There were waves of emotions that rose up at the garage sale today, things only broke open when my sister and I sold the two Rena saucepans Mum bought from a door to door salesman sometime in the late 50s. I didn’t remember this as I wasn’t born yet but I have washed those pans up so many times and Mum used them right up to her death in 2017. I kept the smallest one.
My sister finds it hard to express any emotions due to the drug trajectory she has been on in the past 20 years but when we had lunch we did talk of family traumas and we are meeting a very close friend of my Mum tomorrow to surprise her with a vase of Mum’s as a gift nd my sister said to me “the water works will come on when Suzie gets that vase!” Wow.. water works are tears of genuine love and emotion. I was reading earlier in a book on boundaries about how people will dismiss other people in just such a way “she is a timid as a mouse” there may be truth in it but sometimes it comes across as judgement. My sister was not being mean at all, we talked this over and I said to her wow that’s an interesting thing to say.. She turned to me and said, “I only say it as I cannot cry yet, but one day I hope to be able to cry.” I didn’t see her shed a tear at Mum’s funeral but she was heartbroken I know this… the feelings WERE THERE……just buried.
I find it challenging to be the only one crying, however my sister is very kind when I cry now and holds me.. that is HUGE PROGRESS, yet I feel I, as youngest, contain the family emotion. I find so many people talk so matter of a factly about deeply emotional things, they distance themselves from emotions intellectually or see things in a more practical way, I am just not like this, or maybe I just get more overwhelmed, especially when with others who are not expressing emotion.
Even when it comes to family meanness or lack of empathy I still have love for the other person. For example the nephew who has disowned me since I fell for a scammer I still love and grieve for while knowing he just won’t forgive or open to me any more. I see that maybe I took on board the sacrificial part of staying close by family and especially to Mum and his mother who died back in 2014, it doesn’t make either of us better or worse, just different in our way of living. And yet I often feel I failed by staying so close and yet I also had gains. I got to be with my Mum and older sister in those later years although on the day Mum was dying I went about my business as I had said my goodbyes with her a night before and been spending a lot of time sitting close by holding her hand in the lead up to her passing away. At that last stage they had her drugged out and she wasn’t conscious. I didn’t want to remember her like that.
Today was yet another stage in the grief process. My sister and I were able to support each other through it and we are really talking honestly lately about everything from the past, today we were able to share the pain over how my older sister suffered after her husband sent her home with a one way ticket from New Zealand, separating her from her four boys following her illness. I can talk to my living sister now about most things, and what I realised today is that I do carry a lot of the family ‘stuff’, all Mum’s old things left over are now in my garage and will be taken by the Salvation Army next week.
To be honest I get resentful at times about being the family ‘carrier’. I would like my own life but maybe my true life and adult self is being born slowly out of the dying embers of the old. Perhaps, as it said in a quote I posted the other day, as I feel everything fully I am actually coming to real life and deeper awareness of my place in things. When I allow myself to feel my feelings and let them flow through like a wave, letting them rise and pass without resisting their uprising, while fighting to have a space of free air where I can ‘be’ and breathe and hear my own soul note, while dancing to the tune of my emotions, perhaps through that process I am bearing the waters while riding the tide that is not only personal but collective and as I begin to tune within then it is I feel freer, allowing life to evolve and carry me as it needs to, releasing me to the next phase, whatever that may be.
Emerging From The Dark Night 