Still can’t give details
I will tomorrow if I have time. But there was a big thing supposed to happen this weekend and I found out last night sometime after midnight that it wasn’t happening. All that angst for nothing!
I tell you — family of origin stuff? A person needs a therapist on speed dial to get through the hard parts. Unfortunately I haven’t seen my therapist in (thinking thinking …) six or seven years. But when things are hard I still have to ask myself, “What would Barbara tell me????” She’s my go-to imaginary girl.
My therapist was my mom’s therapist first so by the time I got there she already knew our whole family history — and a convoluted history it is. Then I saw her again when I was resolving our infertility. I carry her with her in a little pocket of transference in my heart. Barbara reminded me of my mother. Other people who remind me of my mother: Becca and Julia. Also my old co-worker Jamie. Why? Because they’re bossy and confident, as is my mother. None of ‘em are that much older than I am but they are older and this is part of it, too.
Another person who reminds me of my mother: Carol Burnett. I have no idea if she’s bossy but her coloring is very similar as is her figure and she has a big mouth. My mom is LOUD. (That’s where I get it.)
On the long ride to the airport, the long wait at the airport and the long ride home, Noah and I talked about all the family stuff swirling around my (and so his) head. As you all know, I’m all about being honest with my kids about relationship stuff so he asked questions about the family of origin issues and I answered as honest as I could, without blaming. I’m not mad at my dad anymore but I will always be heartbroken. There’s just no fixing things that happened a long time ago and we all have to live with the consequences. It makes me think a lot about primal wounds and reunions gone bad and all the heartache that comes through adoption, too. Noah and I talked about some of that as well because he had some questions.
So this week when the coast is clear, I’m hoping to get down some of my feelings about my own family stuff and how this gives me insight into Madison’s family stuff (although I rush to add that I’m not saying she’ll experience her situation the way I’ve experienced mine). It’s given me a lot to think about.
hmm, no idea what is going on but your last two posts reminded me of my own therapist. his teaching has suggested that family of origin stuff gets passed down for sure. stuff not resolve in one generation appears in some convoluted way in the next. (Hellinger family constellation theory touches on this stuff). When I think of all the ignored horrible trauma in my family life (my father being concieved in a concentration camp to a single mother held captive by the Nazis, my mother growiing up as first generation to Irish Immigrants with six children and one dying of brain cancer and much more) it is no wonder to me that my own childhood was fraught with such drama. My familial pattern was to ignore the pain, the bury it, to avoid it, and we wonder why we have two drug addicted siblings and an alchoholic father. That horror has to go somewhere. Needs to be seen. Given a voice. It will manfiest it self somewhere. If not in this generation, then certainly the next.
I also, personally, find it interesting that in my own family there are three generations (on both sides) of uplanned pregnancies. I am the only one who surrendered her child to the adoption machine.
Rambing. Sorry for the hijack but your posts got me thinking about all this stuff.
Hope whatever is going on works out.
this is so not an insightful comment i’m about to leave, dawn, but i just wanted to say that it’s posts like these that i’m glad i read blogs. it’s good to peek into the hearts of other people and see (for example) that they have family of origin issues, too, and that it can be complicated, but also — and here’s the thing valuable to a young person like me — also i see role models modelling that there /can/ be a way to deal with them, and that can only be healthy for me to read about even if i’m not applying it to my life very much, it still is good to hear other voices of people odler than me whom i admire work through similar sort of stuff, too, you know what i mean?
i very much do look forward to your future post about this.
PS
do you take blog-topic requests? given the situations that a friend of mine is going through with his gf, and given a recent realization about why i’m so hesitatnt to start dating because i think i could /only/ be happy with another fellow artist… it reminded me of you mentioning that you at first were all about the artist type. and then you found brett. i have questions about this that i’d love to hear you speak about, but off course i don’t know if yo uhave TIME to take blog topic requests! (so i thought i might ask just in case you were interested anyways in taking them?)