Today I took out the plastic folder the contained my Dad’s international driver’s license. My sister and I found this after clearing out Mum’s things a year or so ago and in it was a photo of me aged about 6 that was taken in my St Bede’s school uniform along with a lovely Delft medallion with a Dutch windmill on it.. I have added to this in the time since a small photo of my Dad taken in the 1940s in his Dutch East Indies Air Force uniform.
Finding this of my Dad’s made me realize he loved me and evoked an avalanche of tears in 2020.. Kat said to me a while back she wondered if anyone in the family really loved me.. but they did the best they could with the kind of love they knew and sometimes they could not see me and a lot of trauma then hit.. I have had my anger over it all, not only for me but for my other two sisters so often medicated instead of understood. And I even had the courage in 2013 to scream down the ICU about this and the nurses did listen to me then when I shared about our history.. My sis needs to be in a treatment facility that deals with the so called dis-ease of what all of us in sobriety battle with daily to heal and stay in an attitude of self love and self awareness so often lacking with narcissistic injury and buried multi-generational trauma.. Sadly she is trapped in that system and only her spirit can break her free.. But staying distant all of the time, at the moment I really am grappling with that. Lately it just seems selfish and mean.
God I am grateful. I can feel love for my Dad now despite the hurts he perpetrated on me.. I no longer need to be angry at every man when he does not see an aspect of me, after all no one is my complete mirror and to lay that on another human being is not fair.. In the end though with self abandonment of the true self we do need effective mirrors to heal as well as those who can help us keep an open mind and heart of wondering about what happened to us and our parents in childhood..
Louise Hay has helped me a lot with this in the past and Al Anon helps to remind me my imperfect parents carried wounds they did not always mean to consciously re-enact.. sometimes its up to me to be the bigger person in terms of seeing or trying to be sensitive to what others may struggle with and that only comes once I find self love for all the parts of me they may have tried to cut off or shame into silence.
I keep that little folder in my bedside table and took a photo of all those things this morning. Sadly my phone will not allow me to upload it today so I cannot share it here but I have put it on my Facebook page and may be able to copy it from there..
In the lead up to Dad’s anniversary on 8 January I am feeling just so much healing flooding through me as well as the release of being liberated from the pinning of skeletal traction as I was on 24 December 1979 replaying in my body. I DID NOT DIE IN THE CRASH BUT I DID CARRY SO MUCH OF MY FATHER’S REPRESSED FEMININE.. Venus stationing slowly in the embrace of Pluto is highlighting all of this as big storms swirl all around me today.. I most surely feel his presence and love for me all around me today as I write this. Anger does not destroy or negate love it just should remind ourselves and others how much our soul longs for it.
Emerging From The Dark Night 