Recycling

The other day my therapist said to me. “What you think is your truth is not your truth. It is your perception.”

I felt mad when he said that.

Then he asked me- “Do you want to heal or do you want to recycle?”

I felt a little less mad and more curious. We started talking about the pros and cons of this. Specifically, the damage that recycling can do. Reliving the traumas. Replaying the wrongs that were done. So. Damaging.

What came next was something deep for me. I realized that when we begin to recover from our traumas, we no longer want the past to be any different than it was. We live our life forward instead of in reverse.
I’ve lived in reverse a lot of my life. I’ve ached for the forward, but have found it elusive. And even more so since I came out of the fog and found my birth family. (More about that another time)

Not wanting the past to be any different felt really hard to swallow and presents competing priorities for me.

1) My hurt, abandoned, angry adopted inner child is pissed about not wanting the past to be any different.
V.S.
2) My whole, centered grown up self wants this to be true so she can heal and live her life fully.

If I no longer want the past to be any different, that means I am ok with being relinquished at birth. It means I am ok with the fact that the story I was told about my biological family wasn’t entirely true. It means I’m ok with the secrecy, shame, sadness and childhood emotional neglect. It means my truth really isn’t the truth anymore.

It means…..

I no longer have anything to be angry about.

Anger has been my protector. Anger keeps me alive. Anger tells the world that I was wronged and I deserve justice. Anger gives me a high. Anger equals control. Anger gives me the adrenaline rush that fools me into thinking I am in control. Anger makes me feel alive.

Anger also makes me dangerous. Anger affects my relationships. It damages my health. It keeps me in a constant cycle of fight/flight. Anger is EXHAUSTING.

What I want you to know is that by staying angry, I am abandoning myself just like I was abandoned. It is my own drama triangle where I started as the victim. And we know that eventually in a drama triangle, the victim becomes the aggressor. And what I can tell you from my experience is that the safest place in the room is to be the aggressor. If you are the hunter and not the hunted, you feel in control. But I can also tell you that it is an entirely false sense of control and isn’t a way to sustain a happy and fulfilled life.

I also want to tell you that I’m thinking about how I can live my life without the anger and adrenaline that has played the part of protector for me. I want to get to a place in my healing that I only reserve anger for real threat- like someone coming at me in a dark alley. Or someone threatening my kids.

The questions I am asking myself are these:
What replaces my anger?
What would it be like to relax into myself and allow myself to live without anger?
Who would I be without recycling my story?

As my therapist also says….. “ What would it be like to truly experience the emotional orgasm of life and let your anger go? “

Well shit, why didn’t he lead with that question? An emotional orgasm sounds great!
I’ll take the recycling out ASAP!

Blankie

I want to tell you a story about the day I threw my mother in the garbage.

My mother was my blanket. I was made to throw her in the trash one day with my other mother encouraging me and praising me for being strong.
I learned recently that my blanket was what is called, a “transitional object”.
The definition of a transitional object according to the APA dictionary is this:

transitional object

1. a doll, blanket, or other thing spontaneously chosen and used by a child to ease the anxiety of separation from his or her first external object, the mother, until the child has established an internal object, or mental representation of her, that provides a sense of security and comfort. [first described by British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896–1971)]

2. by extension, any person or thing that provides security, emotional well-being, and a symbolic connection with a valued other.

If you are a parent and have ever watched “Elmo and the lost blanket”, you have a sense of how important a transitional object is for a child. They would go to the ends of the universe to locate it if it’s lost.

So I had this blanket. Blankie. Blanks. It had been years since I thought of my blanket but lately, I’d been dreaming about the day I was forced to give up blanket.

As a side note, I LOVE blankets and can never have enough of them. I love heavy ones. Fuzzy ones. Soft, thick German cotton ones. Every bed in my home has a minimum of 3 blankets and several more on the ready should anyone need them. I have more than enough blankets, but I find myself looking for more. Searching, searching and searching. Maybe I will always search for “THE ONE AND ONLY BLANKET”? Maybe I am really seeking HER. All my life I’ve searched for HER. I would scan crowds for women her age and wonder if we were standing near each other and thinking we’d just know.

But I digress. Back to THE BLANKET.

The Dream. Or is it a nightmare?

Imagine you are 2 or 4 or somewhere in-between those ages. You are standing in front of a large, tan pasty garbage can in the doctors office. The garbage can is larger than you are and it has that type of revolving triangle top that opens as you spin it. It looks like a big monster’s mouth.
I keep seeing my hand reaching up to deposit Blankie inside. The revolving mouth is HUNGRY. it wants to devour my precious blankie. I feel like crying and then my dream goes completely black.

I usually wake up sad and tense. I feel like I am back at that moment. Like it just happened even though it was almost 47 years ago. The loss is painful still. It makes me tight. I can’t describe it other than this blanket was MY blanket. How betrayed I felt when I had to give her up. How confused I felt when I was praised for giving her up. How unseen and sad I felt when I wasn’t given any space to grieve.
I’ve spent my life searching for her.

My mom will tell you a different story. Hers is happy and sugar coated and seen through her lens. My blanket was BAD. It made me sick all the time. What kind of mother would she be if she let her child keep something that made her sick all the time?
It HAD to go.

I had loved blanket so much, she was falling apart. My mom had cut her into 4 squares so she could rotate them and wash the dirty ones while I still had a piece of precious blanket. At this point, 3 of the blanket pieces had mysteriously been “lost”. I had the last remaining piece under watchful eye. I would not give her up. So my mom brought in reinforcements- the doctor.
My mom will describe how I sat on the exam table clutching to blanket as the doctor lectured me. He told me blanket was BAD and made me SICK because she was DIRTY and GERMY. She describes my solemn face and HUGE eyes. How I listened and didn’t say one word.

The doctor told me I HAD to throw her out. RIGHT! NOW!
”And then you were SO BRAVE! You didn’t say a word and just got up off the exam table and threw out your blanket.”

“I was so PROUD of you!” My mom always says right after she talks of me trashing blanket.
My mom has told this story my whole life. I’ve always laughed about it. I’ve felt proud at how mature I was and that I got rid of that dirty gross blanket.
See, the thing about this is that I was never given the space for my version of this story. My mom’s version never held the space for my version. What is that saying? And… what is that saying- “There are three stories- your version, the other person’s version and the truth.”

My version is a painful, nightmarish version. The version that tells me it was just a dirty blanket- it deserved to get thrown out. It’s no big deal and I shouldn’t care about it. I believed this. I believed I shouldn’t feel angry or sad about it.

Here’s the thing I know about the blanket. It was so much more to me than just an object. Here is what else I know. Adopted parents need to hold space for thier kids feelings. Even if they don’t understand it or want to make those feelings go away. It is not their job to make them go away, it is their job to attune to their child and help the child process.

If my blanket represents my first mother…. then my second mother asked me to throw out my first mother because she made me sick.  Then she praised me for it as she stood by watching.  Imagine all the  confusion for a small child who is told not to shed a tear.  Not one. 
Imagine being an adult and finally realizing why you always cringed when that story came up.  But here is the thing.  My mother didn’t know. She did what she thought was best for me to keep me safe and healthy.  Her version makes her the protector.  My version makes her the aggressor.  The real version is somewhere in-between those two.

If I could re-write this story, it would be a version where my mother held me and told me how hard she knew it was for me to throw out blankie. She would tell me it was ok to be sad and maybe cry a little with me. She would ask me to tell her about the things I loved about blankie, how she smelled, how soft she was. And then she would help me to walk up to the trash can and say goodbye to blankie together. She wouldn’t say anything about being brave. She would ask me what I needed and how did I feel. She would hold me tight. If I tried to push away she would hold me tighter so I would know how much she loved me and that she would NEVER leave me like blankie did. And sometimes, we would just sit around and say things like “remember blankie and how special blankie was to you? I know you were special to blanke too”.

As T.S Eliot says:
”And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

The Mother of All Blogs

Thank you for visiting my blog. I’m glad you are here.
What I want to tell you is that I was scared when my writing coach asked me to write the “mother of all blogs” blog post. 
But I pretended I was brave and told her enthusiastically “What a great idea!”
Great for….
Her?
Me?
Us?
Nobody?

What I want you to know is that I don’t even have a mother so how in the hell can I write
the mother of all blog posts?  Well, you should know that I have 2 mothers. 
TWO MOTHERS!!!  Twice the mothering.  So that makes me an expert, right? 

If it was that easy, I wouldn’t be overthinking this.

I lost my first mother the minute I was born. She’s not dead, but sometimes I wish she was.
She is the equivalent of soul pain to me. 
You know that deep dark secret pain that you know is there but never acknowledge? 
You know that if you really let yourself think about it long enough, you’d be sure you had
looked Satan in his eyes, and he sucked every bit of your soul from you? 
Death eater soul pain sticks to your guts and waits in the dark to ambush you when you are at your weakest.

Then when I was 2 weeks old, I was assigned a second mother.  I became a place setting in
a different china pattern. She’s not dead either, but I used to dream about her dying all the time. 
I’d wake up with tears streaming down my face.  My body would hurt. I felt scared.  I didn’t ever
tell her because I thought she’d give me back because dreaming about your mom dying is not nice. 
I also never told her the part of the dream where I was at the funeral and everyone was hugging me.  
The hugging and attention felt good and made me feel loved and happy.  The acknowledgement of
my loss felt deserved. 
I wonder now, which mother I was crying for and which mother loss I was hoping would be acknowledged?  

I was recently researching synonyms for pain and loss and found this gem:
"Mutterseelenallein"
Here is what the article said about this word:

”This word is the 'mother' of all German words for 'loneliness.'
Even though the word sounds like a typical German word - or rather
three German words pasted together into one long German adjective - the term
derived from the French idiom "moi tout seul," meaning "me all alone."

When the Huguenots, a group of persecuted French Protestants, fled to
Germany in the 18th century, they used the term "moi tout seul" to describe
their feeling of isolation and dislocation from home. But the Germans
misunderstood the phrase as "mutterseelen" (mother's souls) and added the
word "allein" (alone) so that the phrase would make sense to them.

When you're "mother's souls alone," as this German adjective literally
translates to, there is neither your mother nor any other soul around you.
Whenyou're "mutterseelenallein" you're not just alone, you're completely,
utterly, alone.

While being all by yourself can be great - picture yourself on a lonely beach with
just your book, a hammock and a delicious cocktail -
"mutterseelenallein" usually has a more existential, negative
connotation and can be used as a synonym for isolated, abandoned, or desperate.””

So, you see, giving birth to something is so terribly scary for me. It is scary because I
came into the world with birth meaning death. Mother means alone.  Alone means
death. If I birth or mother something, it will die. 
Just like I felt when I was born.  I was alive and dead at the same time. 
I knew that my world had died.  That I would never be safe. 
I learned that anything good would be ripped from me
just like I was ripped from my mother’s body.  

The picture below is me with one of my children at 2 weeks old.   As I imagine
my blog, I picture it as my baby that I’m holding.  That I’m giving it all the love and
attention and protection it needs to thrive.   It is separate, but still connected to me.

I’m slowly learning to mother myself. It feels good, and scary and unknown.
It also feels right and real and safe.