Waves of trauma memories lately remind me of how much I had to cope with after moving home to Canberra and leave me breathless. I am watching the movie Ride in which Helen Hunt plays an up tight mother suffering from fear and control due to grief who learns to surf to get closer to her son who has left to live with his Dad in California and in many scenes you see her being dumped or tumbling around underneath the huge wave or swell..
Just the image of a huge cresting wave leaves me fearful and breathless and I think of a dream in which I faced a 30 foot high surf wall and feared I would be killed… I had the trauma of my Mum and two sisters over 2012 – 2014, hospitalisations, near death of my mum from an embolism due to a botched knee replacement surgery I had to travel to Sydney to support her for… (too much at the time I had been undergoing painful root canal just the day before) and then my sister tried to take her life and that was another wave.. Why couldn’t I just have pulled back from it all.. it wasn’t my fault .. none of it but my caring heart just had to be there as that is what I needed to do then but it went on and on and on until two years after Mum died..
I know its in the past but my poor body.. some days I feel it will give out on me entirely.. I get this swings and today there is pain radiating down my left arm from the heart.. I got Jasper out for our wild walk and that was good he got exhausted and could be in his element chasing birds but taking care of him at times exhausts me too though I do get a super charge of healing from immersion in nature. On these walks often I find myself spontaneously crying in nature while looking out over the vast expanse of the lake or drawing close to thicket of standing and fallen elms that border the lakeside.
I have just made myself nice lunch and I let that anger over past things come up… I don’t hear from family on a heart level much and its hard.. I am kind of pulling back with some members and then I question that too….I will always love them but so much trauma went on in my family and I had no one for so so long. Even when Jonathan needed me to be a wife I could not be as I had so much going on and was so bonded to Jude who at that time was undergoing a lot with the guy who beat her up and then took her out of the first assisted living facility .. my Mum had to deal with all of that during 2001 – 2003 and it was a hard thing and when she fell I just had to come back from the UK as NO OTHER FAMILY WERE THEN LIVING IN MY HOME TOWN FOLLOWING THE FAMILY PATTERN THEY ALL MOVED AWAY…
It was my sister and I who first came back to be with Mum in 2011 after our marriages ended and I am sure its a kind of ancestral tie back of sorts.. Now I have Scott in my life even though he is thousands of miles away and I have that love coming to me through the airwaves even if at times when he tells me I am his everything.. it overwhelms me.. Then sometimes I just cry as I watched the movie Did You Hear About The Morgans last night on Netflicks and in it the character Meryl quotes the Shakespeare sonnet.. :
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,
it is an ever fixed mark that
LOOKS ON TEMPESTS AND IS NEVER SHAKEN.
I particularly adore those lines as those who love you try to understand when you are angry the cry for love hidden within the pain.. In the movie, Hugh Grant’s character wins back his estranged wife, and sorry if you haven’t seen it and I spoiled it… but there you go.. To gaze on tempests.. I think I endured so many tempests or waves in my family .. the trick was learning to let them roll me over and not be so gobsmackingly terrified as I was (impossible..why am I always mininising things, making my reaction or capacity wrong??).
This post morphed, from something into something else..the family I came from was full of tempests and neglectful too at times, and yet my Mum tried her best at times to reach to me with love with all of her shutdowns and limits… I guess if you push away your own pain the only thing you can do is push away the pain of others…but love even looks on that with the open innocence of a child and lets its heart be broken open to an even deeper layer of self recognition of how absolutely fundamental our longing for love really is. I am still letting my heart open. I am still moving through anger that comes from an incomplete view of the awesome magnitude of the ancestral journey I am an end result of. As forgiveness and wisdom opens, ever so slowly I feel my wounded heart softening and releasing the pain of ages, allowing me to come back into relationship with this perfectly imperfect life.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45106/sonnet-116-let-me-not-to-the-marriage-of-true-minds
Emerging From The Dark Night 