A quiet day on the blogging front

Its is close to evening here in Australia and I have had a productive day but I had only logged on briefly this morning to my WordPress site to check comments, not to post anything as therapy started back this morning after a 14 or more day break and then I went to see my sister because I had not visited her since Christmas. I then went to get my groceries and came home and worked for an hour an a half in the garden after lunch as my fruit trees are dropping a lot of fruit and I had been neglecting the back garden for a while now. At the same time I was listening to the audio version of Fates and Furies which I’ve been slowly making my way through over the past few months. The inspiration to write was low today but I do miss keeping up my impetus on my blog. Its a bit strange to lose my mojo. There was a time I posted 118 days in a row and as some followers know some days I can post up to three or more posts on any day.

I just had my fifth year anniversary of starting my blog on Boxing Day and lately I have been reblogging some of my earlier posts because with over 3,000 post now on my site many of them get lost and I cant even remember all that I have written. I didn’t have much of a following in that first year so some posts are worth a second view.

Lately its occurring to me that maybe I never get to say anything new either now, maybe everything I write is about subjects I have covered before explored from different angles or perspectives. Even though life is constantly evolving I have a theory that the path way of recovery for me is not linear but a spiral ride, we keep passing around the cycle of the years meeting certain turning points or times in the season of nature where deeper feelings get triggered that are remembered less intellectually and more bodily by us. As we progress and feel everything again we get a little bit above it and see the bigger picture once we have processed, digested and made sense of its meaning in the larger scheme of our lives. There is always a chance to feel things we may have had to bury before years on.

January is for me associated with the death of my father and then going overseas, I seem to have grieved very deeply for the loss of my father for a long time now, to the point where I feel I have integrated the loss. The death or absence of a parent leaves a big hole in our lives. As I was exploring today in therapy Dad was physically present a lot of the time but emotionally absent. I did not really know how to connect with him and he died towards the end of my teenage years when I was in deep rebellion and had gone through a lot of trauma due to both Mum and Dad’s absence and other traumas and dramas occurring in our family.

I am sure my parents loved me very much but I just don’t know if my Mum especially connected with me easily and I know her attention was often diverted into other things, as my therapist often says there didn’t seem to be parental minds there playing attention and holding me in mind and so I fell through space or had to make my own way and I learned not to expect or ask for too much.

I watched the movie Lady Bird on the weekend and I really identified with the mother daughter dynamic in that film although my Mum was a different character to the mother portrayed, she also struggled with knowing how to connect to me. She secretly admired my intelligence but since Mum had little of an education being taken out of school at the age of 13 to go into domestic service she could not really relate to a lot of my ways of thinking. I see that now. She also struggled a lot in the aftermath of my fathers’ death trying to fill a hole and a role she, as a fatherless daughter herself, was very ill equipped for.

I look back with a lot more compassion for my mother now than I could have years ago and even her death has made certain things clearer to me. I truly can say now that I bear my parents not half the resentment of past years as I know they did the very, very best with what they had. But I also know that our values were quiet different in other ways, for example my Dad was a business man who thought the arts were a waste to time but at the same time he loved his classical music and reading and was an intelligent person. After he died my Mum and I found out my Dad was actually doing a home study course in psychology which turned out to be one of my major subjects of interest as I grew.

I never got to have an adult relationship with my father, sadly and I am sure we would have been able to sort more things out if my father had lived and I would not have struggled so much in later relationships with men were he not so removed from me. The hole that opened up with his death in 1985 and my going overseas alone at a very vulnerable time was probably one of the worst things for me, but it could not have been any different and it also had good aspects. It taught me to fend for myself and take risks and I was blessed to presented over that time amidst all the other traumas with good work opportunities.

When I returned to Australia, though in 1987 after two and a half years of travelling and working overseas and going through yet another broken relationship I had no home to go to. My mother informed me she was remarrying within an hour of my arrival back in Australia. There would be a room with her and her new husband but that was such a huge change for me, so I decided instead to move to Sydney and stayed for some months with my Godparents who proved to be one of the few stable influences in my life over the next 6 years. During this time my addiction escalated finally reaching a series of terrible rock bottoms during 1989 – 1993 when I finally met my ex husband and got sober within a 6 month period.

When you first enter sobriety or addiction recovery you know so little about anything at all. In many ways you are an emotional cripple and you also remain emotionally frozen at the age you started to drink. For me this was in my early teens as Dad gave us all alcohol from a young age believing that to do so would mean we could ‘handle’ it better than others, (some thing that proved grossly inaccurate in the following years). However I have since learned that we also remain arrested at the younger ages of emotional injuries which have a deep, if unconscious impact. For me the departure of my older sister when I was only three years old was a very pivotal event because she, of all my family members, was the one who was most available to me (at least until she fell in love and decided to marry and move overseas.) However in later years our relationship was not so healthy as she was also abusing alcohol and when I went to stay with her I was encouraged to drink and in the younger years I never really learned how to express or regulate my hidden emotions

I see how over the following years I had no sense of strong foundation of self or inner security to rest a sense of grounded stability upon and so it was from 16 to my early 30s I began to careen out of control developing an almost split personality. Encouraged to take on a career I didn’t enjoy I could not find a way to break out of it either as long as I was abusing alcohol and had not a clue of what was really going on deep inside of me.

In many ways at 56 I am still trying to complete critical tasks of growth, separation, individuation and exploring ways to find emotional maturity in my self and relationships. It has really taken all the hard work of these past 25 years of sobriety to even have a chance of finding emotional balance in my life. The way I figure it now is that when I have been sober for half of the time I have been alive and drinking I will be finally approaching integration emotionally (this is just my calculation at the moment. Sober at 31, sober for 25 years now means in about 6 years I may finally be a fully functioning adult!!).

It is said that in sobriety before you have a partner, get a plant, once you have managed to take care of that, get yourself a pet, and then when you know you can take care of your pet you are ready for a relationship…. I am doing pretty well with Jasper my dog now after 6 years so I figure after over 7 years on my own again I am just about ready for a new relationship!!) We will see though.

These are just some thoughts for today as me move toward evening on a day when not much else has been presenting itself for blogging. With the anniversary of my father`s death tomorrow it is interesting to reflect over the past and see that I have survived and am actually functioning so much better than I was when I first started this blog. My life may be far from perfect and it does get lonely at times, but for the fact that I have been able, especially over the past 7 years of being back in my home town, to process my feelings over my past I feel very grateful. If sharing about my journey which is by no means unique can helps others that is some small contribution I can make to the growth of awareness. Seeing my sister today in the hospital made me aware of so much we both carried and highlighted the different ways we have tried to cope. But it filled me with love that we could sit together and listen to some music. It did not escape me that she is in room 13 at the hospital which is the date of my father’s birthday. I see so much of my father in my sister. I am just grateful for my sobriety.. I am so so grateful. ❤