In peace and love

I slept okay last night and just before going to sleep while listening to music to calm me down so much emotion broke through as I saw and felt memories of how I ran and how hard it was to be close to family at times. It was good to let the tears out. I felt around the time of Dad dying how there was no way to be together in the grief. My brother stepped in to manage everything and it was all such a blurr anyway. When I have tried to bring up the impact and consequences of Dad’s death with him, he just brushed it off with a backhand “But God that was YEARS ago.” This does not mean my brother is an arsehole or bad guy its just that he has compartmentalised it and for all I know he worked through his grief in a better way and was more closely bonded to Dad anyway since they worked together as partners for years and years. I STILL FEEL SAD WE NEVER GO TO SHARE TEARS TOGETHER.

But that said after Judy died Mum and Sue tried to come over to my place after going to the Crematorium to arrange for a plaque so we could inter the ashes in the ceremonial garden close to Nana and I was in one of my ‘attacks’ and when they came to the door I screamed at them to go away. I see my Mum and sister trying to draw close but us not being able to manage to break through to feeling with each other so many times. There are so many painful times they did not understand me or the intensity of my reactions and there is that terribly painful memory of how when I was in my addiction my sister came to Sydney and she and her husband took me out to dinner and after it I went on a binge and the next morning leaving their hotel at 6 am they must have driven past where I was sitting on the curb after being at the pub quite under the weather and my sister called me and said she was so ashamed of me and what the hell was I doing in Sydney ‘living a double life”. At that time I had so much unresolved within me. I was really really struggling and so lost and in a career I hated and drinking too much and taking drugs as well.

I understand now that my sister loved me and was scared for me. But her way of dealing with it alienated me. I was not living up to our family ‘image’. She would have been worried anyway as when I fell pregnant a short while later and had to have a termination due to complications it was she who convinced my mother to be there for me. Mum wanted me to go through it alone, My God parents took me in then and gave me a family for a while thank God. I may have drunk myself to death if not

Anyway my addiction was my choice and I need to take responsibility for it which I started to do 3 or 4 years later. But now I consider the impact on my sister of so many things from another point of view than solely my own. She was able to handle being close to people but always has hidden behind her image which is partly absorbed from a lot of my Mum’s fears and insecurities from childhood. And my sister’s Saturn in Scorpio sat on Mums Sun Mercury Saturn conjunction in Scorpio and the Sun will be trining that over the next week or so and my Chiron in Pisces trines that … showing my own wound is around being able to feel a feeling of oneness with others and about a host of wounds in relating and relationships since it is in my seventh house.

I felt a degree of peace last night though as I fell off to sleep after crying deeply and connecting the dots on so many incidents from my past. I felt the disjoint in me that affects my body/mind/heart/soul mending and coming together. I see I had to split off my feelings in order to survive and this to me is the core of narcissism. The positive side of narcissism says our feelings matter. We can have and own them. We don’t need to project them. We don’t have to blame others for not validating them, that is our job (ideally it was our parents job growing up but so many of us had wounded parents.) We don’t have to bury them but life is just life and we all have a shadow, some of us will embrace that shadow given time and when we do our insights will help us to love and grow in compassion for others. When we have true emotional insight we wont need to judge or demonise anyone as we see more through the eyes of compassion and with more love.

As far as my sis goes I see a lot of her harder hasher traits softening now. She used to over run me at times and I have seen her over run her own family in an attempt to bond and be close. I see the struggle she has had with her daughter in law who was put into boarding school when she was very very young. But I also see how shut down my sister’s inner child can be. I got her laughing and smiling a little yesterday. I was telling her about the This Is Us episode I watched on the family therapy and she seemed so interested. I was telling her also about the new movie about lead singer Michael Hutchence called Mystify which explores his life from an inward emotional perspective. I listened to a great interview with the man who made the film yesterday afternoon. In it he says how much the rock star was trapped in an image and explores the grief and loss that drove him towards tragedy. I try to encourage my sister like this all of the time to know she has value for who she is and all she has lived through. I want my sister to know she is loved and I forgive her for not being who I needed and that is arrogant even writing those words for she was given to life for her own journey not to please or define or validate me… I see my own wounds and narcissism and the role they may have played in things.

Really all I want now is to live in love. I want to be there for her one day a week to take her to radiotherapy or maybe two. The Bosom Buddies ladies will be there to take her other days but I would like to be there having gone through it myself. Maybe its not up to me to compensate for the wounds of emotional neglect we both suffered and for the fact my parents had such challenging lives coming out of the depression but I think to thumb my nose and turn on my heel feels just plain wrong. I want to be there in a way that we both can feel nurtured. I hope my sister accepts this offer. It would help me to help her, for in life, isn’t that the essence of peace, love and meaning. That we help each other?