Many tears were shed : post Christmas update

I shed another ocean of tears yesterday.. I cannot explain how utter the pain was, knowing family were only 10 minutes away having a celebration for Christmas to which I was not invited. But I also had to accept it and of course question how things I may have done contributed to this, like not showing up for one Christmas back in 2012 and getting very upset at another where my nephew and his Dad were mocking Robbie Williams, newly sober for being overweight. That was a trigger and I stormed out and then came back in floods of tears.

I bore it okay and it was coming in waves, my dog Jasper and I had some lovely moments amidst the tears and post eating panic attacks. The sadness was of course triggered by calling my sister who had been invited there but did not really want to go as she is upset at being asked to appear before a tribunal deciding if the order placed on her to have ECT will be kept in plac. I tried to remind her she can protest it, but it just made me so sad to hear her say that the youngest son’s little girl was a bit of a handful, after all kids at 18 months are full of life and this speaks volumes for her own shut down inner child and Sun/Venus Mars square. We all had to be so dutiful and reigned in in our family and it’s no wonder there is a wild race horse buried in each of us that longs to break free.

This youngest son never returned a call to wish him happy birthday, but I then don’t want to moan about that. That is not a good thing to do, the mature thing is to accept that others have their right to do or not do what they want, it does not make them a bad person and thinking about it later after some of the waves of emotion had passed, the weight of sorrow I bear is not down to just them not inviting me, it has to do with losses of children I went through and a very painful termination of pregnancy I had on the year anniversary after my father died, also due to the fact I have not built a strong independent life outside of the old family enmeshment.. Yet!!.

That following year ater my father passed in 1985 there was a lot of drinking and lostness but then I look back and think it is not even worth judging that, all of that pain I lived was down to being a disconnected addict whose true self was so lost.. The old pain may be ‘all in the past’ and yet it seems I may always carry the sorrow about it.

Alcoholic families sadly tend to exile members. It’s sad to me to see my sister in aged care because she could not front up for her own life and advocate for herself. For me I know the battle I have with being my true self, as well as the guilt I feel for just having basic human emotions that became more confusing and intense to me due to the fact I didn’t get a lot of help with them either growing up or later in life. At times I do regret leaving AA meetings and just seeking therapy when really I feel I needed both. Other recovering people struggle with self love a lot, I noticed this fact last week listening to several interviews with writer Liz Gilbert who is obviously in 12 step recovery.

I am posting the interview she did with writer Martha Beck below which focuses on being a person who lives with integrity which Martha explains is a state of learning to heal the inevitable fractures we come to live with when we are raised in this self negating culture.. I loved Martha’s take on the book The Divine Comedy which she uses to illustrate the hells and illusions we fall into as we are socialized away from own true essence and authenticity something Gabor Mate also deals with at length in his recent book The Myth of Normal.

It took courage to have those tears yesterday, to not blame my family who are doing the best they can. That said there is obviously not the love there for them to want to return a call or include me as a part of their family, and that is not in my power to change.. How others treat me is their choice and not mine. And who knows if it may not be for the best? Or that could just be me, once again trying to be stoic.

I heard from 3 friends prior to Christmas who really care about me and I am so grateful for that. I can accept too that this part of the year can make me sad and bring back so many memories of losing my Dad as well as the tough lonely years that followed leading up to meeting my ex husband in 1993. There were very sad years with him but some happiness as well.

Today I practice acceptance.. I can be real and true to my emotions. I know it often won’t make me popular with many people having them, as that is not how this culture seems to be wired, sadly it so often seems to pathologize sadness, ‘failure’, loss, or suffering and yet in midlife our suffering can be a doorway into both reality and the dissolution of childish illusions. That said I think midlife really is not a time to dis the inner child but a time to draw closer to understanding those deeply formative influences that had such power over us and still continue to cast shadows.

And I am most surely not the only one to have had a sad Christmas but that said today I do feel peace for having acknowledged and felt all of that authentic emotion. At least I can be real and it is only in this way I can actually be an authentic person. As Kahil Gibrain once said he hoped his ongoing life would forever be filled with both tears and laughter. Only numbed out robots refuse to feel.