You kept seeking my help even when it took me down to the wire, and even as the doubters told me I was a fool, after my brother got so angry I kept trying. I believed you and I didn’t believe you, there were always seeds of doubt but these last four months I realised that if I was going to survive I had to stop helping others as much and start help myself. So even now J am holding on to the resources I have slowly been able to save, but I won’t stop living.
I can’t lie, sometimes I feel murderous rage about what you put me through but then that inner crone figure laughs at me “stupid little girl, don’t you realize you bought it all upon yourself by wanting and needing love”. What to make of this, after all it’s true? But now the wiser all containing self that is learning to love, understand and be patient and accepting of the whole of me, shadow and light, just let’s me be AS I AM young still somewhere very deep down inside my being and soul. There is beauty in that part, there is fire, there is passion there is love, longing and life, but from a young age she became the watcher this part of me, sent off to the sidelines never feeling a part of this system that was the family with so many different conflicts going on inside of it.
So sometimes it’s difficult to be the participant, because I know all too well the hidden depths in people, the things they bury and hide from and I see how those affect others around them and knowing my own inherited fine hair trigger that could go off at any moment I am wary, super wary about getting too close.
Why did you make me feel my feelings were too dangerous? Was it because that is how you experienced your own or that you had no help with them? Anyway its never too late to learn. You wrote in that letter you sent to me at 9 years of sobriety that I’d been immature without owning your own emotional immaturity Mum. We bore the brunt of it. But you gave us good things too, a fighting spirit, that would refuse to die. And help financially, but you also saw me struggle in relating and connecting and to be honest, silently I think that slowly broke your heart.
4 years ago Gerard came to visit with little Lyra. Such a wise and loving little girl, so like her Grandma, I dont think you wanted the visit really, you blamed her Dad and his own father for not being able to ‘make it’ financially and support your oldest daughter but Gerard loved you and he wanted that little girl to know us. I still have the picture she drew me when she visited. She gave me purple hair, I loved that Sadly since the seizure she ended up having on the last day of that visit in early December 2017 I’ve not seen her. Gerard did not return my last call and so I pulled back, but as your 4th anniversary of passing looms I think of those final days after you fell again, taking on too much to put in a birthday dinner for our good friend Betty then seeing Lyra seize such a reminder if how her Mum, your oldest daughter came to grief. I watched all of that too, from the side lines, yet another car crash happening.
We had those final nights together before you passed at 4.10 pm on the 12th of December the day your ancestors left Cornwall for New Zealand, where Judy ended up after she married Ron.
You never said sorry, but only that you forgave me, for what? Trying my best to love and be a good daughter with all the wounds you passed on? I do forgive you (even as a wiser part of me recognises it was just life unfolding unconsciously, Mum.) But the truth is you abandoned me so many times just the way you were abandoned, the pattern never will end or transform until I stop finally abandoning, shaming and blaming myself or anyone for being just a weak, faltering at times confused human struggling to make sense of all of the convoluted and twisted turnings of our complex family fate and seek a path into more cinnectiin, relationship, joy and meaning. And I can bear the gift of testament as I continue to find ways to work through it all and emerge myself in a more fully conscious, peaceful and accepting life.
And after posting this I realize too how much my other sister contained and how hard she worked to connect in 2020 before falling again. Sometimes I still blame myself but sometimes the relationship was only really manageable for me from a distance, getting swept up inside it all just all too often ended up landing me in a compost heap of grief.
Emerging From The Dark Night 