I am with you : today’s reflections

How often in our own feelings of abandonment do we then abandon others? How often do we mistakenly make our pain about them? I keep thinking a lot about this after a day I shed more tears in therapy for my ex husband. He also carried a similar grief in that when we met he has lost his father to cancer around a similar age (early 20s).. Like me, following that loss, Jonathan had gone off overseas, not having a safe place in his family to feel a thing, he also had his partner break up with him too immediately after that, just like mine did. What a sad thing that often because others are scared of someone who is grieving and have no reference point of how to cope with that, they only end up abandoning them and turning against them.

As I look back now I see the part my own fear of my vulnerability played in things breaking apart.. That said my husband decided to leave me, even if I did take a break for 6 months to go back to the UK and try to work more on my therapy. After listening to Thich Nhat Hanh’s talks lately I see how we both failed to meet each other in that tender place and despite the fact is still hurts me and I will always love him I also forgive us both knowing WE HONESTLY DID THE VERY BEST WE COULD AT THAT TIME.

When I walked away for those 6 months my husband and Mum got very close, they had so many similarities anyway, in fact Mum got lent 20,000 pounds to start her first business with my Dad, a delicatessan, since as an enemy alien Dad could not have his air force qualifications recognized here after he decided to settle here with Mum at the end of the Second World War and time in Indonesia repatriating prisoners of war. This makes me feel angry as the Dutch helped to defend Darwin against attack from the Japanese and despite the fact Dad married an Australian woman he struggled to get a job Mum and Dad were battlers though then went on in time after starting that business to establish about 4 others over a 30 year period.. Mum then lent my husband Jonathan 20,000 dollars to start his own garden design and landscape company after we got married.

The truth is though, as my therapist often says I was emotionally and developmentally arrested then and possibly not mature enough to be married! I got sober 6 weeks after we married and did my level best to work through my pain but I did end a pregnancy shortly after I got sober and I do think that was not easy for my husband.. When I walked out for those 6 months alone my therapist at that time in the UK was not happy about it, saying Jonathan should have been my priority but sadly in that relationship it wasn’t safe to feel. And after posting the second previous post on men and grief yesterday I feel Jonathan did bury his and after we split acknowledged that me seeking therapy was the right thing to do.

It is probably very appropriate that a lot of this is coming up as the Sun is about to meet transiting Uranus (planet of light shedding and awakening of the unconscious) in the sign of Taurus ruled by Venus planet of relationships.. As many of you know we had the New Taurus moon a few days ago just after Pluto turned retrograde. And in about 12 days or so we will have a Full Moon Scorpio and a lunar eclipse which is about past eclipsing present so that it can be shed in some way or faced prior to another New Moon which will be a solar eclipse.

I had a very powerful dream of a dark green field sodden it blood and cow carcasses just before we went to live in the UK after a brief visit there to Jonathan’s family in Cambridge in 1998. Taurus is the cow and it relates to the feminine and to my maternal ancestral history as I see it. At the time I had no clue at all about my great great grandfather or his tortured past, about how he left Cornwall after being born at the time of a potato famine with his wife and five kids only to lose two daughters who were the namesake o of my Mum’s grandmother Eliza Jane Trudgeon following their arrival in the land of their migration. Nor that he had lost his mother at the age of 12 and carried that hidden grief which then began to erupt into addiction and rages after some years of trying to make a new life in New Zealand. In time that marriage fell apart as all of my female siblings relationships have.

Today on The History Listen on Radio National there was a program about conditions on the boats of emmigration. This related to a ship that set sail for Australia in the 1870s and it was in 1874 that Thomas and Eliza left Cornwall for New Zealand. They mentioned in this how many babies died from diseases like Typhus due to the conditions and there as yet, undeveloped immune systems.

I now know it was not accident that saw me want to visit the UK for the first time in my early 20s.. Dad sadly died before that and later in that trip Mum and I did manage to make it over to the land of his birth, Holland.. I do not know as much about that side of the family only that when we finally arrived there I suddenly did not feel like the gangly ugly duckling I so often felt growing up. I could look everyone in the eye, it was possible to buy pants long enough rather than have to buy clothes a few sizes larger and have them cut down to size and everyone else had big feet like me.. School shoe shopping for me often used to end in tears as my foot was too long and narrow to fit most makes of shoes in Australia.

These are all bodily issues (Taurus) and may show why I began to feel very self conscious and start to stoop as I grew up.. I was teased by boys and called Federal (match stick legs). Mum felt my buck teeth were ugly so those were soon braced after I had four back teeth taken out and then had to wear that medieval torture chamber bit and bridle head dress for about 18 months every night which made my teeth ache in pain, all on the tender brink of 17. No wonder I smashed the fuck up after the braces coming off on the brink of my woman hood and don’t even get me started on my fear of sex due to boys judging me again as they always seemed to do. It also explains why after I came out of those 3 months in hospital and my sister’s head blew apart with an aneurysm that I began to seek my relief in both alcohol and drugs.

This all does lay in the past but my mouth carries the pain.. As you know the second head injury came about doing therapy on the trauma at 17 when I was about 11 years sober at 43 and i have not been the same since.. Sadly about 4 more unnecessary root canals followed and I now wear a denture having had another 2 teeth taken in the years since my Mum died (2017) digesting, falling asleep, bathing, showering, rising, walking has all been fraught with fear to say nothing of the bloody breast cancer and sinus operations I also feel I never needed if I could have only found a way to address the anxiety/breathing/head injury issues.

Today I must accept that every single step I took on this path was as it needed to be WITH THE LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND AWARENESS I HAD AT THE TIME. This kind of perspective stops me drowning in needless toxic shame, fear and guilt. It also stops me lashing out at my fellow humans who may have hurt me but did it out of not knowing another way.. To finally be able to say Wow I have done brilliantly to get this far and to be still alive.. To not be medicated, incapacitated or full of shame like my living sister… giving my power over to so called ‘experts’ who do not have a clue of what she has lived through and do not take the long range epigenetic view..

Uranus demands we challenge the limited Saturian world and its parameters and expand deepen or elevate our consciousness in order to reach for more open and far less traditionally repressive solutions than those contained in the so called extremely limited and emotionally bereft ‘medical model.’

At the same time I see the impact of what I went through on her as well as others who did nothing to cause my earlier injuries which, in the end, were all down to ancestral fate.. Today I can be proud of how far I have come while still recognizing there is further to go and as the Sun and Uranus meet in that Venus ruled sign of Taurus and as I finally find a way to forgive myself and others more, taking the risk to live, I can begin to take pleasure in the beautiful joys being fully alive in the present moment bring :

Walks in nature with Jasper, sitting on the park bench in glorious full sun while listening to my favorite songs, stopping by the park for a swing, skipping along the path in bright sun as I feel joy and gratitude, allowing myself that lovely weak morning coffee without fear and letting myself buy that 10 dollar remaindered Booker Prize listed novel I am so interested in reading.

And at those times I can, like Thich Nhat Hanh so often says just smile to myself, to Jasper, to the birds and trees and sun while saying despite the pain or challenges of anything I ever endured in the past :

“present moment, wonderful moment.”