June 21, 2006
I see her before me, this adorable three year old, smiling, precious, wanting so much to please and be loved. Yearning for a quiet lap in which to sit and be held. Some place to find peace. Some one to be with her and keep her safe.
Fifty-five years later, she’s still yearning. And frantically trying to find it.
I offer her mine today, but it is not yet peaceful. My mind is formulating a book, a movie, a poem…. Something that might help someone else…. Forgetting her and her needs. The same things I must have done to my children… wanted to be there for them as I thought of other things I could be/should be doing.
I made myself focus back on her, but it took an act of will, and she was watching – alternately grateful for my attention, and angry for my forgetting her yet again as I focused elsewhere.
Is it an ADD thing?
Is it habit?
Is it what I learned to do to try to create a safe harbor for myself somewhere.
My parents lived with my grandparents until I was 10 months old. My father got home from the army, without a job, and two youngest children tried to make a home without ever learning how to make a relationship.
Mom was the youngest of eight, and grew up, as she says, “like weeds”. No one was there to teach her how to express her feelings, and she stoically dealt with her own depression by focusing all her energy on me – her real life doll
Daddy lost his mother to breast cancer as a young man, and was an undiagnosed manic-depressive until I was over twenty-five. He was a warm, loving, funny man, whose frequent fits of rage caused my mother to yell back at him, my brother to avoid him, and my need to keep everybody happy as a way to keep myself safe.
Chaos filled the house – depression, manic-depression, ADD – but no one had the words or ability to fix or heal it, so we all carried on as best we could.
I learned early how to “be cute”. I was cute. I was also smart and intuitive and loving. And deep down very scared, sad, and angry. But no one ever knew it or let me be it or normalized it or validated it. So I hid it, and learned how to be “cute” to make people laugh or feel good or love me.
It worked on the surface, but the sense of responsibility was overwhelming.
So back to that little girl now.
She sees me wanting to make contact. She responds with gratitude when I do, and then she watches me leave her again as I focus outward – as I have always done.
Still trying to create “the perfect family”. Still missing the safe harbor that I never felt I had.
My Baba’s Table
I had it at my Baba’s table – with all my cousins laughing and present. There was love all around that table. Mom and Dad didn’t fight there. No one yelled there. There was food and hugs and a sense of familial camaraderie that still exists today – in St. Louis – once a year or so.
Where is it the rest of the time?
Where are my children? Where is my safe harbor for them? Where is the table of laughter and love and good food and connectedness.
I have to connect to myself first.
I have to create that safe harbor internally.
I have to help my inner child find the peace she is looking for within me.
What is keeping me from her?
Is it sugar? ADD? Depression? Bad habits? Lack of true connection to G-d?
That will be my summer project.
Not to write the books or do the groups or fix the website or Quicken, yadayaday.
But to create an internal home in which she’s safe and loved and nurtured and relaxed and at peace.
So as it is inside, it is outside.
As within as without.
I’m creating an more harmonious, organized, and peaceful home environment in which to nest and feel rested and refreshed.
Now I must do that INTERNALLY.
With G-d’s help.
TYDGA