhood came naturally to my mother. She had her first child at 20 and the remaining three would follow over the next 12 years. It wouldn't be until she was in her 40's that she would go to the local community college and eventually join the workforce. Things actually got a little bit better once she was working. For one, there was more money, but more importantly, I think working gave her something that we, as children, never could: a sense of herself that she could feel good about. The patriarchal lie that motherhood would complete her was a difficult blow. It did not. And her response was that of an ensnared animal, all teeth and claws. Had my mother been born male and with more options, I believe her life would have looked very different, and might have even contained a sort of peace. My mother's life was a casualty of poverty and patriarchy, and so when she saw those big teal and lavender stars and my big dreams to get to space, the pain of her own lost dreams was too much to bear. And so she passed the box of her shame and shrinking on to me. It wasn't mine. You could solidly make the argument that it wasn't even hers. And yet, here it is, poisoning the well of our entire family.
My childhood was a deep lesson in how patriarchal ideas are genderless and equally ruthless in their evisceration of both feminine and masculine bodies. I watched my father become hollowed by my mother, and I watched my brother begin to contort in the same way. I do not wish to portray them as hapless victims of my mother - they most certainly were not. But that is a different story, and this is this story.
Giving back the box of shame is important, but it's only the first step. Dismantling the beliefs you've held about yourself and reality as a consequence of the shame can take time. Grieving all that has been lost to the shame and illusion can be difficult. Changing your current relationships to reflect healthier relational patterns can feel like (and be) a Herculean task. But as you move through this work, life begins to feel lighter and new possibilities abound. What ugly black sweaters are you still wearing that you'd be better off without? What have you inherited from your family and culture that serves only to poison and shame? Freedom is possible, and every inch of progress we make in our own journeys is a gift not only to ourselves, but will ripple outwards to every person we touch. Keep fighting the good fight. It's worth it.
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