“You were You, Colleen. You weren’t meant to be Me. Everybody has to be themselves.” (my Mama) (2024)

“When Akiba was on his deathbed, he bemoaned to his rabbi that he felt he was a failure. His rabbi moved closer and asked why, and Akiba confessed that he had not lived a life like Moses. The poor man began to cry, admitting that he feared God’s judgment. At this, his rabbi leaned into his ear and whispered gently,

“God will not judge Akiba for not being Moses. God will judge Akiba for not being Akiba.”

—From the TALMUD

Quote pulled from “The Book of Awakening” by Mark Nepo)

Becoming, Belonging & the “Both/And”

i. Strange Bedfellows

My Mama on her deathbed quietly became wise & prophetic. I was looking for something else entirely.

I was looking for a mixture of repentance & forgiveness. To be honest, the recipe I was after called for more cups of apology & atonement from her, than from me; or so I think now anyway, retrospectively. (But ah, Memory, that fickle fellow; oh so influenced, & mutable. It’s one thing, then another. It’s more, then less; then gone altogether. Then, Surprise! You didn’t think you got away from me that easily, now did you?) 🤔Or am I talking about Grief?

Strange bedfellows these two-Grief & Memory; how inextricably weaved in wondrous & woeful ways they often are.

• Grief has been wanting my attention. She has been gripping me hard of late; simply demanding I stop everything & give her my time. Grief can do whatever she pleases.

• Having relented, will I now be allowed to resume writing about other things; all that I’d hoped & promised this newsletter to be? Will I now just go back to ‘normal?’ (I pose these ridiculous questions for myself to dispose of the foolish notions. There is no going ‘back,’ (at least not literally) and there is no ‘normal.’ But perhaps I can create a new way forward?)

• In the meantime, here is my offering. It is raw & personal. As cathartic as it was for me, ✨I do hope it offers some comfort; some sense of being less alone to some struggling someone.

• There is personal narrative about me & mama (mostly in italicized) herein, for those who are interested in that story. And there is a little psycho-education for those who come for that. *Take what you like, and leave the rest.*

• Thank you for reading. Time is our most precious, irreplaceable resource, and I appreciate yours.✨

ii. Becoming

The summer my Mama died, I opened my mouth to scream, but No sound escaped; nothing came out. For months, Every night before bed, I’d have this overwhelming urge to scream; to scream & never stop. One night, I heaved heavy, empty, searing, silent sobs that shook my whole body loose from all that I feared losing: my mind; from all that I had already lost: my mama, and lots more. What would become of me without the very thing I pushed against my whole life? What would become of me without her?

My oldest daughter would tell me whenever she was stressed, she’d dream of losing her teeth. She’d most often dream of losing them when her older brother was sick, or struggling. She’d tell me about these dreams, recalling how many teeth lost each time, how most often they’d just start falling out; how she’d be shaken from sleep feeling like she might choke; how in the dream, she’d spit them out. The summer my Mama died, she shared the dream where “Nana” (my Mama) was pulling out all of her teeth; how she straddled over her with pliers to pry them loose; how she left her leaking blood everywhere; how she woke sweating, screaming, drooling; both hands cupped to her mouth, trying in vain to catch these invisible teeth.

I’ve spent the better part of nearly 5 decades trying to “remember who I am;” some grand experiment of me ‘re-collecting’ myself; returning to the source of (my)self; re-‘member’-ing; a daring to seek the “me” of me; that core of Truth & Light✨ A Light that burns singularly & distinctly inside each one of us.

I’ve stumbled, & fumbled, tried on, collected & shed more identities than I can count. I’m an expert escape artist, a proficient pretender, a practiced performer. I’ve memorized much morphing, & specialized in shape-shifting; all in the name of: “see me,” love me, say I’m ok, say I’m enough. I craved this more from my Mother than anyone who has ever genuinely loved me; craved it more than any other earthly thing I have achieved. I felt as though it always evaded me; was just beyond my grasp. I’d give it up like a bad habit, a true addiction; hide it like a mole, some born deformity. It would always return.

iii. Belonging (“be”-“longing”)

What to make of all this striving, all this effort-ing to be “seen,” to be “enough,” to please, especially her, my mama, all these decades, while simultaneously~

Was I, inadvertently rejecting both of us? Is that what we do when we don’t ‘show up’ as our fullest & truest selves? Is it, in fact, a lie when we seek to ‘please & appease,’ no matter the well-intended, and often sub-conscious goal?

I remember listening to Brene Brown’s “Atlas of the Heart” on Audible while walking in the woods one day, maybe some three & a half years ago now, if I had to guess. I was utterly fascinated by her research on all of the 87 different human emotions. When she got to the difference between “belonging” & “fitting in” though, I stopped still in my tracks. I remember her words from that day:

“fitting in is the opposite of belonging.”

She’s discussed this in at least one other book as well:

To know it is a human thing, a survival thing, for my brain to seek mirroring, co-regulation, coherence, attunement, validation, (especially from my primary care taker, my first contact with this 3D world); to know we are all genetically engineered to default first to attachment, affiliation, & group acceptance,

over our own authenticity, simply as a matter of survival, (because back in the cave man days, we generally didn’t fare well, or last long on our own)~

does help me feel a little less alone in my experience. And yes, this is something.

However, simply knowing these facts has taken away none of the ache from “the little girl parts” of me that didn’t quite feel ‘seen;’ that didn’t synchronize a ‘felt sense’ of coherence; that didn’t viscerally feel the safety she needed to express all of her & therefore, found herself/myself, working hard to “be who I needed to be,”

rather than be “who I was.”

Am I the tiger in the photo above, looking in at the fish; searching for her, while lamenting that I cannot swim, or breathe underwater; wondering why I still have no sparkly gills? Am I a shiny, aquatic finned creature, back-boned, sure, but cold-blooded; my temperature regulated not internally, but woefully subject to the whims of my surroundings?

I think now, how I want to be a Thermostat, not a Thermometer. I want to be in control of my own internal temperature, not fluctuating with fickle forces outside of me. I want to be done donning any skin but my own.

iv. Ink, Smoke & Choice

Ah, but Not a one of these metaphors is the shape of the holes that need healing. So now what?

Well, if you relate to my any of my words, I want to share with you that time & time again, writing has helped me heal. It does this by helping me feel into, not only my feelings, but what I actually think about a thing.

Writing helps me organize a new narrative. Writing helps me turn my ‘contaminated story’ (the one where I suck & everything is my fault) into one of ‘redemption,’ (a story with some room for nuance in it; some space for the “both/and”) if I so choose. Or, in some cases~writing has helped me find something brand new, something I’d never noticed before. It’s also helped me create something brand new, something that never existed before.

This is powerful medicine. This is the medicine of empowerment.

I get to: Pause, Feel, & Choose. I get to: Create

A way of looking at this ‘organizing bit’ that writing does, when something is all jumbled up; because of grief or trauma, is…

It’s as if writing is picking up the strewn papers from the tipped over file cabinets, reorganizing them, shredding some & keeping some; picking precisely where you want each item to go, what to name the file folders, if & how you’d like to decorate them.

Another option: Let’s go to the woods. (I love the woods.) But this time, there has been a wildfire, and here, we are sorting through the charred rubble, dusting off whatever’s salvageable from this destruction; deciding what we’d like to keep, what we’re ready to let go of; noticing how not everything has been destroyed; noticing how some new growth has been stimulated even. Yes, maybe this.

Maybe on some days, just this “noticing” is enough for now.

Have you ever heard of the Fire Lily?

“How they only seem to want to reproduce after a fire? How no other environmental factor seems to trigger (their) flowering?” (It’s the smoke! The Fire Lily waits for smoke, its flowering cue.)🪷

I ask myself, “What is my “flowering cue?” You can ask yourself too!

🖌️When I write, I get to say. When you write, You get to say. We get to tell it.

What we tell ourselves about ourselves, shapes how we feel about ourselves;

Or, at least I’ve noticed this is the case for me.

✨How is it for you? Are you struggling with how you feel about yourself? Is there someone alive or who has passed on with whom you share this wound of authenticity vs. attachment with? With whom you have tried to ‘fit in’ for, rather than feeling as if you just ‘belonged?’ Have you written yourself a new story? One where you are not broken, and there is not now, nor was there ever, anything inherently wrong with you?

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v. Memory

From this seat now, some two years distance, one of my kinder selves will say that I didn’t cop out by not heaping every hurt & sorrow on my Mama as she lay dying. Even though, even though, I really, really wanted a reckoning.

No, unloading every scathing unkindness; iterating truckloads of her transgressions, fanning out her failures in full color, tagging them with their corresponding deleterious affects on me would have been…

Well, I don’t know that I could live with myself, had I taken that route.

After all, I knew her labored, intermittently choking breaths were numbered. And I could see her there, a mere skeleton: her skin, a cloud white muslin, draping her bones; her tiny doll lips, her all but wrinkle-free, dainty face (oh, how I marveled as a small girl watching as she’d blot it with washcloth wrapped ice, readying herself for some special occasion with my Daddy. “What’s that for Mama?” “It helps set the makeup so it will last the whole night.” I was fascinated by the care she took, the attention paid.)

But now, here were those unadorned emerald eyes, slightly sunken, lost to luster, but still seeking something… relief? peace? I simply couldn’t do it.

Though she denied pain, and would refuse medication when offered, I could see it in her winces when we turned her. It was palpable in the way she barely moved, how she took in the room slowly, carefully; how the muscles in her neck sometimes had to help her breathe~that she was already suffering enough.

Or so I say now.

I’ve warned you about memory though, so I can’t be sure the exact order of events then; when I wept words & she whispered what I’ve decided was wisdom. I can’t be sure what happened precisely when; & well, I’m not so sure it’s important to what I’m setting out to share with you anyway.

No.

I do however, want to share with you the fullness of our exchange; the words I did muster the courage up to say, and how it led to what I received in return, the quoted title of this missive.

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But first, for the sake of this maybe someday coming under the eyes of my children, or my children’s children…probably not; but for that, and for the sake of my sense of truth-telling~ I do want to record some

• Preamble (& A hidden treasure)

to share that my Mama’s last days at home were Not all riddled with pain. In fact, after we honored her wishes and brought her home, it was~for a short while anyway, a few days perhaps~ as if she had become young again, well again, content, if not, was she happy?

It was rather surreal as she sat up and smiled, reminisced and remembered; (this last bit being particularly something given the ‘cognitive decline/Alzheimer’s diagnosis’ she was given 4 months prior). Her best-friend who visited stayed for hours! My Mom actually swallowed some jello. She caught up with nearly all of her 11 grandchildren asking them relevant & interested questions. She chatted on about nothing in particular with neighbors, laughed with my two best-friends; rattled off some of her usual unsolicited advice, instructions, opinions. (I am grateful to learn, my husband has a recording of her instructing my youngest daughter on how to wash her face. “Make sure you wash twice and rinse 5 times. This is the secret.” I believe the video is over 8 minutes long. He could have said 18, and I would have shrugged. My mother was that precise and detail-oriented.

Yes, before the pain, she had pleasure: locking eyes with my Daddy, teasing him again, holding his hand, hearing him say, “I love you Shar.”

One day, while changing the sheets on the bed next to her hospital bed, (the one my Daddy, or I took turns sleeping in) she randomly told me I ‘looked pretty.’ I am not ashamed to admit, it felt like Christmas to hear this from her, even if I thought I looked ridiculous, exhausted, and anything but attractive. I remembered how much she loved clean sheets; how she would change them daily on her own bed. I smiled at my own maneuvering to avoid…what? I’m not sure, but I turned to her, and said “Awe, thank you Mama.”

Toward the end, I did start medicating her. The fist time this happened, she made a mean face at me😂 when she found out. The Hospice nurse had come & she heard me tell her.

But then~she agreed it had made her feel better; so she trusted me the rest of the way, saying: “whatever you think Colly,” when decisions came along (& they did.) This was indeed a shift for this ‘always in control,’ “never let the bastards see you sweat,” “fake it til you make it,” “because I said so,” boss of the house.

But today, today I get to say. Today, I choose to remember. Today, I get to write it.

And so I shall:

• Her, & Her, & Little Me & Some Space to See:

One day, one quieter day, when there were no visitors; when my Aunt, and my Daddy, my brothers and any nurses, or aids that might have come were all away~I went upstairs where my Mama was napping. Slowly, quietly, I stepped up a flight of stairs, winding around and up the next, landing in the hallway just one door down from the room she now rested in; the first room, incidentally, that was mine, when we first moved into this house. Each time I entered, it was with a sense of something unnamable. An echo of: beginnings & endings on my heart.

She opened her eyes before I entered the room. I can’t be sure what time of day it was, but the lighting is soft. She’s wearing her oxygen, just a cannula, those clear little prongs that rest in your nostrils, not a mask. I can hear a low hum from the machine that brings her air. It’s a sound I know well. It comforts me. Her dainty head is propped. Her skin is like porcelain. Her short hair, brown. She’d always had it “done,” “set,” ready. Not today. I see her eyes take me in softly; know me. How do we know what eyes say when we look in them?

I smile & say “Hi Mama. Did you get some rest?” I think she nodded. Maybe she asked me to move her around, fix her pillows. I remember putting a new top sheet over her. I see myself removing the grey and white fuzzy blanket; the one where most of the sheep are white, but one. There she is! She is black, this one sheep. I drift away quickly into memory…how I’d used her lamb mold one Easter; how instead of making her cake, (Mama’s cake) the one with the raisin eyes, and the half jelly-bean mouth, who she’d sit in that plastic green grass, atop her best crystal dish, its wool frosted to a snowy-white perfection, then topped with piles of coconut~how I’d made mine: a black sheep. Yes, it flashes for just an instant, how I’d used a Devil’s food cake, didn’t bother separating eggs, nor even fiddling with the mess of coconut. How instead, I’d just heaped heavy helpings of ‘not even home made’ dark fudgy brown chocolate all over that sheep, licked my fingers laughed while doing it!

I parachute the sheet into a quick puff before it lands softly upon her. I see myself gingerly lifting her fluid filled feet ever so carefully on top of the pillow at the foot of the bed; placing another behind her back to support a ‘side-ish’ position. (The head of her bed could be neither too low, nor too high. The former made breathing more difficult, but the latter would put even more pressure on her bones, on the tissue paper skin from which they pressed, and protruded.) I remember a fresh, cold washcloth for her forehead, her “Ahh,” holding a straw between thin, dry pursed lips. I make sure she’s swallowed the pill. I offer & spoon a singular ice chip. Yes, I believe this was before the choking.

I can feel my hesitancy, and at the same time, my sense of: “Now; now is the time to say it. Whatever ‘it’ is.” I had nothing prepared. I don’t know what I expected of myself. I don’t know what I hoped for exactly.

Just know, that instead of asking for her atonement, I gave my own.

I said, “I’m sorry for not being the daughter you always wanted; for rejecting all the things you tried to teach me: how to sew & crochet, how to ‘keep a home,’ & make the best lemon merengue pie; all the things I didn’t appreciate: how hard you worked, how much you sacrificed for us; all you did for my children, for Sean especially~for saving his life. I wept hard, but on a roll, “I’m sorry for my impatience all the time; for always being in a hurry; for not getting to snuggle up for Hallmark. I’m sorry we never made that pineapple upside down cake together Mama! We were supposed to make it! I’m sorry I forgot the cherries. I’m so sorry for all the trouble I caused you when I was an teenager; all the worry & the fighting; all the mean things I’ve ever said to you. I’m sorry for leaving home; for what I’m sure felt like me choosing “Kiki,” and rejecting you.

in the middle of my heart

[*While I left home at 18 after an actual ‘roll on the floor’ ‘tussle,’ with my mother, prompted by the first and only time I called her “Bitch,” I had actually ‘left’ home when I was just 7. I found a knew Mama; a soft place for my (too?) tender heart to land. She lived right next door. For the last 32 years, we called her “Kiki,” a moniker coined by my first son; but for the first 19 years of my life, she was simply Karen; and Karen was my home away from home.

I don’t remember exactly how she started becoming the mama I needed, but the first image I see pans to me at her screen door, hairbrush in hand. Next, I feel her fingers as they comb and weave, gently tugging in this, and then, that direction. I am on the couch, my feet tucked under me sideways. We are laughing at “Bosom Buddies,” “Cheers,” “Newhart.” It is ridiculous that there are 3 Darryl brothers, but we laugh anyway. We share more than our humor in common. Her Mama is like mine, and we talk about this sometimes. It’s July now, sticky hot & there I am on her bedroom floor, snuggled in blankets below her window mounted air conditioner reading Beatrice Small. I smell the chicken stir-fry when she opens the door to check on me. We are shopping, laughing, singing; it’s Aretha Franklin; it’s Tina Turner; it’s Patti LaBelle. Their songs became the music I’d birth my first daughter to; the daughter she’d later become godmother to, buy every Christmas dress for.

I was the daughter Karen always wanted, & later, the sister she never had. She gave me her time. She took her time, made the time: to talk, to listen, to really look at me. And She was the woman who saw “Me;” “got me,” when she did. She had for me what my own Mama didn’t, or simply couldn’t offer. She remained this woman to me, and to my own children, nearly until the day she died, just two years before my own Mama. Her loss is its own story.]

vi. “Both/And”

So that day, as my Mama lay dying, tears streaming from my face, as I huffed sobs & wiped snot, in spite of all of the truth above~along with all the truth above~

[Wait, ‘another truth?’ Could there be two truths who, at face value, seem to contradict each other?]

I sputtered out: “Mama, I never loved Kiki More than you.” “I Always loved you. And I never stopped being your daughter.”

“No matter how I felt about her, You were always my Mama.”

“Oh, Collie, I know that.” “And You were a wonderful daughter.”

Wait; What?! But how? I remember feeling like it simply didn’t fit; couldn’t be true. How could it be true? I sure wanted it to be true, but it was as if I’d been asked to don a ball gown 3 sizes too small. While I loved everything about the dress~ sure; the color, fabric, detailing, style~ all perfect; I simply couldn’t zip it up. What’s more, my prom years were long gone, so where was I to even wear this dress now? What was I supposed to do with it now?

Next, I heard someone (perhaps ‘a little me’ no longer willing to be hushed) say,

“Well, it didn’t always feel that way Mama.”

[And then, like a faucet left on for the cat, water fell, flowing from my eyes, dripping down my cheeks, to my chin, landing on her hands.] I gulped for air & pressed on,

“I felt like maybe I wasn’t always enough in your eyes. Like maybe I just wasn’t quite right? It felt like maybe you wanted me to be, I don’t know…more like you?”

Here, my vision is underwater, a sopping mix of mascara & broken vessels, so I don’t see, but rather feel her looking at me. I feel her when she speaks. I hear her in an almost sing-song cadence, an empathetic melody as she says:

“You were You, Colleen. You weren’t meant to be Me.

Everybody has to be themselves. And you were~ Perfect.”🤯

What?! What?!!

I cannot say what I did next.

I have not yet remembered.

I have gone over this a few times; though not many in truth.

This writing here is likely my deepest exploration; my sifting through the rubble so to speak; and for this I am grateful. There is a part of me that is disgusted I didn’t say more; another part of me is so, so grateful that I said exactly what I said. There is a part of me that laughs at my Mama’s words; thinks they’re preposterous, insulting, an outlandish insult; gaslighting even! How dare she say these things to me now? Does she think this undoes decades? Re-writes history? Negates my reality? An impactful portion anyway.

✨There is another part of me though; perhaps my Wiser Self; the Center Me that isn’t spinning herself into tangles. She long exhales, surrenders, sighs with relief. She forgives, allows, recognizes the “more” of what it Also was then, the gift of it, the “Both/And” of her dying, the gift of me getting to be a part of it, & of what came shortly before. ✨

Having lost many of her memories, the Alzheimer’s also changed her personality. It softened her; loosened the grip fear had over her for most of her life; a brutal grip of fear I came to know just four months before her passing, came from her own childhood traumas. It was only after she was diagnosed that she’d stare off & recollect a chilling story; share it with me. I’d sit stunned. Was it fear that twisted her inside out? Did it make her believe her own safety lie in maintaining control over everyone and everything all those years?

Of course, this was never possible, and didn’t feel like love. Of course, this made for many battlegrounds, and brought much bloodshed & tears; especially for me.

I realize now, though I’ve been blaming myself for getting her the diagnosis; (the same one her mother had; the one she swore she’d never live with); the one I told myself was the reason she gave up:

• there is room for something else too; something just as true:

  when the Alzheimer’s came, the sword went.

• And Another truth: since she’s passed on, I’ve come to loosen some of my own gripping. It’s offered: some space to see more; a fuller view of her, of me, of what we were even before the diagnoses; what we might of been,

• and what we actually still are, and always will be~ Mother & Daughter.

*I do think now that Perhaps it was the Trust she finally surrendered to me, the Trust she’d handed over with the words: “Whatever you think Colly” that, in the end, were what said to me: “I see you, and you are worthy” even more so than some notion of perfection; some sage eleventh hour truth.

And Perhaps, I allow this alone to be Enough?

The truth is, I could fill libraries with all I am Not telling of our story; our many stories.

The truth is, I’m still re-writing some of them.

The truth is, there is never just one truth.

vii. Grief

But the Grief. I vacillate in it now. This grief, it can distort things, play tricks. The loss of her seems even harder this second year. This perplexes me given the way things were between us.

And this is where, on sad or cynical days, I sometimes find myself the punchline to some cruel joke.

• Like, “Ok, my God!! That’s enough horsing around already! This trip has gone on long enough! When the hell you coming home, Mama?”

• “Mama, will you come home if I promise to stop hassling you about your smoking? I swear I’ll never mention it again.”

• “Mama, I promise, I’ll come make that Pineapple upside down cake with you. I’ll bring the right brand of maraschino cherries this time. I believe you! They do make all the difference! I will come Mama. We will make it together in your cast iron pan. You can tell me what to do; boss me however you like. I will listen, & step by step, I will follow what you say. It will come out just the way you like it; just the way I like it~lots of buttery sweetness with a crisp on the edges & a cherry in the middle of every pineapple. She will be beautiful. We will eat in your bed all snuggled up.”

• “We can watch Hallmark, you can pick your favorite episode & you can even pretend that you haven’t seen it already. I’ll look at you and say ‘Wow, how’d you know that? You are So Clever! So Smart!”

• “Come home Mama. Please come home.”😢

• Some days~Some days are real hard, and I can’t remember what I was doing, or even thinking about. I just go blank. I stare at nothing in particular. Some days, I start to write something & I’ve lost my words; can’t find the word for some ordinary object: a griddle, a spatula.

• Some nights, I have dreams where she is alive. She is so alive I can smell her, the exactness of her blend. It feels so real, that when I wake, I have to lose her all over again. She must die again, and again; each time I have a “too real” dream.

• Some days, it is me who is lost; like actually & truly. I am driving, presumably somewhere specific, and then a little shockwave floods me, & I think ‘Where am I? Where the hell am I going?’

• Some days, it’s just much easier to be angry; full of venom and rage, even if I have nothing to do with this horror-filled, helpless fury; even if my screams are still silent.

viii. Sizes & Shapes (& “messy me”)

Because did you know that if you’re afraid ‘your grief will swallow you up;’ that it’s too big a monster for you~your brain will do all sorts of things to protect you? For example, did you know that you don’t have to miss someone you are furious with? Pissed at? At least not as much anyway. You can just stay in that space of self-righteous indignation, churning & churning like you always did; just like when they were alive? It’s sneaky and it almost works. Almost.

It’s almost enough to keep your regrets at bay, your self-loathing “sorry’s” & wasteful wishes for “do-overs” locked down. I mean, even if it hasn’t quite done that, so far~just the right dose of anger, (not so much as to hurt anybody, or make a scene) I’ve noticed, (for me anyway,) has at least kept my knees from buckling; the ground from swallowing me up. And that’s not nothing, right?

Maybe you’d be surprised to know, that though I’m a well-credentialed, decades seasoned trauma therapist, I haven’t allowed myself much time to just “feel my feelings?” Oh, I tried at first. I set aside some time~went off to the woods alone, just to grieve, in fact; like one might schedule a dental cleaning. But Grief stiffed me! Or she took on the shape of a migraine instead. No tears came; no memories to sift through, re-construct narrative with! She never even bothered to show up. I laugh at myself to think of it now, how I’ve been trying to control grief! Am I my Mama’s daughter after all?

• Sometimes, when I’m not lost in responsibility, willful distraction, or fleeing to one of my favorite fantasy-lands;

• Sometimes, I ask myself, “Was it real? Any of it?”

Ursula K. LaGuin says, “We can’t question reality directly, only by questioning…our belief, …our construction of reality. All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was,

“It doesn’t have to be the way we thought it was.” Ursula K. LaGuin

I am So grateful for all the tools, & resources, all the love & support I have in my life. I am grateful for safe community. I am grateful for walking in the woods, & meditation, reading brilliant works, yoga & my own therapist. I am grateful for writing. While this isn’t my prettiest piece; while I haven’t made use of any of the new craft I’m learning (to use sparse, unfamiliar language, third level emotion or “the thing itself,” etc.;) while I haven’t made a lyrical essay (as I want to soon;) while this is much too long & too, too much~ I’m letting that all be OK.

I get to just be my “messy self” now. After all, my Mama said so.

I want to say that I know ignoring hard things~losses, & traumas; all the Big feelings they bring~ doesn’t make them go away. Distracting, displacing, fantasy, pretending-is just a finger in the geyser.

Sometimes however, this is simply where we’re at for a time.

Because here’s the thing about “soothe & distract” measures-(provided they aren’t the truly destructive sort): they are, in fact, life saving~ until our more integrated resources & capacities are built.

And what is it that I say?

Everything that’s ever happened to us, is etched in us; like grooves in the bark of a tree~our cells tell what we’ve been through, what’s touched us, shaped us, marked us; all we’ve endured. We can study the circles of a tree, see what they say about its ‘sap fueled growth’ & all that went into it, more than just sugar.🌳 Our physical bodies, like the bark of a tree, hold our stories for us, until we’re ready for them. And while ignoring isn’t the way, (at least not forever😉) there isn’t just one way through. After all, we can enter a circle anywhere. There is no beginning, and there is no end.

One thing does seem certain though,

If you are grieving, Please love on yourself, and remember,

when it comes to Grief, there are No rules, & there is No timeline.

Your Grief will be the shape of Your Love,

the size of Your Loss; a shape & size that changes as You do.

Xoxo,

Colleen